This book has its origins in a course of mine given in the Winter semester of 2014–15. As a teacher of history of Southeastern Europe at the University of Regensburg, I decided to conduct a seminar in an archive so that my students could see, touch and feel original documents, and in so doing come to have personal impressions of how difficult the journey from raw source material to a historiographic narration can sometimes be. Our midsize town is the principal seat of the Thurn and Taxis family, a noble dynasty originally from Northern Italy, who, from the 14th century onwards, amassed wealth and influence as postal entrepreneurs. A systematic collection of documents pertaining to the family’s economic and other activities having been initiated in the 16th century, the ‘Princely Thurn and Taxis Central Archive’1 currently comprises an extremely impressive collection of documents whose chronological sweep extends from the Middle Ages into our own time. During the 19th century, the princes of Thurn and Taxis became large landholders in present-day Poland, the Czech Republic and Croatia, and thus the archive is an intriguing and useful place for historians interested in Central and Southeastern Europe. The Thurn and Taxis archive is located in St Emmeram, a huge palace in downtown Regensburg. Once a week, my students and I left behind the concrete greyness of our university campus to conduct ‘real research’ in the impressive Rococo building, surrounded by historic portraits and heavy old bookshelves, poring over documents concerning the Thurn and Taxis possessions in Croatia, and from time to time walking over creaking parquet floorboards to retrieve the next box of documents from the welcoming, friendly and competent Thurn and Taxis staff members.
Teaching at St Emmeram was not my original idea. It came from my departmental colleague Natali Stegmann, who at the time my course was held had established herself as a pioneer in studying East Central Europe through the lens of Thurn and Taxis documents. In a seminar on the ‘Eastern’ possessions of the princely house,2 she and her students had come across documents indicating that between the two world wars, a struggle between the new state of Yugoslavia and the princely house had emerged in which corruption played a key role. Since I had just started working on the history of corruption in Southeastern Europe, I decided to dedicate my own seminar to this issue. What were these ‘rumours’3 all about? What could they teach us about the general history of interwar Yugoslavia? During the seminar, we were able to identify some of the most important sources, and two of my students – Tanja Kipfelsberger and Stephan Groll – helped me to comprehend them by writing the first analyses of certain documents. But even after three months of weekly meetings in the Thurn and Taxis archive, it still seemed to us that the princely house’s struggle against Yugoslavia, aimed at avoiding the nationalization of its property, remained too complicated to fully grasp: more time, energy and resources were required to properly understand it. When the seminar ended, I thanked my students and promised them that I would soon visit archives in the former Yugoslavia to see whether combining German and Yugoslav records might help. Other obligations delayed me somewhat, and the gathering of further documents lasted up through 2020. I consulted archives in Berlin, Belgrade, Zagreb, Rijeka and, finally, the Thurn and Taxis archive once again in Regensburg, where I went through the records we hadn’t yet managed to look through.
While digging deeper and deeper into the Thurn and Taxis case, I brought together an interdisciplinary group for corruption research at the University of Regensburg. In early 2020, not yet knowing that measures adopted due to the Covid-19 pandemic would soon bring worldwide travel to a hold, Björn Hansen (Professor of Slavic Linguistics) and Thomas Steger (Professor of Leadership and Organization) and I initiated ‘From Informality to Corruption (1817–2018): Serbia and Croatia in Comparison’, a three-year research project funded by the German Research Foundation.4 Employing three doctoral students (one for each discipline), we proceeded from the idea that history, linguistics and economics should combine their approaches and efforts to undertake qualitative, in-depth research on the multilayered phenomenon of corruption. While linguistics can help show how language reflects a society’s understanding and evaluation of corruption, economics can, in contrast to the usual perspectives focusing on how civil servants conform to rules, say something more about those offering the bribes, whose perspective has long been neglected in legal and scientific analyses. History, my discipline, possesses an advantage that is surely the envy of many investigative journalists: namely, historians have access to and can use sources which are usually hidden from the contemporary public, such as internal notes made by participants in corrupt interactions, police reports, diplomatic minutes and so on. At the same time, looking at a corruption scandal from a temporal distance allows us to understand more clearly the mechanisms that make for scandal – contemporaries are usually influenced by public outrage, but historians can observe and analyse this outrage as a historical force in its own right.5
Though corruption is generally and rightly considered an issue always present throughout human history, it is also true that it has been defined and evaluated quite variously across time and within different contexts. One element, however, that is common to all these different approaches is the issue of trust in individuals and institutions, which is usually reflected in historical corruption research. But the discipline of history can go further; it can also prove effective in mapping corrupt practices and ordering them into a system. To reach its full potential, a history of corruption requires cases where documentation is ample and rich – and this is the main reason why I decided to dedicate an entire book to the ‘Thurn and Taxis Affair’ (Afera Turn Taksis), as it was referred to in interwar Yugoslavia.
There were in fact many conspicuous episodes of corruption in Yugoslavia between the world wars, and public opinion tended to view the country as ridden by endemic corruption.6 But this doesn’t mean that interwar Yugoslav corruption can easily be researched. Most historical corruption research relies heavily either on public sources (media, parliamentary inquiries) or on documents produced by the police and the judicial system, where ‘prosecutor bias’ cannot be ruled out. And if, as with most corruption scandals in interwar Yugoslavia, a case never went to court, the source problem becomes so grave that research beyond mere analysis of press accounts is rendered impossible.
The Thurn and Taxis case is an exception to that rule. It is so interesting because the affair culminated in a lawsuit against the Thurn and Taxis agents. From a historian’s perspective this civil case, held in Belgrade between 1935 and 1937, served as a veritable machine for the generation of sources. Though the court records only partly found their way into the archives, the Thurn and Taxis defence was extremely organized and produced a great number of documents representing the perspective of the accused. Many of these sources were not intended for use in court: that is, they were meant to catalogue one’s own involvement for in-house use and then were to provide a basis for an effective line of defence to be mounted. All in all, I found this source trove to be dense enough to allow me to attempt a broad description of practices as revealed in the source material and to systematize my findings into a ‘grammar of corruption’. This ‘grammar’ certainly does not pretend to the exactness, comprehensiveness or generalizability one finds in grammars of standard modern languages.7 It applies not to corruption as such but to rules and structures inherent in bribery (and alleged bribery) in this particular case. That said, I hope my findings will prove useful and thought-provoking for other scholars in the field.
While the ‘grammar’ will (I hope) be of interest for corruption researchers, this book also attempts to answer a question relevant for general historians of Southeastern Europe – is the frequently deplored corruption of the present just a postsocialist phenomenon, or does it possess a deeper historical dimension? Considering the present focus on state capture or even state failure in postsocialist states8, the work here also represents an attempt to determine the extent to which corruption affected policy prior to the socialist regime. This case study will show that lobbyism, bribery, clientelism and the embezzlement of public funds were indeed important elements in the politics of interwar Yugoslavia; but this does not mean that one could buy everything – especially not if those engaged in corruption were, as agents of a former Habsburg magnate, on the ‘wrong side of history’.
Before getting started, some theoretical considerations are in order. Corruption research has, in recent years, generated a vast theoretical literature.9 Though there is a clear tendency to bridge disciplinary differences in understanding corruption, the dominant social sciences – to this day – show a tendency towards ‘hard’ (essentialist) definitions of corruption, while the humanities seem to prefer either ‘soft’ (relativist) definitions or not to define their object of inquiry at all. By ‘hard’, I mean definitions which can be used independent of time and context, since a definition claims to address universal traits of a given phenomenon. The best-known definitions of corruption, Transparency International’s (TI) “abuse of entrusted power for private gain”10 and the World Bank’s “the abuse of public office for private gain”11 – are widely applied ‘hard’ definitions. What they have in common, though with different expressions of explicitness, is the juxtaposition of public vs. private, a notion closely connected to the normative programme of Western modernity. This distinction is hardly applicable to many premodern scenarios where political rulers or officials did not (really) differentiate between public and their own private interests but distributed resources and political positions according to ‘personalized’ criteria such as loyalty, kinship and friendship. According to the TI and World Bank definitions, societies with a highly personalized political rule and dominant patron-client systems are endemically corrupt and thus morally tainted – but what is the benefit of such moral labelling if such a society’s members are not even aware of the criteria the researcher applies to them? At this point, applying hard definitions of corruption can lead the researcher to misunderstand history and to deprecate, in an ‘orientalist’ manner, all societies where the private-public distinction has not (yet) been established.12
Against this background, historians, but also anthropologists, insist that corruption research should always take what a given society understands as corruption into account.13 Here, corruption is not a universal type of action but an evaluative scheme, which is applied whenever somebody asserts that a person or group has gained access to resources (material and immaterial alike) by violating certain norms. This understanding covers, for example, situations in 18th-century Mexico, where the Spanish elite labelled the entry of non-nobles into the colonial administration as corruption,14 or situations in interwar Croatia, where Catholic clergymen simply declared that the decay of Catholic mores in the most general sense was corruption.15
It is clear that both hard and soft definitions of corruption have their pitfalls. If hard definitions tend to produce misunderstandings of and discriminations against societies which do not share our value system, soft definitions are sometimes too broad to allow a focus on concrete phenomena. In this dilemma, histories of corruption can either follow ‘soft’ definitions, which runs the risk that their research will be neither intelligible nor relevant to those who follow ‘hard’ definitions, or they can try to bridge the hard and soft sides, aiming to balance the historian’s relativistic and ‘culturalist’ approach with today’s globalized ‘hard’ discourse on (anti-)corruption. In our above-mentioned interdisciplinary project studying corruption in Serbia and Croatia between 1817 and 2018, we are seeking precisely this synthesis in our efforts to determine whether there has been, over the past 200 years, a linear development in the local understanding of corruption according to ‘Western’ notions of the common good, abstract universal rules and a separation between public and private – or whether this development has been non-linear and ambivalent, characterized by competing norms of conduct.16 Our research question thus includes both the universalist ‘hard’ definitions of corruption and the locally embedded ‘soft’ ones, and sets these two conceptions in relation to each other.
Following such a path, the present book proposes one additional bridging technique: an integration of the ‘hard’ principal/agent theory with ‘soft’ concepts such as loyalty and labelling. The principal/agent theory, or agency theory, has been well established in research on organizations since the 1970s17 and is extremely important for much of the social science research on corruption.18 According to this research, to reach a particular goal, a certain principal (an owner of a firm, a state or any other stakeholder) needs to employ one or more agents (officials, managers, employees, representatives, lawyers, etc.) to do a job since the principal cannot do it alone – the job requires time, travel, special contacts or knowledge which the principal does not have. The principal thus hires an agent, but their interests do not necessarily coincide.19 Agency theory is typically modern in its assumption that individuals behave according to rational choice criteria and in particular as rational, egoistic profit maximizers, using their knowledge and their opportunities to serve their own interests. In corruption research, as the political scientist Petra Stykow points out, the principal-agent approach usually means that an agent ‘cheats’ his principal, typically through a transaction with a third person, a client. In any case, the agent breaks the contract with the principal, frequently in a hidden manner, to maximize his or her own gain.20
Agency theory lies implicitly at the heart of the TI’s and the World Bank’s definitions of corruption mentioned above, since both speak of ‘abuses’ and ‘office’ or ‘entrusted power’: there must be a principal who has put trust in the agent and has entered into a contract with that agent to establish a boundary separating legitimate from illegitimate behaviour.21 But that is not why I have decided to include agency theory – as discussed above, the TI’s and World Bank’s definitions can be quite problematic for the historian. Rather, I have opted for this theory since it very obviously fits the source material. Throughout its fight with the Yugoslav state, the House of Thurn and Taxis made use of a myriad of agents tasked with lobbying for Thurn and Taxis interests, and many sources deal with the question of whether, and if so how, these agents cheated the princely house, manipulating information so as to receive as much of their honoraria in advance as they could. The sources themselves, though written decades before the broad establishment of agency theory, dealt precisely with the principal-agent relationship, so that the corresponding theory matches the source material ‘organically’. The same is true regarding the relationship between the Yugoslav state and all its officials who had come under the influence of Thurn and Taxis lobbyism: here, too, a principal, in this case ‘the state’ or rather people claiming to represent it, was anxious that its own agents – that is, its bureaucrats, state officials, members of parliament or ministers – could cheat the principal by pursuing hidden, self-interested agendas, e.g., by taking bribes from the Thurn and Taxis side. In this book, I will develop the principal-agent relationship more explicitly for the House of Thurn and Taxis and its agents than for the relationship between Yugoslavia and its representatives, a tendency necessitated by asymmetries in the source material – whereas Regensburg kept very explicit records about the relationship with its agents, this is not the case in the Yugoslav archives, which contain official documents but appear rather to follow the rule that when it comes to informal matters, nobody should leave any trace of what had happened, not even in retrospect.
As mentioned above, the ‘hard’ principal-agent approach is necessary but not sufficient for a theoretical framework. As we will see when we get closer to certain agents of the princely house, their motivations are frequently but not always as simple as would be supposed by the principal-agent theory. In court hearings, some said that they had taken their decisions in favour of Thurn and Taxis not because of material gains but because they believed that they were working for a ‘just cause’. Patterns of older loyalties and friendships also shine through here, and it is not always so easy to depict them as merely profit-oriented. Thus, alongside the ‘cold’ principal-agent relationship, another dyadic relationship enters the game, namely the ‘warm’ patron-client connection. In the social sciences, clientelistic relations are frequently characterized as pre-modern or as outmoded, dwindling relics of the past,22 while principal-agent relations tend to be seen as modern and universal. As I will show in the Thurn and Taxis case, both models coexisted quite conveniently and probably continue to do so to this day.
It is necessary to point out that in contrast to what one finds in conventional corruption discourse, I apply the agency model without moral connotations. Usually, the principal is equated with the state as an institution representing the common good and controlling its ‘egoistic’ agents.23 But the core of the theory concerns not morals but simply knowledge asymmetries, differing interests and the principal’s capacity to control the agent.24 That is, by applying agency theory I claim neither that a principal must be a state nor that the principal must be benign or unified. Instead, the principal’s role can be fulfilled by a private person, representing particular interests. And even if the principal is a state, it may in fact be composed of personal networks and their respective manifestations of self-interest. The only criteria to be deemed a principal are the capacity to use agents and the evident attempt to control them.
As we will see, the Thurn and Taxis case overturns the conventional correlation between ‘correct agent behaviour’ and corruption. Whereas in a standard situation, the agent’s betrayal of the principal amounts to corruption – that is, the agent breaks his contract and cheats the principal through an illicit exchange with some client – disturbances in the principal-agent relationship on the Thurn and Taxis side signified the opposite: here, the principal felt cheated if the agents did not bribe Yugoslav officials but instead kept money for themselves. This is precisely where we need the ‘softer’ approaches to corruption to understand the situation. In this book, we will encounter numerous cases in which the Thurn and Taxis administration reflected on its agents in Yugoslavia engaging in bribery. The administration had to morally deal with this fact since in interwar Europe bribery was considered a serious crime, just as it is today, and needed to be either denied or morally justified.25
This is where labelling theory comes on stage. In this constructivist line of sociological thought, deviation from a behavioural norm is not some ontological ‘fact’ about the deviant person but rather an ascription that others use to assert their own superiority and power over those labelled as deviant.26 In our story, both sides used labelling to delegitimize their opponents. While for Yugoslavia, the state’s steps were always justified insofar as they were directed against somebody labelled a historical enemy of the people – the German feudal lord – the Thurn and Taxis side immunized itself against moral reproaches by frequently repeating the claim that bribery, while not a good thing, just needed to be practised in the Balkans, where corruption was allegedly endemic and a part of the culture. As we will see, Thurn and Taxis agents also made use of orientalist labelling to motivate the princely house to engage in bribery; since the bribes went through the agents’ hands, they did so not without self-interest. At this point, the hard and the soft approaches intersect with considerable intensity: profit-maximizers ‘discover’ the utility of cultural labelling as a strategy for achieving certain material goals.27
Historians sometimes reproach the social sciences for using theories not as a possible explanation of reality but as a replacement for that reality. That is, our discipline tends to reject the use of historical examples to prove or falsify theories and uses theories instead to understand our objects of inquiry. When acknowledging the complexity of past events, structures and discourses, we regard with suspicion the idea that a single theory can explain the past without undue reductionism.28 Invoking labelling theory, for example, I might be tempted to abandon history’s tempered approach by merely claiming, in the manner of a radical neophyte enamoured of a newly discovered theoretical faith, that no particular Balkan history of corruption exists: we simply possess a discourse on Balkan corruption due to (post-)imperialist labelling. But if this were so, it would mean that from the very beginning, I neither take concerns about corruption in Balkan societies seriously nor show any willingness to engage with a history of regional corruption which goes beyond labelling issues. Such a radical approach, I believe, would not be very helpful; historical enquiry would be subjected to relentless ideologization.
At this point, let me return to the work of our Regensburg corruption research team, which represents a much broader view than what can be found in this in-depth study of a particular case. The evidence we have collected so far indicates that in Southeastern Europe, imperial (and especially Ottoman) rule created widespread mistrust towards political institutions and a strong tendency to circumvent them through patron-client relationships, even during a time when central and western Europe were turning their backs on this model, declaring the centrality of the general welfare by following the dictates of ‘ethical universalism’ and adopting corresponding formal rules. This mistrust did not cease with the end of imperial rule but was inherited by the post-Ottoman Balkan states, and though the majority of their populations found these newly founded countries to be more democratic and trustworthy in general, they nevertheless alienated many of their citizens by their rapid authoritarian modernization based on foreign models. In this situation, normative dualism between traditional patronage and formalized institutions could easily survive well into the 20th century.29 This is not to say that the Balkans, in the interwar period, was more corrupt than Western Europe – there is no hard evidence to substantiate such a claim, since comparative research on this question does not exist. Future researchers tackling historical comparisons will not arrive at easy answers, struggling as they will with the complexity of corruption as a phenomenon, with problematic source material and with great sectoral differences within a particular society – for instance, between petty corruption in everyday life and grand corruption in public procurement. Late 19th-century scandals make it impossible to conclude that Serbia, for instance, was more corrupt than France – one is rather left with the opposite impression.30
These remarks are simply meant to stress that territories each have their own histories of corruption, consisting of more than just labelling; they manifest their own patterns of ‘getting things done’, which can and should be investigated. Since research on the modern history of corruption in Southeastern Europe has just begun,31 one cannot contend that talk of ‘Balkan corruption’, instrumentalized so amply in the Thurn and Taxis case, was either a factual description of social mores or merely an orientalist prejudice devoid of substance. In this book, I do not attempt to answer this question: an in-depth investigation of one isolated affair does not provide the proper means to do so.
Before getting started, I would like to make clear that this study, while focusing on corruption, has strong ties with other fields of history. First, it touches upon environmental history, since all the (alleged) bribery was directed mainly towards the use of forests. The interrelation between corruption, the use of natural resources and ecological destruction will frequently appear here, and in this sense, my book links history with important contemporary discussions. In addition, my study is connected to the literature on agrarian questions, since Yugoslavia’s main justification for expropriating the Prince of Thurn and Taxis was the difficult situation of the peasantry, which was to be alleviated by redistributing the property of large noble landowners. Last but not least, and as with most books on interwar Yugoslavia, the present work is also linked to the country’s dominant political conflict, the one between Serbs and Croats. The lens of corruption research, I hope, will help add new nuances to this old issue as well.
Allow me to mention here some of the more helpful people who supported me during the research, writing and editing of this study – such as Miloš Lecić, my doctoral student, who helped me to assess some ‘forgotten’ sources in the Arhiv Jugoslavije. He, like my dear colleagues Vesna Aleksić and Vladan Jovanović, were also among the readers of this book in manuscript. The same is true for Jelena Kisić Jorgačević, another doctoral student of mine, who read the book from the angle of an experienced journalist. Last but not least I need to mention Suzanne Weinberger (our Australian-born secretary) and Jim Gibbons, both of whom were extremely helpful and efficient in language editing.
Fürstliches Thurn und Taxis Zentralarchiv, abbreviated FTTZA.
See the published results of this seminar in Raffael Parzefall, Natali Stegmann (eds): Deutsche Besitzungen im ‘Osten’ und deren Enteignung: Quelleninterpretationen, Regensburg 2014. Available online at https://www.uni-regensburg.de/index.php?eID=dumpFile&t=f&f=20004&token=7e1d641933602025beb86757d3c80519348b6be3 [accessed 15 September 2022].
In the above-mentioned volume, a first approach to the issue was undertaken by Tamara Brandenburger; see pp. 77–86.
Cf. https://www.uni-regensburg.de/forschung/geschichte-der-korruption-in-suedosteuropa/dfg-projekt-von-der-informalitaet-zur-korruption-1817-2018-serbien-und-kroatien-im-vergleich/index.html [accessed 15 September 2022].
The strength of this approach is demonstrated, for example, by Jens Ivo Engels, Die Geschichte der Korruption: Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2014).
Zvonimir Kulundžić: Politika i korupcija u kraljevskoj Jugoslaviji (Zagreb: Novinar, 1968); Klaus Buchenau: ‘Korruption im ersten Jugoslawien (1918–1941): Eine Skizze zu Diskurs und Praxis’, Südost-Forschungen 72 (2013), 130–164.
The metaphorical use of the word ‘grammar’ as an attempt to establish rules in nonlinguistic matters is present in the research on mass violence. Cf. Jacques Sémelin, ‘Elemente einer Grammatik des Massakers’, Mittelweg 36, vol. 15 (2006) No. 6, 18–40; Alexander Korb: Im Schatten des Weltkriegs. Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013), p. 16.
See, for example, Michal Klíma, Informal politics in post-Communist Europe: Political parties, clientelism, and state capture (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2020); or Bálint Magyar and Bálint Madlovics, The anatomy of post-communist regimes: A conceptual framework (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2020).
E.g., Bo Rothstein / Aiysha Varraich (eds): Making sense of corruption. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017; Bruce Buchan / Lisa Hill: An intellectual history of political corruption. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Arnold J. Heidenheimer, Michael Johnston (eds): Political Corruption. Concepts & Contexts. New Brunswick, London 2009; Paul M. Heywood (ed.): Routledge handbook of political corruption. London: Routledge 2015; Alena Ledeneva / Roxana Bratu / Philipp Köker: Corruption Studies for the Twenty-First First Century: Paradigm Shifts and Innovative Approaches, in: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 95, No. 1, Innovations in Corruption Studies (January 2017), pp. 1‒20; Elisabeth Wagner, Burkhardt Wolf (eds.): Korruption. Mosse-Lectures 2010 an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Berlin 2011; Harald Bluhm / Karsten Fischer (eds): Sichtbarkeit und Unsichtbarkeit der Macht. Theorien politischer Korruption. Baden-Baden 2002; Peter Graeff / Jürgen Grieger (eds): Was ist Korruption? Begriffe, Grundlagen und Perspektiven gesellschaftswissenschaftlicher Korruptionsforschung. Baden-Baden 2012.
https://www.transparency.org/en/what-is-corruption [accessed 15 September 2022].
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/factsheet/2020/02/19/anticorruption-fact-sheet [accessed 15 September 2022].
Cf. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, The Quest for Good Governance: How societies develop control of corruption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Mungiu-Pippidi is, as a governance researcher, well aware of the definition problems and does not apply the World Bank or TI definitions directly. Rather, she understands corruption as the absence of “ethical universalism” (p. 17), thus presupposing an opposition of universalism and particularism. This differentiation is in fact closely related to the separation between public and private.
For anthropology, cf. Davide Torsello, The ethnographic study of corruption: Methodology and research focuses. In: Routledge handbook of political corruption, pp. 183–195; for history, cf. Ronald Asch, Birgit Emich, and Jens Ivo Engels, ‘Einleitung’, In: Asch/Emich/Engels (eds): Integration, Legitimation, Korruption: Politische Patronage in Früher Neuzeit und Moderne, ed. by Ronald Asch, Birgit Emich and Jens Ivo Engels (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 7–30.
Christoph Rosenmüller, ‘“Zweihundert Schläge mit brennenden Ocote-Zweigen”: Recht und Vergehen der Amtsleute an den kolonialen Gerichtshöfen von Guadalajara und Mexiko-Stadt’ Südost-Forschungen 77 (2018), 10–29.
Klaus Buchenau, ‘Korruption im ersten Jugoslawien’, p. 162.
Klaus Buchenau, ‘Historicizing Corruption: An Outline on Serbia (19th–21st Century)’. In: Klaus Roth / Ioannis Zelepos (eds): Klientelismus in Südosteuropa 54. Internationale Hochschulwoche der Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft in Tutzing, 5–9. October 2015, ed. by Klaus Roth and Ioannis Zelepos (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2018), pp. 109–132.
See the groundbreaking article by Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling, ‘Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure’, Journal of Financial Economics 3 (1976), 305–360.
Heather Marquette and Caryn Peiffer, ‘Collective Action and Systemic Corruption: Paper presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops’, University of Warsaw 29 March–2 April 2015, p. 4 https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/b5944a31-85b6-4547-82b3-0d4a74910b07.pdf [accessed 29 March 2021].
Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, ‘Agency theory: An assessment and review’, Academy of Management Review vol. 14 (1989) No. 1, 57–74; Mark Ebers and Wilfried Gotsch, ‘Institutionenökonomische Theorien der Organisation’, in Organisationstheorien, ed. by Alfred Kieser and Mark Ebers (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2006) pp. 247–307 (pp. 258–277).
Petra Stykow, ‘Mésalliance à trois: Politische Korruption als Beziehungsphänomen’, in Bluhm and Fischer, pp, 87–133 (p. 91).
In the management literature, agency theory is closely connected to contracts between principal and agent, and how they should be constructed to minimize misuse by the agent. Cf. Ebers/Gotsch.
Shmuel Eisenstadt and Louis Roninger, ‘Patron-Client Relations as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (1980) No. 1, 42–77 (42–43).
Bo Rothstein, Controlling corruption. The social contract approach (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 24–25.
Marquette/Peiffer.
Engels, Geschichte der Korruption, pp. 291–321.
Erving Goffman, Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Stefan Quensel, ‘Das Labeling-Paradigma – ein Konstrukt? Oder: Wie wir Theorien lieben’), in Grenzenlose Konstruktivität? Standortbestimmung und Zukunftsperspektiven konstruktivistischer Theorien abweichenden Verhaltens, ed. by Birgit Mensel and Kerstin Ratzke (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2003), pp. 17–36.
On similar mechanisms in contemporary African societies, see Giorgio Blundo, ‘Hidden Acts Open Talks. How Anthropology Can ‘Observe’ and Describe Corruption’, in Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective, ed. by Gerhard Anders and Monique Nuijten (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 27–52 (p 31).
Stefan Haas, ‘Theoriemodelle’, in Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 11 February 2010, http://docupedia.de/zg/Theoriemodelle [accessed 15 September 2022].
Buchenau, ‘Historicizing corruption’.
For Western Europe cf. Engels, Geschichte der Korruption, pp. 293–321; for Serbia, cf. Korupcija i razvoj moderne srpske države, ed. by Aleksandra Bulatović and Srđan Korać (Beograd: Centar za menadžment, 2006).
In the context of this case study, it makes little sense to list all titles pertaining to this field. The most important contributions on the former Yugoslavia and its component parts are Kulundžić, Bulatović and Korać, Korupcija i razvoj, and Buchenau (see bibliography). On the Thurn and Taxis case, there exists only one short paper by Aleksandar Miletić, ‘Afera Turn-Taksis’, in Bulatović and Korać, pp. 89–92.