one can expect the development on patterns of cooperation which cut across the border between old and new member states, such as cooperation between Germany and Poland, or between Nordic and Baltic countries.
GOOD GOVERNANCE: EUROPEANIZATION RIGHT
infl uences. The return to Europe turned the EU into the most important external infl uence in this respect. Second, some of the institutions were non-existent and the EU has been a natural source of templates for their creation. Third, the EU targeted the national administrative capacities to a greater extent than ever before, making candidates initiate important administrative reforms. Not only has it addressed the executive branch of the central government but it has also been involved in the reforms of legislature, judiciary and sub-national state structures. Moreover, these reforms took place at an enormous speed, as they had to be at least partly in place before accession itself.
Despite these favourable conditions, the process of Europeanization of national administrations has been far from smooth, as it had to struggle with the communist legacy. This legacy consisted of the under-politicization of the state administration in policy terms, and of its over-politicization in personnel terms (Goetz and Wollmann, 2001). On the one hand, the state administration was under-politicized in the sense that it was not involved in policy formation, only serving for the implementation of decisions made by the Communist Party. On the other hand, it was over-politicized as all the important appointments were subject to the approval of the Communist Party. Therefore, after the fall of communist rule a thorough overhaul of all the state institutions was needed to create the administrative backbone of the state, where decisions would be taken and implemented effi ciently. This overhaul concerned all three branches of the state’s central power – executive, legislature, and judiciary – as well as local and regional structures.
Intended Europeanization
In discussing the role of the EU in the Europeanization of national administration in candidate countries, one can distinguish between its intended and unintended effects. Interestingly, the latter tend to be stronger than the former, and sometimes they run up against each other.
To start with, the EU, together with other international organizations (the OECD, World Bank), aimed at specifi c administrative reforms to improve administrative capacity. At the macro level, the EU used the accession negotiations and regular evaluation reports to signal what issues it saw as vital to successful administrative reforms. In this respect, three issues stood out: the professionalization of the central administration, regionalization, and the enhanced effi ciency of the courts.
First, professionalization was supposed to overcome the over-politicization of appointments. Apart from Hungary (Meyer-Sahling, 2001), candidate countries started their civil service reforms under pressure from the EU,
and often with great reluctance. For example, the Czech Republic keeps delaying the implementation of its Civil Service Act, whose approval the EU considered as indispensable for the conclusion of the accession process, and which would deprive the political élite of much of its control over appointments in the civil service. Second, regionalization is connected with the EU system for development assistance (Structural Funds), which is distributed on a regional rather than on a national basis. Therefore several candidate countries had to establish new regional structures to become eligible for EU funds. In this respect, for most CEECs, with the exception of Poland, regionalization was a top–down process motivated by the EU, taking place in the absence of any bottom-up pressures for regionalization (Marek and Baun, 2002, p. 896). Third, the ineffi ciency of the judicial system became notorious in most candidate countries. The average length of the judicial process took several years, thus hampering law enforcement and the very rule of law. Repeated criticisms by regular reports put the reform of the judiciary high on the domestic political agendas.
However, besides these interactions at the macro level, the EU also tried to shape the national administrations at the level of specifi c procedures.
The most important tool of this micro management was twinning (Bailey and De Propris, 2004), a programme within which civil servants from EU countries’ administrations (so-called ‘twinners’) were invited by the accession countries for up to two years to assist their administrations with the implementation of the acquis. The Commission launched twinning in 1998 as its key programme of institution building. It did not aim at the transfer of any specifi c procedures, its goal was more general, namely to build an effi cient national administration which would be able to implement the acquis. Therefore, most twinners were in the areas that presented the greatest challenges for implementation, such as public fi nance, justice and home affairs, and agriculture (ibid., p. 87).
Preliminary fi ndings suggest that the results of twinning have been mixed (Königová, 2004). It usually failed whenever twinners rigidly stuck to the model of their own national administration, trying to export that model.
Moreover, it was often diffi cult to overcome the distrust and the lack of interest on the part of the local civil servants, which was a particular problem at the start of the twinning programme. However, it was successful when, on the basis of argumentative interactions, CEEC civil servants were able to refl ect on the existing procedures and to learn from the experience of the twinners. In the Czech Republic, it was, for example, in the areas of public–private partnerships in social services, environmental education, and health care for non-residents that twinning brought substantial added value (ibid., p. 20).
Unintended Europeanization
As suggested, the impact of the accession process has often given birth to unintended consequences. I focus on four groups of these effects:
professionalization; the rise of the executive; bureaucratization; and centralization (Grabbe, 2001; Lippert et al., 2001a). First, the preparations for membership presented an enormous challenge for the civil services of candidate countries. Each administration set up a special EU unit which was responsible for the preparation for membership in the given area of competence. Moreover, all of these units were coordinated at the governmental level (Lippert et al., 2001a). This brought benefi ts in two regards at least. To start with, the governments were forced to invest in the modernization of their institutional structures, and to tackle long-standing problems such as inter-agency and interministerial coordination. Moreover, civil servants within these structures had to be able to communicate in English, and to absorb and implement new knowledge. These civil servants were then exposed to the EU in a very intensive way. On this basis, a highly professional group of civil servants emerged, standing out ‘from overall public administration organs in quality and effi ciency’ (Nunberg, 2000, p. 20, quoted in Goetz and Wollmann, 2001, p. 878). Thus islands of professionalism inside the national administrations were created from which the know-how of effi cient administration is likely to spread into others.
Second, the accession process privileges the executive over the legislature (Grabbe, 2001). The executive plays a key role in the preparations for and negotiation of membership, while the legislature is expected to rubber- stamp the EU laws without any deliberation. On the one hand, this rise of the executive helps to establish strong central state institutions, thus overcoming the totalitarian legacy. On the other hand, it can contribute to the weakening of the role of parliaments in democratic decision making, thus creating a democratic defi cit.
Third, the technical nature of most accession issues makes them largely intangible to the political élite, which is then heavily dependent on the expertise of civil servants. Therefore a signifi cant part of the decision making gets de-politicized and bureaucratized (Lippert et al., 2001a). The bureaucratization refers to two processes. On one hand, it reduces the over-politicization of personal appointments within the state institutions, strengthening the principle of meritocracy; for example, most chief negotiators were professionals rather than politicians. This brought the advantage of stability, as the chief negotiators did not change with every change in government. In this connection, bureaucratization provides a shelter against political interference in contributing to institutional autonomy (Drulák et al., 2003).
On the other hand, bureaucratization may further deepen the under- politicization of the state administration in policy formation in the sense that the administration is fully absorbed by implementation of Brussels’
rules and procedures without developing any capacity for autonomous policy making. Therefore bureaucratization is a mixed blessing: it provides a remedy for the problem of over-politicization while deepening the problem of under-politicization.
Fourth, even though the accession process gave rise to a wave of decentralization at the constitutional level, it often led to centralization at the practical level. This centralization is again connected with the technocratic nature of the accession process. As Marek and Baun (2002, pp. 913–14) observe, ‘the Commission’s demands for efficiency and expediency in accession preparations and the implementation of EU programmes have had a contrary effect, reinforcing the centralist preferences of national government authorities and undermining the Commission’s nominal support for decentralization’. Therefore, even though sub-national units came into being at the insistence of the EU, the practice of EU accession was not favourable to their empowerment.
To sum up, the accession process helped to improve the administrative capacity of CEECs, thus contributing to their better governance. In this respect, it was benefi cial to the stabilization of their young democracies.
However, the accession also encouraged centralization, the weakening of parliaments, and further under-politicization of policy making; these are detrimental to good democratic governance.