1-Goetz-OBL

Making sense of post-communistcentral administration:modernization, Europeanization orLatinization?Klaus H. Goetz

ABSTRACT Two main perspectives dominate in the study of central stateadministration in post-communist CEE: modernization and Europeanization.These perspectives can be characterized with reference to main drivers of admin-istrative change: developmental objectives; the conceptualization of current institu-tional arrangements; and the decisive actor constellations that are thought to shapeadministrative trajectories. Modernization and Europeanization capture importantaspects of the development of post-communist public administration; but they alsosuffer from limitations in their descriptive, conceptual and explanatory power.Against this background, it is proposed to enrich the study of public administrationin CEE by seeking inspiration from comparative public administration, especiallyas it applies to southern Europe and Latin America. Such a broadening of theanalytical purview may, in particular, help to redirect attention to the substantiveopenness of administrative transition and to the growing diversity of institutionalarrangements in the region.

KEY WORDS Central administration; Central and Eastern Europe; European-ization; institutional enclaves; Latinization; modernization.

POST-COMMUNIST CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION: ACASE OF BELATED MODERNIZATION?

The dominant analytical perspective on the development of public administra-tion in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has been providedby modernization theory, in both its sociological and its political sciencevariants.1 Viewed from this perspective, post-communist administrative devel-opment is part of a comprehensive ‘belated’ or ‘catching-up’ modernization(nachholende Modernisierung) (Habermas 1990) of the countries of CEE, themain elements of which include liberalization and democratization in thepolitical sphere; privatization and marketization in the economy; and pluraliza-tion and individualization in society. The emergence of a speci� c type ofadministration – public bureaucracy – does, of course, occupy a central placein the classical Weberian account of modernization. At least in the continentalEuropean context, ‘modern’ public administration was, until recently, largely

Journal of European Public PolicyISSN 1350–1763 print/ISSN 1466-4429 online © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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Journal of European Public Policy 8:6 December: 1032–1051

synonymous with Weberian public bureaucracy. Accordingly, modern publicadministration constitutes a distinct social sphere, with its own organizationalprinciples (notably a strict functional and hierarchical division of labour); itsown staff (a professional career civil service); and its own bureaucratic ration-ality, with an emphasis on legality, impartiality, objectivity, regularity and apublic service ethos. From the perspective of classical sociological theory, theestablishment of a modern public administration under the rule of law is a keypart of the comprehensive modernization of post-communist countries.

Political science accounts of modernization are centrally concerned with therise and consolidation of liberal democracy. The analytical focus here is, inparticular, on the conditions of democratization; diverging trajectories oftransition and consolidation; and the comparative assessment of differentdemocratic institutional arrangements. In this context, too, the emergence ofa well-ordered sphere of modern public administration is regarded as anintegral part of the consolidation of democracy. For example, Linz and Stepan(1996: 3ff.), in their comparative account of democratic transition and con-solidation in post-communist Europe, southern Europe and South America,identify ‘rational-legal bureaucratic norms’ as the ‘primary organizing principle’of the state apparatus, which constitutes one of the � ve major arenas of a‘modern consolidated democracy’ (the other arenas being civil society, politicalsociety, economic society and the rule of law).

Both the classical sociological and the political science strands of moderniza-tion theory, thus, associate liberal democracy with a very speci� c type of publicadministration. In the CEE context, accounts of administrative developmentinspired by the modernization paradigm regard the ‘real socialist’ state admin-istration as the starting point of post-communist reforms and a ‘conventionalWest European system’ as its developmental objective (see König 1992; sim-ilarly Hesse 1993). The ‘real socialist’ administration is shorthand for theorganization of state power under communism that was based on the explicitrejection of the idea of an effective separation of powers; a uni� ed stateadministration comprising all tiers of the state apparatus, with strong hierar-chical controls and subordination; the intertwining of party bureaucracy andstate administration, with the former having directive authority over the latter;a general disregard for the rule of law, so that party decisions took precedenceover legal norms; a personnel system that relied on politicized cadres and aparty-controlled nomenclatura; the reluctance to acknowledge a separate pub-lic service identity; and an emphasis on economic planning and social controlas central administrative functions.

Against this background, a ‘modernist’ understanding of post-communistadministrative development emphasizes the need for fundamental rather thanpartial reform. In fact, post-communist developmental objectives constitute amirror image of ‘real socialist’ administration and include key requirementssuch as the growing differentiation in tasks and personnel between the politicaland the administrative parts of the executive; administrative devolution anddeconcentration and effective political decentralization, notably through the

K.H. Goetz: Making sense of post-communist central administration 1033

creation of an independent sphere of local government; a fully � edged systemof administrative law and effective legal controls over administrative actions;the establishment of a professional non-partisan civil service; and a rede� nitionof the task pro� le of public administration. Current administrative arrange-ments are assessed with reference to these key modernization requirements andthe desiderata of a stylized national public bureaucracy. In other words, thechief issue in analysing post-communist administrative trajectories is how farthey have advanced in the direction of a modern public administration.

In terms of the decisive actor constellations driving administrative moderni-zation, most accounts tend to privilege domestic in� uences. In common withmuch of the democratization literature, they employ an eclectic mix of actor-centred, institutional and historical–cultural variables. Prime explanatorypower is accorded to domestic actor constellations, as, for example, in Meyer-Sahling’s (2001) explanation of Hungary’s front-runner status in civil servicereform; the importance of institutional veto-points, as in Zubek’s (2001)account of Poland’s ‘checked executive’; and the in�uence of communist andpre-communist legacies, most notably cultural, behavioural, attitudinal andmental orientations that are seen to hamper institutional reform. As far as thelatter variable is concerned, much has been made of the lack of popular trustin public institutions (see, for example, Mishler and Rose 1997, 2001) and theeffects of distrust within administrative institutions, notably between of� cialsand elected executive politicians (Vass 1999). This is not to say, of course, thatmodernization accounts are oblivious to the direct effects of both externalpressure and assistance on institutional change in the region (see, for example,Brusis and Dimitrov’s (2001) analysis of the impact of International MonetaryFund (IMF) pressures on executive arrangements for budgetary policy-mak-ing). But these tend to be treated as contextual variables that establishopportunities and constraints for domestic reforms rather than decisive driversof institutional development.

The identi� cation between modernization and public bureaucracy that hascharacterized both the practitioners’ discourse on administrative reform inCEE and the dominant analytical perspective may seem surprising to studentsof West European public administration. After all, for the last two decades orso, the Western modernization discourse has not been about Weberian publicbureaucracy, but about the remoulding of public administration according tothe precepts of the new public management (NPM) (for an informative recentsurvey, see Pollitt and Boukaert 2000). There is no need here to rehearse thearguments between NPM apologists and defenders of Weberian public bureau-cracy. What is worth noting in the present context is that modernization in thesense of creating a managerialist administration along the lines of NPMmodels has, so far, hardly featured in the CEE reform discourse. As a recentWorld Bank study of administrative change in Hungary, Poland, Romania andRussia has noted, the ‘CEE countries . . . have steered curiously clear of theNPM approach. The implicit systems and models adopted so far have been thecentralized hierarchies of the Weberian tradition’ (Nunberg 1999: 264).

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It might have been thought that Western institutional transfer agencies,such as the World Bank itself, SIGMA (Support for Improvement in Govern-ance and Management in Central and Eastern European Countries), sponsoredby the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)and the European Union (EU), or the EU would have sought to challenge the‘strong national and organizational cultural preferences in CEE countries forthese classical traditions’ (Nunberg 1999: 264). In fact, such transfer agenciesseem, on the whole, to have reinforced domestic predispositions towards theclassical variant of modernization. As far as SIGMA is concerned, its pro-grammes have been informed by scepticism, if not ‘the rejection of the transferof the concepts of the new public management that derive from the manage-rialist administrative systems of Anglo-Saxon countries’ (Speer 2001: 85; mytranslation, KHG). In the case of the World Bank, its fairly late conversion toaddressing issues of governance; the dispersion of responsibilities for publicsector reform inside the World Bank; and scepticism about the appropriatenessof managerialist approaches in transitional settings shared by key staff havecombined to limit the impact of NPM on governance-related initiatives. TheBank’s recent conceptual reorientation from supporting ‘best practice’ to ‘good� t’ (World Bank 2000: xv) has further limited the scope for pursuing acomprehensive NPM-inspired approach.

What is the picture of administrative development that is emerging fromstudies informed by a modernization perspective? Although there is, inevitably,an element of subjectivity involved in trying to summarize a broad range ofcontributions, it would seem that, over time, doubts about progress in estab-lishing modern administrations have been increasing rather than decreasing.The expectations for a radical and fast break with the institutional legacies ofcommunism, which had informed Western analyses of state administrationduring the early years of transition (see, e.g., Hesse 1993; Hesse and Goetz1993/94), have given way to more pessimistic assessments that highlightreform delays and evidence of systematic gaps between reform legislation andadministrative practice. The creation of professional civil services is of specialrelevance in this respect, because of their emblematic signi� cance in modernistaccounts: ‘The passing of civil service legislation is . . . rightly seen as a vitalingredient of the reform process. A stable, competitive, accountable anddemocratically reliable civil service is a pre-condition for success not only ofadministrative reform, but for political stability and economic development aswell’ (Hesse 1998: 175).

Yet, recent surveys of civil service development in the region have voicedconcern about a lack of substantive progress in many countries in which thecreation of a career civil service has been on the of� cial reform agenda for thelast decade (see, in particular, Verheijen 1999, 2001). With the exception ofHungary, which adopted civil service legislation in 1992 (György 1999), andthe Baltic republics, which passed relevant legislation in the mid-1990s(Vanagunas 1999), the adoption of legal frameworks to create civil services hastaken much longer than expected. Thus, in Poland, a Civil Service Law was


adopted in 1996 (Torres-Bartyzel and Kacprowicz 1999), but its implementa-tion was aborted, and a new act only entered into force in June 1999. InBulgaria, civil service legislation only took effect in 1999. In the CzechRepublic, a core of administrative reformers have pushed for legislation tocreate a civil service since independence in 1993 (Vidláková 1993) andsuccessive drafts bills have been prepared, but it is, at present, estimated thata Civil Service Law will only � nally enter into force in 2002 (Vidláková 2001).More worryingly, civil service law often seems to remain a dead letter, asVerheijen has recently suggested:

Civil service laws have seldom been the expected catalysts for the stabiliza-tion, depoliticization and professionalization of the central administration.Rather than being a starting point for the development of civil servicepolicies, the adoption of laws has become an objective in itself. Apart fromHungary, none of the candidate countries has come close to the develop-ment of a civil service policy, in addition to the necessary legalframework.

(Verheijen 2000: 29)

Implementation de� cits are said to be particularly glaring when it comes tolimiting political in� uence over the careers of line ministerial servants, even inthe case of apparent front-runners of reform, such as Hungary (Vass 2001).Moreover, reversals on the way to a professional depoliticized service are anever-present possibility, as Verheijen has noted with respect to more recentdevelopments in Poland and Hungary (Verheijen 1999: 336).

EUROPE TO THE RESCUE? THE IMPACT OF EUROPEANINTEGRATION

Since the mid-1990s, ‘Europeanization’ has evolved as the second majorperspective on administrative development in the region (Grabbe 2001;Lippert et al. 2001, with further references). In analytical terms, European-ization ‘Eastern style’ draws heavily on the rapidly expanding literature thatseeks to understand the impact of European integration on the polities, politicsand public policies of the EU member states. The key question here is to whatextent and in what ways the political systems of the member states have beentransformed under the in�uence of European integration (for recent surveys ofthe ‘state of the art’ of Europeanization research, see Bulmer and Lequesne2001; Goetz and Hix 2000; Green Cowles et al. 2001; Héritier et al. 2001;with speci� c focus on public administration, see Goetz 2000; Kassim et al.2000; Knill 2001). The Eastern-style Europeanization approach extends theanalysis of the integration effects to the likely future members of an enlargedEU. At present, it centres, by necessity, on anticipatory effects, i.e. the mannerin which the future member states prepare their administrative systems foraccession; and on anticipated effects, i.e. the likely long-term administrativeimplications of eventual EU membership.


Europeanization is not a rival approach to modernization, with which itshares many basic assumptions. Rather, it is a complementary perspective thatis more narrowly focused in its empirical, conceptual and explanatory con-cerns. It also differs from the modernization perspective in that it givessystematic attention to the consequences of ‘opening the state’ to the supra-national level – to borrow a phrase used by Wessels (2000) in his discussionof the effects of European integration on Germany – and to the potentialin�uence of non-domestic actors in institutional development. If we turn, � rst,to the assumed key drivers of administrative development, Europeanizationstudies concentrate, in the main, on the speci� c adaptive requirements asso-ciated with EU membership negotiations and eventual EU accession. Thisemphasis has been criticized by some as being overly restrictive. It has,therefore, been proposed to distinguish between such a limited understandingof integration effects – variously referred to as ‘EU-Europeanization’, ‘EU-ization’, ‘Unionization’ and ‘Communitization’ – on the one hand, and a widerconception, which sees membership negotiations and accession as part of abroader ‘return to Europe’ (Lippert et al. 2001), on the other. However, to theextent that administrative Europeanization in CEE has been empirically inves-tigated, the narrower understanding has prevailed (Nunberg 2000). Attentionhas, accordingly, concentrated on the domestic consequences of the need toadopt and implement the acquis communautaire and to prepare for what, inEU parlance, has become known as the ‘European administrative space’(SIGMA 1998, 1999).

In common with modernization accounts, the Europeanization approachregards the legacy of ‘real socialist’ state administration as the key challenge tobe addressed in post-communist administrative development. But whereas theclassical version of public bureaucracy is, at its core, informed by the notionof the sovereign nation-state, Europeanization Eastern-style understands ad-ministrative development as part of the emergence of a ‘multi-level’ politicalsystem (Lippert et al. 2001). The key developmental objective is not, therefore,to build a modern bureaucracy for the traditional nation-state, but a publicadministration that allows the future member states to act as effective playersin the EU’s multi-level governance system (Lippert et al. 2001). As Grabbe(2001) points out, there is little chance (or danger) that European integrationwill lead to the emergence of a uniform model of public administrationamongst the applicant countries. Persistent differences amongst the admin-istrative systems of long-standing member states make such an outcomeunlikely. But EU-compatibility is seen as the decisive yardstick for evaluatingcurrent administrative arrangements. Institutional development in the regionis, thus, viewed through the EU lens.

In terms of decisive actor constellations, the Europeanization perspectiveexplicitly recognizes the signi� cance of external pressures and expectations andthe role of both international agencies and Western governments in shapingthe path of administrative reform in CEE. Europeanization research has, onthe whole, been more interested in examining the substance of adjustment


effects than in the instruments and modalities of Europeanization; but, asGrabbe’s (2001) analysis underscores, there is a rich repertoire of mechanismsalready employed in institutional transfer into the region, including gate-keeping; benchmarking and monitoring; the provision of legislative and in-stitutional templates; aid and technical assistance; and advice and twinning.

How ‘Europeanized’ are the administrations of the CEE applicant states, inparticular those belonging to the � rst wave of Eastern enlargement? In themain, empirical assessments up to now have concentrated on linkage issues, i.e.the institutional arrangements that link national executives and EU authoritiesand the institutional practices that have evolved at the national level to supportnational–EU connections (see, in particular, Ágh 1999; Blaszczyck 1998;Jablonski 2000; Lippert et al. 2001; Rupp 1999; ÏSmejkal 1998; Verheijen1998). In addition, there have also been attempts at more comprehensiveassessments, which go beyond the institutional arrangements for managingaccession, to include broader concerns of personnel policy and policy formula-tion and implementation (Nunberg 2000). Note should also be taken of theregular ‘progress reports’ produced by the EU and their comments on admin-istrative capacity. If anything, analyses of administrative capacity for EUaccession in CEE tend to be even more critical than those grounded in generalmodernization theory. European integration does, indeed, appear to have actedas a force of institutional change, in as far as the development of administrativecapacities for managing accession negotiations at the top levels of the minister-ial bureaucracy is concerned. In this sense, European integration is a contribut-ing factor in the emergence of post-communist core executives (Goetz andWollmann 2001; Zubek 2001). However, there is, so far, little evidence ofstrong horizontal and vertical diffusion effects. In fact, as will be suggestedbelow, European integration appears to contribute to the creation of ‘enclaves’,whose effectiveness at connecting with international institutions is notmatched by the quality of their linkages with domestic institutions.

THE LIMITS OF MODERNIZATION ANDEUROPEANIZATION

The conclusion to be drawn from the above is that in much of CEE,administrative development has not advanced ‘according to plan’, i.e. in linewith the aspirations of domestic modernizers and Europeanizers, the initialexpectations of many external analysts, and the reform agendas of internationaltransfer agencies. Nunberg’s (1999: 265–6) sombre conclusion re� ects a widelyshared sentiment: ‘bureaucracies of the ancien régime have proved strikinglyresistant to wholesale transformation, dashing notions that modern, ‘western-style’ administrations could be installed with minimal effort and maximalspeed . . . the overwhelming tendency has been of structural conservatism.’

It is not dif� cult to � nd reasons why modernization and Europeanizationshould take longer and proceed in a less straightforward manner than earlyoptimists may have assumed. A list of widely recognized obstacles to effective


root-and-branch reform includes, inter alia, the weight of communist legacies,which those who associated the fall of communism with a process of generaldeinstitutionalization underestimated; chronic resource shortages, be they � -nancial, organizational or human, which hamper effective reform implementa-tion; the absorption of decision-makers with more immediate economic,political and social problems, which relegates administrative reform to a lesserpriority; frequent changeover in political personnel, as a result of which thosein charge of formulating reform legislation are rarely in of� ce for long enoughto oversee implementation; con� icting and sometimes inappropriate externaladvice; and, perhaps most importantly, inevitable time lags between formalorganizational change and deeper institutional transformation affecting in-formal rules, norms and values.

However, the argument put forward here is that the discrepancy betweenexpectations and observed outcomes is not just to do with these practicalbarriers to reform, important as they undoubtedly are. Rather, the way inwhich modernizers and Europeanizers frame central challenges of post-communist institutional development is problematic and the reference modelsemployed in analysing current administrative arrangements and their con-sequences are partly inappropriate. In particular, these perspectives have prob-lems in making sense of deviations from Western public bureaucracies, treatingthem as dysfunctionalities and pathologies.

To illustrate and substantiate these points in respect of the modernizationapproach, it is instructive to turn again to the issue of the establishment of aprofessional civil service, especially the relations between elected executivepoliticians and senior of� cials employed in the central ministerial administra-tion. As was noted earlier, modernizers assume that the establishment ofprofessional, non-partisan career civil services is one of the fundamentalingredients of improved governance. Communist doctrine regarded state ad-ministration as an instrument for the realization of the party’s decisions. Inpersonnel policy, the nomenclatura system ensured partisanship and politicalreliability amongst members of the state administration. There is some dis-agreement as to the relative weight that was accorded to overtly politicalcriteria in personnel policy. Thus, it has been pointed out that in somecountries political reliability was a necessary, but by no means suf� cient,criterion for personal advancement and that in economic administration, inparticular, professional skills and expertise increasingly came to balance polit-ical allegiance, which became a formal rather than a substantive criterion. Thispoint has been made, in particular, in relation to Hungary, where, as Vass hasargued,

political loyalty was the � rst requirement, while state servants made de� niteefforts to maintain their professional integrity . . . Political control overappointments was strong, but of� cially a so-called ‘triple requirement’ wasestablished for state servants: political loyalty, professional merits and moralintegrity. After launching the economic reforms in 1968, a more liberal


regime was built and the equal importance of those three requirements wasemphasised.

(Vass 2001: 154; similarly György 1999: 143)

Such differences of emphasis notwithstanding, the communist tradition ofopen partisanship certainly suggested that depoliticization must constitute acentral plank of administrative reform in the region. Such depoliticizationwould need to involve the establishment of clear functional and organizationalboundaries between the political and administrative parts of the executive;effective arrangements for policing these boundaries; and limiting the role ofpoliticians – to the greatest degree feasible – to establishing a legal frameworkfor civil service policy.

A strategy of pushing politics out is, however, prone to exacerbatingpathologies of executive performance, for it is in danger of con� ating politi-cized personnel policy with the functional politicization of top administrativepersonnel. As has been noted elsewhere (Goetz and Wollmann 2001), minis-terial administration under communism was unpolitical in the sense that it wasnot geared towards the preparation, assessment and authoritative resolution ofpolicy alternatives, which were largely prerogatives of the party bureaucracy.Of� cials socialized in an environment in which political direction and deci-sions were imposed from outside, therefore, � nd it dif� cult to make an activecontribution to the art of political policy management. Civil service strategies,principally geared towards strengthening the functional and organizationalboundaries between politics and administration rather than fostering ‘politicalcraft’ (Goetz 1997) amongst of� cials, are likely to aggravate this problem. Theyhighlight the danger that executive politicians see the civil service as anobstacle to, rather than a resource for, effective policy-making. This exampleunderlines the fact that a careful analysis of the reality of state and partyadministration under communism is required to avoid constructing a mislead-ing conception of modernization requirements. It also illustrates how themodernization perspective � nds it dif� cult to make sense of deviations fromWestern models, as the almost universal criticism of widespread party polit-icization of personnel policy under the conditions of post-communism bearsout.

Turning to the Europeanization perspective, there is no need here to reviewthe arguments for and against treating European integration as an explanatoryvariable for change in political systems of the EU member states. Suf� ce it tonote that, as far as change in central executives is concerned, much recentwriting points to the conclusion that the differential impact of Europeanintegration on the administrative arrangements of current member states hasmore to do with the relative weakness of European integration as an independ-ent source of domestic institutional change than with the strength of nationaladministrative cores or traditions (Goetz 2000; similarly Sverdrup 2001). Inother words, empirical work on administrative Europeanization ‘Western-style’suggests that European integration may be a trigger for, or an intervening


variable in, domestic institutional development, but explains little on itsown.

There are, admittedly, some good reasons to expect that the transformativepower of European integration on national administrative systems in CEE ismore pronounced than in the case of Western European countries (see alsoGrabbe 2001). Five arguments, in particular, deserve highlighting.

� The Western Europeanization literature tends to argue that the strongernational administrative traditions and institutional ‘cores’, the more likelythey are to be resistant to adaptive pressures associated with Europeanintegration (Knill 2001). As far as CEE is concerned, these traditions andcores may be assumed to be signi� cantly weaker than in the case of recentWest European accession countries. The institutions inherited from thecommunist era have been at least partly delegitimized and the newlycreated legal and organizational framework of democratic governance is notyet as strongly institutionalized as in long-standing Western democracies.Administrative arrangements in CEE are, therefore, more likely to yield toEuropean pressures than the historically validated systems of WesternEurope. In fact, in the case of CEE, it might be justi� able to speak of aco-evolution of national institutions and the European integration process,comparable to the co-evolution of West German statehood and the in-tegration project during the � rst decades after the foundation of theFederal Republic.

� Policy and institutional ‘voids’ aid adaptation. Whereas recent West Euro-pean accession countries have joined the EU with fully developed sets ofpublic institutions and domestic public policies, EU integration in CEEoperates partly under different conditions. This applies, in particular, toinstitutions and policies in the area of market regulation, where EUintegration may act as a direct cause or catalyst of their emergence.

� As the literature on policy transfer and cross-national policy learningsuggests, the susceptibility of national policy-makers to external advice andassistance in domestic institutional design is likely to be greater in the wakeof political and economic crises that call into question the capacities oftraditional national institutions. The more obvious domestic institutionalshortcomings, the more likely it is that national policy-makers look abroadfor inspiration in institutional reform. In such a context, European in-tegration does not so much constitute an external pressure for change as anenabling factor.

� However, to the extent that European integration is most appropriatelyconceived as an external adaptive pressure, it does operate with muchstronger, more encompassing and much more detailed conditionalities inCEE than in the case of previous Western accessions. It also pays moreexplicit attention to national administrative capacities (Dimitrova 2001).The ability to administer the acquis communautaire is given a much higherpro� le than in previous cases of enlargement and the sanctions for failing


to meet the EU’s baselines are more severe. As a result, one may expect agreater domestic willingness to break with the past rather than to seek toaccommodate EU demands within existing arrangements.

� Finally, whereas in the case of Western Europe, EU adjustment has beena long-term process, in CEE the time frame is more compressed. Theapplicant countries are expected to achieve full EU compatibility beforeaccession rather than subsequent to full membership. Adjustments are,therefore, likely to be both more rapid and more radical.

These considerations certainly provide ample justi� cation for paying system-atic attention to the European effect in administrative change in CEE, despitethe reservations concerning the explanatory power of European integration asa source of domestic administrative development. The Europeanization per-spective certainly helps to identify important drivers and actor constellationsin administrative development; in this respect, it links in with the broaderdiscussion about the role of international and transnational forces and actorsin democratic transition and consolidation in CEE (see recently, e.g., Zielonkaand Pravda 2001, with further references). However, the Europeanizationperspective becomes problematic when an ‘EU-compatible’ administration isused as an archetype with which current administrative arrangements arecompared.

A LATIN LENS

The limitations of the modernization and Europeanization perspectives, inparticular their failure to provide a positive conceptualization of ‘deviations’from a stylized end-state of post-communist administrative development,suggest the need to seek conceptual inspiration from additional sources. Whatis proposed here is, � rst, to take note of the experience of administrativedevelopment in other regions – especially the southern European democracies(including ‘non-Latin’ Greece) which underwent democratization in the 1970sand 1980s and some Latin American countries. Second, it is proposed toexplore in what ways employing such a Latin lens may help us to bettercomprehend some conspicuous characteristics of contemporary CEE stateadministration. The general democratization literature offers some outstandingexamples of the fruitfulness of comparing the experience of democratization inCEE with post-authoritarian institutional trajectories in southern Europe and/or Latin America (see, e.g., Greskovits 1998; Linz and Stepan 1996; Maravall1997; Pridham 2000; Pridham and Lewis 1996). The following remarks are farless ambitious in intent. They do not attempt to compare CEE with otherpost-authoritarian settings, but serve merely to point to a few interestingempirical parallels and to draw out some of their conceptual implications.

The most obvious, but also perhaps the most important, points to note arethe similarities in the most frequently cited ‘pathologies’ of the central statein the three regions. They include, in particular, widespread corruption; state


capture, whereby special interests – private or collectively organized – penetratepublic authorities and systematically redirect the resources of the state for theirexclusive bene� t; clientelism; nepotism; various forms of party-political patron-age, including the ‘parcelling up’ of the state and its resources amongst a smallcartel of political parties; low public trust in state authorities and theirpersonnel, both political and administrative; and the existence of informalshadow governance structures that complement, and sometimes undermine,formal institutional frameworks. To this list could be added oft-criticizedorganizational shortcomings, such as institutional fragmentation at the centrallevel of government, not least through the proliferation of specialized agenciesoutside the main ministerial administration; a decoupling between the politicaland administrative parts of the executive; and insuf� cient mechanisms forpolicy co-ordination and for building policy coherence at the centre.

These empirical parallels suggest that many of the current features of stateadministration that the CEE-centred literature associates with the legacies ofcommunism and speci� c post-communist circumstances are, in fact, fairlytypical of democratizing settings in comparatively poor countries. It is notdif� cult to see why development administration has, up to now, contributedlittle to the study of public administration in CEE. Foreign analysts who havewritten on the administrative systems of CEE almost without exception havea background in the study of Western, especially West European, bureauc-racies. Analysts from the region have taken their clues from their Westerncolleagues. Perhaps more importantly, CEE policy-makers themselves haveconsciously sought to dispel any notion of their nations’ comparability to‘developing countries’. If the problems of post-communist public administra-tion are less particular than is often assumed, then the explanatory power ofreferences to ‘post-communism’ as a causal rather than a temporal categoryneeds to be revisited.

Despite oft-noted problems, CEE and many Latin administrations share theexperience of ‘islands’ or ‘enclaves’ of professionalism and technocratic ex-cellence. They have been observed, in particular, in the � elds of budgetary,economic and � scal policy. In both the CEE and Latin American context, itis well documented that economic and � scal policy-making under crisisconditions has to some extent been shielded from the general pressures underwhich much of the rest of public administration operates. Greskovits hasprovided a very succinct general description of this ‘syndrome’ of the ‘lone-liness of the economic reformer’:

The syndrome is a metaphor for a certain bureaucratic and political style ofeconomic policy making used to enhance state autonomy and state capacityduring neoliberal transformations under economic stress. Brie� y, it denotesa politico-bureaucratic situation in which top domestic policy makers, alliedwith their foreign advisers or supervisors and equally committed to aspeci� c version of the market-oriented policy approach, acquire discre-tionary in� uence and power in initiating and implementing sweeping


economic adjustments and transformations . . . Bureaucratic insulation istypically secured via the leading policy makers’ placement on strategiccommittees, advisory boards, and cabinets backed by, and subordinate onlyto, the top political leadership.

(Greskovits 1998: 35–6)

In his detailed comparative analysis of � scal reform in the Czech Republic,Hungary and Poland between 1989 and 1999, Bönker (2001: 132) shows how‘the availability of determined change teams proved vital for keeping reform ontrack during early transformation . . . the turbulent environment of the early1990s provided change teams with huge leverage. The pressing � scal problemsand the need for quick � xes strengthened the case for unconstrained action’(see also the recent detailed analyses of the Hungarian case by Greskovits(2001) and Haggard et al. (2001)). There is evidence to suggest that aseconomic, � scal and budgetary crises pass, the autonomy of change teamsdeclines. Moreover, as Brusis and Dimitrov’s (2001) comparative study of post-communist budgetary policy-making underlines, the centralization of decision-making powers in the core executive with which technocratic crisismanagement is associated may be reversed, if no steps to institutionalize thecore are taken. Nonetheless, transitional change teams can be seen to providethe nucleus out of which more stable and long-lasting islands of profession-alism grow.

A closely resemblant dynamic can be observed in the case of the institu-tional arrangements for negotiating EU accession and ensuring the imple-mentation of the acquis in CEE. Here, too, relatively small teams of politiciansand of� cials trend to be placed under the direct authority of the head ofgovernment (see Lippert et al. 2001) and are distinguished by their pro-fessional competence. Thus, Nunberg has observed that

EU accession institutions stand out from overall public administrationorgans in quality and ef� ciency . . . Staff associated with the dedicated EUmanagement institutions have high status, are multilingual and have higherskills and educational levels than general civil service staff. Remunerationlevels tend to be higher, resulting from explicit bonus programs or circum-vention of standardized civil service constraints.

(Nunberg 2000: 20)

Whilst ‘islands’ exist, it is uncertain what they imply for the longer-termfuture. In a best-case scenario, at least for modernizers and Europeanizers, theyact as catalysts for the comprehensive modernization and Europeanization ofcentral administration; in a worst-case scenario, they further add to institu-tional fragmentation. The latter alternative does not seem far-fetched, for theproblematic nature of enclaves is well recognized. Thus, in a recent criticalreview of its own past approach to public sector reform, the World Bank(2000: 19) has noted that ‘to achieve their speci� c objectives, projects often


support specialized implementation units, with higher pay scales than the civilservice as a whole. These institutional enclaves deplete government of scarehuman and �nancial resources.’ With speci� c reference to civil service develop-ment, a member of the World Bank’s staff, writing in a personal capacity, hasargued that

Experience from numerous countries suggests that it may be feasible tocreate enclaves or islands of excellence, but such enclaves rarely lead tobroader civil service reform, since their typically unique situations maketheir replication throughout the core public sector generally quite dif� cult. . . These agencies all share a number of unique advantages, including: (i)institutionally insulated from political pressures; (ii) accountable to a well-de� ned constituency for a well-de� ned product; (iii) positioned to serve asa training ground for entry into attractive private sector employment; (iv)capacity to pay relatively competitive salaries.

(Reid 1998: 7–8)

The potentially harmful effect of enclaves in the case of CEE is stressed byNunberg (2000: 21) in her analysis of EU accession management units, where,because ‘of limited resources, EU talent has largely been siphoned off fromcore public administration tasks. Continuing demand for EU skills will furtherdeplete professionals from core public administration tasks.’ Moreover, there isthe danger of a ‘post-accession brain drain of skilled personnel that manyexpect to occur in national EU structures . . . Talent may be lost to Brusselsor to the private sector’ (Nunberg 2000: 20). Modernization and European-ization in parts of central administration may, thus, be achieved at the expenseof increased fragmentation. Such an assessment chimes with analyses of thedivergent and potentially divisive impact of European integration on thenational polities of less developed countries, a point that has, for example,repeatedly been made with reference to the Europeanization of the Greek state(Featherstone 1998; with special reference to public administration, seeSpanou 1998).

In the context of a consideration of the likely effects of centres of pro-fessionalization, it is also worth commenting brie� y on the relatively small sizeof the civil services that are being set up in CEE, if compared to publicemployment overall. This point has been emphasized by Cardona (2000: 10),who notes that most CEE countries ‘are opting for a restricted notion of civilservice whereby civil servants will only be those holding public authority ordirectly involved in policy making, law drafting or implementation of legisla-tion’. Civil service status is the exception rather than the rule in publicadministration (for detailed recent surveys, see Verheijen 1999, 2001). InHungary, for example, civil servants only account for some 12 per cent ofpublic employees and include ‘those specialists (excluding politicians) who areemployed at a central public administrative organ (ministry, national governingbody) or at a local public administrative organ (local government of� ces, de-


concentrated bodies), who act for and on behalf of the state or the govern-ment, and who can take decisions binding on citizens’ (György 1999: 132; fora detailed analysis of Hungarian civil service legislation, see also Jenei 1999).At the same time, political advisers, who are not members of the civil serviceand owe their positions directly to the political leadership, are commonthroughout CEE, even where civil service legislation is in place (Goetz andWollmann 2001). In Hungary, for example, up to thirty such advisers may beappointed at the Prime Minister’s Of� ce and up to � fteen in each ministry.Moreover, at the very top of the ministerial civil service hierarchy – admin-istrative state secretaries and deputy state secretaries – party-political considera-tions are widely thought to in� uence personnel policy (Vass 2001). What thissuggests is that – outside technocratic islands – ‘modern’ administration maybe squeezed between a political top and the bulk of public employees, who donot have civil service status.

AN OPEN FUTURE

The preceding remarks do not point to a clear future of central administrationin CEE. In fact, the main message is that this future is still, in decisive respects,open. The emergence of a modernized and Europeanized central administra-tion is not a foregone conclusion; nor, on the other hand, however, is itimplausible as such. Recent analyses of the emergence of a ‘core executive’centred on the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Finance in Hungary (Ágh2001a; Fricz 2000) and, in a less marked fashion, Poland (Zubek 2001)demonstrate close parallels to developments in Western European executivesystems (Goetz, forthcoming); but it is also noteworthy that the ‘govern-mentalization’ of post-communist executives, in the sense of strengtheningpolicy-making capacity at the centre, has progressed much less in Bulgaria andthe Czech Republic (Brusis and Dimitrov 2001; Goetz and Wollmann 2001)or Latvia and Lithuania (Evans and Evans 2001). There is, therefore, growingevidence of substantial cross-country differences in post-communist admin-istrative trajectories (see Ágh 2001b).

More importantly, a Latin lens helps to highlight tensions, divisions,incongruities and apparent contradictions between different parts of the ad-ministrative systems of CEE countries, which external involvement in institu-tional development would appear to heighten, if not create, rather than lessen.Some of these disjunctures emerge quite clearly from the studies assembled inthe present collection of articles. They concern, in particular, the relationshipbetween a core executive with developed policy-making capacities and low-capacity central institutions; between technocratic enclaves and patronageadministration; between political appointees, small cores of civil servants, andthe mass of ordinary public employees; between Europeanized and non-Europeanized parts of the executive; between formal legal frameworks andshadow institutions. It is open to conjecture, however, whether post-communistconsolidation will conserve these disjunctures for the longer term or eventually


lead to their resolution. The latter scenario would broadly con� rm the assump-tions of those who expect a gradual convergence of CEE administrationtowards a conventional West European model. By contrast, the former scenariowould imply that, in parts of CEE, the ‘return to Europe’ will remainincomplete, at least if ‘Europe’ is understood to stand for north-west Europeanadministrative traditions. As the above remarks suggest, this consolidatedfuture could in some respects resemble the experience of Latin administrations.Whether the East will go south only to arrive west remains to be seen.

Address for correspondence: Klaus H. Goetz, Department of Government,London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, LondonWC2A 2AE, UK. Tel: 0044 20 7955 7910. Fax: 0044 20 7831 1707. email:[email protected]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article draws on the research project ‘Executive Capacity in Central andEastern Europe’, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, and a project on‘Transferring “Good Governance” to Emergent Democracies: Ideas and In-stitutional Change’, funded by the ESRC as part of its Future GovernanceProgramme (Grant Number L21652016). My collaborators on these projects– Martin Brusis, Vesselin Dimitrov, Francisco Panizza, George Philip, HellmutWollmann and Radoslaw Zubek – have provided very helpful comments. Anearly version of the article was presented at a seminar organized by theDepartment of European Studies, University of Bradford, 30 March 2001. Iwould like to thank the organizers and participants of this seminar, inparticular Kenneth Dyson, Roberto Espindola, Kevin Featherstone andDimitris Papadimitriou, for their valuable comments and suggestions. A moreadvanced draft was presented at the ECPR General Conference, 6–8 Sep-tember 2001, Canterbury, Panel 5-1: Former EU enlargements and theaccession capacity of the CEE states. I owe special thanks to the panel’sdiscussant, Paul Lewis, for his perceptive remarks.

NOTE

1 The following remarks draw primarily on examples from Bulgaria, the CzechRepublic, Hungary and Poland. Occasional reference is made to the Baltic states.The discussion is limited to central state administration, including the centralministerial administration and non-ministerial central agencies.

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