Public Administration in Central Europe

Ideas as Causes of Reforms

Stanisław Mazur

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000050257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the extent to which recent transformations of administrative systems and public management mechanisms in Central European (CE) countries serve the purpose of providing effective and efficient public institutions, high quality of public services, respect for the rule of law, and the citizens' trust in the state.

It details the reasons behind the major differences in the modernisation paths followed and their attendant inconsistencies and how, despite the adoption of values and solutions prevailing in the EU upon accession, these countries are shifting, to varying degrees, towards institutional design reminiscent of illiberal democracies. Taking a comparative approach and based on rich original data, it applies theoretical models to explain the nature and implications of the processes under consideration and identifies the determinants that impact upon the transformation of public administration systems and its consequences.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of public governance, public administration and policy, East European studies, and more broadly politics, law, sociology but also economy.

Part I

Introduction

1 The singularity of Central Europe?

Jacek Purchla

The history of the Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak states is built upon the foundations of West European civilisation: the tradition of antiquity, Christianity, self-government, and respect for the rights of individuals. The question thus arises: Can we speak of the singularity of these countries and nations within the concept of Central Europe today, and if so, in what respect?

The idea and myth of Central Europe

The idea and myth of Central Europe experienced fluctuating fortunes in the twentieth century. In the 1970s and 1980s intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain ‒ György Konrád, Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Czesław Miłosz, Erhard Busek, and Karl Schlögel ‒ employed the cultural singularity of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to manifest the fundamental differences between Soviet reality and traditional European values. This was a time of triumph for the myth of Central Europe.

For Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians the answer to the seemingly trivial question “East or West?” is a fundamental matter of identity which determines the political reality not only of the central part of Europe, but of the entire continent. This is also the root of the concept of Central Europe, which is above all a historical and cultural notion rather than a geographical one. Belonging to the East or to the West is a question not of geography or borders, but first of all of aesthetic sensitivity ‒ it is membership of a cultural circle, an economic zone, and a political system, a question of worldview and community of experience.

A fundamental problem for the citizens of Central Europe is their obsession with location, which is especially clear in the case of Poland. Its situation between the two largest nations in Europe ‒ the Germans and the Russians ‒ has long given rise to a sense of insecurity. In respect of Russia, and also, for some time, Turkey, this threat was associated with a sense of mission, of being the bastion of Latin civilisation. The difficult and turbulent history of the region not only necessitated a struggle for survival, thus considerably strengthening both national and European identities, but also gave rise to the question, still debated today, of whether Europa Minor is the continent’s East or West. Characteristically, the concomitant division of Europe into North and South ‒ which in the late eighteenth century was still clear-cut owing to the dividing line that ran according to the criterion of dynamically developing Protestant North and stagnant Catholic South – is of secondary importance in the case of the countries of the “New Europe”.

Central Europe is the lesson of communism; it is criticism of the idea of progress; it is the ubiquitous presence of history, complex geography and geopolitics, cultural diversity, and the power of nationalisms; it is the inferiority complex of the peripheries and the creativity of the borderlands. Central Europe epitomises difficult dialogue between neighbours (Johnson, 1996). Communism disavowed the tradition of Central Europe and its civilisational achievements; this proved a civilisational shock that was rejected by the nations of Central Europe. The idea of Central Europe proved stronger than communism!

It is clear that the struggle of the Central European nations against Soviet domination, crowned with victory in 1989, was a struggle not only against communism as a system, but in equal measure for a return to the Euro-Atlantic civilisation. This strong attachment to a civilisation to which they had contributed for over a millennium, and the half-century of resistance to a totalitarian system unknown in Western Europe, is not only the baggage, but also the capital contribution, of the nations of the Younger Europe.

The character of the relations between the states and nations in Central Europe was formed by the distinct historical experience of this part of the continent, and in no small part by the lessons of the twentieth century. The longue durée of feudalism, the delay of nation-forming processes, and the emergence of new nation states only after World War I, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Holocaust, the scale of destruction and looting of cultural assets during World War II, the post-war border changes and large-scale ethnic cleansing, and finally the almost half-century “lesson of communism” and the transformation processes after 1989, cannot be ignored in any analysis of the uniquely complex socio-political situation in Europe east of the Elbe. These and other phenomena and processes are the “terms of trade”, so to speak. It is also vital to remember that in the twentieth century political borders in Central and Eastern Europe, unlike in the West, changed faster than cultural ones. That is why, among the characteristic phenomena which have shaped the reality of Central and Eastern Europe, we now include the following:

• the perpetual presence of history,

• collective memories,

• politics of memory and identity,

• cultural differentiation,

• the new mapping of Europe,

• proximity,

• borders,

• migration issues,

• conflicting narratives,

• the significance of dissonant heritage.

After all, the Central European experience is unique, derived not only from the nature of the region’s path to independence and modernity in the nineteenth century, its tragedy in the twentieth century, and the lesson of communism, but also from the sudden change after 1989, the speed and complexity of which is now usually summed up in the fashionable word “transformation”.

The Visegrád Four

The year 1989 opened up new opportunities for cooperation in Central Europe. The 1990s were a time of dialogue between neighbours and of mutual rediscovery. National revivals produced a polyphony of narratives and greater cultural diversity. The polycentricism of Central Europe once more became an asset. Even before the Iron Curtain fell, György Konrád had called for a new rationality based on cultural pluralism. According to this Hungarian intellectual, the idea of Central Europe had the potential to mean not only a “blossoming of diversity”, but also an awareness of diversity (Konrád, 1987, p. 8). This “new rationality” was one of the fundamental intentions behind the creation of a platform for cooperation and integration in Central Europe, which in 1991 was formalised in the political structure that is the Visegrád Group, comprising the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. With the help of the Visegrád platform, the countries in the region gradually managed to overcome the burdensome heritage of the past and prioritise cooperation. The community of goals and efforts of the Visegrád Four was aptly communicated in the report drawn up for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the group’s founding:

Twenty-five years after it came into being, the Visegrád Group has attained its founding objectives. The four countries reconciled their historical divergences without diluting their traditions and identities, laying the foundations for lasting regional stability. The Warsaw Pact and other structures of the former regime were dismantled without any successor organisation. The objective of accession into the European Union and NATO – anchored in the four countries’ commitment to Western values, practices and patterns – is completed.

The origins of Visegrád cooperation date back to a shared sense of solidarity among the nations trapped under Soviet influence after World War II. What first crystallized as an intellectual and literary vision in the 1980s – inspired by Central Europe’s distinctive cultural and historical heritage – later became a vehicle for a momentous geopolitical endeavour: our collective return to Europe and the Atlantic civilisation.

In the process, but despite lacking institutional thickness, Visegrád established itself as the most efficient and visible format for political dialogue and sectoral cooperation in Central Europe. In a region plagued by legacies of conflict, Visegrád embodied a spirit of inclusiveness and openness: instead of being directed against any power or country, it promoted understanding, friendship and good neighbourly relations among and beyond its member states.

(V4, 2016, p. 7)

Europa Minor

The example of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia makes it easier to understand the essence of European civilisation. The baptism of the first rulers of these emergent states initiated the gradual acculturation of their societies. Christianity became the main driver of development for the civilisation of Europa Minor – the Younger Europe. At the turn of the tenth century, the statehood of three new monarchies started to take shape. These monarchies (which now constitute the V4 countries) – along with the Scandinavian states – were to develop into the only permanent extension of the Western European constitutional model.

If Christianity and local self-rule are to be considered two of the foundations of Latin civilisation, they are also part of the millennial experience of Central Europe. An overview of the two main aspects of the development of Europe’s civilisation – the cultural and the economic – reveals clearly the progressive integration over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary – the monarchies of Europa Minor – with Carolingian Europe. A major element of this process was the economic programme of the Cistercians, above all the vast eastward spread of settlement in that period. This exported the Western European model of settlement and political system to Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary at a time when municipal self-government was becoming one of the pillars of European urbanisation, with town communities gradually accruing new rights and privileges. The autonomy of medieval cities – the fruit of the revolutionary movement which saw the emergence of communes – was the source of their strength, and municipal law also determined their spatial layout. As early as in the Middle Ages, self-government as a factor in civilisation founded on the sovereignty of the territorial community became something of a pass to Europe and a force for the integration of the older and younger parts of the continent.

The chartering of medieval towns provided not only a framework for their spatial development, but also a foundation for their legal and economic organisation. In this respect, German law became the political paragon. Throughout the Central Europe of the day, the culture of the German language played a special role in creating a new urbanisation model. As early as between 1176 and 1178, the Bohemian duke Sobeslav (Sobeslaus) II granted a privilege to the Germans in Prague, which is widely recognised as the first endowment of urban legal autonomy in Central Europe (lex iustitia Theutonicorum) (Eysymont, 2009, p. 43). The influx of German colonists introduced the element of multi-ethnicity. These colonists – the medieval equivalent of developers – were the organisers of the urban boroughs, taking with them their standardised organisational and legal model as far east as Transylvania, then the farthest fringe of Latin Europe.

German law – written law (ius scriptum) – gave rise to an entirely new legal culture based on a foundation of commonality. It taught respect for the law. It is also important to emphasise the wide remit of the ius municipale of this period, which encompassed civil law, criminal law, administrative law, and legal procedure. At its heart lay the concept of the legal identity of the burghers (cives) within the city limits, encapsulated in the phrase Die Stadtluft macht frei (city air makes one free) (Purchla, 2011, p. 172).

By the latter years of the Middle Ages, Poland, like Bohemia and Hungary, was organically connected with the West and was closing the gap caused by its civilisational delay. It is thus paradoxical that the turn of the sixteenth century was to mark a divergence of the subsequent socio-economic development paths of Europe’s East and West, as the great geographic discoveries ushered in a fundamental economic divide in Europe along the line of the Elbe. The lands east of the Elbe gradually assumed the role of the continent’s granary. But the price they came to pay for their prosperity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fuelled by the “price revolution”, was that of re-feudalisation and the entrenchment of an economy based on the manor farm and serfdom model. This delayed the development of modern capitalism in Central Europe and brought about the gradual economic decline of many towns and cities. And thus, the civilisational unity of Carolingian Europe and Europa Minor achieved at the end of the Middle Ages on the one hand gave rise to further cultural integration in the Renaissance and Baroque eras, but on the other succumbed to a slow, yet inexorable disintegration of the socio-economic system. At the turn of the nineteenth century, this came to act as a drag on the transformation towards liberalism in Central Europe.

The medieval town as municipality was a corporation with its own legislative, judicial, and executive powers. The urban commune was an independent union which operated in a sense in parallel to the state, to the extent of being a state within a state. These towns, which since the Middle Ages had enjoyed administrative and economic autonomy, and as such remain something of an ideal and symbol of self-government, in the age of enlightened absolutism in the late eighteenth century lost their independence. Self-rule was replaced with strong state authority. In Central Europe in particular, this period saw the emergence of a direct relationship between state and citizen which bypassed the municipality.

The Habsburg Monarchy

Where the chartering of towns under German law had, since the Middle Ages, contributed to the unification of Europa Minor with the older Carolingian Europe, the major modernising and urbanising processes underway in the Habsburg Monarchy at the turn of the twentieth century created a distinct identity for the landscape of Central Europe. In 1910, the Habsburg Monarchy was the second-largest territorial state and third-greatest power (after the Russian and German empires) in Europe. It had a population of over 51 million citizens, who used more than a dozen different languages, including German, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Romanian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Italian, and Yiddish.

The ambivalence and trauma accompanying the Kafkaesque reality of the end of the Belle Époque were but a reflection of the dilemmas faced by the “man without attributes”, the resident of Kakania,¹ who, as Robert Musil aptly put it, was torn between the various dimensions of his identity: profession, nation, state, class, geography, and gender (Musil, 2002, p. 44). Austria-Hungary’s largest cities were peculiar “glocal hubs” in which the imperial costume exported from Vienna clashed with local pre-existing conditions, and the spirit of the street was determined by multiculturalism. This is also the root of the paradox of the homogenising urbanisation processes underway in the final decades of a monarchy whose residents were concurrently experiencing a marked identity crisis caused by its ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity.

The main factors unifying the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy included the modern notion of the rule of law, territorial self-government, civil society, and hig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• PART I: Introduction
• PART II: Ideational basis for the emergence of institutions and institutional reforms
• PART III: Public administration relations with the environment
• PART IV: Management reforms in public administration
• PART V: Reconceptualization – the role of competition of ideas in PA reform
• Afterword
• Index