“I was 25 and completing a PhD as a psychiatrist, when the 1989 revolution in Romania started,” says Professor Alina Mungiu-Pippidi.
She was part of a group, who edited a dissent student magazine. The magazine had been forbidden due to censorship, but as the revolution began, the students immediately published an issue, the first free newspaper in Romania. They did so by confiscating print paper from communist printing houses, and the print workers, caught up in the revolutionary enthusiasm, printed the sheet for free.
"Overnight, I became a public opinion leader and a journalist. This period has had a significant impact on my later work," Mungiu-Pippidi says.
In the 1990s, Mungiu-Pippidi completed her PhD in social psychology, and her path led to the Harvard University Kennedy School, where her career as a political scientist began.
Today, Mungiu-Pippidi is a professor of comparative public policy at the Italian LUISS University and she serves as the chair of the European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State-Building (ERCAS) after for fifteen years holding the Democracy Chair at Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.
Alongside her research, Mungiu-Pippidi has developed practical tools to support good governance and anti-corruption efforts. These metrics can be found on the ERCAS-developed website, corruptionrisk.org.
Anti-corruption work begins: Coalition for a Clean Parliament
Mungiu-Pippidi has never confined herself to the ivory tower of academia; rather, she has been an outspoken figure both as a journalist and as an influential voice in civil society.
Let’s go back in time to when the young researcher returned from the United States to post-Ceaușescu Romania and founded the country's first political think tank. The plan was to focus on public policy, but soon the founders discovered the main issue was systemic corruption.
"Romania was the last of the Central Europe countries to experience alternance in government – democrats won their first elections against former Communists only in 1996, six years after the fall of Ceausescu. As in Russia these were the times when the state passed surreptitiously into private hands, with most of its assets, so we soon realized that further democratization meant fighting state capture," Mungiu-Pippidi explains.
She also realized that research alone wasn’t enough and developed a methodology to help clean up a country where a large part of the parliament was thoroughly corrupt. Thus, a broad naming and shaming ‘Coalition for a Clean Parliament’ (CPC) was born.
“We monitored the integrity of candidates for each constituency, based on a common understanding with the broader society, after public opinion surveys, and negotiated with parties. We gathered a lot of media attention, with over 70 investigative journalists involved in our work,” Mungiu-Pippidi recounts.
Political parties dropped some black-listed candidates from their lists and the voters eliminated others. The former communist ruling party with most black-listed candidates, who was originally a frontrunner lost elections.
The CPC lawyer, Monica Macovei became the new minister of justice and unleashed Europe’s toughest crackdown, which led in the end to over twenty ministers jailed for corruption, countless mayors, generals, and topped by the national soccer establishment. The young prosecutor selected by Macovei was Laura Kovesi, who later became Europe’s first EU Public Prosecutor.
Good governance needs to be people’s best interest
Due to her background, Mungiu-Pippidi has taken a particular interest in how young democracies transition from authoritarianism toward good governance, and why so few succeed.
She names Estonia as the foremost success story, and gives special recognition to Mart Laar, the Prime Minister during Estonia's early years of renewed independence. Under Laar’s leadership the country swiftly freed itself from the chains of the Soviet era.
Other countries that have succeeded in building good governance include Uruguay, Botswana, Chile, Taiwan, and South Korea. What unites these diverse nations?
"They’ve had, during their political development, the right kinds of coalitions that included both selfless, altruistic people and self-interested groups," says Mungiu-Pippidi.
“A country needs to have sufficient people whose best interest is to achieve an equitable government and a merit-based society. It's not going to succeed just as a crusade preached by some.”
Too many elements gathered into the rule of law basket
While Mungiu-Pippidi actively promotes the rule of law in many ways, she has become wary of the concept itself. In her view, it has, over recent years, become abused as an umbrella term.
"The rule of law is like a basket to which new elements are continuously added. When there are so many dimensions, they risk not being consistent with one another, and they can even come into some contradiction," she observes.
“Then it becomes impossible to promote them effectively. Some anticorruption campaigns effectively trample upon the rights of people, for instance.”
Mungiu-Pippidi advocates for narrowing the concept of the rule of law and focusing on its core specific elements if promotion is to remain effective. She believes that the essence lies in the separation of powers and judicial independence, and the most important universal values relate to human rights and corruption: nobody agrees to being abused and being put in jail arbitrarily, and nobody agrees to being ripped off by the government.
In her view, the overextension has turned the rule of law into a sort of utopia, an ideal that is impossible to achieve. The abstract nature of the concept is compounded by the fact that the rule of law is difficult to measure.
To evaluate the actual situation, Mungiu-Pippidi believes there should be a greater focus on practical applications and concrete actions. She emphasizes that it’s not enough for something to be written into law, de jure, if the law, in practice, de facto, fails to fulfill its purpose.
One of Mungiu-Pippidi’s favorite areas of study is examining the public integrity – specifically, assessing how well governance succeeds in minimizing the risk of corruption. The Index of Public Integrity, which she has developed, extracts one component, public integrity from six key areas: budget and administrative transparency, online public services, judicial independence, press freedom, and digital citizenship.
“And the statistical miracle is that they all come together as one”, she says. “We then know what is lacking and should be fixed’.
How to promote rule of law internationally?
One of Mungiu-Pippidi’s research areas is especially relevant from the perspective of the Rule of Law Centre: she has extensively explored, how to promote of the rule of law across borders by examining the EU’s performance within its borders and across them, in 127 countries where EU offers aid in exchange for some good governance conditionality.
Mungiu-Pippidi’s conclusion is clear: the rule of law cannot be transferred to another country from abroad (“Only Napoleon Bonaparte succeeded in Switzerland”, she says), but its construction and operating of local coalitions may require international support.
Promoters should mind unintended consequences, making things worse – like when presidential contenders Biden and Trump fought over who should have been general prosecutor in Ukraine in 2019. “Imagine what Putin thought during their dispute”, she says.
By support, she refers to assistance for domestic coalitions of civil society, as diverse as possible, which often need both know how and funding to get a national and an international voice. First and foremost, it’s crucial to enable like-minded individuals or groups to even find each other; shared problems can only be tackled by effective collective action, but that is rare and often needs a helping hand.
Mungiu-Pippidi emphasizes that there’s no need to despair, even though rule of law development has regressed worldwide in recent years.
“I've seen everywhere people who really want to change their countries, because it is in their best interest. And the rule of law promotion should be empowering these people.”
Each year, during Rule of Law Day, the Rule of Law Centre at the University of Helsinki and the Leo Mechelin Foundation award the Leo Mechelin Medal to an individual who has made significant contributions to advocating for the rule of law. The award ceremony also includes the recipient’s Leo Mechelin Lecture.