Greece: Citizens View Corruption as a Normal Way of Getting Things Done

"There are a number of ambivalences characterising perceptions of corruption in Greece", PD Dr. Giannakopoulos (University Konstanz/Germany) reports. He found in his EU-research-project "Crime and Culture": "There are strong beliefs about corruption being highly widespread and diffused in the social fabric, because:

Corruption should indeed be considered as a dominant social attitude and acceptable behaviour, or even as one of the main evils in modern Greek society (social disease);
General collapse of values: Greek society suffers an erosion of culture and therefore the usual corrupt conduct does not coincide with the explicitly illegal action. It goes against approved ethical standards, but these seem to have lost the binding force required to keep law-deviations at bay;
Culture of corruption: Citizens view corruption as a normal way of getting things done and that this way of thinking and practice is becoming deeply embedded into the conceptual, moral and practical attitudes of everyday life ...

Corruption should be considered as omnipresent in the social fabric of modern Greece, but this acknowledgement is immediately blocked off by denying any personal experience of overtly criminal behaviour in one´s own field of action ..."

Literatur zum Thema:
Korruption – Forschungsstand, Prävention, Probleme
Kliche, Thomas; Thiel, Stephanie (Hrsg.)