The European Public Servant

A Shared Administrative Identity?

Fritz Sager, Patrick Overeem

• Publisher: ECPR Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781910259542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sager & Overeem's timely analysis constitutes an original effort to integrate history of ideas and cutting-edge survey research. It presents the subject's ideational foundations as well as its modern manifestation in European administrative space. 'Sager & Overeem's excellent collection is the first serious exploration of the historical and comparative development of the public servant in Europe. The result is a superb set of essays that are historically insightful and of contemporary relevance. Scholars and practitioners will benefit from learning of the historical roots of the often competing concepts of public service and democratic legitimacy that still inform so much of contemporary practice.'Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley'From the ashes of the second world war, the European Union emerged as, ultimately, a moral experiment. But can today's EU of 28 nations and 400 million people from immensely diverse cultures transcend the traditional nation-state and all its historic limitations? Many factors will decide the answer. Among the most critical is the EU's capability to forge its own public administration expertise, corporate identity, and ethical commitment to carry out effectively its policy agendas. This book attempts to examine that fundamental yet often neglected problem confronting Europe's future. While no simple or clear-cut conclusions can be found in these pages, the book's contents open intriguingly diverse perspectives and raise key research questions on a seminal public issue that deserves priority attention for those who wish the EU experiment success.'Richard Stillman, University of Colorado'This volume puts the European civil servant centre stage. It offers disciplined, insightful comparisons across time and space and reveals converging trends towards ashared European administrative identity. The lucid chapters are coherently assembled and fill a gap in the literature. An important contribution to the debate about the European administrative space.'Michael W Bauer, Deutsche Universität fur Verwaltungswissenschaften, Speyer

Part One

Searching for a European Public Servant

Chapter One

Introduction: The European Public Servant’s Shared Identity

Fritz Sager and Patrick Overeem

Towards a European administrative space

As the economic, political and cultural integration of Europe advances, the organisation of European administration becomes more complex. Consequently, the need for a shared administrative identity among the member states of the EU becomes more salient. Europeanisation can thereby take two directions. Héritier et al. (2001: 3) define Europeanisation as ‘the process of influence deriving from European decisions and impacting member states’ policies and political and administrative structures’. In this perspective, Europeanisation is triggered from above, but it also grows from below. Risse, Cowles and Caporaso (2001: 3) take on the inverse perspective and define Europeanisation as ‘the emergence and development at the European level of distinct structures of governance, that is, of political, legal and social institutions associated with political problem solving that formalizes interactions among the actors, and of policy networks specializing in the creation of authoritative European rules’ (emphasis in original). Europeanisation in this perspective takes place at the supranational rather than at the member state level. These notions of Europeanisation share the institutionalist claim that a common institutional framework such as the EU results in common political practices, and eventually, a shared culture or even identity. Following Olsen (2010: 158), ‘[i]nstitutionalization as a process implies that an organizational identity is developed and legitimacy in a culture is built’. The growing literature on the European public sphere takes on this perspective when maintaining ‘that national public spheres become Europeanised if the discourses within these spaces evade the boundaries of certain national debates and assume transnational, European points of view’ (Nitoiu 2013: 33; see Koopmans and Statham 2010: 43). Given that EU compliance research finds the implementation of EU policy and hence the process of Europeanisation as described here to be conditional upon well-functioning administrative structures, it is striking that the question of a European administrative identity has not been given the same attention as the European public sphere so far. The case is even more surprising as some fifteen years ago, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in its paper ‘European principles for public administration’, highlighted the need for the construction of a collective European administrative identity as follows:

No acquis communautaire exists for setting standards of horizontal systems of governance or national public administrations. Targets and orientations for public administration reform in the perspective of EU accession are therefore less distinct. However, over time a general consensus on key components of good governance has emerged among democratic states. These components include the rule of law principles of reliability, predictability, accountability and transparency, but also technical and managerial competence, organisational capacity and citizens’ participation. Despite the lack of an acquis communautaire, this consensus has established principles for public administration shared by EU Member States with different legal traditions and different systems of governance. […]

Shared principles of public administration among EU Member States constitute the conditions of a ‘European Administrative Space’ (EAS). The EAS includes a set of common standards for action within public administration that are defined by law and enforced in practice through procedures and accountability mechanisms. Countries applying for EU membership should take these standards into account when developing their public administrations. Although the EAS does not constitute an agreed part of the acquis communautaire, it should nevertheless serve to guide public administration reforms in candidate countries. In EU Member States these standards, together with principles established by the constitution, are usually embedded in or transmitted by a set of administrative laws, such as administrative procedures acts, administrative process acts, freedom of information acts and civil service laws. (OECD 1999: 5)

While meant as an introduction to the enumeration of ‘administrative law principles as a set of criteria to be applied by candidate countries in their efforts to attain the administrative capacity required for EU Membership’ (OECD 1999: 6) for practitioners of public and administrative law, this long quote reads like a research agenda for social scientists.

What is striking about the European Administrative Space, however, is that it is abstract rather than concrete, conceived as a set of principles rather than a community of people. In much of the thought and talk about an integrated European public administration, the public administrator is still conspicuously absent. Yet this social figure, the ‘public servant’, as most Europeans know him or her, is crucial. After several centuries of increasingly strong statehood and bureaucratisation, the type of the public servant has taken a central place in the European mind. This is even the case in a time when, as many hope or fear, the nation state with its bureaucracies seems to recede again: the Europeanised public servants or ‘Eurocrats’, both in Brussels (Leidenfrost 2011) and in the member state capitals (Geuijen et al. 2008), are regarded as key players in the process of continental integration. So it seems that no shared European administrative space can exist without a clear idea of the role and characteristics of the public servant. In this book, we aim to enrich the literature about administrative Europeanisation with much-needed historical and theoretical background. Sociological institutionalism distinguishes three ways in which harmonisation processes such as Europeanisation can take place: first, coercive isomorphism describes the development of structural similarities, where organisations are forced to change by external forces such as formal supranational power (supranationalism); second, normative isomorphism, driven by horizontal interorganisational interaction as can be found in soft law (intergovernmentalism); and third, as an actual counter-concept to Europeanisation, where uncertainty encourages imitation (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Historical institutionalism, in addition, emphasises the crucial role of a shared ground for any sort of harmonisation to take place at all. There is a normative edge in this view in the sense that a certain amount of commonality is a necessary condition for integration.

Following up on this historical institutionalist assumption, the main question this volume addresses is whether European thought (in different periods of time and across different places) offers such a shared idea of the public servant and of public service more generally as can serve as a cornerstone for the project of building a common European administrative identity in the increasingly integrating continent.

Despite its centrality to the European project, surprisingly little analysis of the idea of the public servant in Europe exists. So far, very little research has been done on the question of a European administrative identity: neither whether such thing exists nor how it may develop. Indeed, compared to the history of political ideas more generally, the subfield of the history of administrative ideas is still rather underdeveloped. Our book aims to contribute to this scholarly and practically relevant endeavour by analysing – from the perspectives of political and administrative theory and conceptual history – the similarities and dissimilarities of historical and contemporary ideas on the public servant as a relevant political actor in Europe. As collective identity relies not only upon the mutual recognition of shared values, but also on the confrontation with ‘foreign’ values (Albert and Whetten 2004: 89; Hobsbawm 2004: 109), it is crucial to address the development of both inter- and extra-European administrative thought in a comparative manner. Whether we identify such thing as a European public servant depends not only on similarities among European public servants but also distinctions that can be noted from non-European public servants.

In this comparative perspective, it seems inevitable to pay special attention to the contrasts and commonalities of the European notion of the public servant with that of its counterpart in the United States. Although not original – European and American administrative thought in general have been compared more often (Stillman 1997; Rutgers 2001) – there is no getting around the fact that the (Anglo-) American tradition has clearly been the most important reference point for and influence on the development of modern European administrative theory and practice. A number of influences from other parts of the world may be graciously acknowledged (the Chinese merit system is a case in point), but no tradition of administrative thinking has exerted an influence on the European understanding of public service and the public servant even closely comparable to that of the American tradition. This influence does not deny instances of independent conceptual development in Europe, let alone of the reversed pattern of early and ongoing ‘Europeanisation’ on the other side of the Atlantic: both these developments will be made amply clear in this volume. However, the American influence is a historical given, which every study of our topic must recognise.

In current debates, both academic and practical, there are several competing approaches to public administration. Whereas economic and managerial approaches emphasise administrative values such as efficiency, effectiveness and economy (e.g. Schedler and Proeller 2003; Hood 1991), neo-progressive approaches stress the importance of public servants’ responsibility and reliability (Lowery 1999; Goodsell 1994). Other scholars suggest that it is time to rediscover Weberian bureaucracy (Olsen 2006). According to Max Weber (1978: 223; see Pierson 2004: 16), ‘the development of modern forms of organization in all fields is nothing less than identical with the development and continual spread of bureaucratic organization’. This suggests that the modern public servant, in Europe and elsewhere, should be the classical bureaucrat, but of course other (and older) ideas and ideals are available as well (Sager and Rosser 2009; Sager et al. 2012).

Our book contributes to the examination of the intellectual roots of such different administrative approaches in order to find out to what extent their respective values may serve as an ideational foundation for a potential European administrative identity.

This volume

In this book, we chart so far unexplored territory by pushing the study of public administration more towards that of the history of (political) concepts, and at the same time establish a direct link with the political study of Europeanisation. The attempt brings together hitherto mostly unconnected strands of political scientific, administrative and historical research. The volume is built around the following four sub-questions:

a. How has the public servant been conceived (in different periods of time and at different places) throughout the history of European thought?

b. How do the European conceptions of the public servant compare with and/or reflect the influences of other conceptions, in particular American ones?

c. To what extent do different conceptions of the public servant converge in times of European integration?

d. Is it possible to identify a shared conception of the public servant that can serve as a building block for a common European administrative identity?

These sub-questions will be answered in the order in which they are listed, but in an accumulative rather than a serial manner: Each one presupposes the other(s) and when all sub-questions have been addressed, an answer to the volume’s main question will be formulated. The book has a logical and chronological order and is divided into six parts: The first part aims at developing a common understanding of our topic and a concept to capture it, and the second part looks into older notions of public service preceding the formative nineteenth century, which is treated in Part Three. Part Four addresses specifically the American influence on European administrative science in the twentieth century, after which Part Five investigates the Europeanised public servant in the EU in more detail. We conclude in Part Six by summing up the findings with regard to our initial question: Is there a shared administrative identity in Europe?

In the following chapter, Jos Raadschelders offers some of the main conceptual and methodological assumptions that can be used for analysing the changing role and identity of the public servant in Europe. Raadschelders presents cornerstones for a general assessment of European ideas of the public servant throughout the volume.

Part Two and Three deal most explicitly with the historical development of the concept of public servant (sub-question a). Part Two, entitled ‘Older notions of public service’, goes back to the early modern period and is opened up by Joanne Paul’s analysis of the sixteenth-century figure of the king’s counsellor as the European public servant’s ancestor (Chapter Three). She concentrates on the important relationship between public service and advice to rulers through a close scrutiny of sixteenth-century discourse, exploring the purpose of counsel, the figure of the counsellor and the emergence of a republican view of liberty captured in the idea of parrhesia – speaking truth to power. From such an investigation we are able to identify a clearly articulated figure who serves the interests of the people by giving truthful, fearless advice to the monarch. This has implications for contemporary discourse regarding the revival of an ‘ideal’ of public service. By turning to the sixteenth-century development of the political counsellor, we begin to understand the growth of an essential, yet often marginalised figure in the public service tradition – the political counsellor.

Mark Rutgers in his contribution (Chapter Four) discusses the oath of office as a characteristic of public office, especially for public servants. In most European countries the oath of office is still in place as a symbolic rite de passage when entering public office. Being symbolic may suggest that it is not a very important or substantial matter, but this obscures the fact that it is clearly important for many, and probably more important than signing a contract. It is particularly clear in the case of legal professionals and when public officials have to give evidence in a legal context. Thus, the oath of office as the symbolic act of accepting public responsibility and of receiving public authority is central to the professional status of public servants. The oa...