Lithuania's anti-corruption policy: Between the "West" and the "East"?

Corruption is still a serious problem in Lithuania as well as in the majority of new European states. It reveals itself not only through regular internal corruption scandals, but is also exposed in various international surveys, such as Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index (CPI), or the World Bank's Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS). In recent years, the European Commission in its annual reports on the progress achieved by candidate countries in the process of European integration expressed concern about the inefficiency of the real anti-corruption policy in all those states. However, what kind of anti-corruption policy should be implemented in the new European states, including Lithuania? To what extent could it be based on international "best practices" and how sensitive it has to be to the cultural and political traditions and habits of the country in question? The Lithuanian story about the creation and the implementation of the national anti-corruption strategy could be interesting not only because it illustrates institutional and legislative peculiarities of the "transitional" period of the society, but also due to the fact that the Lithuanian state tries to combine different models of anti-corruption activities that come from both the West (the North American and the West European experience) and from the East (Hong Kong's anti-corruption practice). The article focuses on the political and cultural aspects of these approaches as well as on the problems that lead Lithuanian law enforcement bodies in their attempts to implement anti-corruption policy in the Lithuanian society. © Springer 2005.