Between Globalization and Integration The Europeanization of Romania

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN ECONOMICS
Sebastian Vaduva
Between
Globalization and
Integration
The Europeanization
of Romania
SpringerBriefs in Economics
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8876

Sebastian Văduva
Between Globalization
and Integration
The Europeanization of Romania
Sebastian Văduva
Griffiths School of Management
Emanuel University of Oradea
Oradea, Romania
ISSN 2191-5504 ISSN 2191-5512 (electronic)

SpringerBriefs in Economics
ISBN 978-3-319-27008-1 ISBN 978-3-319-27009-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-27009-8
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Preface
The concept of the “business civil society” outlined in this volume, an outgrowth of
the traditional civil society, itself an old, yet misunderstood and underutilized con-
cept, is an attempt to provide a neutral, voluntary, and contingent space where pub-
lic politicians, administrators, theoreticians, etc., can meet and dialogue with their
counterparts from the private sector. The nations of Europe, including Romania,
have different civil traditions varying in their intensity, cultural heritage, scope of
activity, religious or nonreligious affiliation, etc., to the point that the civil society
means different things for different people. Western Europe has experienced over a
century of modern government involvement crowding out the efforts of traditional
civil society, while Romania, along with the other Eastern nations of the former
Soviet bloc, experienced almost a half-century of systematic efforts by communist
regimes to eradicate and control all spheres of voluntary, nongovernmental civil life.
To make matters worse, the inexperience and immaturity of Romanian society in the
early transition period after communism, particularly its so-called entrepreneurial
class, have discredited and abused the concept of civil society, utilizing it solely for
tax benefits and selfish purposes. Nevertheless, I hope my work will provide a hum-
ble impetus to both business and public administrators in both Romania and the
European Union to consider this complementary alternative to future public admin-
istration reforms. I believe that our historical global context expects fresh and inno-
vative ideological paradigms from both the public and the private sectors.
In 2010, while writing on my dissertation, I outlined three historical realities that
comprise the era of globalization and why both business and public administration
communities ought to change their adversarial paradigms and find common solu-
tions instead of finding flaws with the other: (1) rapid technological transformation,
(2) the interconnectivity of the capital markets, and (3) competition from develop-
ing nations with massive populations such as China and India. Since then, I must
add two other realities that have taken place and will probably have substantial
historical implications for Romania and the European Union: (4) the “Arab Spring”
political revolutions potentially causing vast population migration toward the
European Union and placing an immense strain on the public treasury with possible
social unrest and native retaliation and (5) the possible collapse of the Euro and/or
v
vi Preface
the loss of national sovereignty. I hope these, along with other historical and global
realities, will provide sufficient motivation for Romanian and European public
administrators and business owners to search for solutions that are “out of the box”
of traditional thinking and finger-pointing.
The business civil society is built on the traditional, value-based concepts of early
Western European nations, yet it takes into account the realities and pressures of
globalization. In these challenging times, practitioners and theoreticians alike from
multiple disciplines and various nations owe it to their societies to engage in honest
and professional dialogue and explore nonlinear and non-traditional solutions. I trust
the current volume will be a small contribution to the ongoing dialogue among polit-
ical scientists, public administrators, business leaders, and the civil society.
I state the hypothesis that there are no inherently rich or poor nations; instead,
there are well-managed, prosperous nations and poorly managed, impoverished
ones. This builds upon Michael Porter’s (1990) and Hernando de Soto’s (2000)
claim that governments have an absolute determinant role on the quality of life of
their citizens. This has always been true, yet I will argue that in the current era of
globalization, international competition has increased, placing unusually high
demands on national public administrators not only to perform routine tasks associ-
ated with their office but increasingly to generate prosperity and well-being for their
citizens. Globalization, with its three major pillars of technology, international and
unrestricted finance, and demography, is changing the governance paradigms we
have inherited from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries with worrisome
speed. The traditional passive and reactionary role of public administration is being
altered to include proactive and anticipatory measures. The traditional levers of
power are also being transformed. Where in the past public administrators reacted
primarily to their political masters, in the global era they are increasingly sensitive
to faceless financial markets, rating agencies, international media conglomerates,
and increasingly technology-enhanced micro-corporations. In these first sections, I
will broadly outline the global issues facing public administration reformers the
world over, along with some of the globalization forces that are dictating a different
reform paradigm. Even if this volume focuses mainly on Romania, it behooves us
to understand what pressures mold our new world.
This global, macroeconomic reality manifests itself in the perception of
Romanian society through the process of Europeanization; therefore, I will suc-
cinctly outline the literature on the European Union along with its theoretical under-
pinnings, history, identity, integration impetus, and administrative/legal structure.
For an in-depth analysis on the European Union in the Romanian language, I fol-
lowed in the footsteps of Iordan Gheorghe Bărbulescu and his school of thought,
utilizing his numerous and insightful works on the subject. The European Union is
a dynamic and robust political and social construct that is too large for one volume
to contain. I am afraid my work will not do it sufficient justice, and I would like to
apologize in advance; any shortcomings and omissions are entirely my own. In the
past few years, any committed and passionate student of the European Union has
been witnessing events that are both challenging and exhilarating. The academic
future of European Union studies will be ripe with opportunity for analyses and
Preface vii
interpretations, and I trust that the experts from both Romania and the rest of the
Union will continue to provide us with astute elucidation.
I will then contextualize the discussion of globalization and Europeanization and
refer to the nation of Romania, which is the focus of my research. Again, I will not
go into all the exhaustive details of the current Romanian public administration with
its two decades of reforms, since many significant scholarly works have already
been written on this subject. I will mainly focus on the historical legacies and the
major legal and political transformations that took place after the fall of the com-
munist regime. Valuable work of my Romanian colleagues has permitted me to also
briefly focus on the reforms and alterations affected by European integration along
with the instruments utilized in the Europeanization process.1
In the opinion of this author, although the Europeanization efforts of both the
European Union and the Romanian reformers have been commendable, they have
also been both hypocritical and insufficient. Further, I will address what is consid-
ered the greatest challenge to Romanian public administration and to Romania’s
place in the world: corruption and a lack of healthy leadership. Once again, the limi-
tations imposed by the time and the space of my research did not permit me to
adequately discuss this subject; therefore, the works of other experts on this subject
ought to be explored. My primary research contribution has been a study on the
business leadership of Romanians, who are the target group that my work is attempt-
ing to mobilize and engage in the current public administration reform discussion.
Given the speed of communication and the interconnectivity of the world, both busi-
ness and government leaders have a real incentive to reduce corruption and increase
transparency. Through various “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) initiatives,
the globalization of the NGO sector, and anticorruption priorities for local and
national government, there are numerous studies that correlate low levels of corrup-
tion with long-term, sustainable prosperity.
Although fully integrated into the European Union and the global community,
Romania’s reform initiatives on corruption eradication, and, more importantly, eco-
nomic prosperity, are not over. To complicate matters, the global continuous change
and hyper-turbulence identified and outlined previously are even more pronounced
in public administration. The European Union, portrayed as a beacon of stability,
prosperity, and civilization, seems to be shaking to its core. I will return to the theo-
retical and ideological instruments of public administration reforms of New Public
Management (NPM), Neo-Weberianism, and Digital Government. As valuable
instruments for future public administration reforms, they necessitate in-depth
understanding and masterful utilization; therefore, I will outline their history, con-
text, and ideological underpinnings. These three tools, especially Digital
Government, must be properly utilized by Romanian public administrators and the
Romanian population at large. Public administrators must strike a right balance so
1
I would like to mention Adrian Miroiu, Iordan Gheorghe Bărbulescu, Mihai Păunescu, ăerban
Cerkez, Mirela State-Cerkez, Radu Nicolae, Florin Bondar, Ana-Raluca Alecu, Radu Comăa,
Lucian Ciolan, Andrei Trandafira, Bogdan Lazarescu, and Andrei Miroiu, whose research has
provided me invaluable information and guidance.
viii Preface
that the benefits of each ideological tool may be maximized, while its negatives,
neutralized. However, based upon historical observation and worldwide research,
neither New Public Management, nor Neo-/Traditional Weberianism, nor Digital
Government can function without an adequate cultural construct. Unfortunately,
most public administration reform initiatives ignore this reality, downplay its impor-
tance, or do not think that culture creation and nurturing is their responsibility. This
is why I propose the consideration of a fourth reform ideology, civil society, which
is both complementary and foundational to the abovementioned three.
Eventually, I will proceed on a transdisciplinary and complementary approach to
public administration reform by discussing the concept of a modern business civil
society in Romania. I begin with an attempt to explain the concept of traditional
civil society, a concept minimized by the advent of the modern state in the late nine-
teenth century and sometimes misused in the public discourse. Traditionally, the
civil society complemented and enhanced public governance, as it was the “third
sector” providing a neutral, voluntary interface between government and business.
Historically, it held three main responsibilities: (1) generate appropriate national
culture, (2) hold government accountable, and (3) supplement the government’s
activity, when needed.
The timing of this initiative is most appropriate since the private business sector
is recognizing its duty and, through corporate social responsibility (CSR), it is will-
ing to contribute to the improvement in social conditions. Therefore, Romanian and
European Union political and administrative leaders ought to take concrete steps in
revitalizing this most important and all-benefiting space. Perhaps this can be a long-
term public–private partnership of educating the general public as to the benefits of
having a healthy, functioning, and objective civil society. The instruments and para-
digms that produced the European experiment and modern prosperity are limited in
their reach, especially under the pressures of new technological, financial, and
demographic realities. It is my argument that both the public and the private sectors
have to find innovative methods to complement and aid each other; otherwise, both
will sink under the weight of their own selfish demands.
Methodology
This work utilizes a theoretical approach, by presenting various theories of public

administration, public policy, globalization, governance, Europeanization, govern-
ment reform, corruption, culture, economic development, civil society, and corporate
social responsibility. In most cases I begin with a general, macro perspective and
move to particular, locally contextualized realities. I will utilize primary date studies,
journal articles published in prestigious journal and international electronic data-
bases, as well as seminal books published by reputable publishing houses. Invariably,
my research will move back and forth over the course of the past century on selective
specialty literature published mainly in English and Romanian, giving it also a his-
torical perspective. In 2011, along with a group of young researchers at the Griffiths
Preface ix
School of Management, we conducted a survey of 145 top Romanian leaders and

institutions on a broad range of topics giving this research a primary data dimen-
sion. This survey was conducted online using advanced and efficient survey instru-
ments (Qualtrics), obtaining data from top Romanian leaders and their organizations.
The results will be presented along with interpretations and explanations.
However, I believe the greatest contribution of my research is its transdisci-
plinary nature. Considering the pressures that global finance and economics are
exercising upon public administration, and the fact that budgetary austerity is
becoming the new norm for most public treasuries, perhaps non-traditional fields
need to be explored for possible solutions. I argue that cultural and religious studies
could offer a complementary perspective and reform instruments to the traditional
public administration and public policy. My hypothesis is that voluntary cultural
and religious initiatives could (a) reduce the budgetary burden on government bud-
gets, especially in the area of social services; (b) decrease waste and inefficiency of
current government structures through objective and transparent accountability; and
(c) rekindle a healthy entrepreneurial spirit that will create societal prosperity. The
space that should be explored, and in some instances created, is what I refer to as the
business civil society, envisioned as a neutral, transdisciplinary, and mutually ben-
eficial space. Public administrators and private businesses alike are the beneficiaries
of economically virtuous cultures, and by the same token they are negatively
affected by a culture where corruption and inefficiencies are the norm rather than
the exception. By bringing a cultural and implicitly a religious perspective into the
field of public administration and economics, I hope to enlarge the scope of the cur-
rent dialogue and render some transdisciplinary alternatives.
Oradea, Romania Sebastian Văduva, Ph.D.

Contents
1 The Twenty-First Century and the Expectations

Placed upon Public Administration .......................................................... 1
1.1 Introduction .......................................................................................... 1
1.2 Globalization, Transformation and the “Flat World” ........................... 3
1.3 Globalization and its Impact on Public Administration....................... 6
1.4 Globalization and its Mandates on Public Administration .................. 9
1.5 The Necessary Capabilities for Strategic Public Administration......... 12
1.6 Coalition Building, a Substantial Element
of Modern Public Administration ........................................................ 17
1.7 Tactical Implementation Capacities ..................................................... 18
1.8 Governance in the Globalization Era: A Synopsis............................... 21
References ..................................................................................................... 24
2 The European Union: Amid Globalization
and Integration ............................................................................................ 29
2.1 Neofunctionalism and Intergovernmentalism ...................................... 31
2.2 Economical Interests and the European Project................................... 33
2.3 The Pursuit of Identity and Integration ................................................ 36
2.3.1 Multi-Level Governance .......................................................... 36
2.3.2 The Integration Impetus ........................................................... 37
2.4 National Identity or Economic Prosperity?.......................................... 40
2.5 The Influencers of European Integration ............................................. 45
2.6 The Features of European Public Administration ................................ 48
2.6.1 An External, Legal Perspective ................................................ 49
2.6.2 An Internal, Administrative Perspective .................................. 51
2.7 Accountability Within European Administrative Space ...................... 55
2.7.1 Instruments of Accountability.................................................. 57
References ..................................................................................................... 60
xi
xii Contents
3 The Europeanization of Romania in the Globalization

Context ......................................................................................................... 67
3.1 The Historical and Cultural Contexts of Romanian
Public Administration .......................................................................... 68
3.2 Romania Prior to the European Integration ......................................... 71
3.2.1 The Political and Legal Conditions of the Early 1990s ........... 71
3.2.2 The Challenges of the Europeanization Process ...................... 76
3.3 Europeanization Principles in Romania ............................................... 78
3.4 Europeanization Instruments in Romania ............................................ 83
3.5 Europeanization Effects in Romania.................................................... 86
3.6 Synthetic Aspects of Europeanization in Romania .............................. 90
References ..................................................................................................... 95
Cases ................................................................................................................... 101
Further Reading ................................................................................................ 103

Chapter 1
The Twenty-First Century
and the Expectations Placed upon Public
Administration
1.1 Introduction
The twenty-first century, still in its infancy, promises to be challenging and full of
surprises. As we survey the world around us, east, west, north, or south, we see how
governments, technology, multinational corporations, labor unions, the invisible
capital markets, and the international governing agencies are reshaping the way we
live, compete, and collaborate. These global macro-changes are especially affecting
public administrators all over the world, as they are struggling to redefine and fulfill
their responsibilities facing insurmountable challenges ranging from declining
budgets, anemic economic growth, environmental pollution, the aging of their
population, technology, free-market capitalism, unrestricted movement of labor,
etc. How to survive and thrive in this new challenging era has been the topic of
intense debate and research. The challenge is almost universal: governments must
provide and enhance goods and services of a higher quality on diminishing budgets
constrained by the global financial and economic crises (Davis, 2007).
Our world entered a new century with phenomenal changes that are transforming
nations, economies, governments, and public administrations. The world has entered a
new era with many positive and negative consequences, forcing it to question basic,
traditional assumptions of government and public administration. The world seems
smaller, with more individuals able to interact more easily while more institutions,
governments, and economies integrate into the “global village.” However, the world is
also threatened by growing poverty, terrorism, conflicts, war, and unemployment that
has increased as more and more jobs migrate from the traditional west to the new east,
driven by the new “flatteners” (Friedman, 2005). Opposite to the optimistic supporters
of globalization and free-market capitalism, who view the new world order as a great
development for humankind (Friedman, 1999; Fukuyama, 1992; Ohmae, 1990), there
are more pessimistic worldviews. They foresee serious challenges in the future for the
global community, national governments, and public administrators in the coming
age of “anarchy” (Kaplan, 2000; Korten, 2001).
© The Author(s) 2016 1

S. Văduva, Between Globalization and Integration, SpringerBriefs
in Economics, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-27009-8_1
2 1 The Twenty-First Century and the Expectations Placed upon Public Administration
According to Fritjof Capra in his 1982 work, The Turning Point: Science, Society
and the Rising Culture, we are living at the dawn of a new turning point in the world
history. The twenty-first century seems to usher in a new era of “chaotic changes”
(Lewin, 1992), “hyper-uncertainty” and “hyper-competition” (Weick, Kathleen, &
Sutcliffe 2001), “hyper-turbulence” (D’Aveni, 1994) that replaced the ages of
“certainty” (Prigogine, 1997). Some experts are calling it the “age of madness and
tyranny” intolerant to individuality, an “age of unreason” (Handy, 1990). Even if
some scholars are downplaying the extent of the global impacts on government
and administration, all seem to agree that this permanent and constant change will
produce a complex society (international as well as national) that will be difficult to
manage and will require modern, innovative administrative tools. The new world,
with its positives and negatives, represents a fundamental factor that makes the
responsibility of governance and administration in the twenty-first century challeng-
ing (Priesmeyer, 1992). Nineteenth- and twentieth-century administrative tools,
important and valuable as they may be, are insufficient to meet the new challenges
of the globalized era. Both theory and practice at the international as well as the
national levels need to retool and develop skills, cultures, new sets of knowledge,
and designs that are nonlinear, prepared for surprise, and entrepreneurially oriented,
as to meet the challenges of this new age of “unreason” with its rapid changes and
“chaos” (Farazmand, 2003; Handy, 1990; Morgan, 2006; Murphy, 1996).
Over the past half-century, Romania experienced a tremendous amount of change
and transformation (Goetz, 2001). At the end of World War II, it developed into a
communist dictatorship with particularities that I will later explore, given their rel-
evance for the current public administration reform. In December 1989, it began its
slow and painful transition toward democracy and free-market capitalism. The tim-
ing of this transition coincided with the worldwide transition from the Cold-War era
to the new Globalization era, a phenomenon that deeply affected and transformed
the entire world. Worldwide, the 1990s were characterized by the dismemberment
of the old traditional roles of the state with its absolute monopoly on power and
ownership. In Romania as well as the rest of Eastern Europe, state resources were
privatized without a clear direction or a roadmap, and the void left by the communist
party with its mammoth administrative network was replaced by a plethora of
political parties competing for power and influence (Horga, 2004; Zamfir, 2004). In
2004, Romania joined NATO, an event that brought additional changes and demands
for the political and administrative leadership of Romania (Layne, 2006). In 2007,
adding to its burden of international pressure, Romania was admitted into the
European Union. These events almost exclusively dominated the recent public
administration reform agenda, and they continue to do so, with stringent issues
such as admission to the Schengen area, absorption of EU structural funds, jus-
tice reform, and the decentralization of public services such as education, health,
and culture (Crăciun, 2008). Before outlining modest and nonconventional
considerations for the Romanian public administrators, I will attempt to broadly
outline the twenty-first century context in the field of public administration and
the new geopolitical era. It is the belief of this author that we cannot simply
import public administration practices from western nations without first
1.2 Globalization, Transformation and the “Flat World” 3
understanding the international context and the national direction of Romania.

Historical, geographical, economic, and cultural differences exist between
nations, but in an interconnected world there are also universal challenges in the
field of public administration that we must be aware of.
In the period prior to 1989, the public administration debate has been about how
to deal with complex “bureaucracies becoming unmanageable” (Elgin & Bushnell,
1977), or “how to control them for democratic ideals” (Niskanen, 1971), or how to
“reconcile bureaucracy with democracy” (Waldo, 1992). In the new global era, the
public administration challenge is “how to manage the obstacles of a hyper-turbulent
environment of chaotic changes and uncertainties” (Galbraith, 2006; Kiel, 1994;
Murphy, 1996; Nonaka, 1988). Ali Farazmand, in his 2009 article, Building
Administrative Capacity for the Age of Rapid Globalization: A Modest Prescription
for the Twenty-First Century, calls for the building of a “new administrative capac-
ity” as an imperative for public administrators. I would like to build upon his and his
colleagues’ theories, contextualize them for the Romanian public administration,
and perhaps fill in some small gaps. Farazmand argues that a new administrative
capacity must be built so it can adequately sustain global affairs across the economic
system. This capacity must be designed at both the macro- and micro-levels. The
macro-level administrative capacity has to do with organizational, institutional,
policy, and managerial issues of public governance and administration. The
micro-level administrative capacity has to do with the acquisition, refinement, and
the applicability of those managerial, administrative, and technical tools so they
can accomplish the objectives set forth by the macro design. These micro-level
capacities are rooted in the individual’s culture; they take longer and require different
tools to change. Toward the end of my research, I shall address the building of the
micro-level or individual capacities that are cross-functional and useful throughout
the Romanian society and demanded by the new globalized realities. In this first
chapter, I will outline the macro-level administrative capacity that is required as a
roadmap, which Romanian public administrators might consider in their reform
efforts. I will further look at the need for developing and outlining capability design
and enhancement strategies, governance capabilities, institutional policy, and outline
some of the administrative capabilities that require analysis and implementation.
1.2 Globalization, Transformation and the “Flat World”
Change has been a constant in human history and across the world in the most
unusual ways. While major changes produce long-term effects that are not
immediately seen or felt, small changes are more common, with some predictable
and unpredictable consequences. Small changes can produce monumental transfor-
mations in the long-run through what is known in chaos theory as the “butterfly
effect,” a small event that can cause a system breakdown (Lewin, 1992; Prigogine,
1997). According to Dwight Waldo in his 1992 work, The Enterprise of Public
Administration: A Summary View, change, time, and civilization are directly related.
Transformation—both large and small—can take place through many forces, both
internal and external. Theories of change and reform explain that change can appear
bottom-up or top-down, through institutional reforms, reorganizations, reinventions,
or revolutions (Peters, 2001). Natural processes of change also comprise the inner
forces of movement, transformation, and evolution in human ideas and behavior
through “mutual causality” and “self-organization” of organic systems (Capra,
1982; Jantsch, 1980; Weick et al., 2001). In eras before modern globalization,
changes took long periods of time to materialize, making it almost unfelt by the
general public. In contrast, in the globalization era, change has grown exponentially
with a lopsided scale and significance. In the new global reality, change is sudden,
chaotic, unexpected and difficult to anticipate; it happens almost instantly with
unfolding surprises; it produces anxiety, ambiguity, and possible system break-
downs across nations and administrative systems. Besides the challenge of global-
ization, in the past 10 years, the world has experienced numerous calamities such as
terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina, Asian Tsunami of 2004, the BP oil spill of
2006, the 2008 global financial meltdown, the 2010 floods in Romania, the 2011
Arab Spring and anti-establishment protest, etc. There are administrative strategies
and methods to deal with and manage such unexpected events, but these are not
guaranteed and uncriticized. In this new global reality, lacking definite choices,
public administrators must consider what Yehezkel Dror (2001) calls “fuzzy gam-
bling” options and instruments that provide some means of steering through turbu-
lence. A closer analysis of the global patterns of change in the hyper-turbulent world
demonstrates a general model of continuity in a “self-organizing universe” (Jantsch,
1980). The direction of this transformation, or the system continuance, seems to
point toward and reinforce the free-market economic system along with its social
constructs, governance, and public administration, producing newer and updated
versions of free-market, democratic capitalism. As a matter of fact, in the past few
centuries in the western world, only a few serious, path-changing events occurred—
and mostly failed—to check the march of free-market capitalism with its far-
reaching consequences for humanity, societies, and cultures.
The supporters of globalization—such as Samuel Huntington in his 1996 work,
Clash of Civilizations, among others—find this pattern to be inescapable, an era
to be embraced and harnessed to its fullness. Critics of free-market globalization
find its ideological underpinnings dangerous for humankind beyond any single
government’s control. According to the critics of globalization, the argument of the
inevitable clash of civilizations is nothing more than an intellectual claim to a politi-
cal ideology of building a global empire by the United States to dominate the world,
by hypocritically championing democracy and liberalism while overlooking
economic and political repression (Hoffman, 2006; Johnson, 2006). The proponents
of this global ideology claim that “the world is flat” and any resistance to the
flattening and the new world order will be politically and financially sanctioned by
the international community (Ferguson, 2004; Friedman, 1999, 2005). Thomas
Freedman argues that communication technology has made the world more
interconnected and flatter by breaking down traditional geographic, political, and
other boundaries for information sharing, global commerce, competition, and
1.2 Globalization, Transformation and the “Flat World” 5
collaborations. In the era before globalization, proponents argue, natural and

political geography along with the expensive cost of communication created barri-
ers hindering people to compete, collaborate, and work together. With the advent of
the “information age,” a series of events converged to flatten the world so that geog-
raphy and distance are no longer barriers to global trade and collaboration. The
prevalent availability of computers, standardized file formats and transfer protocols,
excess international fiber-optic cable capacity, outsourcing, and a handful of other
trends have greatly leveled the international playing field. According to proponents
of globalization, governments are no longer the dominant force in the world, but
rather agile, well-connected corporations and individuals with access to information
and capital. Since the goal is optimizing costs to increase profits, low-paying jobs
are outsourced to low-paying countries while high-paying jobs gravitate toward
countries and regions where trained and skilled specialists live. Thus, in the global-
ized world, public administrators must learn not only to manage the tangible
resources of their cities (infrastructure, healthcare facilities, etc.) but must focus on
the attraction of qualified talent that commands higher wages on the world scale.
Location is all but irrelevant when the products of intellectual capital can move
instantaneously around the globe and employees can live almost anywhere. Along
with Friedman, Martin Wolf, associate editor and columnist for the Financial Times,
argues in his 2004 book, Why Globalization Works,
Globalization’s changes in technology and the economy have complex cultural, social, and
political effects. Changes in how people are able to earn their living, in what they can buy,
in how readily they can move from place to place, in how easily they can transport things,
in how they can disseminate and access information and ideas necessarily transform human
societies and the individuals who live in them (Wolf, 2004, p. 18).
Advances in computers, transportation, and communications (cellular tele-

phones, the Internet, microchips, fiber optics, digitization, satellites) are the drivers
of the “hyper-turbulence” that societies in general and public administrators in
particular feel worldwide.
To the critics of the new world order, globalization is a dangerously destructive
phenomenon intended to drive developing nations in a “race to the bottom”
(Brecher & Costello, 1994; Korten, 2001). This global American empire is some-
thing that Alice Amsden claims developing nations cannot escape from in her
2007 book, Escape from Empire: The Developing World’s Journey through
Heaven and Hell, since they are dependent on conditional aid and under the
expert advice coming from the international agencies. Overstated or not, these
accusations have a seed of truth: individuals and national members of the globalized
world are experiencing economic exploitation and poverty, along with the
hypocritical support of dictatorial regimes that are some of the leading causes of
terrorism (Johnson, 2006). To the supporters of globalization, these are the costs
of a global empire; their solution to terrorism and global insecurity is more polic-
ing and better security. This seems to create a vicious circle that benefits only a
few “hegemonic corporations” (Dugger, 1989) that want “to rule the world”
(Galbraith, 2006; Korten, 2001) along with their nations and their “geopolitical
reasoning” (Agnew, 2005).
Considering the two extremes outlined above, the natural question arises
regarding globalization: is it inherently evil, set out to destroy the masses and enrich
a few? This is a philosophical issue beyond the scope of this work, but I believe that
the real issue is not whether globalization is good or evil, but rather if we can be
unaffected by it. Naturally, the answer is no. Therefore national energies and focus
ought to be concentrated on making globalization benefit as many people and
nations as possible. Globalization is not inherently evil, as some claim, but neither
is it automatically, or guaranteed to be, as moral and good as its proponents would
like to believe. For instance, entering the European Union—as was the case of
Romania in 2007—does not automatically guarantee prosperity, order, and general
welfare. The negative tendencies of globalization must be counterbalanced with
modern, global tools of public administration and civil society. Certainly, the global
free-market has a major role in the world, but so do governments, and more impor-
tantly civil society, which must check the multinational corporation’s negative
tendencies, stimulate homegrown market dynamics, and control imperialistic
behavior (Dugger, 1989). The 2008 global financial crises that led to a near
meltdown of global capitalism requiring multi-trillion-dollar rescue plans from
taxpayers is but an example of how mythical the notion of free-market capitalism
without problems is, and how greatly it needs a healthy civil society cultivating
human virtues and an interfering capitalist state to supervise it.
1.3 Globalization and its Impact on Public Administration
Globalization, change, and transformation can best be understood through from a

historical viewpoint and its view of time. The twentieth century had many trend-
setting events with long-term structural consequences and profound implications for
public administrators. Public administration scholars generally point toward two
all-encompassing twentieth-century trends that produced large-scale transforma-
tions in the world of the twenty-first century (Capra, 1982; Kaplan, 2000). The first
was the communist revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union as a world super-
power that ushered in the socialist worldview, the bi-polar world system and the
welfare state. The second was the free-market, liberal capitalistic ideology along
with the transnational corporations and consumerism that are the underpinnings of
the “new world order” and globalization (Cox, 1999; Friedman, 1999; Kaplan,
2000; Ohmae, 1990). In the context of these two ideological pillars, political leaders
and public administrators in the twentieth century experimented with numerous pub-
lic policies, such as: the establishment of the “welfare administrative state” in
response to the Soviet communist revolution and the Great Depression; the dismem-
berment of colonial empires and the creation of the European Union with necessary
emigration and social policies; and the integration of former communistic Eastern
European states. Underneath it all, there was the ever-present competition between
socialism and capitalism—ideologically, culturally, economically, and militarily
draining public resources and postponing development. The public administration of
1.3 Globalization and its Impact on Public Administration 7
the twentieth century was further complicated by issues such as urbanization,

bureaucratization, agrarian reforms, public–private institutional partnerships, public
corporations, and an overall extended role of the government and public administra-
tion (Heady, 1996). “Systems theory” became the ideological underpinning of polit-
ical stability, social order, system continuance, and the welfare state. In Western
Europe, the political economy of the government was the acceptance of the welfare
state, with both a public and a private economy, while in the United States a mili-
tary-industrial complex was established to compete with the Soviet Union and
Soviet allies in various revolutionary and liberation movements.
By late 1970s, the traditional public sector with its multiple responsibilities
entered an era characterized by the decline and loss of credibility. Bureaucracies
were viewed as wasteful, inefficient, and corrupt, protected by public unions who
had lost their initial scope of protecting the worker and instead actively engaged
in protecting their positions and privileges. The result was a reinvention of govern-
ment, downsizing, privatization and commercialization that were considered the
appropriate new “prescription” for solving administrative problems and running
the business of government (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992; Savas, 1982). The official
architects of this global reversal were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who
claimed the government was the problem, not the solution, and passed through
legislation to diminish it. The traditional bureaucratic state was dismantled, and in
its place a new business-like structure was proposed, forged on neoconservative
principles of supply-side economics and the political theories of “public choice”
(Carroll, 1991). This public administration revolution in the Anglo-Saxon nations
provided a new paradigm for global and globalizing institutions like the World Bank
(WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations (UN) and the US
Agency for International Development (USAID) to modify relations among the
government, civil, business, and the rest of society (Korten, 2001). They resulted in
the following new axioms, which are considered universally applicable to all nations
regardless of history, geography, religion, or local context:
• Free-market supremacy
• The Washington Consensus (Frank, 2000; Johnson, 2006)
• “New Public Management” (NPM) ideology in public administration to promote
corporate-like privatization and optimization initiatives in governance (Barzelay,
2001; Donohue, Joseph, & Nye, 2002)
• An accelerated process of corporate “globalization” (Farazmand, 1999)
The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, and later the dismantling of the Soviet Union
in 1991, served as a validation that the public policies pursued by the United States
and the United Kingdom were vastly superior to those of the socialist left. Some
proponents celebrated corporate globalization by claiming that “the market was
God with many blessings” (Cox, 1999) and that global capitalism will render the
state “irrelevant” who will eventually turn its traditional functions to free-market
institutions and multinational corporations (Ohmae, 1990).
Critics of corporate globalization view this new era as a “false dawn” (Gray,
1998), “a return back to medievalism” and reiterated the dangers that “hegemonic
and globalizing corporations that rule the world” could bring to the public welfare
(Dugger, 1989; Johnson, 2006; Korten, 2001; Rowland, 2005). By 2006 Stanley
Hoffman noted in his book, Chaos and Violence: What Globalization, Failed States,
and Terrorism Mean for US Foreign Policy:
The benefits of globalization are undeniable. However… it is largely an American creation,
rooted in the period after World War II and based on U.S. economic might. Globalization’s
reach remains limited because it excludes many poor countries and the states that it does
transform and react in different ways (Hoffman, 2006, p. 117).
He and other critics of the new public administration practices imposed upon
developing nations by global institutions were expressing concerns over the hyper-
changes that affect nations with unequal impact, benefiting some more than others
(Stiglitz, 2003; UN, 2001, 2005a, 2005b). Ali Farazmand notes:
…dramatic changes have a tendency to produce at least three types of effects: good, bad,
and ugly – and some neutral ones. Beneficiaries of the “good” praise the changes, while
receivers of the “bad” suffer and complain, but the “ugly” effects harm virtually everyone
everywhere; this “ugly” side of the current global changes has caused a profound debate
and created serious backlash. Examples include the erosion of national sovereignty and
public infrastructure, increasing unemployment and underdevelopment, global warming,
expanded global economic crisis, poverty and hunger, ethnic conflict, war, AIDS, insecurity
and terrorism, increased corruption and lack of accountability, and corporate-friendly dicta-
tors (Farazmand, 2009)
In general terms, there are three perspectives on globalization and its impact
upon public administration reforms: opponents, proponents, and the realists in
between. The opponents fear the erosion of community, the disappearance of
national culture, sovereignty, and democracy. They see the global trends leading to
a crisis of “governance and governability,” in a sense a “re-colonization of the
world through global corporations,” and possibly an end to public administration
(Korten, 2001). The proponents of globalization and its impact on governance dis-
miss those criticisms as exaggerated since they view the world as a “global village”
full of opportunities, and they see competition beneficial in the long-run since it
will make public administration and governance more efficient and innovative
(Friedman, 1999, 2005; Ohmae, 1990). The third perspective, that I embrace and
which may be appropriate for Romania, accepts globalization as a historical real-
ity, but suggests approaching it with an in-depth knowledge of its underpinnings,
complexities, and consequences. Having clear objectives in ensuring sovereignty,
self-determination, and a democratic governance, Romanian public administrators,
along with their political masters, can then formulate adaptive and innovative
national strategies. Considering the global public administration debate and the
realities present in Romania, in my opinion the following areas warrant an in-depth
analysis:
(1) Understanding NPM and its limitations.
(2) Managing the outsourcing and privatization of public administration
functions.
(3) Initiatives to transform public sector services to reap the benefits of the private
sector.
1.4 Globalization and its Mandates on Public Administration 9
(4) Reconstruct traditional administrative functions to also include economic

development.
(5) Educate the public on the realities of globalization and the adjustment of the
national culture.
In the new twenty-first century context, these and other issues have profound
implications on governance and public administration, but most importantly on the
national capacity to develop and advance. Nations, and Romania is not excluded,
must compete against each other as they historically have, but with new and modern
instruments. Some traditional societal paradigms have to be revisited and upgraded
for the new global realities, while others have to be strongly defended against the
external leveling ideology. The new realities must be properly analyzed, debated
and understood; but also innovative, societal solutions must be devised. The state
and its public administration will not disappear, rather their character and behavior
will be altered to meet the demands of globalization with its market-based, corporate
system of governance and administration (Farazmand, 1999, 2004).
Modern globalization, as we know it today, began to take shape after World War
II and continued with the expansion of trans-world corporations—the United
Nations, the World Bank, IMF, the World Trade Organization, etc. What is new after
the fall of the Soviet Union, however, is the nature, power, pace, and capacity of
these major global institutions with their professional staff capable of penetrating
and integrating states, like Romania, through economic sanctions and inducements,
political instruments, military intervention, and even war. Even if there is no
universally agreed-upon definition of globalization—it can mean new opportunities
or new perils, among many others—what matters is how public administration will
manage the challenges that globalization and global changes generate, challenges
that cut across all sectors and areas of governance, management, and culture.
1.4 Globalization and its Mandates on Public Administration
Managing public administration and governance in the global environment of

rapid, unexpected transformations with all its hyper-complexities is a complicated
and challenging task, but it can also be highly rewarding. Increasingly, according to
some experts, the difference among nations is no longer their natural endowment
but rather their administrative capacity. This is not bound by geography or richness
in natural resources, and it can be developed over time. This administrative capabil-
ity is important for both the private and the public sectors and it is valuable in
dealing with both international and national participants. However, it is difficult to
measure and its utility is most obvious in its absence. The agile, innovative
administrative capacity demanded by globalization is not readily found even in
most advanced nations, and not because they lack the personnel, but because
globalizations challenges are too numerous and complex and change rapidly in
nonlinear paths (Dror, 2001). Our global world may be getting smaller and more
interconnected, but it is increasingly “unknowable” (Stacey, 1992). The complex

problems and dynamic far-reaching events of the new global era cannot be managed
by traditional crisis management capacities alone. Currently, most challenges and
crises facing national governments and public administrators are beyond any single
nation’s reach and capability, and require coordinated and collaborative action
with non-traditional, non-national participants, a quality lacking under traditional
governance (Lomborg, 2004). Increasingly, all governance challenges have a
“spillover” factor from one jurisdiction to another in the context of a pervasive mass
media with communication technologies instantly providing unfiltered and
unverified information. As I will attempt to briefly outline some generally agreed-
upon administrative principles, probably familiar to veterans, perhaps it would aid
us to revisit the legitimacy of the field of public administration. Later, after briefly
outlining the administrative tradition in the European Union and Romania, I shall
conclude with a few observations regarding the reform of the Romanian national
culture, coming full-circle to reflect what globalization mandates from both public
and private institutions.
Romania is not alone, and as the worldwide protests of 2011 in both the
Arab world and the major capitals of the west illustrate, the world seems to be
experiencing full-scale assault against governments, public administrators, and “the
establishment.” Scholars have highlighted this phenomenon for some time and call
it either a “legitimacy crisis” (Habermas, 1973, an “institutional crisis,” the “global
crisis in public service” (UN Report, 2001), the “quiet crisis in the civil service”
(Lewis, 1991), the “fiscal crisis of the state” (O’Connor, 1973), the “growing
problems of ungovernability,” and “underdevelopment crises” (Amsden, 2007; UN
Report, 2001). Charges of corruption, incompetence, nepotism, and unaccountability
abound as they accentuate the crises of modern governments and their administra-
tions. The 2008 financial crisis that required the largest governmental intervention
through multi-trillion-dollars rescue for the western banking sector and attracted
visceral criticisms of government regulators and financial legislation, but the latest
example of the ongoing legitimacy crisis in governance. Before addressing the
global competitiveness of national public administrators, there needs to be a revital-
ization and a vindication of public administration, as well as the perception that the
production of public goods needs to be reestablished as a necessary and noble
component of any healthy society. The capability to manage basic domestic issues
and the production of public services has been diminished out of concern for
inefficiency and corruption. For modern government to meet global challenges and
play a pivotal role in coalition building and culture creation, it needs to be restored
to its proper societal role. As Farazmand states:
No global crisis or problem can be solved, nor can the challenges of an unknown tomorrow
be met, with a broken institutional and legitimacy capacity in public service and administra-
tion. Revitalization and reinstitutionalization of public service and administration require,
first and foremost, a renewed emphasis on the constructive role of responsible govern-
ment—however defined—in domestic and global affairs (Farazmand, 2009).
As outlined by Farazmand (2009) this “constructive role” of traditional govern-

ments has fallen into two large categories that are still very much required in the
1.4 Globalization and its Mandates on Public Administration 11
twenty-first century, but with updated, contextualized cultures that react in real-time
to the challenges imposed by economics and technology. He first states that govern-
ments—directly and indirectly—are required to deliver basic public services that
entail both security and non-security goods. Security public services offer a sense of
overall safety for all individuals in a society through law and order as a non-
exclusionary public good. To produce security, governments engage in social
actions that promote fairness, equality, social and economic justice, opportunities
for individual growth and development along with the elimination of poverty, dis-
crimination, and disease. This is what the UN considers the “essential sources for
security and good citizenship” (UN, 2007). In the absence of these basic public
goods, insecurity develops, violence and conflict expand generating a vicious cycle
needing further policing, social control, and repression. According to the 2005 UN
report, “public service and administration must be revitalized and their institutions,
organizations, processes, and values re-institutionalized.” This is accomplished
through stable laws, legislation, and the proper, limited, and professional role of a
national government in a democracy fit to represent it in international affairs. The
reclaiming of administrative legitimacy is best accomplished through engaging citi-
zens, community organizations, and other civic institutions in decision-making and
administration while building trust, enhancing transparency, accountability, and
ethical behavior (Denhardt, 2004). As the UN reports have repeatedly stressed,
basic public services cannot be ensured in the absence of ethics, accountability, and
transparency as they have proven to be the most important underlying principles of
democratic and effective government; they truly prevent corruption and ineffective
administration.
The second expectation placed upon governments and public administrators is
continuous economic and societal development, which is the key to socioeconomic
advancement and human prosperity (Huntington, 1996; Waldo, 1992). Development
classically refers to lifting society upward by striving for better economic and social
conditions, increasing the standards of living, creating opportunities for sustainable
growth and the advancement of science and technology. It may also mean eliminat-
ing or reducing poverty, diseases, and injustice as the sources of crime, insecurity,
terrorism, conflict, and war. Public administration theorists refer to it as a means of
building secure “capacity in administration” (Farazmand, 2004) or “development
governance.” Developed western nations accomplish economic and societal devel-
opment without external help, where developing nations, lacking necessary
resources and expertise, rely on external financial and technical aid. The transfer-
ence of finance and expertise generates much heated debate among scholars and
practitioners who point to an imperfect, often hypocritical and self-serving system
that imposes unfair, unreasonable, and inhumane conditions upon the nations that
are being helped. Critics claim that much of the financial aid coming from advanced
countries and their super-government structures has self-serving and collateral
aims, calling it “tying aid” (Amsden, 2007), given primarily for political and geo-
strategic reasons, rather than true development (Hancock, 1989; Sallnow, 1990). In
some instances, international aid is a cover-up for western corporate corruption and
it actually inhibits rather than empowers the development of nations, as “tying aid
prevents them from shopping worldwide for the best bargain, and from building
an experienced local infrastructure of executives, managers, and engineers”
(Amsden, 2007, p. 60). There are vocal calls by globalization scholars and politi-
cal leaders to reform the international aid structure and remove the unneeded
obstacles that may breed corruption and discontent (Easterly, 2002; Stiglitz, 2003).
This aim was clearly outlined in the historic declaration of the UN Millennium
Development Goals (UN Report, 2001), a document some call “the global manifesto
for development in the twenty-first century.”
In response to these criticisms, proponents of international aid blame developing
nations for not having “absorption capacity” and the necessary local firms to execute
private public works and provide domestically produced goods. They point to the
absence of institutional, political, administrative, and organizational mechanisms
that must be present to develop a culture of anticorruption, free of political manipula-
tion. This culture of professionalism in public administration is especially important
in that developing nations can build their own capacity for sustainable development
and positively respond to global audits (Dwivedi, Khator, & Nef 2007).
In my opinion, even if public administrators from developed and developing
nations differ in the levels of trust and legitimacy they enjoy from their citizenry,
both face the restoration of their proper place in the public debate as their premier
challenge under globalization. Young democracies such as Romania especially need
a strong, credible state to ensure the success from a communistic dictatorship toward
a representative democracy. Trust, legitimacy, and institutional capacity will be
increased and in some cases restored only through the restoration of transparency,
accountability, and ethical standards. Globalization mandates that governments
and public administrators revisit and creatively perform its two basic functions:
providing basic public services and promoting social development. Designing the
appropriate macrostructure to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century will
re-grant public administrators their due legitimacy.
1.5 The Necessary Capabilities for Strategic Public

Administration
In my perspective, once legitimacy is restored, and the public truly mandates its
government to face the challenges of globalization and ensure national success
in global competition, public administrators can move toward creating strategic
capabilities that improve government and societal performance in both the tradi-
tional and the modern aspects of its responsibility. This necessitates a paradigm
shift as public administrators seek to accomplish their traditional role of providing
basic public service and development in a new, radically different environment of
technological, communication and geopolitical interdependence. According to
Ali Farazmand (2009), beyond possessing the traditional public service delivery
capacity, public administrators in the new global era must also have an adaptive
capacity, as well as an advancement and development capacity. These initiatives are
1.5 The Necessary Capabilities for Strategic Public Administration 13
true for all governments, but especially for new democracies such as Romania,
learning how to be a fully integrated member of the international community with
all rights and responsibilities.
Public administration performances, in routine as well as emergency situations,
will determine the degree of legitimacy governments enjoy or lose among its
citizens and the international community. In the 2002 book The New Public Service:
Serving, Not Steering, Janet and Robert Denhard state that effectiveness in service
delivery is evaluated by the criteria of efficiency, cost-effectiveness, timeliness, the
meeting of promised goals and objectives, and overall citizen satisfaction and trust.
As previously stated, government performance falls into two broad categories: the
production of security and protection at community and national levels, and the
delivery of non-security services such as development and quality of life improve-
ments. The delivery of non-security services can positively contribute to the perfor-
mance of basic security services and vice-versa; the two are constantly reinforcing
one another. For instance, a program of poverty reduction, increased employment,
and public health or infrastructure development will positively contribute to indi-
vidual security and better government performance (UN Report, 2001). The age of
globalization and interdependence brings numerous structural arrangements—both
public and private—that need to be considered in providing efficient and effective
public service. The service providers may include national or international actors
while the financing may be provided by a varying number of private, public, or
semi-public institutions. The capacity to deliver basic public services in the era of
globalization no longer means that the government alone will own all the instru-
ments and perform all the services. Especially after the financial crises of 2008,
there are significant budgetary constraints while the general public is growing more
demanding and more impatient. The delivery of basic public services along with the
maintenance of stability and order are predicated upon a government’s ability to
facilitate and negotiate win–win situations for private, public, and not-for-profit
institutions (national and international), and to creatively engage people for the
common good by “unlocking the human potential for public sector performance”
(Dror, 2001; UN, 2005a, 2005b).
The age of globalization is characterized predominantly by dynamic change and
transformation necessitating adaptive skills, knowledge, and attitudes by public
administrators. The twenty-first century is shaped and reshaped by constant dynamic
events and interactions that are difficult, and sometimes impossible, to predict and
control (Handy, 1998; Morgan, 2006). This requires public administrators, who are
traditionally reactive, to assume a proactive, adaptive capability. This adaptive capa-
bility is the second major public administration capability required by globalization.
It is comprised of a capability for awareness or monitoring, as well as an anticipa-
tory capability. Modern governments that thrive in the age of globalization are
informed and up-to-date with the ever-changing environment, thus enhancing their
ability to perform effectively and efficiently. Secondly, the adaptive capability
entails the ability of public administrators to think entrepreneurially, to anticipate
and prevent problems, and even to design the future to be favorable to their own
national interest (Stacey, 2001). It is what Andy Grove, former chairman of Intel
Corporation, referred to in his 1996 book Only Paranoids Survive as the ability to
foresee and shape the future. This adaptive capability is paramount in the ability
richly rewarded by globalization to “make things possible and happen,” to change
and alter environmental conditions to fit the organization’s or the nation’s goals
rather than simply reacting to external changes. This is a major advantage of multi-
national corporations and their respective governments in the West, having prac-
ticed this “environmental molding” across the world since World War II for “serving
national interests.” Western governments and organizations are wealthy and power-
ful not because they wait for the right moments and situations to benefit them, but
rather because they have the strategy, discipline, methods, and organizational and
human resources to mold the world for their benefit. Many opponents of globaliza-
tion deplore the questionable and sometimes corrupt practices of transnational cor-
porations and super-government institutions, but lack the same level of adaptive
capability to participate on equal footing and counter-balance them in shaping glo-
balization fairly. Preparing for the future by taking proactive steps in the present is
an imperative for all institutions and individuals in developing nations and young
democracies. The adaptability capability has been richly outlined in the systems
theory of organizations since the 1960s, as well as in contingency and institutional
theories (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991), but, with only some notable exceptions such
as China and Brazil, few developing nations have truly internalized it, seeming to
expect adaptability capacity to come natural.
The third strategic capability outlined by Farazmand (2009) and required by glo-
balization, besides performance and adaptive capability, is advancement capability.
The strategic administrative capacity to advance and develop goes beyond the abil-
ity to perform and to adapt. It refers to those laws, policies, and practices that stimu-
late a nation or a region to strive toward development, growth, and advancement in
all areas. Western nations, even if comparatively more advanced than their eastern
and southern counterparts, constantly strive to develop their economies, their rural
and urban life, their science, technology, education and other programs. Dwivedi,
Khator, and Nef in their 2007 book, Managing Development in a Global Context,
call for developing nations such as Romania to actively engage in advancement by
employing various approaches and strategies rooted in their cultural realities so they
can “accelerate the development process.” Essential to this development process is
the appropriate utilization of international financial resources—such as loans from
the World Bank and the IMF—not for immediate consumption but for the modern-
ization of infrastructure, the development of science and technology, human
resources and organizational leadership for “managing development,” as well as for
enhancing “development governance.” This is not a simple task, as most developing
nations are under the influence of the industrialized nations of the West and their
multinational corporations, which can dictate their will through “conditional aid”
(Amsden, 2007; Sallnow, 1990).
An important aspect that the leaders of developing nations are in danger of
misunderstanding is that not all Western, developed nations, corporations, and
agencies are identical, a fact Graham Hancock explores in his 1989 book, The
Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business:
1.5 The Necessary Capabilities for Strategic Public Administration 15
…Some [multination corporations, western governments] may even promote functional

corruption that empowers certain local elites for political, security, and economic reasons
and actually contributes to more poverty and corruption, a cycle that calls for more external
oversight (Hancock, 1989, p. 35).
However, most governments and especially the European Union support the
local development of capacity and good governance (Tavis, 1982). Developing
nations such as Romania must learn to change their path of dependency, promote a
culture of development, discipline, and self-confidence, and to participate in regional
and global collaborative entities as equal participants in order to enhance their own
development. This is possible only through “social learning” and a “sound public
administration system” with institutions, processes, and values that attract rather
than discourage qualified human talent with trust and appreciation.
Modern governance at the international, national, and organizational levels
requires the ability to monitor, understand, and diagnose changes and transforma-
tions as they present themselves unexpectedly through chaotic surprises. The
difficulty for traditional public administrators arises from the chaotic and nonlinear
nature of events and the high degree of dynamism and complexity generating
unpredictable or uncontrollable outcomes. The ability to distinguish and correctly
read current events is a learned behavior that works institutionally, technologically,
and professionally. Modern governance has the learned ability to design the proper
response and appropriate approaches to the challenges of globalization. This is part
of the adaptive capability outlined above, and it refers to continuous learning, adapt-
ing, and relearning. This “continuous learning” or “lifelong learning” is established
in the body of literature on organization theory and behavior, political science,
and public administration (Peters, 2001; Senge, 2006). The recipe for successful
government in the new global era seems to be the possession of modern administra-
tive abilities that may or may not change in the future. The environment has to be
adequately assessed and the necessary tools have to be developed to properly
address the challenge.
The validation of whether or not a government possesses necessary modern
administrative abilities reveals itself in the cases of an emergency. All governments
require an emergency response ability in the twenty-first century; however, it may
be hindered by a malfunctioning bureaucracy, a failing leadership, a corrupt pro-
cess, or any number of other problems that affect sound governance throughout the
world. Given the constantly changing environments, the increase in anarchic events,
natural and man-made disasters, crises or catastrophes can occur at any time.
Governance ability demands a high level of “anticipatory capacity” as part of an
emergency response strategy. This ability is even more important in regions of
the world facing earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons, and massive human unrest
problems. Human unrest issues especially can become exacerbated when they affect
multiple nations with massive populations, such as the 2004 tsunami that devastated
several countries and took more than 200,000 lives in Asia. All crises create
emergencies—war, starvation, famine, genocide—but not all emergencies produce
crises; unfortunately, when they do, they sometimes find governments woefully unpre-
pared. Standard crises are easier to prepare for, but the unexpected, never-before-seen
ones with all their dynamics are difficult, if not impossible, to read. Traditional
abilities may be adequate for regular tasks, but they are insufficient for managing
complex, surprise-producing crises. Given current European tensions, the backlash
against austerity and emigration, and extreme nationalistic sentiments, in my analy-
ses the Romanian government has to be prepared for unlikely, but possible human
unrest both within its traditional borders and in the greater European context, where
a large portion of its population increasingly lives, works and travels.
Theories of crisis management reflect on the possibilities of “transformation
breakdowns” with all-encompassing turbulence and collapse. Oftentimes, they
require “emergency regimes” potentially dangerous to democratic and liberal
governments. Some scholars argue that under extreme conditions of chaos and
breakdowns the need for a “transient” government of emergency management may
be necessary, but only without resorting to a dangerous “plebiscite democracy” built
on strong political authority (Dror, 2001). In contrast, many believe that, as was the
case of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, a system breakdown is an opportunity
for positive transformation toward a better future. Even before the 1950s, Joseph
Schumpeter, referred to by some as the “prophet of globalization” (Friedman,
2005), called this “creative destruction,” and suggested that it is the natural venue
for competition to eliminate inefficiency.
Government emergency response ability is comprised of specialized emergency
response training courses, programs, and workshops targeted at key political leaders,
preparing them to assume leadership functions in crisis situations. Equally, there
has to be a competently trained and strategically positioned cadre of personnel
(technical, scientific, administrative and managerial) objectively assessing the
emergency and advising on how to deal with it (Dror, 2001). A culture of cooperation
and communication has to exist among government, business, and nongovernment
organizations, so information can flow seamlessly and quickly to all necessary
parties. Public administrators and politicians have to undertake periodic simula-
tions, scenario-planning, and specialized workshops to sharpen their skills and
knowledge with the latest information on their respective tasks. It is also necessary
to establish advanced centers, schools, and specialized curriculum for strategic
studies on crisis and chaos management. This stimulates research and dialog on
the specific fields and serves as training grounds for future professional crisis
managers, equipping them with the capacity to assess and manage the unknown
situations and “govern surprises” (Weick et al., 2001).
In my perspective, history seems to indicate that good, wholesome governance
such as citizen participation, democratic and free elections, strong yet selfless
leadership, self-confidence, transparency, accountability, and efficiency cannot
simply be legislated or externally imposed. Quite the contrary, before legislative
acts and international mandates, there seems to be the presence of a strong and
healthy civil society that generates the normality and expectations of those
trademarks as a way of daily life, which in turn spillover into effective politics,
governance and private institutions (UN Report, 2007). Building and managing
governance and public administration capacity adequate for the twenty-first century
is difficult, if not impossible, without first crafting public service delivery capacity,
1.6 Coalition Building, a Substantial Element of Modern Public Administration 17
the adaptive capacity, and the advancement and development capacity. These
capacities have to first be developed at the strategic, intentional, planning, and
theoretical levels, taking into consideration the history and the culture of a specific
nation. Next, as Farazmand (2009) outlines, three implementation capabilities have
to be present to ensure that those plans—well-crafted and with the adequate support
of the national and the international community—are implementable. They are
(1) the ability to govern and build broad-base coalitions, (2) the ability to build
the functional instruments required by global governance, and (3) having admin-
istrative abilities.
1.6 Coalition Building, a Substantial Element of Modern

Public Administration
Partnership building and management are significant components of modern

governance given the multitude and the varying nature of societal participants—
public, private, national, and international. Partnership systems differ and are cir-
cumstantially dependent given the nature of the project or challenge and rely on
various arrangements and degrees of control, autonomy, and authority. Coalition
building, resource procurement, contracting, and project management are essential
modern features in governments’ ability to govern and influence the many networks,
organizations, and partnerships at the local, national, and global levels across
the public, privates and nonprofit sectors. Crafting, promoting, and managing
collaborative partnerships with local business, multinational organizations, non-
governmental organizations, and intergovernmental organizations at all levels is
increasingly becoming the most important and rarest governance ability (Kettl,
2006a, 2006b).
According to the 2007 UN report, the key to partnership building and manage-
ment is “transparency, shared responsibility, and authority.” Transparency is a
central element of building trust and confidence among partners, and it can and
should bring government and citizens closer through mutual trust. This would
promote creative problem-solving, cost reduction, waste elimination, innovation,
confidence, dignity, satisfaction, and generate “sound governance and administra-
tion” (Farazmand, 2004). Accountability and transparency are central to “trust,” a
most important issue that I will revisit later since it generates prosperity, confidence,
credibility and legitimacy through responsiveness to broad-based public demands,
needs, and expectations of both the national and the international community
(Denhardt, 2004; UN Report, 2007). Authoritarian governments tend to limit free
space and reduce the size of the “public sphere.” They are therefore dangerous as
they spread anxiety among citizens and neighbors. To ensure that such governments
do not take hold, an empowered and engaged civil society must be present and
enabled by the government to promote shared governance and responsibility. True,
governments must be given a degree of autonomy and trust to govern under extreme
crisis situations, but appropriate mechanisms must be set to ensure accountability,
prevent secrecy as well as “righteous” public officials who may eventually destroy
public trust in government. Strong governance authority must have an equally
strong democratic oversight system that prevents the manipulation of power and
authority. Developing strategic human capital capable of building and managing
broad-base coalitions is an imperative in developing governance ability. This can
be built with the effective application of technological innovations, human intel-
ligence, and creative ideas that can lead to improvement and innovation not only
in governments, but also in business and society (Drucker, 1962; Stacey, 2001).
1.7 Tactical Implementation Capacities
The strategic abilities of accurate assessment and intelligent planning have to be

complemented by tactical, implementation capacities. The danger for public
administration reforms throughout the world, including Romania, is to craft
wonderful analyses and appropriate strategic responses on paper that lack tactical
implementation instruments and capacities. Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, in their
2002 business book EXECUTION: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, state:
… execution needs to be part of a company’s strategy and its goals. It is the missing link
between aspirations and results. To understand execution, you have to keep three things in
mind: (1) execution is a discipline, and integral to strategy; (2) execution is the major job of
the [business] leader; and (3) execution must be a core element of an organization’s culture.
The heart of execution lies in the three core processes – the people process, the strategy
process and the operations process
Implementing or executing modern governance strategies requires new thinking

in managing turbulent and chaotic situations in a multi-dimensional world.
From a technological perspective, it involves the application of innovative tools,
techniques, and designs that sharpen the capacity to manage, and lead to break-
throughs in science and other societal resources. The building of modern gover-
nance implementation instruments is essential in “redesigning the future” as well as
developing and managing the necessary “adaptive systems” (Weick et al., 2001).
From a human talent perspective, execution has become paramount as strategic
policies have to be properly and efficiently implemented as to benefit all stakehold-
ers, and to ensure the production of basic public goods and developmental goods.
Here are several functional instruments that may be beneficial as governments
ensure proper implementation of their strategic initiatives:
First, governments ought to develop institutional capacity which involves
both intangible and tangible elements. The intangible concepts behind institu-
tional capacity are the new and powerful tools of comprehensive strategic thinking,
which captures and institutionalizes innovative ideas and the behaviors that gener-
ate them. Richard book, Institutions and Organizations, discusses how vital are the
legitimization, acceptance, and expectation of creative ideas, structures, processes,
and cognitive values to institutional theories, especially neo-institutionalism. This
process of institutional and social approval and acceptance of creative, nonlinear
1.7 Tactical Implementation Capacities 19
ideas evolves over time and through various means; it can take place gradually or
suddenly depending on the external context and pressures. The acceptance or
rejection of creative ideas serves as the background and fundamental determinant
of institutional capacity. The intangible institutional capacity is a cognitive capac-
ity generated through knowledge creation and information sharing, which in turn
builds the memory of the institution, fortifies its values and norms, and enables its
leadership to accurately and efficiently read, understand, and manage complex
problems (Stacey, 1992, 2001). The intangible, instrumental norms and values
provide further familiarity and comfort to members of the organization, leading
to even more creativity and innovation along with the ability to reinvent them-
selves and the institution in response to external pressures and challenges gener-
ated by globalization (Peters, 2001). Contrary to popular belief, tangible
instrumentality is an accurate reflection of the culture, values, and norms of the
organization. Many public administration reformers, especially in the developing
world, are convinced that the primary instruments that constitute an institution
are the tangible instruments. They are overly obsessed with buildings, equipment,
tools, etc., which are important but cannot substitute for proper organizational
culture. Institutional capacity as a tactical implementation instrument is com-
prised of both the tangible and the intangible aspects. In developing an appropri-
ate governance implementation mechanism, public administration reformers have
to begin with the intangible culture, where government bureaucrats are taught
their appropriate roles as well as global realities. However, they cannot neglect
the importance of modern instruments and technologies that can aid governments
in performing their duties.
The second functional instrument that governments must develop to ensure
proper implementation of their strategic initiatives is organizational capacity. The
1983 book Power in and Around Organizations states that organizational capacity
provides the structural instruments required to achieve strategic goals and the capac-
ity to manage. The capacity of an organization provides the mechanisms through
which power and influence are exercised and its strategic objectives are imple-
mented on time and within budget. Given that the external environment for all orga-
nizations in the twenty-first century is increasing complex and chaotic, organizations
are forced to be organized and efficient. They have to function according to pre-
established and objective rules since organization is the key to order, efficiency, the
accomplishment of goals, and the exercise of legitimate power and authority (Weber,
1947). An organization refers to the structure by which an activity or a process is
organized for collective action to take place—such as a university, a church, a pri-
vate firm, or a government department (Waldo, 1992). Organization refers to the
structure of a society, established through a constitutional document or some other
institution such as a legislative parliament or board of directors (Weber, 1947). It is
further shaped by history, culture, and traditions that furnish the “basic assump-
tions” and the overall norm. Since organizations transform ideas and resources into
desired outcomes, a key tactical implementation function for the execution of govern-
ment strategies is the capacity to organize efficiently. Through the interconnected
financial market, globalization rewards efficient nations that are organized in
manageable sectors such as public, private, and nonprofit, while it punishes nations
that are disorganized and inefficient. The interaction among these sectors varies
depending upon history, culture, and tradition, spanning from “aggregated
facilitative governance,” to “big, more or less do-it-all government,” to the newly
“disaggregated and offloaded government and aggregated response to onloaded
stress” demanded by globalization via market-based and self-governing network
organizations. The most visible mechanisms for rewards and punishments that glo-
balization has at its disposal are the international bond market with all its collateral
activities, and the willingness of the citizenry to migrate to an organized nation and
away from a disorganized one. In my opinion and based on the works of numerous
authors, here are some of the government features that have to be properly organized
to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century:
• Structures that generate rules and forms of bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic
organizations that are utilized to implement decisions, policies, and preferences
in the three sectors and their networks.
• Processes by which activities are accomplished, procedures and steps followed,
software and hardware tools, and the methods utilized to perform tasks.
• Values, traditions, and norms that cement the organizational elements in order to
build capacity and development.
• Resources allocated efficiently to make organizational capacity work.
Organizational capacity, as a tactical implementation instrument, may be
enhanced through reorganizations, reforms, reinventions, strategic positioning and
repositioning of structural and process arrangements or reconfigurations within a
sector. Globalization and the interconnection of the world provide a plethora of
tightly or loosely knit network organizations, hybrid, public–private partnerships,
cooperatives, and other forms of self-governing organizations depending on needs
and circumstances.
The third functional instrument governments have to develop to implement their
strategic initiatives is policy capacity. Policy capacity provides the specific and
pragmatic answers to the key implementation questions of what, where, when, how,
and who (Lasswell & Kaplan, 1950). The question “what” must be clearly answered
both in the short- and long-run and it must be a verification mechanism that all
stakeholders understand, embrace, and are actively engaged in concerning the
strategic issue. Miscommunication, misunderstanding, and information voids are
some of the most common reasons for constructive government policies not
being implemented. Whatever a government, an agency, or a department wants to
accomplish, it has to clearly communicate, as well as the precise direction for both
domestic and international affairs, taking into account the economic, historical, and
geographical realities already outlined. Similarly, other policy questions such as
“where,” “when,” “how,” and “how much” should be utilized to distinguish between
policy choices and directions, and to harness the other tactical instruments toward
optimal governance, taking into account both external realities (opportunities and
threats) and internal capabilities (strengths and weaknesses). In as much as possible,
policy capacity should be further empowered with modern tools essential to
correct policy analysis, development, and choice adoption. The establishment of
1.8 Governance in the Globalization Era: A Synopsis 21
professional, nonpartisan centers and institutes of policy analysis, development, and

research is essential to any focus on national and global issues with implications for
governance and public administration. Beyond public policy degree programs
offered by various universities, public administration curricula have to be designed
to respond to the changing needs of the environment and toward providing
specialized courses and degree programs in policy analysis and research that
enhances policy capacity. Policy questions should be answered by key government
officials representing the will of the people, along with genuine participation by
civil society and private sector members (Dror, 2001). Finally, governing officials
with genuine input from the other two sectors will answer the question “who?”
to ensure that there is a clear understanding of the responsibility of policy
implementation (Peters, 2001).
The fourth tactical implementation capacity that governments and societies should
consider developing in the twenty-first century is political capacity. Politics are at the
heart of implementing tactical instruments, and governments have a responsibility to
ensure it has appropriate, objective manifestations. Politics is both science and art, as it
provides a manner through which policy and governments are molded by the changing
dynamics of time and conditions. Politics can either be “dirty means of manipulation
and deception” to accomplish selfish goals with a win–lose perspective, or it can be
positive and constructive with a fair win–win perspective that provides positive
compromise and sustainable solutions. Most areas of politics are quite nuanced, how-
ever, appearing so blurry and complex that conflicts of interests often intervene
and cause failure. According to political scientist Charles Jones, “the causes of policy
failures are, at root, political.” In the absence of constructive, accountable politics that
enjoys broad-base support, bureaucratic politics will rise through force and manipula-
tion, serving selective interest groups at the expense of others (Weber, 1947). Healthy
political capacity exists when the society at large is interested, educated, and engaged
in the well-being of a nation. As a tactical implementation instrument, political capacity
means that the political class truly represents and leads the citizenry, while those who
are led have easy access to information and possess the intelligence to interpret it and
altruistically decide on the best course of action. Broad-based interests and preferences
need to be articulated with sound and transparent participation within the democratic
processes. In the age of an ever-expanding global governance system, it is essential to
enhance a nation’s political implementation capacity and build the national capability
with anticipatory and “future-weaving” abilities that can guide the political class and
empower the administrative capacity (Dror, 2001; Peters, 2001).
1.8 Governance in the Globalization Era: A Synopsis
In this initial chapter I attempted to briefly outline some of the fundamental issues
facing public administration reformers in the twenty-first century era of globaliza-
tion. Assuming that governments have appropriate strategies and plans, those
strategies must be accomplished with the appropriate administrative capacity. In the
newly integrated world with its ever-changing environment, the traditional
distinctions between public and private, foreign and domestic, political and admin-
istrative, are diminishing. Flowing from the public administration tradition, my
work highlights the necessity for the Romanian government and society to increase
its overall administrative or governance capabilities. I am fully aware that adminis-
tration is a broad term with multiple uses and implications, prompting much
constructive debate among scholars and practitioners alike. In its simplest and
generally agreed understanding, administrative capacity entails the efficient
operation of a political, administrative, or economic system, capable of executing
strategic decisions and translating the collective will of the people into quantifiable
actions. In the modern public administration sense, administrative capacity entails
the ability to develop and deliver the required public goods, such as security, social
advancement, and development. As Matthew Holden Jr. stated in his 1997 book,
Political Power and the Centrality of Administration, “administration is the life-
blood of power: no administration, no power.” It is reasonable to assume that
public administration is the differentiating factor among the levels of quality of life
in varying nations and the generator of national competitiveness in the global
economy. The exercise of benevolent power in a democracy requires organization:
without organization, there is no power and order.
The available public administration literature is filled with the requirements of
a modern administrative apparatus given its many functions, dimensions, values,
processes, and nuanced issues. I will conclude this first chapter by suggesting a few
essential features of the administrative capacity, though I realize they may not exist
in a perfect state, even in the most advanced governments. Nevertheless, the age of
rapid globalization and hyper-complexity demands that governments purposefully
and contextually build their administrative capacity and prepare for preventive,
future-weaving, history-making governance. This is just a “modest prescription for
survival,” not necessarily a guarantee for supremacy and prosperity (Farazmand,
2009). These fundamental blocks of administrative capacity encompassing both the
strategic and the tactical levels are:
• The appropriate and properly contextualized structural design, such as the degree
of centralization vs. decentralization, outsourcing vs. in-house execution,
national vs. international.
• The process ability which includes the efficient and effective execution of stated
goals and political promises at the same time constructively compromising and
reaching an accord among competing interests based on the capacity to “self-
regulate” the behavior of the organization (Senge, 2006).
• The intentional development of cultural and normative capacity that establishes
an environment of trust, accountability, and transparency that in turn fosters
creative problem-solving and idea sharing.
• The institutional and organizational abilities, noted earlier, that generate both
efficient and effective organizations devoid of corruption.
• Open-minded, flexible leadership with the managerial capacities of “double-loop
perpetual learning,” focused enough to execute stated goals and flexible enough
to consider the changing environment.
1.8 Governance in the Globalization Era: A Synopsis 23
• Strategic human talent with the necessary entrepreneurial capacity grounded in

the realities of globalization, generated by educational institutions and civil
society with its organizations and associations (Farazmand, 2004). It further
includes international language and communication skills along with “holistic,
lifelong learning” that generates knowledge and expertise with impact and
applicability to all three societal sectors (Drucker, 1962).
• The global financial resources, ability, and expertise, which is the ability to
manage money and resources, speak the international language of finance, accept
and understand international standards of finance, and the ability to generate
financial resources given the national and societal endowments.
• Technological ability, which is the existence of a technologically savvy citizenry
with comprehensive knowledge of the Internet and other information systems
technology, willing and able to utilize technology as a primary business and
government tool.
• Transparent, ethical, and accountable public officials—elected or appointed—
respecting the constitution, the international laws and the other aspects of demo-
cratic representation and fairness, along with a civil society willing to actively
engage and hold its dignitaries accountable (Waldo, 1992).
• Entrepreneurial abilities in government, business and the nongovernmental sector,
based upon collaborations, creative problem-solving, and solution-finding. The
purposeful encouragement of research in science and technology, the willingness
to assume risk and fail, and the commercialization of new inventions (Dwivedi
et al., 2007).
These, along with other related capabilities, build the administrative capacity of
a society, which in turn determines the quality and the ability of governments and
their public administrators to meet the challenges of rapid change and globalization.
They cannot be built overnight or in silos of governmental laboratories. They are the
direct result of a culture and mentality fostered over time, shaped and molded by
events as well as decisions both at the macro- and the individual level. Any attempt
to reform public administration is incomplete unless it outlines strategies and steps
to building micro-capacities.
In my opinion, developing, building, and enhancing modern administrative
capacity for Romania in an era of globalization characterized by hyper-complexity,
hyper-competition, and hyper-turbulence is an imperative. Romanian institutions of
governance have to continue its modernization impetus and continuously build their
administrative abilities so that the nation can successfully manage and negotiate its
appropriate position in the global economic system. The capacity to manage in an
anticipatory, future-weaving, and history-making fashion should be enhanced.
Good information and knowledge is essential and it can be acquired by continu-
ously striving toward excellence and development with creativity and innovation.
The Romanian public administrators have to grow in this most essential “capacity
to manage”—both in theory and in practice—for our age of chaos and hyper-
uncertainties. Political regimes may change depending on the wishes of the elector-
ate, but the capacity to manage and govern has to offer continuity, relying on
modern, contextualized administrative capacity, continuously upgraded to meet
new challenges. There is no alternative to preparedness. All of the lessons learned

in the past 10 years, from 9/11 to the global financial crises, have pointed to the
essential need for such an agile administrative capacity: a dynamic, resourcefully
trained, anticipatory and adaptive government equipped with the essentials of a
surprise management system. I realize that the common features outlined in this
chapter are characteristics that even the most advanced governments do not adhere
to, even if they preach them to the developing world.
In the remainder of my work, I would like to further research the possibilities
of implementing some principles of sound governance in Romania, fully aware
that there are historical and cultural constrains making the automatic transfer of
“western best practices” not only undesirable but quite harmful. I would like my
research to be an invitation to scholars and practitioners of public administration for
further investigating the field and advancing the knowledge of public governance
and administration in a global context. However, we must proceed by exploring
alternative, non-apparent options, differing from traditional public administration
models. Public service and administration, once rescued from its seeming chronic
crisis of legitimacy and incapacity, will be revitalized to its status as a societal con-
tributor and a self-conscious, effective enterprise. There is a desperate need for a
new and different way of thinking that can complement the dominant schools of
thought and generate the necessary tools for management in the new global context,
a world that is increasingly unknowable. Much the same way as conventional
armies are ineffective against networks of guerilla fighters, who rely on the
elements of surprise and uncertainty, so are traditional bureaucratic models in the
age of unexpected surprises.
One of the arguments of my work is that effective public administration
requires capabilities that it cannot create by itself. Quite the contrary, they are the
results of culture and thus shaped by many years of habit and practice in the civic
sector. Perhaps public administrators might consider my argument to reorient
their activities not only in providing public goods, but to also facilitate, stimulate,
develop, lead and empower a multitude of organizations and networks—public,
private, nongovernmental, national or international—to generate the much coveted
entrepreneurial administrative abilities. Left alone, this public sphere of civil
society will be influenced by political and global forces through the manipulation
of power, money, and events.
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creation. London: Routledge.
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Chapter 2
The European Union: Amid Globalization
and Integration
Globalization, with its technological, economic, and structural forces, is the

international phenomenon that seems to affect all aspects of life—globally, individu-
ally, and institutionally. Public administration and governance studies are equally
affected the world over, as theoreticians and practitioners search for the best practices
to survive and thrive in this environment. The current research wishes to join this
global debate, especially as it plays itself out in the admirable efforts of public admin-
istration reforms in Romania. This is a bold statement and I am bound to fall short of
my aim, as the communist legacies of the past alongside the current economic and
financial crises work to obstruct reform initiatives from progressing. Particularly in
the case of Romania, the 2007–2009 interval was challenging for two reasons. First,
the budgetary abundance of the period prior to the financial crises and European
integration allowed reformers to concentrate mainly on spending money for institu-
tional reforms; in the period after, they are faced with significant budgetary reduction
and even a challenge to stimulate the economy. Second, the phenomenon of emigra-
tion, present even before the European Union integration, has been accentuated, in
some ways draining human talent away from useful in-country employment.1
According to most public administration scholars—both domestic and foreign—
European Union integration has been the single greatest force defining and motivat-
ing most reform initiatives in Romania in the time leading to and since full
membership (Bărbulescu, 2001, 2006; Birzea, 2005a, 2005b; Horga, Șipoș & Suli-
Zakar, 2006; Mărgineanu, 2001; Petersone, 2008a, 2008b). The European Union
has been the principal provider of reform directions, together with financial and
technical assistance in the efforts to restructure the government and society. I do not
1
From a macro-economic, public administration perspective, emigration is a negative phenomenon
since individuals most likely to emigrate tend to be young, able to work, who do not require major
social expenditures (education, healthcare, pension, food and heat subsidies, etc.) Citizens who do
not emigrate tend to be older, less able to work and requiring significant public expenditures. In
fairness, emigrants do help their nation of origin through remittances, yet only a small percentage
is destined for the public treasury, most of it being invested in the private sector. Therefore, most
economists view emigration as having a negative effect on government budgets.

in Economics, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-27009-8_2
30 2 The European Union: Amid Globalization and Integration
wish to diminish the functions played by other key global institutions like the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, USAID, etc. in Romania’s efforts to reform,
however the European Union has provided the most effective and efficient reform
incentives. Therefore, before suggesting nontraditional alternatives that may com-
plement the current public administration reforms, I believe it might be beneficial
for us to understand how globalization has affected the European Union itself along
with the expansion and integration of new European states. In this chapter, I will
follow many of the paths set forth for the Romanian public administration school by
Bădulescu in his numerous articles, books, and governmental reports. Of special
interest to any student of the European Union and its impact upon the Romanian
society is his 2001 book published in Romanian, Uniunea Europeană—Aprofundare
şi Extindere: De la Comunităţile Europene la Uniunea Europeană (The European
Union—Integration and Expansion: From European Communities to the European
Union). In the following chapter, I will turn my attention to a brief and broad discus-
sion on the general European issues since the end of WWII. Naturally, it is not
within my scope to detail all events leading to the integration of Romania, but rather
a basic understanding of the European Union public administration space, and how
it created and responded to globalization as benefits the understanding of our later
research.
Recent social, economic, and political developments within the world and the
European Union have provided a powerful reality check for the very existence of the
European project. The words of Harold Macmillan are truer than ever; when asked
by reporters what was his greatest challenge in office, he answered “events, dear
boy, events.” The dynamic character of the European Union seems at times to be as
fast moving as globalization itself, therefore the understanding of Romanian public
administration reformers must be current and accurate, since this polity Romania is
now part of escapes traditional political science labels such as nation, state, empire,
region or federation. The integration process that has impacted Romania in so many
ways challenges the old division in the field of political studies between politics
within countries (national and local jurisdictions) and among countries (regions and
coalitions). These European realities affect the very definition of the traditional con-
cepts of governance, justice, equality, freedom, rule of law, taxation, and their appli-
cability within the European space is often counterintuitive. In the European
administrative space, politicians, administrators, and legislators in individual
nations as well as at the European level, interact among themselves as well as with
private and nongovernment groups, exhibiting their national and organizational
interest at the same time as they think and act European.
The analysis of the European Union, growing and integrating against history,
culture, religions, and natural instincts, has spawned significant conceptual innova-
tion in the academic and practitioner fields. The velocity and the success of the
European Union formation and expansion have been undeniable: what began as a
benevolent supranational authority regulating steel and coal extended its authority
to include mobility of capital, food processors, and educational matters, and ended
up with a European legislation and a monetary union. In a half-century, it increased
its population from 190 to 493 million, and peacefully came to govern almost an
2.1 Neofunctionalism and Intergovernmentalism 31
entire continent with varying cultural, geographical, and historical differences.

In the past, only wars and military power have been able to transform massive
geographic units in such a short time period. The major historical distinction of the
European Union is that this unification was deliberate, voluntary, and absent of the
military and political force that shaped empires in the past; in this regard, the
European experiment is certainly unparalleled in history. Keeler, in his 2005
Mapping EU Studies: The Evolution from Boutique to Boom Field 1960–2001,
identifies the three major periods of the European Union’s brief history, and I will
follow his timeline to analyze the theoretical underpinnings of the Union for a sense
of what globalization means for Romania.
• The Launch Era (1957–1965) began with the implementation of the Treaty of
Rome and significant theoretical debate between “neofunctionalism” and
“intergovernmentalism.”
• The Doldrums Era (1966–1987), the period of stagnation after the “Empty Chair
Crisis” that generated pessimism among scholars and practitioners regarding the
future of the Union and discouraged grand theorizing. As Dahrendorf stated in
1978, “after many years of progress in European unification, this process has
now come to a halt.”
• The Renaissance Era (1988–present), that we are currently in, with rapid trans-
formations and integration following the Single European Act, which revived
grand theorizing and generated the monumental changes of the 1990s including
Romania’s integration.
2.1 Neofunctionalism and Intergovernmentalism
In the past five decades, the European Union has provided an ideal setting for
experimentation and research in the area of public administration and political
studies as they were affected by globalization and the hyper-transformations out-
lined earlier. Given the historical European economic and military global suprem-
acy along with its democratic politics, free-market capitalism, social and
technological development, any ideological changes had an effect on the rest of the
world. Manny public and administrative social reforms, governance institutions,
parliaments, modern political party structures, economic and financial institutions
were initially cultivated and developed in Europe. The fundamental motivation for
creating the European Union was to avoid destructive military conflicts like World
War I and II, and to increase economic development and prosperity for its citizens
(Papadimitriou & Phinnemore, 2004; Prisecaru, 2004; Prisecaru & Idu, 2003;
Profiroiu & Popescu, 2003).
Haas, one of the early theoreticians of the European Union and its pragmatic
integration incentive, wrote The Uniting of Europe (1958) and International
Integration: The European and the Universal Process (1961), which examine the
various forms of regional integration rising in postwar Europe. He argues that
supranational constructs such as the Nordic Council, the Council of Europe, NATO,
the European Coal and Steel Community, etc., had positive impacts upon eco-
nomic prosperity and political stability and should be pursued as a response to
external threats such as the USSR in spite of historical and nationalistic tendencies.
In his 1964 book, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International
Organization, Haas further argued that European integration efforts were in fact
part of a global natural impulse toward global economic integration. This perspec-
tive had a profound impact on the creation and articulation of European
neofunctionalism,2 an ideology that persists in Europe today and has been exported
to other parts of the world.
By the end of the 1960s, the European experiment entered the “Doldrums Era”
as international events and internal disagreements contributed to the weakening of
globalization efforts throughout the world. The collapse of the Bretton Woods
Accord in the early 1970s reversed many of the integration efforts of the Launch
Era, generating national protectionism and the erection of traditional trade barriers
among nations. European integration efforts, even if not completely stopped, were
perceived to be in a crisis mode with the possibility of being completely halted
(Dahrendorf, 1978; Spinelli, 1978). Even Haas came to the point of claiming
regional integration to be “an obsolete and failed experiment,” while other critics of
European integration stated that “integration suffered near fatal asphyxia in the
Euro-stagnation of the late 1970s” (Caporaso & Keeler, 1995; Haas, 1975;
Hoffmann, 1966; Inglehart, 1967; Niedermayer & Sinnott, 1995). The March 1982
cover of the Economist featured a tombstone with the words “EEC: born March
25th, 1957, moribund March 25th 1982, capax imperii nisi imperasset.”3
The national governments that embraced neofunctionalism as the only credible
European integration ideology were becoming disenchanted with the progress of
the European Community. Perhaps neofunctionalism imploded in the Doldrums Era
because of its own complexity and impracticability. As a result, European nations
were increasingly considering the competing “intergovernmentalism” theory pro-
posed by Stanley Hoffman and others, where the national governments control the
level and speed of European integration. Under intergovernmentalism, any increase
in power and influence at the supranational, European level must be the direct result
of a decision by individual national governments. Integration driven by national
governments must be a reflection of national politics and economics.
Intergovernmentalism further rejected the concept that supranational organizations,
such as the European Community, could be on equal level to national governments
in terms of political influence. In explaining why intergovernmentalism replaced
neofunctionalism, Hoffmann stated:
… the limits of the functional method: its very (if relative) success in the relatively painless
area in which it works relatively well, lifts the participants to the level of issues to which it
2
Neofunctionalism refers to regional integration and explains how economic interdependence
among nations interacts with the capacity to resolve disputes and forge international legal rules,
and how supranational economic rules can replace national regulations.
3
Capable of power until it tried to wield it.
2.2 Economical Interests and the European Project 33
does not apply well any more—like swimmers whose skill at moving quickly away from
the shore suddenly brings them to the point where the waters are stormiest and deepest, at
a time when fatigue is setting in, and none of the questions about the ultimate goal, direc-
tion, and length of swim has been answered (Hoffmann, 1966, p. 886).
As a theoretical ideology, neofunctionalism was temporarily discredited by the

fact that the European Community was not fulfilling its basic commitments of the
Treaty of Rome to remove trade barriers, to increase economic prosperity for its
member nations, and to offer them a clear vision as to their place in the world. By
the early 1980s, intergovernmentalism was the dominant European ideology and
the elimination of the national veto—the symbol of national identity and power—
was imminent. The national veto was viewed as a vestige of neofunctionalism and
an indication that national governments were refusing to confront domestic rent-
seekers who were speculating the Treaty of Rome, receiving national state aid,
public contracts, and sitting comfortably while protected by national rules designed
to keep foreign competition out. Even stoic defenders of national sovereignty such
as British Prime-Minister Margaret Thatcher admitted that some form of majority
voting was pragmatically necessary to achieve economic integration. The zenith of
the intergovernmentalism movement came when the European Community
President, Jacques Delors, given his ambitious legislative plan to eliminate nontar-
iff barriers, empowered the European Parliament to introduce “majoritarianism” in
the Council of Ministers.
2.2 Economical Interests and the European Project
The Revitalization Era, marked by the Single European Act of 1986, opened a new
chapter in the European quest for economic and increasingly political and social
integration. By adapting this act, national governments in effect agreed to the
majoritarian rule in the Council of Ministers on issues pertaining to economic leg-
islation and allowed Parliament to pass amendments into law unless overridden by
unanimous opposition in the Council. This act in theory and in practice shifted the
debate away from national sovereignty and only preserved some diminishing
national prerogatives. This pragmatic relinquishment of national sovereignty was in
part influenced by the global events of the 1990s, mainly the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the communist Eastern European bloc, but also the advances in science,
technology, and finance. The momentum for European integration was back in full
swing, built upon two seemingly contradictory realities: that individual European
nationality could not survive the global economic pressures alone, but that national
identities were still important and ought to be preserved. Sandholtz and Zysman in
their 1989 article 1992: Recasting the European Bargain, predicted the plausibility
and pragmatic necessity of neofunctionalism as a replacement of intergovernmen-
talist ideology. Their economically pragmatic argument was that the single European
market construct did not necessarily represent the will of the European citizenry
who did not seek political and cultural integration. Instead, the heart of European
integration was a practical and economically calculated response to international

economic realities. They noted that:
any explanation of the choice of Europe and its evolution must focus on the actors – the
leadership in the institutions of the European Community, in segments of the executive
branch of the national governments, and in the business community, principally the heads
of the largest companies (Sandholtz & Zysman, 1989, p. 108).
The Single European Act, they argue, was taken by “supranational entrepreneurs
and transnational firms,” often working against the will and the sentiments of
national governments and their citizenry. This perspective is consistent with the
globalization literature outlined in Chap. 1, and the charges brought against multi-
national corporations by consumer groups, nongovernmental organizations, and
national governments alike. In a sense, national sovereignty was not lost by the
European nations to other political powers or even the supranational government of
the European Union, but actually to global multinational corporations. Considering
this global market pressure, most European national governments shifted to the
center-right of the political spectrum, and those that insisted on the socialistic path,
such as France under the Mitterrand presidency, were punished by the international
capital market:
National governments – particularly the French – have begun to approach old problems in
new ways and make choices that are often unexpected. The Commission itself is an
entrenched, self-interested advocate of further integration, so its position is no surprise. The
multinationals are faced with sharply changed market conditions, and their concerns and
reactions are not unexpected. The initiatives came from the EC, but they caught hold
because the nature of the domestic political context had shifted (Sandholtz & Zysman,
1989, p. 108).
Instead of fighting or resenting this corporate and financial powers, Caporaso

and Keeler (1995), Sandholtz (1996), and Sandholtz and Sweet (1998), among oth-
ers, presented new models of neofunctionalism that include multinational corpora-
tions as active integrative participants. They point to the fact that it is actually the
corporations and their political-administrative lobby efforts that press for govern-
ment reforms and integration initiatives that lower cross-border transaction costs.
Governments typically respond by establishing supranational institutions, such as
the European Union and its agencies, so costs can be lower. Corporations and labor
are thus motivated to increase their economic activities across national borders and
press their governments for further integration and liberalization. This “corporate-
inclusive” theoretical models are built upon Deutsch’s (1966) ideology that points
to economic and transactional activity as the major source of political reform and
North’s (1990) concept that one of the main purposes of institutions is to lower
transactional costs. From this perspective, European institutions were erected and
exist mainly to lower transactional costs and stimulate economic growth, sustaining
the economic activities of the multinational corporations that proposed them in the
first place. Apparently, this new governance ideology separates the traditional
activities of governments. Public institutions are changed only with the production
and distribution of basic public goods, while multinational corporations and other
private entities are responsible with the production and dissemination of develop-
ment and advancement initiatives.
2.2 Economical Interests and the European Project 35
This revival of neofunctionalism in the early 1990s and the drive by multinational
corporations to lower the transactional costs of cross-border economic activity have
affected the European Court of Justice as well. The request for supranational gover-
nance by the multinational corporations engaging in international commerce can be
longitudinally measured across time, countries, and sectors. A careful analysis of
the references to the preliminary ruling by the European Court of Justice has indi-
cated the number of times there was a charge by a multinational corporation of a
national state breaching European trade law. The empirical evidence overwhelm-
ingly confirms that the greater the speed and volume of commerce among particular
nations or sectors within Europe, the greater the demand for legal dispute settle-
ments (Caporaso, 2006; Conant, 2006; Sweet & Brunell, 1998). The empirical
evidence states that an increase in economic transactions across the continent
increases the volume of trade disputes settled by private lawyers, national judges,
and the European Court. Given the density of this legal activity, European law is
strengthened in an unprecedented way, increasingly becoming an unofficial
European constitution.
The intergovernmentalism response to the reemergence of neofunctionalism
states that individual European national governments could retain control only
through their exclusive power over treaty making. Moravcsik best outlined this
response in his 1993 article Preferences and Power in the European Community:
a Liberal Intergovernmentalism Approach, arguing that collective decision-mak-
ing preserves, and in some cases even strengthens, individual national control
over economic activity. In his view, governments will be motivated to participate
since “policy coordination increases their control over domestic policy out-
comes, permitting them to achieve goals that would not otherwise be possible”
(Moravcsik, 1993).
The critics of his argument pointed out that this ideology does not clarify the
distinction between a government’s ability to influence societal participants and
the capability of implementing goals and objectives. The newly revised intergov-
ernmental framework did not allow for the scenario where a European nation’s
best economic interests could conceivably be to relinquish control to supra-
governmental structures like the European Community. In his 1998 work The
Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht,
Moravcsik forsakes the notion of individual state control. His version of intergov-
ernmentalism now favors a pragmatic, rational argument where individual states
would make informed trade-off decisions between the economic benefits they
would expect from integration and the loss of their national sovereignty. The cyni-
cal observation throughout this period was that individual states, responding to
multinational corporations and other economic agents, were fully aware when
willingly transferring control to the central European unit of control. The justifi-
cation was that they were acting out of economic necessity yet able to choose the
powers they would transfer to the European institutions, and that any loss of sov-
ereignty was minimal and deliberate.
2.3 The Pursuit of Identity and Integration
During the Revitalization Era, the traditional debate between neofunctionalism and
intergovernmentalism was relegated to the background while European identity, or
“the nature of the beast” (Risse, 1996), became prominent along with questions about
further eastward expansion and integration. With the newly freed Eastern European
nations, there were questions about what the integration process would look like and
which aspects would be most relevant and with the greatest implications (Hix, 1994,
1996; Hurrell & Menon, 1996). Was European integration strictly an economic
response to globalization and a venue for mitigating international affairs, or was there
a European cultural identity issue at stake? Two influential volumes were written in
the early 1990s, outlining broad positions and attempting to answer basic questions
regarding the European Union identity and its pan-continental institutions: The New
European Community: Decision Making and Institutional Change, by Keohane and
Hoffmann (1991), and The European Community: A Balancing Act by Sbragia (1992).
Both works dealt mainly with European identity, European Eastern integration, and
Europe’s new role in global affairs given the collapse of communism in the Soviet
Union. These authors seemed to:
consider well-known and even apparently trivial empirical observations in a new substan-
tive context, in which they then turn out to allow for interesting answers to questions that
had never before been asked about them (Streeck, 2006, p. 7).
Both books analyze the European Union through conventional comparative poli-
tics lenses, assessing the European jurisdictional architecture (Caporaso, 1996;
Heritier, 1996; Majone, 1994; Marks & McAdam, 1996; Peterson, 1995; Pierson,
1996; Pollack, 1995; Sbragia, 1993; Tarrow, 1995; Tsebelis, 1994). They show the
contradiction between national interest and European governance. European mem-
bership actually leads to a “joint decision trap” (Scharpf, 1988) that prevents both
national governments and the European Union from taking policy decisions and cre-
ating a general blockage at the national and the central level. They do not address the
issues of whether the European Union is a state or an international organization, but
the core ideology of intergovernmentalism is directly challenged, arguing that
national governments no longer control policy outcomes. By the end of the 1990s the
European jurisdictional structure appeared settled with intentional and calculated
integration transforming sovereign states into a “multi-level governance system,”
making the European Union a federation (Bache & Flinders, 2004; Horga, 2010;
Kohler-Koch & Eising, 1999; Scharpf, 1997).
2.3.1 Multi-Level Governance
There are many and various definitions of “multi-level governance” in Europe, but
the most common use of the concept is that authority on multiple issues is shared
among European institutions, national and subnational governments. According to
2.3 The Pursuit of Identity and Integration 37
Bache and Flinders (2004), there is a gap in the research and the general understanding
of the interworking of the Union and the multi-level governance exerted upon
nonpublic and semi-public organizations that in turn influences decision-making.
They found it was unclear the extent to which informal networks and interlocking
interests influence decision-making and policy formulation instead of formal hier-
archies and structures. In spite of its apparent shortcomings, multi-level governance
has the capability to adjust the scale of the governance to the scale of the problem,
and most challenges then facing the European Union were no longer merely
national, but rather regional, even continental (Prisecaru, 2009). The issues facing
the European Union in the late 1990s were possibly the integration of Eastern
European nations, the environment, the minimizing of transaction costs, and the
elimination of currency exchange speculations, all transnational issues requiring
transnational governance. Multi-level governance was also flexible enough to stand
down on issues of local importance such as school districts, garbage collection, or
land zoning (Hooghe & Marks, 2001).
Multi-level governance was also a European response to the transformations in
global policy, regime, and geopolitics of the 1990s. Centralization was the natural
choice during and immediately after World War II, where power needed to be con-
centrated in centralized governments to orchestrate resources for war and the short-
ages that followed. However, the seeds of multi-level governance were sown in
Europe by the late 1940s, where economic growth, trade, and social welfare became
paramount in national politics. In a sense, the Coal and Steel Community was a first
attempt at having some transnational governance mechanism while maintaining
individual sovereignty. The issues facing Europe necessitated different levels of
local, national, and international response and economies of scale, so multi-level
governance was always in the background (Jachtenfuchs, 2001). This pragmatic
tendency, intrinsic to liberal democracies, where politicians only get re-elected if
they deliver maximum results for their constituents, was perhaps the basis for suzer-
ainty abdication by the European nations. Multi-level governance was also aided by
the pressures of the Cold War, where Europe was in between the Soviet Union and
the United States of America, both of which were pushing for European integration
in their own way (Cuglesan, 2006). European nations could concentrate on integra-
tion and the reduction of barriers because, unlike Asian nations, individual survival
was aligned with, not against interdependence (Katzenstein, 2005; Marks, Hooghe
& Blank, 1996).
2.3.2 The Integration Impetus
In the 2007 article A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From

Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus, Hooghe and Marks address the
complex and controversial issues of European Union integration. In their view,
European integration can be viewed as the natural outcome of a broader global pro-
cess of authority dissipation, coming from below and above the traditional central
state. The presence of a large market lowered the costs of regional autonomy.
Previously, the major constraint against regional autonomy was that it would lead to
small, inefficient, parochial economies unable to compete on the national markets.
With integration, the rules regulating market access could be determined at a higher
level, therefore support for decentralization changed when economics was elimi-
nated. Under the multi-level governance ideology, it was presumed that authority
and governance could be broken into separate pieces and allocated across multiple
levels of local or central authority, giving it administrative flexibility. European inte-
gration was built gradually, in a series of agreements designed at the lower level of
competencies that had decision-making capability and the freedom to redesign them
depending on needs. This was a radical departure from classical federalism, which
viewed sovereignty divisible, allocating competencies across levels of government.
The European integration process was built with the main objective to efficiently
allocate competencies across various levels of governments. The brilliance of this
new construct was to ensure political and administrative autonomy at the local and
national level, while extricating the economic and transactional issues at the
European level.
Börzel, in her 2005b article Mind the Gap! European Integration Between Level
and Scope, analyzes the formal treaty rules of the European Union from 1960 to
2000 to determine the proportion of an issue in a certain policy field subject to
European Union legislation (range), and compare it to the extent of those decisions
being either supranational or intergovernmental (depth). The range of integration
refers to the assortment of policies or tasks for which the central European govern-
ment has played a role while the depth of integration refers to the supranational or
intergovernmental character of the decision rules. Her research conclusion illus-
trates that there is wide variation across policy areas. On the “range” axis, issues
vary from “exclusive national competence for all issues in policy area” to “exclusive
EU competence for all issues in policy area;” on the depth axis, issues range from
“no coordination at the EU level” to “supranational centralization.”
As showed above, policies designed to redistribute income among individuals
are handled almost exclusively within national states, while those having to do with
trade and market integration are handled almost exclusively at the European level.
A revealing fact about the pattern in Fig. 2.1 is that there is not a single case of a
policy reverting from the European central jurisdiction back to the national level,
nor is there any case where policies that were “supranational” become “intergovern-
mental.” This seems to indicate that European Union integration has been unidirec-
tional and irreversible. The policy areas that were transferred to the European level
follow functional, pragmatic logic rooted in economic activities such as trade, the
environment, and the movement of people. However, this pragmatic logic has a
limit, as policy shifts may involve political side-payments, structural and/or cohe-
sion policies, and agricultural subsidies. Further, the European integration process
does not encompass all theoretical policy domains for which there are collective
functional benefits, such as defense. Most exceptions are explained by “distribu-
tional consequences” and the capacity of potential losers (national governments) to
block reform. The neofunctionalist perspective emphasizes the pragmatic pressures
2.3 The Pursuit of Identity and Integration 39
monetary
5 breadth
Supranational/EU
depth
agriculture
4
3
political extenal
tax
2 culture
National
Rome SEA Maastricht Amsterdam Nice Constitutional

Treaty
Fig. 2.1 Integration and European Union authority policy range and depth 1957–2004 (Source:
Börzel, 2005a, 2005b, 221-223)
of a global economy along with the rearrangement of the new world order, while the
intergovernmentalist perspective highlights the distributional impediments to inter-
national cooperation. Neither schools was able to predict the backlash of public
opinion against European integration, an issue that I will briefly touch upon later
and which deserves a separate discussion given its impact both on the sustainability
of the European project and on the decision whether Europe will or will not expand
further.
Marks, Hooghe, and Schakel charted regional decentralization in Europe and the
OECD over the past six decades in their 2007 paper Patterns of Regional Authority.
Their research findings show an increase in regional authority that is particularly
strong in the European Union. The picture is consistent with the theory that I alluded
to earlier, that democracies are favorable to multi-level systems of governance. It
further supports the idea that decentralization is less expensive if detached from
economics and the rules regulating market access. With minor exceptions, the inte-
gration of Europe has been unidirectional for economic and commercial reasons
and it seems to have a well-planned process built upon ongoing reform activities,
and not a series of discrete and accidental bargains.
The above-mentioned studies give credence to the claim that the jurisdictional
architecture of the European Union has become multi-leveled. But what has been
the impact on local politics? How has it affected the Europeans’ public conception
Fig. 2.2 Evolution of regional authority, average annual change 1950–2006 (Source: Marks,
Hooghe, & Schakel, 2007)
of their political communities and how has it influenced the structure of political
conflict? These questions are extremely relevant as Romania is a newly integrated
nation into the formidable integration machine of the European Union. It has will-
ingly relinquished its sovereignty, like many other nations before it, and one of the
initial impacts of integration has been the mobility of its citizens into the western
club. The individual, human perspective upon the European Union and its integra-
tion efforts merits an in-depth analysis.
2.4 National Identity or Economic Prosperity?
The initial theoreticians of European integration took individual identity and

national loyalty seriously, and with the integration of the former communist nations,
the issue is once again in vogue and considered a crucial part of European integra-
tion efforts. In Haas’s views, integration was the “process whereby political actors
in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expecta-
tions, and political activities toward a new centre” (Haas, 1958, p. 16). Karl Deutsch
considered the building of a “sense of European community” to be a key indicator
of integration. What and how long it would take for individuals who formerly saw
themselves in terms of national identities to shift their allegiance to a “European
identity?” This is a very pertinent question for the newly integrated nations of
2.4 National Identity or Economic Prosperity? 41
Eastern Europe, who differ from the European Union through their culture, religious
heritage, and government traditions (Bărbulescu, 2005). In my perspective, national
identity can and it should be preserved at the same time as economic prosperity
ought to be pursued, through creative, entrepreneurial initiatives.
In his articles An End to European Integration? (1967) and The New Europeans:
Inward or Outward-Looking? (1970), Inglehart believes that generational replace-
ment was working in that direction. In his view, the underlying process of European
integration (or Europeanization) was “political socialization.” Individuals social-
ized in a community where public goods and services would be provided by supra-
national instead of national governmental institutions would have their loyalty as
citizens toward those supranational governmental institutions. Deutsch and his
coauthors, Burrell, Kann, Lee, Lichterman, Lindgren, Loewenheim, and Wagenen,
in their 1957 book, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International
Organization in the Light of Historical Experience, disagree based upon their
“transaction theory” of identity. They argue that national communication was
increasing at a much higher speed than European communication, therefore institu-
tional building in Europe “had not been matched by any corresponding deeper inte-
gration of actual behavior.”
With the advent of the Maastricht Accord, the creation of a European identity
once again became a pressing issue in the movement to integrate the formerly com-
munist nations of CEE. The accord was viewed and designed by its framers as a
series of practical steps to further integrate Europe economically, monetarily, envi-
ronmentally, and socially. The implicit purpose of each integration step was to
improve efficiency through centralized decision-making at the continental level and
to make the European Union more competitive for the globalization era. However,
the unanticipated effect of the Maastricht Accord was to present the European citi-
zens with a supranational polity. Some of the proponents and creators of the
Maastricht treaty, including Jacques Delors and his allies in national governments
and the European Parliament, were determined to use practical integration as a
stepping-stone toward a federal Europe. The opponents of this vision, under the
leadership of the British Conservative government, tempered those excessive fed-
eral visions and blocked the goal of a federal Europe in the Maastricht treaty. While
scholars were debating if national sovereignty was destabilized or not, opinion lead-
ers and national politicians were debating whether they could tolerate a striking
authority transfer to Brussels and its institutions. Even if the Maastricht Accord was
negotiated by the political and economic elites, it had to be submitted to the general
public in four referendums that led to one defeat in Denmark and one near defeat in
France. Neofunctionalists and intergovernmentalists alike considered the European
decision-making process an exclusively elite affair, but after Maastricht it appeared
that decision-making was shifting in a populist direction to the general public
(Gabel, 1998; Ray, 2004).
Seven public referendums were held on European issues in the 25 years prior to
the Maastricht Treaty; eight if we include the 1972 referendum in which Norwegian
voters decided not to join the European Union. In contrast, there have been 34 pub-
lic referendums in the period after Maastricht. While the political elites were finally
subjecting themselves to public approvals after Maastricht, the public opinion

became inclined to withhold legitimacy. In post-Maastricht Europe, political leaders
find it necessary to ask their citizens for confirmation and legitimacy. The case of
European constitutional reform, the democratic transition of former communist
societies in Central and Eastern Europe, and the regional devolution in nations like
France, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland are but a few vivid examples. Even the
United Kingdom, “the cradle of parliamentary sovereignty,” submitted to a public
referendum the devolution of Scotland, Wales, Greater London, and the North East
(Hooghe & Marks, 2005).
Intriguingly enough, in the previous 27 European referendums, the governments
and their allies have been defeated in six of them. This unprecedented mobilization
of public opinion has transformed the fundamental, and as some would argue, the
rational dynamics of European integration. If political and business elites in the past
negotiated integration on issues of efficiency, transactional cost reduction, eco-
nomic development, and distributional consequences, the public now seems to be
influenced primarily by identifying overeconomic concerns (Carey, 2002).
Individual and national identity is no longer a motionless outcome of jurisdic-
tional reform, as Deutsch and Haas assumed, but a powerful force either for or
against integration. The book The Limits of Europeanization builds on Haas’s and
Deutsch’s interest in identity transformation as an outcome of European integra-
tion. He argues that the benefits of Europeanization, which he defines as the “pro-
cess of building European-wide social arenas where people and organizations …
routinely interact,” have been limited to and benefitting only 20 % of the popula-
tion in cross-border transactions: managers, professionals, and other highly edu-
cated people. At first, scholars searched for an economic explanation for the public
opinion reaction. Neofunctionalists and intergovernmentalists alike believed that
European integration was mainly a form of economic integration that narrowly
affected income flows across sectors and factors. Conventional wisdom stated that
“distributional effects” determined whether individuals supported or opposed
Europe and its policies (Anderson & Reichert, 1996; Eichenberg & Dalton, 1993).
Most surveys focused predominantly on occupation and income, not identity, as
they were exploring how economic interest determined the political perspective of
European citizens.
By the early 2000s, the concept of “interest formation” was challenged by the
issue of national identity (McLaren, 2002; Medrano, 2003). Immigration had
become a hot political issue in both the traditional and new member states, as popu-
list right parties made emotional connections between immigration and loss of
national sovereignty resulting from European integration. Debate about European
identity in the popular press was oriented to opposing conceptions regarding
national identity, its origins and meaning. Elites who viewed Europe from the glo-
balization standpoint of economic benefits in the long-run were surprised that the
public did not share in their rational view and patience. As Eichenberg and Dalton
(2007) note in a survey of public opinion literature:
2.4 National Identity or Economic Prosperity? 43
When the post-Maastricht years are included in the analysis… the causal dynamic of previous
periods is substantially altered. Through 1991, public opinion responded very much in the
way that the existing literature would lead us to expect: support for integration responded
positively to increased trade within the EU and to improvement in economic conditions.
Since Maastricht, however, these relationships have essentially disappeared (Eichenberg &
Dalton, 2007).
The theoretical underpinnings of research on identity in Europe were quite thin.

Most research on identity refers to the “social identity theory” stating that group
identification shapes the individual self-conception and that humans have an “innate
ethnocentric tendency” that leads them to selfishly favor their own group (Brewer,
1993; Druckman, 2004; Tajfel, 1970). Political scientists are best equipped to
answer questions whether “ethnocentric tendency” breeds hatred, intolerance, or
something in between. In my opinion attempting to analyze the importance of
European identity in the process of integration, there are three fundamental issues:
(1) How are individual identities mobilized in the political contest?
(2) How do multiple identities and loyalties—to Europe, individual nations, and/or
subnational communities—fit together?
(3) How are individual identities shaped by political discourse?
Research on the first question engages the connection between belonging to a
particular nation—British, German, Polish, or French—and having a particular
political attitude. Very often, national identities are not apparent in the world of
politics, but require: (1) Framing or connecting to a particular political object, as
when a political party connects having a national identity to opposing immigration;
(2) Cueing, to be highlighted by instilling a bias, for instance against foreign influ-
ence; and (3) Priming, when a political party highlights an identity in the context of
an electoral campaign. Edwards and de Vries, in their 2006 paper, Taking Europe to
its Extremes: Extremist Parties and Public Euroskepticism, provide a compelling
example of framing in their findings that individuals who consider themselves
“Euro-skeptics” view themselves not only in exclusive national terms (French, not
Europeans) but that their identity is framed by the presence of a strong and vocal
populist right party. They substantiate that the stronger the radical right-wing politi-
cal party in a particular country is, the more intensely those individuals with
exclusive identities oppose European integration process. Further, they found that
radical left political parties in Europe frame attitudes regarding Europeanization
among individuals who feel economically insecure. This effect is less pronounced
than that of populist right parties for individuals with exclusive national identity.
The issue regarding integration and multiple identities seems to be supported by
the fundamental psychological insight that most people can and do have multiple
identities (Brewer, 1993). The early ideologists of the European Union—like Haas
for instance—were undecided on the question of whether European and national
identity were mutually exclusive. They did not eliminate the possibility that multiple
sources of governance at different territorial levels would generate corresponding
“tiered multiple loyalties,” and argued that “a shift in the focus of loyalty need not
necessarily imply the immediate repudiation of the national state or government.”

Risse, in his 2005 article Neofunctionalism, European Identity, and the Puzzles of
European Integration, states that much depends on the interpretation of Haas’s
meaning of the word “immediate,” but it seems fair to state that neither Haas nor
Jean Monnet conceives the issue of European identity as a zero-sum issue.
In the past 20 years, a number of opinion polls disclose that most European citi-
zens have simultaneously “some positive attachment” to Europe as well as to their
nation community (Citrin & Sides, 2004; Marks, 1999; Medrano & Guttiérez,
2001). These studies confirm Hass’s intuitive perspective that identities would not
be zero-sum and that strong national identity does not predispose an individual to be
against Europe. According to these studies, the decisive and delicate issue is how
multi-level identities fit together. Do individuals conceive national identity as “one”
among a “multitude” of attachments or as an exclusive attachment? Are national
identities perceived as civic characteristics that can be acquired, or as ethnic charac-
teristics that can only be inherited? For instance, Haesly, in his 2001 article Euro-
skeptics, Europhiles and Instrumental Europeans: European Attachment in Scotland
and Wales analyzed a focused group discussion in a set of Welsh and Scottish com-
munities and discovered that individuals in both countries have an affinity to their
own nation as well as Europe, but that they regard their identities in contrasting
ways. The Welsh think of their European identity as a trademark that differentiates
them from the Euro-skeptic English, while the Scots are drawn to the pluralistic,
overarching, and “non-British” character of Europe.
Marcussen et al. in their 1999 article Constructing Europe? The Evolution of
French, British, and German Nation-State Identities, discredit the notion that
European identities are homogenous across Europe and ask the questions, “how are
identities shaped by political discourse?” and “how are identity frames constructed,
and who does the construction?” Research has explored how the history taught in
schools, political party, together with the elite discourse as well as media reinforce-
ment of national understandings, is entrenched in national institutions (Medrano,
2003; Schmidt, 2007). Such frames, history, and practices are durable and conse-
quential. Risse (2005) once again explains why—in his view—some member states
have consistently been more willing to relinquish sovereignty on common foreign
and security policy than others:
…the social constructions and collective understandings that come with federalism:
Countries whose elites and citizens are used to the notion that sovereignty can be divided
and/or shared between various levels of governance, are also more prepared to include
supranational levels of governance in these understandings. Once one is prepared to accept
supranationalism over intergovernmentalism in general, this might also extend into ques-
tions of war and peace. Borrowing from neofunctionalism, one could call this ideational
spillover (Risse, 2005)
The major strength of the social identity approach is that it accepts the notion that
a person’s political views are correlated with their identity. Identity and its under-
standing are key to European integration, especially as it is compliant and depends
on how it is framed in the domestic political conflict.
2.5 The Influencers of European Integration 45
2.5 The Influencers of European Integration
During the 1980s, the fundamental ideological debate was whether the European
Union would absorb authority away from national states or not. The answer was
obviously “yes” through the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty, there-
fore the ideological debate in the late 1990s, and early 2000s shifted to focus on
what effect the European Union would have upon democratic politics within mem-
ber states. The public view began to perceive the political and economic elites as
subjective and inadequate to chart the future course of European integration by
themselves. Through a series of popular referendums, the public clearly communi-
cated that major European reforms and the integration process were too important
to be left exclusively to political and business elites. This was a radical paradigm
shift in modern European history, which, after the populist extremes of the 1930s
and the atrocities of World War II, considered the general population immature and
too volatile to be trusted with major decisions concerning polity.
In a cynical sense, the elites believed that only scientists, businesspeople, tech-
nocrats, politicians, public administrators, etc., were sufficiently tempered and
rational to avoid war and produce prosperity through economic and political inte-
gration. Europe was not alone in adopting such a paradigm; in a sense it was the
basis for the unofficial international protocols following World War II that gener-
ated global economic planning, integration, and encouraged nonconflict problem-
solving. The core of the European integration project was conceived as an initiative
that would overcome national differences. Functionalists and neofunctionalists
alike shared the belief that economic interests would triumph over political inter-
ests: “the end result would be a community in which interest and activity are con-
gruent and in which politics is replaced by problem-solving” (Caporaso, 1972).
European modernization and integration was built on instruments that coincide with
the drivers of globalization such as Industrialism (Kerr, Dunlop, Harbison & Myers,
1960), Structural-Functionalism (Parsons, 1960), and Functionalism (Mitrany,
1948, 1976). Their congruent idea was:
…that modern societies, including their politics, were shaped by technological imperatives
that left little or no choice with respect to alternative modes of social organization or,
indeed, ways of life. In fact, faced with the overwhelming dictates imposed by the unrelent-
ing progress of technology and industry, politics had mutated into rational adjustment of
social practices and institutions to indisputable universal constraints, dealing with which
was best left to technocratic experts trained in the parsimonious pursuit of functionalist best
practice (Streeck, 2006).
As far back as 1948, Mitrany, in his article The Functional Approach to World
Organization, stated the radical claim that the traditional nation-state was obsolete.
Neofunctionalists were less certain about the demise of the traditional state, since
they considered that national governments would not easily relinquish their roles. In
the 1950s, the French National Assembly’s rejection of the proposed “Political and
Defense Community” confirmed that nationhood still had an active role in the
European psyche. Similarly to the current identity and integration dispute, the 1954
debate raised issues of national sovereignty and identity. The epic defeat led reformers
to take a low-profile political route and instead focus on economic integration with-
out directly challenging nationhood. The “Empty Chair Crisis” of 1966 further
reminded the European elites that certain leaders, such as De Gaulle, who sabotaged
the Commission’s plan to fortify supranational authority by advancing his own
intergovernmentalist design for foreign policy and defense cooperation, were not
ready to abolish the national state. As Hoffmann observed:
The nation-state is still here, and the New Jerusalem has been postponed… Domestic dif-
ferences and different worldviews mean diverging foreign policies; the involvement of
policy makers in issues among which “community building” is only one has meant a deep-
ening, not a decrease, of those divergences (Hoffmann, 1966).
Over the next three decades, European policy-making was practiced in terms of
those “divergent national interests” with European issues debated in national poli-
tics and national realities impacting European debates.
The main issue in today’s populist political landscape seems to be if European
integration and the decline of national identity would constitute an additional politi-
cal divide beyond the traditional (a) center or periphery (b) secular or religious (c)
urban or rural and (d) rich or poor (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967). Bartolini, in his 2005
book, Restructuring Europe: Centre Formation, System Building, and Political
Restructuring between the Nation-State and the European Union, argues that
European integration actually reverses a historical long process of national bound-
ary erection that limited trade and commerce within the nation-state. He makes an
essential distinction between modern European integration efforts and traditional
state formation. The traditional state was two-sided since it replaced local boundar-
ies with national boundaries. Unlike traditional states, the European construct is
one-sided, as it removes national boundaries without replacing them with European
ones. Bartolini’s perspective is consistent with other negative observations made by
Scharpf (1988) and Streeck (2006), that European integration might be a harmful
phenomenon for the European population. They see positive effects of European
integration when it allows individuals opportunities to escape from inefficient or
corrupt authorities at the national level. Arguably, this pressure may be pertinent for
national public administrators who have to perform at European levels and deliver
competitive public goods, or otherwise risk losing their citizens and intangible
resources to other European jurisdictions.
Kriesi et al. (2006) wrote that:
in a Rokkanean perspective, the contemporary process of “globalizations” or “denational-
izations” can be conceived of as a new “critical juncture” which is likely to result in the
formation of new structural cleavages, both within and between national contexts” (Kriesi
et al., 2006).
Analyzing the public opinion and political discourse in six European nations,
they recognized a new and powerful “demarcation vs. integration” conflict.
Globalization in general and Europeanization in particular have generated three
distinct spheres of political competition with new sets of winners and losers: (1)
competition between protected and unprotected economic sectors; (2) cultural
competition between natives and immigrants; and (3) competition between defenders
2.5 The Influencers of European Integration 47
of national institutions and proponents of supranational governance (Kriesi et al.,

2006). This new European conflict cannot be addressed using traditional left–right
political competition, but is likely to cause unusual political alliances and loyalties,
even transforming traditional political parties’ identities. Those who stand to lose
from Europeanization and globalization are migrating to parties that promise to
shield society from external shocks, while those who stand to win, have merged to
parties that advocate further integration. Their research further accentuates the
dynamic effect of globalization and suggests that the European Union has a cul-
tural as well as an economic dimension.
The current “for or against Europeanization” conflict escapes conventional polit-
ical competition among mainstream political parties, and necessitates a political
repositioning, otherwise parties face the dangers of the rise in populism, particularly
on the radical right. The events of the previous 2 years in nations such as Holland,
Hungary, and the 2012 elections in Greece and France, seem to confirm those
extremist tendencies against Europeanization and globalization. This new ideologi-
cal line regarding Europeanization breaks with conventional functionalist or neo-
functionalist thinking, as Schmitter (2005) states:
The real impediment to a revived neofunctionalist dynamic comes from something that
Ernst Haas long anticipated, but which was so slow in coming to the European integration
process. I have called it “politicizations”. When citizens begin to pay attention to how the
EU is affecting their daily lives, when political parties and large social movements begin to
include “Europe” in their platforms, and when politicians begin to realize that there are
votes to be won or lost by addressing policy issues at the regional level, the entire low pro-
file strategy becomes much less viable. Discrete regional officials and invisible interest
representatives, in league with national civil servants, can no longer monopolize the
decision-making process in Brussels (known in Euro-speak as “comitologies”). Integration
starts to generate visible “winners and losers” within member states, and loses its percep-
tion of being an “all winners” game. Haas had an idiosyncratic term for this. He called it
“turbulences” and there is no question in my mind that the regional integration process in
Europe has become “turbulent.” It will take a major revision of his theory before anyone can
make sense of its changing dynamics (Schmitter, 2005).
The opponents of this view still perceive European integration as a technical

aspect without the need for public referendums and debates. In Majone’s (1994)
view, Brussels is a regulatory regime, where experts and supranational officials in
“non-majoritarian” institutions, insulated from the turmoil of sentimental politics,
make decisions. Joerges and Neyer (1997a, 1997b) have emphasized the delibera-
tive, problem-solving character of decision-making in European “comitology.”
Research has identified several different European decision-making models, with
only two envisioning a significant role for mass political participants. So is the
European Union integration process subject to public opinion and national identity,
or is it a technical, objective matter to be negotiated by technocrats?
A possible perspective is that exclusive technocratic issues are applicable to a
diminishing subset of European Union decision-making, while national politics and
elections establish the general agenda and parameters for elite negotiations. In his
2005 book, Dilemmas of European Integration: The Ambiguities and Pitfalls of
Integration by Stealth, Majone observes that six decades of functionalism created
by European technocrats and a legal system from a hyperactive European Court of

Justice have finally come to an end by the mid-2000s:
Integration by stealth is no longer a viable strategy. The latest European elections have
shown that the efficiency and legitimacy costs of the traditional approach have become so
high that popular hostility to the very idea of integration is no longer a phenomenon limited
to a few member states of the Union … An increasing level of politicization of EU
policymaking becomes unavoidable as more and more tasks involving the use of political
discretion are shifted to the European level (Majone, 2005, p. 220).
The intentionality of European integration is an economic and global necessity.

Looking into the future, administering the decisions and the laws that have been
taken in the past 60 years will certainly be a challenge, especially for newly inte-
grated nations such as Romania. With the euro crises and the rise of new global
powers such as China and India, the European Union is under even more economic
pressure than before. With the few notable exceptions, the public finances of most
European governments are not encouraging, while the predictions of lower birth
rates coupled with increase in life expectancy will negatively affect the economic
situation even further. Even if many attempts have been undertaken to stimulate the
European economy and the entrepreneurial spirit, the overall European growth rate
of the past decade is still quite anemic. European public administrators will further
have to deal with identity issues such as emigration, job creation, protectionism,
social welfare, and cultural and religious integration. The recent “Arab Spring” is
bound to complicate matters, especially in the traditional western European states,
who, by the nature of their generous welfare benefits, will continue to attract emi-
grants not only from Eastern Europe, but increasingly from Northern Africa and the
Middle East. It is safe to assume that cultural identity and economic prosperity will
continue to color the European integration debate along with Europe’s place in the
global economy.
2.6 The Features of European Public Administration
European integration would still be a dream, were it not for the administrative
capability of various national and supranational institutions that implement the
decisions and the strategies that created the European Union. Similar to individ-
ual nation-states, the European Union also requires a complex and dynamic
administrative space to produce and maintain basic public goods along with
advancement capability. In order to understand the administration reforms affect-
ing the newly integrated nation of Romania that I shall outline in subsequent
sections, it would behoove us to have an epigrammatic understanding of a few
key elements of the European administrative space, acknowledging the limitative
nature of this section. Many academic works have been published on this topic,
and since it is not the main thrust of my research, I will refrain from deep analy-
sis and interpretation (Alecu & Păunescu, 2008; Bărbulescu, 2001, 2005; Birzea,
1998, 2001; Johnson, 2008).
2.6 The Features of European Public Administration 49
“Space” is the common term used by European experts and ideologists when
referring to integration initiatives of the European Union. There is a “European
constitutional space,” which describes shared constitutional values among mem-
ber states and the European Union, a “European judicial space,” which refers to
the cooperation between courts, and a “European administrative space,” which
describes the implementation of European laws as well as the “Europeanization”
of national administrative law (OECD/PUMA, 1998). In some views, the European
administrative space is more than the cooperation and implementation of European
Union law. It is actually a key determinant of the nature of the European system
of shared sovereignty and the premiere condition for accountability and legiti-
macy. To outline the European administrative space and its impact upon newly
integrated states, one has to first understand the development of the European law
that created it. Further, there must be an understanding of the main European par-
ticipants (national, European, and in between), the nature of their powers and
responsibilities, and their main forms of interaction and the administrative struc-
tures they have created. Finally, I will analyze the current state of the European
administrative space as it pertains to the integration process and the creation of an
integrated public administration.
2.6.1 An External, Legal Perspective
The European legal order, established by the member states, had to grow and
develop to meet the challenges of external globalization and internal European inte-
gration. The culmination of these rules has been the “acquis communautaire,” the
quantitative creator and repository of the European administrative space. However,
to accurately understand it, we must also be familiar with the qualitative aspect that
developed through a slow but certain relinquishment of sovereignty by member
states and the creation of a supranational European public administration. The cre-
ation of a European supranational legal system of shared sovereignty has its roots in
the classic notion of territories. Under this notion, the “summa potestas”4 of a state
is the concentration of public power within a certain territory while at the same time
exercising independence toward outside states. Classical territoriality restricted a
state from exercising its sovereign powers outside its borders, thereby limiting gov-
ernmental activity upon another foreign territory. “Supranationalism,” the goal of
the European legal system, was innovative since it created an alternative to the clas-
sic demarcation between internal public law and external public international law.
Within the European supranational legal system, public power is jointly exercised
through European and national institutions. Several European experts have com-
pared this development to the pre-Westphalian legal orders as a model of organiza-
tion of public power through non-territorially bound structures (Wind, 2001, 2003).
Under European supranationalism, the territories that are under European Union
4
Totality of power. It refers to the final authority of power in government.
jurisdiction are exempt from traditional international law in relations between states
since national public law was replaced by European law. This separation between
national and supranational law became ever less prominent within the context of
European integration. Newly integrated European nations would have allowed
administrative power to be also exercised from outside their borders, as long as they
would participate in crafting and implementing that law. This led to a “de-territori-
alization” of public power and provided the necessary framework for modern
European administrative law, a process that had several distinct and overlapping
phases (Joerges, 2006; Weiler, 1991).
First, there was the establishment of the European Community legal order that
consummated the transfer of sovereign powers from individual states, first to the
European Coal and Steal Community (ECSC) and later to the European Economic
Community (EEC). In this phase, member states vertically opened their national
legal system to the transfer of administrative power to the European level. The rul-
ing of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the Van Gend en Loos and Costa
ENEL cases laid out the basic principle that European law had supremacy over
national law. European law became acceptable to all member states because it was
not unfamiliar to their national systems and since member states were active in the
legislative process and the creation of the administrative regulations. Nevertheless,
in this initial phase, the effects of public power at the European level remained
within the nation in which the legal order was established and its territorial reach.
The legal heritage, of which European law became part, was exercised strictly
within the territory of each nation, in a sense becoming an administrative model
where individual European law was implemented in each individual state separately
(Joerges, 2006).
The second phase in the creation of the European legal system was the “horizon-
tal” opening of the individual states’ legal systems. Since the mid-1970s, the
European Court of Justice increasingly focused on the obligation of individual
states to recognize administrative decisions made by other member states, espe-
cially on issues pertaining to the European Community. This was a natural
phenomenon since the initial legal provisions had fundamental horizontal effects on
other member states. This is best symbolized by the 1979 case “Cassis de Dijon”
that required individual member states to recognize and enforce each other’s admin-
istrative decisions, even if there was no harmonization of legislation at the European
level. Based upon that decision, the administrative and legislative decisions of one
member state would affect issues beyond its territorial jurisdiction into other mem-
ber states, thus giving national law a “trans-territorial” effect. This was a more pro-
nounced challenge to the classical notion of territoriality than the vertical opening
that only established the supremacy of the European Community law.
Hofmann and Türk outline the third phase of legal development in the European
administrative space in their 2007 article, The Development of Integrated
Administration in the EU and its Consequences. According to them, the main issue
in this phase was the evolution of “subsidiarity,” the principle of allowing the imple-
mentation of European rules at the local level. Subsidiarity featured in debates over
vertical distribution of legislative powers, but in reality, the practical impact of
subsidiarity was strongest in political terms. For that reason, the ECJ abstained from
ruling or discussing the merits of subsidiarity, viewing it as a prerogative of the

European legislators (ECR I-5755, 1996; ECR I-2405, 1997; ECR I-8419, 2000;
ECR I-7079, 2001). The result of this move by the ECJ was the practice where only
a few implementing powers were retained at the European level, instead creating a
system of decentralized but cooperative administrative structures in the territory.
For instance, the single market program of the late 1980s that necessitated the
implementation of the European law was established mainly through local adminis-
trative networks of individuals or institutions from member states, the European
Community, and private parties. This network feature is a fundamental characteris-
tic of this third phase of legislative integration, known as the “age of subsidiarity,”
where the distinction between European and national prerogatives in agenda-set-
ting, policy-making, and implementing are no longer clear. The distinct vertical
and/or horizontal relations between the European and national levels have been
transformed into a network of complex relationships. In response to this complex
development, structures have been developed to link European networks with par-
ticipants from non-European nations such as the European patent system, the Århus
Convention, or the Schengen system.
These transformations created the European legal administrative that exists
today, where member states exercise power outside their territory, either vertically
through the European Union or horizontally through other member states. This
became possible since individual nations themselves were involved in the creation,
implementation, adjudication, and Europeanization of European law. Shared sover-
eignty is where member states and European administrative structures are both sub-
jects and crafters of the European law and the administrative networks designed to
implement it.
2.6.2 An Internal, Administrative Perspective
Analyzing territoriality in understanding the European administrative space must be

followed by a discussion regarding the practices that form, preserve, and implement
European law. The administrative act is traditionally associated with the execution
of laws and policies and analyzing and evaluating this practice may give us an inter-
nal perspective. The European reality is very dynamic and complex, so unlike their
traditional predecessors European public administrators do not limit themselves
only to the acts of implementation. Quite the contrary, they exercise significant
power and influence in the important agenda-setting and policy-making stages.
Therefore, I believe that the external, somewhat static legal perspective has to be
supplemented with an internal, dynamic perspective to better understand European
administrative space. The external perspective often focuses on rules and proce-
dures that are legally binding or on the outcomes of those procedures. Analyzing the
European administrative space exclusively through an external perspective risks
missing the consensus-building process or the cooperative negotiation and some-
times compromise it requires at times to reach a final decision.
One of the fundamental shortcomings of the external perspective is that despite

its clarity and usefulness as an analytical tool for the understanding of administra-
tive law in Europe, it does not showcase the subtle, influential, and preparatory
functions of public administrators. Therefore, I believe we must complement the
external, visible, and somewhat objective perspective with an internal theory that
addresses the framing and coordinating functions that administrators play in the
entire policy cycle such as agenda-setting, policy formulation, and implementation.
These roles, sometimes informal, that were developed in the historical process of
integration are a very important key to understanding European administrative
space. The internal, administrative perspective reveals that integrative administra-
tive structures operate beyond formal rules and treaties. They seem to be governed
by the “spirit of the law” as a general principle instead of the “letter of law.” The
informal principles and practices evolved over the integration process in each stage
of the policy cycle and in each policy area, creating a rich heritage of administrative
acts varying in form, location, and practice, and taking into account some of the
cultural differences between member states.
In the policy phase of the agenda-setting, expert groups generally composed of
national public administrators and independent consultants play a central role in
shaping the Commission’s policy initiatives. They are used to test ideas, build coali-
tions, simulate policy outcomes in sensitive areas that require intergovernmental
conflict solving, and the developing of coalitions among national experts
(Bărbulescu, 2005; Larsson, 2003; Larsson & Trondal, 2006; Trondal, 2004).
Furthermore, supranational and national administrative participants exercise influ-
ence on the European decision-making process. This is mostly felt within the
European Council working parties supporting COREPER, where the national pub-
lic administrators must balance their national mandate against the need to reach a
consensus at the European level (Neuhold & Radulova, 2006). While this type of
interaction also exists through the “Open Method of Coordination,” the most inten-
sive administrative cooperation and interaction takes place in the implementation
phase (Bărbulescu, 2008; Hodson & Maher, 2001; Linsenmann, Meyer, & Dritter,
2002; Regent, 2003). When implementing policy, the administrative activities can
range from a single-case decision all the way to acts of administrative rule-making
and/or the amending of existing provisions in the current legislation. The current
constitutional framework in the European Union only partially reflects the evolu-
tionary development of policy implementation, which has been driven by practical
necessity and political arrangements (Articles 10, 202 and 211 of the European
Constitution).
According to Cassese in his 2004 article European Administrative Proceedings,
the classic distinction between direct or indirect public administration has become
less relevant. Instead, in many policy areas, the continual integration of European
and national administrative proceedings has led to “composite proceedings” that are
created by both national and European Union administrations (Cananea, 2004;
Cassese, 2004; Chiti, 2004; Franchini, 2004). Certain administrative structures
undertake policy setting and implementation decisions such as the “comitology”
and “lamfalussy” types of committee procedures, agencies, and administrative net-
works including private parties. These implementation structures are not mutually
exclusive and generally collaborate in single policy areas. This administrative
collaboration, between national and European levels, is well documented in the
formalized process of comitology, the institutional arrangement developed in the
1960s and codified subsequently by the comitology decisions of 1987, 1999, and
2006 (Bergström, 2005; Bradley, 1997). Within the European comitology struc-
tures, the European Commission has the central implementation authority, giving it
its functional role as the European Union chief executive (Lenaerts & Verhoeven,
2000, 2002). The European Commission, however, is limited in its activity by the
necessity to involve comitology committees in the implementation process. The
interaction between the European Commission and national representatives is typi-
cally characterized by consensus building, in which the Commission attempts to
accommodate individual nations’ interests as much as possible (Andenas & Tuerk,
2000; Joerges & Neyer, 1997a, 1997b; Joerges & Vos, 1999; Lenaerts & Verhoeven,
2000; Pedler & Schaefer, 1996).
According to Article 7(2) of Council Regulation 1/2003, OJ L 1/1, the
Commission’s autonomy in implementation is restricted by the obligation—in cer-
tain cases—to secure the participation of affected parties and the scientific commu-
nity and to consider their opinions. The Commission, therefore, is not an
unaccountable decision-maker, but rather a network manager of formal and infor-
mal networks made up of national representatives, experts, and private entities
(Harlow, 2002). In the administration of the financial sector for instance, the comi-
tology procedures were used as guidelines for the effective policy setting and imple-
mentation in collaboration with individual member state (Lastra, 2004; Moloney,
2003). The “Financial Services Action Plan” of 1999 set out an ambitious reform
package to achieve a more integrated European capital market required by the larger
global market, and developed a four-level approach known as the “Lamfalussy
structure” with the following structure:
(1) At level one, the legislative acts would be adopted by the European Council and
Parliament, ensuring the core political principles were followed; the nature and
extent of implementation procedures are also decided.
(2) At level two, the implementing details of level one would be adopted by the
European Commission in cooperation with the European Securities Committee
(ESC) under the regulatory procedure provided in the 1999/2006 Comitology
Decision.
(3) At level three, the European Securities Regulators Committee (ESRC) ensures
the correct understanding and implementation of normative acts on levels one,
two, and three.
(4) At level four, the European Commission, as the guardian of treaties, pursues the
enforcement of the adopted measures.
Because of its success, the Lamfalussy approach has been extended beyond the
securities market to the banking, insurance, and investment fund sectors. In 2005,
the European Parliament, through Council Directive 2005/1, established two new
comitology committees: the European Banking Committee (EBC) for the banking
sector and the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Committee (EIOPC).
The recent growth in European agencies does not constitute a move toward a
European federal executive, but reveals all the characteristics of multi-level admin-
istrative interaction. European agencies can be viewed as decentralized forms of
administration that integrate national administrative bodies into their operation by
providing structures for cooperation between the European and national authorities
(Geradin & Petit, 2004). According to Chiti (2004) in his article Decentralization
and Integration into the Community Administrations: A New Perspective on
European Agencies,
agencies often pursue their tasks within a wider administrative setting, which includes other
patterns of EU implementation, such as comitology, but also providing a channel for the
input of different public actors from the national and sub-national levels. European agencies
are therefore separate, but auxiliary to the Commission’s implementing tasks. (Chiti, 2004)
The implementation of European administrative law is marked by the presence

of multiple administrative networks often created around comitology committees
and agencies. These networks, created and tailored to the specific needs of each
policy area, collect information, organize, plan, and/or coordinate the enforcement
of European law. They integrate the supranational and national administrative bod-
ies within structures designed to conduct joint and synchronized action in the imple-
mentation of European policies. Where the implementation is entrusted to private
entities, the relevant private national participants are integrated into a supranational
framework (Andenas & Tuerk, 2000; Joerges & Neyer, 1997a, 1997b).
These administrative networks include varying forms of cooperation that takes
place directly or indirectly between different national agencies, forms which consist
of commitments at different levels of intensity. They typically range from informal
obligations, to information exchanges, all the way to formal, legal network struc-
tures intended to implement individually binding decisions. Network structures
may also be established for those regulations that have a “trans-territorial” effect,
that is, when the administrative decision made in a nation has a legally binding
effect beyond its territory. This is necessary, for instance, to coordinate the admin-
istration of the single market by different national authorities. Finally, network cre-
ation and utilization under administrative law can reach the status where a national
administration can be utilized like a European Union agency, and it determines the
nature and purpose of its activities (Sydow, 2004). These types of formalized admin-
istrative network structures operate in addition to the comitology and Lamfalussy
systems and supplement the executive position of the Commission in the implemen-
tation of European Union law.
The European administrative system with all of its overlapping networks of for-
mal and informal relationships may seem to be designed counter-intuitively when
compared to traditional public administration systems. However, Kassim (2003)
claims that the European administrative system is relatively small compared to the
aspirations and duties of the European Union. Furthermore, the European adminis-
trative system is a creation of history and cultural context. Member states consti-
2.7 Accountability Within European Administrative Space 55
tuted the Union, bringing their own legal systems, administrative traditions, and
sociocultural conditions. This required active involvement from the initial stages of
planning of joint action to the last stage of implementation. In a sense, the notion of
subsidiarity in implementation is a victim of its own success. The European system
of integrated administration has distinctiveness that makes it difficult to establish
common rules and principles, but at the same time European administrative struc-
tures, networks, and administrative laws are evolving. Unfortunately, there is little
coordination between policy areas as European administrative law exists mainly as
general principles of law and only a few rules are applicable across several policy
areas. Fragmentation seems to be a fundamental feature of the European administra-
tion law, where power is spread over several institutions, and executive functions are
almost always executed in cooperation with public and private actors from within
and outside the European Union.
As illustrated above, an accurate understanding of the European administrative
space requires an internal perspective to complement the external, formal one.
Naturally, European public administration is not limited to simply the implementa-
tion of laws issued by the European Parliament. This administrative space is not a
simple polity composed of two superimposed territorial structures, a European one
as described by the constitution, and a national one within its territory. The European
legal and administrative space developed through a gradual “de-territorialization”
and the establishment of formal and informal networks of integrated administration
that both create and implement European policy. For an accurate analysis and a
complete understanding of the European administration space, a combination
between the external, legal perspective and the internal, administrative perspective
is necessary. The integration of the two perspectives is not always visible to the
European citizens since they interact with a limited amount of people and informa-
tion. Viewed simply from the external, legal perspective, it would appear that
national administrators and European Union officials collaborate well together and
that a relatively homogenous European organizational structure exists.
2.7 Accountability Within European Administrative Space
This apparently well-organized, integrated administrative machine, however, raises

issues of checks and balances necessitating structures of political, judicial, and
administrative supervision and control. In the European context described above,
the issues of administrative oversight and accountability are complicated given the
various backgrounds, policy areas, and stages within the policy cycle. Any work-
able system of accountability must reflect the complexities of the European admin-
istrative reality. It must include the ongoing crafting of administrative procedural
rules along with input from all levels of administrative entities and sufficient forms
of participation and representation. How is accountability to be accomplished in this
complex and dynamic European administrative space? What are the models for
developing the criteria for checks and balances? How are these models to be
implemented? These are a few questions that I will attempt to shed light on in this
section (Bărbulescu, 2008; Petersone, 2008a, 2008b).
The European models of checks and balances for public administrators has to
consider the unique character of its integrated, consensus-driven, and dynamic con-
stitutional space. Lenaerts and Verhoeven, in their 2002 article Institutional Balance
and Democracy, present a “parliamentary model” that, when applied to the European
Union legal system, suggests that administrative accountability ought to rest with
the European Parliament and/or the Council, similar to a federalist system. Under
their model, the European public administration draws its democratic mandate from
the European Parliament and has the European Commission at the center of its
executive hierarchy. However, considering the continuous challenges of European
integration, this model, along with the practical checks and balances it requires, is
limited. The first significant limitation is the fact that most administrative integrat-
ing instruments outside the European Commission are not under the political con-
trol of the Parliament. In fairness, the Commission, as the main executive under the
parliamentary model, is under political control and oversight, but it is not an exclu-
sive, all-encompassing entity of the European integrated administrative system. A
number of administrative entities exist, mainly at the national level, which in some
instances are more influential than the Commission but not accountable to wider
European political control.
In contrast, a “regulatory model” of public administration and integration views
the European Union for what it is, primarily a special purpose organization that
requires administrative checks and balances through the delegation of regulation
authority (Lenaerts & Verhoeven, 2002). Under the regulatory model, accountabil-
ity for the exercise of power is ensured by both the European Union and individual
states via the “ultra vires”5 test. This model seems to be more relevant in the context
of European integration since both the accountability and legitimacy of administra-
tive bodies and their decisions must be ensured by national as well as European
political entities. The conditions for accountability in the integration of administra-
tion—especially through the practice of comitology—are being debated under the
concept of “deliberative supranationalism” (Joerges & Neyer, 1997a, 1997b). This
regulatory model considers the European Union superior given its “superior capa-
bility of creative problem-solving through accommodation, persuasion, argument,
and discursive processes” (Joerges & Everson, 2006). The result of this superior
problem-solving process is viewed to distribute administrative responsibilities at the
national level in the sense of becoming a broker of conflicts. The checks and bal-
ances required in this model are mainly procedural. Therefore, considering the
nature of integrative administrative networks throughout Europe, it is difficult to
oversee administrative participants solely through traditional Weberian-style hierar-
chical accountability. Both models of administrative checks and balances contain
valuable components, however neither one by itself is sufficient to meet the chal-
lenges of European administrative integration.
5
“Beyond the powers of” or “beyond its power.” For instance if an act requires legal authority and
it is done with such authority, it is characterized in law as intra vires.
Instead, to determine the required checks and balances instruments, we must

consider the different policy phases. In the initial, agenda-setting phase, the param-
eters for the legislation and the various policy-making procedures are established.
The necessary accountability system in this phase is process-dependent, and requires
transparency, integration of experts’ opinion, and participation from civil society.
These latter aspects in particular may present delicate dilemmas, as to who should
be considered as appropriate partakers and who should select them. The European
Commission, under the duty of consultation, must make choices as to who should
be consulted, what opinions can be taken into account, and whether to limit debate
only to direct stakeholders or open it beyond the parties directly affected (Obradovic
& Vizcaino, 2006). All rules and procedures are retroactively subject to judicial
control, yet given the discretion of the European Commission and the nature of the
review process, only the final legal act is really verified. In reality, the accountability
of the policy-making process is predicated upon institutional interaction and the
balance of power among the various interest groups that contributed to the law-
making process. The two institutions facilitating this political-administrative pro-
cess, begun at the national level and completed at the European level, are the
European Parliament and the European Council. Therefore, the corporatist model of
interest representation in the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) is
challenging since its perspective is only channeled toward the European Commission
in the agenda-setting phase (CES 1253/2001). Any later intervention of national
administrators in the Council of Ministers for instance may help with the efficiency
of the Council but may create problems in the transparency of the European Council
as a legislator.
In the implementation phase, the legislative mandate of the European Commission
is insufficient to control the “political administration” of the European Union with
its far-reaching regulatory powers (Joerges, 1999). Nevertheless, it is during this
phase that individuals are most likely to feel the effects of an administrative deci-
sion, therefore expert and stakeholder input in the creation of the administrative rule
is crucial. The judicial review may gain more importance and the transparency
required may increase, but it must be balanced with the discretion and the efficiency
of the administrative process (Türk, 2003). These concerns are paramount given the
limited political control of the Parliament and national legislators, yet recent studies
show that national parliaments are developing supervisory capabilities of European
administrative policies (Harlow, 2002; Hofmann & Türk, 2007).
2.7.1 Instruments of Accountability
The methods of ensuring administrative effectiveness in the European administra-

tive space contain both traditional and contemporary approaches. The first tradi-
tional approach entails holding the public administrators politically accountable or
responsible for juridical consequences by the European and/or national parliament
and to the justice system. However, history shows that administrative control by
parliaments tends to be more intense during the legislation phase than the imple-
mentation phase and the courts tend to be lenient and discrete when reviewing leg-
islative acts rather than implementation decisions. Parliaments throughout the
continent, both European and national, are capable of exercising a great deal of
supervisory control over the administrative integration process. Yet, they do not
always possess an in-depth understanding of the nature and structure of European
administrative entities. Such information would enable them to verify their respec-
tive public administrators in the various phases of policy setting and administrative
fields. The fundamental limitation of parliamentary control is the difficulty in
information-gathering, the insufficiency and the inadequacy of timing, and the lack
of resources required to respond to a complex and hyper-turbulent situation in a
timely manner. Eventually, this constrain will be overcome through resource shar-
ing and the use of intelligence indicators, yet the perfect method of parliamentary
control in Europe is limited by the fragmentation of supervisory responsibilities.
The second traditional administrative accountability instrument is judicial con-
trol and supervision of administrative acts. This form of control is limited by its
retroactive nature; however, in the European administrative integration case it has
been utilized to establish precedent for future administrative acts. Judicial control
over the administrative act includes the review of legality, testing compliance with
already existent rules, the enforcement of basic notions of legality, and the guaran-
tee of substantial and procedural rights. Oftentimes, the justice system balances the
discretionary powers of the public administrators within the general principles of
the law. What complicates this traditional accountability task is the unique charac-
teristic of European Union governance and its integrating and evolutionary nature
(Azoulay, 2002).
Traditional judicial oversight is challenged by incoherent administrative respon-
sibilities, the multiple forms of administrative governance, and the applicability of
general laws to specific situations. European courts, for instance, already face dif-
ficulties in establishing a sufficient level of judicial review of comitology proce-
dures (Bradley, 1997). In the administrative procedures for the single-case
implementation of European law, the courts face the issue of how to address the
uniformity of national and supranational administrations. Previously, it tended to
sanction procedure violation (Cases C-269/90, C-97/91, C-32/95, C-151/01,
T-450/93, T-346/94, T-42/96, T-215/00), but given the insufficiency of procedural
provisions in the European law, there is quite a bit of confusion over the roles of
varying administrative participants in composite procedures (Cassese, 2004).
Effective judicial control would be possible only if the courts would be able to real-
locate responsibilities and reduce the complexities of European Union administra-
tive structures.
European judicial oversight was built on the “gradual approach” method and is
the fundamental distinction between judicial and political control, since it was
developed by a history of case law that discriminated among the levels of verifica-
tion required by various administrative activities (Hofmann & Türk, 2007).
Typically, the more the political control in an area, such as agenda-setting, policy-
making, or other European Council activities, the less judicial supervision was
required. This principle applies to general policy setting by European administra-

tors as in the cases of Lamfalussy rules and comitology processes (Case T-342/99,
T-310/01 and T-77/02, T 5/02 and T-80/02, Schwarze, 2004). This type of judicial
review of administrative activity is concerned with ensuring both procedural and
substantive rights; therefore, it follows a rights-based approach to the integration
of administration.
Beyond the traditional methods of administrative control, the European public
administrative space is experimenting with contemporary approaches. One such
hybrid accountability approach is a method of mutual supervision built into the
collaborative administration networks in the forms of checks and balances that
ensure a more agile accountability in certain policy areas and in different policy
phases. This entails the overcoming of the disadvantages of heterarchical adminis-
trative systems—difficult to control with traditional methods—through the pres-
ence of participants with different origins who can provide mutual accountability
and control. Trondal, in his 2004 article Re-Socializing Civil Servants: The
Transformative Powers of EU Institutions, illustrates this new method of account-
ability in a hyper-changing environment. He shows that the benefits of “mutual
control” can be weakened through the individuals’ participation in the procedures
and the process of administrative integration that will affect the persons’ loyalty,
outlook, and behavior.
The innovative system of comitology is a possible illustration of how the con-
flicting approaches of traditional control and the involvement of invested stakehold-
ers could be harmonized. The comitology committees are a form of integration
between the European Commission and individual, nonpartisan national experts,
but at the same time, committees are allowed to refer matters to either the European
Council or the Parliament for a final decision. In equal measure, the Lamfalussy-
type procedures allow a review of the establishment of administrative rules by the
European Commission. Another illustrative example of mutual control and verifica-
tion is the relationship between various European agencies and the European
Commission. The Commission may be entrusted to make the final decision, but the
expertise often lies with the agencies themselves, therefore the final formal decision
will be greatly influenced by the national agencies. Other such systems of checks
and balances exist between European agencies and national agencies. They consti-
tute network and heterarchical relationships and contain elements of mutual control
and supervision. This type of network exists in relationships with private parties as
well, especially norm-setting private standardization bodies such as European
Committee of Standardization (CEN), The European Committee for Electrotechnical
Standardization (CENELEC), and European Telecommunication Standard Institute
(ETSI), whose standards are accepted by administrations until there is proof of them
being insufficient. The various systems of checks and balances are also present
within the European Commission itself, especially in highly sensitive areas such as
competition law.
The European Union and its administrative space cannot be reduced to a simple,
bi-dimensional concept and does not simply create another territorial layer over
preexisting national territories. The European administrative space, in which
Romania was integrated as of 2007, is the area that jointly exercises powers dele-
gated to Brussels in a system of shared sovereignty, thus creating a “new type of
legal order” whose law has become “an integral part of the legal systems of the
Member States” (ECJ Case 6/64). The European administrative space entails the
creation, administration, and preservation of European Union law and the process of
Europeanization; therefore it is a three-dimensional space with vertical, horizontal,
and diagonal relationships (Joerges, 2006). As outlined in this chapter, this develop-
ment has been gradual and fluid in response to global economic pressures and its
structures developed on a case-by-case basis in different policy areas (Kassim,
2003). Within this tri-dimensional space, the forms of collaboration differ across
various policy phases such as agenda-setting, legislative rule-making, and imple-
mentation. Since they cannot be clearly distinguished and there is no clear hierarchy
in the European constitution, they have developed jointly, with the legislative phase
not clearly distinguished from the implementation phase and current experiences in
implementing policy often resulting in agenda-setting for future policy. Despite
many differences in policy areas, the administrative collaboration has led to an
“integrated European administration,” a rigorous cooperation among national and
supranational administrative entities and initiatives. This reality becomes apparent
only when the external, legal perspective is completed by the internal, administra-
tive perspective.
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Chapter 3
The Europeanization of Romania
in the Globalization Context
The Romanian public administration space, the subject of this next chapter, is an
active and dynamic player in the global debate of public administration reforms. The
globalization forces that affect governance everywhere certainly have an impact in
Romania as well. Over the last two decades, Romanian society has transitioned
from a centrally planned, communist dictatorship with crumbling infrastructure and
a stifled democracy to a newly integrated member of the European Union. Most
political, economic, and administrative reforms that took place over this period were
affected by these two monumental realities: the communist heritage and the European
aspirations. As Romania’s interaction with globalization was filtered by these two
realities, the dismantling of the old communist state and meeting the criteria for
European integration became the palpable facets of globalization (Birzea, 2005a,
2005b; Crăciun, 2008; Crăciun & Collins, 2008a, 2008b; Hâncean, 2009a, 2009b).
In the 2008a article, Varieties of Legacies: A Critical Review of Public
Administration Reform in East Central Europe, authors Hinrik and Meyer-Sahling
discuss the public administration heritage of nations in former communist nations
like Romania. They point to a common mistake made by the European Union and
other international agencies, of lumping all former communist nations together and
recommending uniform reform policies. The fundamental mistake of the past 20
years of administrative reform has been the implementation of reform policies
solely to appease the international community without regard for other ideological
options or contextual realities (Goetz & Wollmann, 2001). Romania has transitioned
from a unique brand of centralized and highly politicized communist administra-
tion, with close supervision and subjective rules interpretation, to an immature
democracy built on pluralistic and transparent principles. Even if labels and
institutions might have changed, the legacy in people’s minds and behavior still
persists. Unfortunately, there was no accurate recipe for this transition; therefore the
modernization process was slower than expected and more difficult to account for.
As with other nations, the European Union in Romania had to change its expecta-
tions from “best practices” to a “good fit” as it attempted to increase administrative
efficiency and government performance. The belief underlying this move toward

in Economics, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-27009-8_3
68 3 The Europeanization of Romania in the Globalization Context
modernization was that an increase in administrative performance will increase

government performance. However, finding and implementing the appropriate
administrative paradigms was and is a challenge, since even developed nations with
long democratic and objective administrative traditions are in search of better
administrative models to cope with globalization.
As the reform efforts in Romania were externally supported and financed by the
European Union, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the major
trustees of globalization, they provided the reform model that Romania followed
(Gabel & Whitten, 1997). The involvement of these organizations in the transforma-
tion process of public administrations in Romania was, and continues to be neces-
sary, in that they act as political, technical, and external stimulus and guarantors of
reforms. The challenge for the Romanian reformers is to understand the deep roots
and the true causes of their realities and to buffer or oscillate between administrative
and cultural traditions and external modernization efforts. Foreign assistance and
impetus cannot replace the efforts of Romanian reformers; instead it should support,
guide, and speed up the process and its implementation.
3.1 The Historical and Cultural Contexts of Romanian

Public Administration
According to Schmidt’s categorization of nations, Romania at the dawn of the 1989

revolution was a simple polity ruled by a single communist party (Bache, 2010).
The public administration tradition, starting with the modern building of Romania
in the late nineteenth century, was heavily influenced by the French administrative
system (Hitchins, 1996). Additional traditions had left their mark upon the public
administrators’ psyche given the fact that prior to the nineteenth century, Romania
was “at the cross-roads of civilizations” (Huntington, 1996). The western region of
Transylvania was influenced by the Austrian–Hungarian Empire; the Russian
Empire influenced the eastern region of Moldova; the southern region of Walachia
had a rich Ottoman heritage. In the period after World War II, all of it was under
direct influence of the Soviet empire and its communist ideology.
Reform literature in the past 20 years reveals a wide spectrum of perspectives
regarding the communist regime, from condemnation and blame all the way to con-
doning and even praising it. Some experts, including this author, assign a great deal
of relevance to the heritage of the communist era; after all, public administration
was an essential part of communism and the failure of the communist system is
associated with failure of communist-style administration. A system that was
entrenched for so long and so deeply left significant marks upon the population as a
whole and public administration in particular, as a result “both academic and non-
academic circles have therefore commonly stressed the need to ‘overcome’ the
communist legacy” (Meyer-Sahling, 2008a).
3.1 The Historical and Cultural Contexts of Romanian Public Administration 69
The fundamental principle of Weberian bureaucracy is the separation of elected

politicians and the objective, non-political public administrators who operate
according to the rule of law. This might have been the case on paper, but in reality
few Romanian public administrators were not members of the Romanian Communist
Party (RCP). The RCP came to power in 1947 and ruled the nation under an extreme
form of socialism and later dictatorship as the owner/operator of all the means of
production, outlawing all political competition. During the 1960s, a Soviet-style
nationalization of lands took place granting the RCP even more power. The public
administration machinery, akin to the party itself and inspired by its doctrine, was
characterized by a “high sense of destiny and an almost divine appointment sense
of superiority.” In his 1992 book, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of
Communism, Kornai explains this sense of ideological superiority and apostolic
zeal that characterizes communist public administrators:
The adherents of the official ideology are imbued with the Messianic belief that socialism
is destined to save mankind. The conviction that the socialist system is superior to the capi-
talist one is one of the most important ingredients in the ideology. The main assumption
behind this is that socialist production relations offer more favorable conditions for devel-
oping the forces of production than capitalist production relations…
…Another important ingredient in socialism’s sense of superiority is moral ascendancy,
even though it does not count as a prime criterion in the competition between the systems.
The official ideology states that socialism is a purer, nobler system that ensures social
justice and equality. People are transformed under this system, as they place themselves,
voluntarily and increasingly, in the service of the common good, so conquering their own
selfishness and individualism. (Kornai, 1992, p. 109)
This sense of superiority, still persistent today in the minds and attitudes of some
public administrators, is a major hindrance in reform initiatives. Private property
being forbidden, the viable alternative for social status expression was a public-
bureaucratic position, preferably with an impressive sounding title.
The members of the bureaucracy have prestige. This applies first and foremost within the
bureaucracy, where a member in a higher position has prestige in the eyes of a member in a
lower position. Under the system (save among a few exceptional professions such as schol-
ars, scientists, artists, and sports figures, who have their own yardsticks of prestige), the
level of the position attained in the bureaucracy is the sole measure of rank. (Kornai, 1992,
p. 136)
In the communist political party and its administration system, actual salary was
not particularly high but the real benefits came from the influence each position
carried with it. It was the position that allowed an individual to use state resources
for personal use, a practice widely utilized and accepted by society and a major
generator of corruption. Under communism, most posts were assigned not on merit
but on belonging to the right political network within the communist party.
In the revolution of December 1989, Romania began its journey toward global
integration with a negative legacy of hypocrisy, corruption, technical deficiencies,
and ill-maintained national infrastructure. This deterioration was most visible in
the commercial network, transportation, housing, and the health system. The inad-
equacies of the tangible assets of Romania after the fall of communism were
surpassed only by the weakness in human capabilities. In comparison with developed

nations, the workforce was ill prepared in technical and managerial matters and had
a poor work ethic. Most managers were unfamiliar with free-market capitalism, yet
had to “overnight” face the removal of state subsidies and international competition.
This led to massive lay-offs, factory shutdowns, and early retirements, factors con-
tributing to the socioeconomic tensions of the early 1990s. The most visible tension
surrounded privatization efforts. The traditional communist government system in
Romania dominated all walks of life through an all-encompassing public sector
with few elements of private life. The early 1990s necessitated plans and schemes
for the privatization of state assets, a difficult matter with numerous setbacks and
mistakes. Like in other parts of the communist bloc, the methods by which the
emerging class of owners privatized the state assets were highly questionable and
deeply political (Giosan, 2008).
Even if the political system ruling Romania changed very quickly, the public
administrator operating the country could not be replaced overnight. Regardless of
the political powers that came to govern in the early years, it seemed that the
implementation of reformed public policies were inefficient and filled with corrup-
tion. At the same time, the opening of the borders encouraged large-scale migration
of young Romanian professionals, which resulted in an even higher burden on those
who stayed behind. The transition from a communist dictatorship to a functional
democracy and a free-market economy imbued the reshaping of the entire Romanian
society with deep implications for public administrators. The new liberal realities,
and especially the integration desire that followed, necessitated a redefinition of the
relationship between government and the private sector along with a reorganization
of governance through new tasks and profiles. In the words of Hinrik and
Meyer-Sahling:
The transition to constitutional democracy meant that the relation between politics and
public administration had to be re-defined, public administration had to be brought under
the rule of law, a sphere of autonomous local self-government had to be carved out and
professional, politically neutral civil service systems had to be built on the ruins of the com-
munist nomenclature system. (Meyer-Sahling, 2008a)
A number of authors marveled at the slow progress of public administration

reform after the revolution of 1989 (Nunberg, 1999; Verheijen & Rabrenovic, 2001),
but research has concluded that the former rulers and public administrators with a
communist-style mentality were the main opponents of reform and their behavior
has persisted to this day:
The discrepancy between formal rules and administrative practices is commonly argued to
remain a hallmark of post-communist administrations. Institutional instability and a prefer-
ence for personalistic and discretionary governance have remained familiar since the days
of the communist regimes (Meyer-Sahling, 2008b).
The conclusion was that habits and practices learned during the communist
era by public administrators were difficult to remove from their hearts and minds.
In particular, the practice of political parties intervening in personnel assignment is
still a practice commonly accepted to this day (Dimitrov, Goetz & Wollmann, 2006;
Goetz & Wollmann, 2001; Meyer-Sahling, 2008a).
3.2 Romania Prior to the European Integration 71
3.2 Romania Prior to the European Integration
In analyzing the administrative realities in Romania and also necessary reforms, a

possible error is to place an exclusive emphasis on its communist legacy or to use
culture and traditions as excuses against modernization. Besides the communist and
Ottoman legacies, of particular interest for public administration reformers are the
events that took place in the early 1990s after the fall of the communist system and
before European integration. Foreign experts evaluating reform progress in Romania
point to the negative impact of an inexperienced multi-party system in this transition
period and the positive impact of European integration with its pre-adherence finan-
cial and technical assistance (Johnson, 2008; Petersone, 2008a, 2008b). Once com-
munism was discredited, the natural course of action was to transition from a central
administration tightly controlled by a single party system to a modern democratic
government emulating the public sector of the European Union (Hesse, 1998).
In his 2001 article Making Sense of Post-communist Central Administration:
Modernization, Europeanization or Latinization, Goetz points to the fact that the
motivation of European integration was the most significant factor in the reform
process of former communist nations. In preparation for European integration,
Romania had to alter its legal system, public administration structure, and finance
mechanisms to meet the criteria set out by the European “acquis communautaire.”
It had to establish the appropriate coordination systems, train a new class of civil
servants capable of operating at European standards, and build the appropriate
administrative capabilities (Dimitrova, 2002; Grabbe, 2002).
Grzymala-Busse in her 2007 book, Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition
and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies, along with other authors,
outlines both the importance new political parties had in shaping the new public
administration, and their inexperience in governance and providing public services
(Meyer-Sahling, 2006; O’Dwyer, 2006). Of particular importance and a source of
major political and international tension was (and still is) the practice of offering
public administration posts in exchange for support during electoral campaigns
(Giosan, 2008; Negrescu, 2002). This was a particularly delicate issue during the
privatization period when state-owned assets were sold to private interests on ques-
tionable terms or when new leadership appointments were made to state-owned
companies. Furthermore, global issues such as the economic and financial
crises, public debt and the welfare system, labor productivity, IMF and World Bank
conditionality, were all issues that shaped public administration reform efforts in
Romania (Păunescu, 2008; Mărgineanu, 2001).
3.2.1 The Political and Legal Conditions of the Early 1990s
The period following the collapse of communism in the early 1990s was best char-
acterized by chaos and uncertainty. Fundamental, existential questions had to be
answered since the people’s long-held beliefs promulgated by years of communist
propaganda were severely shaken. To complicate matters further, the period of the
Romanian revolution coincided with a major tectonic shift in the development of
globalization. As mentioned in Chap. 1, Friedman (2005) referred to the year 1989
as the year that began the present global transformation “when the wall [Berlin]
came down and the windows [Microsoft] went up.” Being integrated overnight into
the “information era” with its 24 h news channels profoundly altered the conscious-
ness and also the perspective people had of themselves, their country, and other
countries around them. The population of Romania could now freely communicate,
travel, and experience the realities of Western Europe and around the world, and it
became apparent how reprobate their nation was. The 1989 revolution was charac-
terized by exuberance and enthusiasm with the population believing that once the
dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was removed, all societal problems would fix them-
selves naturally. In the period after the revolution, it became painfully real how
distant Romania was from Europe and how difficult it would be to catch up; there-
fore the nation entered a stage of quiet desperation and apathy (Dobre, 2010).
This distance was perhaps nowhere more apparent and more painful than in the
public policy and administration area, where Romania faced an acute discrepancy
between itself and the European Union in several key governmental areas. Dobre, in
her 2010 article Europeanization and New Patterns of Multi-level Governance in
Romania, outlined some of the political and administrative issues facing the coun-
try’s desire for European integration in the early years. She points to a number of
“inhibiting domestic factors” that had to be overcome, first politically and then
administratively, in order that Romania might be on a path to integration. Naturally,
like other experts, she also points to the necessity of transforming the
centralist state tradition, which was maintained and reinforced after the historical critical
juncture of the end of communism by a constellation of nationalist, former communist
actors who held power and centralist beliefs. (Dobre, 2010).
At this point, it behooves us to make the distinction between the rejection of the
Ceauşescu dictatorship on one hand and communist ideology and practice on the
other. The early leaders of Romania, like so many of their counterparts throughout
the Communist Bloc, were former communist leaders seeking to reform the system,
not abolish it. They organized themselves into the National Salvation Front (FSN),
which later turned into the Party of Social Democracy of Romania (PDSR), who,
along with the nationalist parties of National Unity (PUNR) and the Greater
Romania Party (PRM), ruled Romania until 1996. They strongly opposed any pros-
pect of reform or global integration, but instead dealt with the natural outcomes of
a globalized economy using outdated instruments and paradigms. The elections of
1996 mark the turn away from centralist administration and toward western, liberal
principles, when the Democratic Convention of Romania came to power, uniting
such reformist parties as the National Agrarian Christian-Democrat Party (PNŢCD),
The National Liberal Party (PNL), The Democratic Party (PD) and the Democratic
Union of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR). This development reflected a determi-
nation on the part of the Romanian people to promote true democratic reform and
integrate the nation into the international community.
Given Romania’s legalistic, French-style public administration heritage, any

type of reform had to begin with reforming the legal system (Matei & Dogaru,
2011; Petersone, 2008a, 2008b). Considering the newly found political freedom of
the early 1990s, along with the pluralism of public policies methods, there was a
significant increase in the passing of new legislation by all the political constella-
tions mentioned earlier. In 1991, Romania began the rebuilding of its legal space
with the passing of a new constitution, establishing Romania as “a democratic soci-
ety governed by the rule of law.”1 In the following decade, the legislative journey of
the newly elected parliament along with several emergency ordinances issued by the
various governments constituted a colorful and sometimes contradictory legal space
(Comșa, 2008; Munteanu, 2006). This period of legal “trial-and-error” was actually
the discovery and the forming of the legislative process that traditional democracies
take for granted (Gunn & Hogwood, 1984; Lasswell, 1951). Dye (1995) describes
the normal, if not necessarily correct, process through which new laws were passed
in Romania as in most other young democracies:
the formulation of the public policy takes place within the bureaucratic governments, the
offices of the interest groups, the rooms of the legislative committees, within the meetings
of the specialized committees… (Dye, 1995).
This was certainly the case for the Romanian legislative space, where public
policy was negotiated primarily by politicians, political parties, labor unions, spe-
cialists, technocrats, and other types of elites instead of the general public.
With regard to the European integration process, most authors consider the year
1993 as a turning point, when the Romania government signed the Association
Agreement with the European Economic Community (EEC), thus becoming an asso-
ciated state (Bărbulescu, 2001, 2005; Birzea, 2001, 2005a, 2005b; Morar, 2002).
This coincided fortunately with the Copenhagen Accord, where the European Union
stated its determination to further integrate and established the conditions for the
integration of new members. In specific terms it required the new applicants to have
the following:
• Stable public institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human and
minorities’ rights.
• A functioning free-market economy with the ability to face global and European
competitive pressures.
• The administrative capabilities to assume membership rights and responsibilities
in the social, political, and economic areas (Presidency of the European Council
Conclusions, Copenhagen, 1993).
By 1995, Romania decided to apply for European Union candidacy, and with the
favorable 1997 decision of the European Commission it changed its status to official
candidate. Beginning in 1998, Romania’s progress was periodically and formally
monitored by the European Commission to assess the accomplishment of the mem-
bership criteria established in the Copenhagen Accord. According to Morar (2002),
1
The Constitution of Romania of 1991, art. 1, paragraph 3.
Romania could finally be perceived by the international community as a unitary state,

characterized by a pluralistic political party system with several election cycles, a strong
executive and a majority logical system. (Morar, 2002)
Unfortunately, civil society and its participation in the policy-making process

continued to be feeble (Bădescu, 2008). An outlining and a brief explanation of the
legal acts that were passed would aid our understanding of both the transition that
Romanian public administrators experienced, as well as some of the remaining
challenges Europeanization in Romania faces.
In her 2010 books, Romanian Public Management Reform—Theoretical and
Empirical Studies, Volume 1 and 2, Matei highlights and comments on some of the
most important legislative acts and government ordinances that shaped the Romanian
public administrative space and also Europeanized it. Starting with 1994, the year
after the Copenhagen Accord, the following laws were enacted in Romania:
• The Law on local public finances (189/1998), providing the framework for local
finance mechanisms to facilitate financial autonomy;
• The Law on local fees and taxes (27/1994), establishing the conditions and
types of taxes local governments could collect and administer;
• The Law on public domain (213/1998), establishing the separation of local and
central public property, as well as of the public and private property;
• The Law on government companies’ privatization (44/1998), establishing the
transferability of government companies from the central to the local govern-
ment and setting up the methodology for their possible privatization;
• The Laws on civil servants (188/1999) and ministerial accountability
(115/1999), outlining the rights and responsibilities of civil servants and the prin-
ciples of transparency and accountability required by all ministries. These were
“enhanced” by Government Ordinance 71/2002 clarifying the functionality
of “issues of local interest.” These laws were further complemented by Law
161/2003, passed with the express purpose of curtailing corruption and requiring
further transparency of public dignitaries, civil servants, and businesspeople;
• The Law on the restitution of property rights (1/2000) complementing Laws
18/1991 and 169/1997. This was a necessary step as many private properties
confiscated by the government during the communist era had to be given back to
their rightful owners;
• The Law on local public administration (215/2001), outlining the jurisdiction
of local authorities and holding the elected official accountable to the local citi-
zen, and the Law giving free access to public information (544/2001).
The year 1998 marked another important turning point in the Europeanization
process. In the period that followed, a number of legislative acts were passed, some
replacing old laws; others, completing the deficiencies in the current legislation;
others to deal with the economic and financial issues facing Romania, and some
responding to the Europeanization impetus. In 2003, the constitution of 1991 was
“upgraded” to reflect major changes in Romanian society, the desire for integration
into the European Union, and the reforming of public administration. The spirit of
these changes was a significant shift toward “decentralization, local autonomy, and
devolution of public services.”2 A few changes worth mentioning in the 2003

constitution:
• The European principles of decentralization, local autonomy, and devolution of
public services are applicable to all administrative-territorial units (counties) of
Romania.
• A county council is elected locally and responsible for coordinating and manag-
ing all activities within its jurisdiction to achieve the best results.
• According to Law 340/2004, the central government appoints a county prefect
for each county, who represents the central government and serves as a “connec-
tor” between the local administrative government and the various central authori-
ties. His/her responsibilities are established by law and there are no subordination
relations between him/her and the local authorities.
Besides the legislative acts passed by the Parliament of Romania in the period
leading up to the integration into the European Union, the various governments
passed a number of Government Resolutions and Emergency Ordinances designed
to clarify and implement the laws of the Parliament. According to some authors
researching this period, many of those government acts did not complement or clar-
ify the laws passed by Parliament but rather confused, even contradicted them
(Bondar, 2007; Comșa, 2008; Munteanu, 2006). Few such government decisions
are worth mentioning:
• Government Resolutions 1006 and 1007/2001 approving the strategy for speed-
ing up the reform in public administration and the introducing of new informa-
tion technology in public administration.
• Government Resolution 856/2003 establishing the “Project Management Unit
for Public Administration Reform” a governmental level unit that assured
the adequate management of the future loan programming adjustment from the
World Bank, designed to reform the public administration and enhance its
capabilities.
• Regarding public administration in Romania, the government entrusts the
Ministry of Administration and Interior to manage all issues pertaining to reform,
institutional restructuring, program and legislative implementation according to
European Union standards and for the express purpose of European integration.
• Considering the European experience, Government Resolution 747/2003 decides
to significantly reduce the number of governmental ministries to only 15, under
even the European average.
• In order to approve the “Framework Regulation” of the functioning of local
county councils mentioned above, the government passed Ordinance 35/2002
and the guiding by-laws of the territorial-administrative unit, Government
Ordinance 53/2002.
• On the issue of local public finances, the government adopts emergency ordi-
nance 45/2003 to establish the framework, principles, and procedures of local
funds administration.
2
The Romanian Constitution of 2003, Article 120, alg. 1.
In 2006, the Romanian Parliament adopted the Law on decentralization (286/2006)

to further strengthen local self-government. Its main purpose was to classify the ter-
ritorial-administrative units according to their administrative capacity and to clearly
delineate the responsibilities of the central, county, and local governing authorities.
Paramount in this law was the requirement that central authorities consult the local
ones on all issues and the provision of financial assistance for the implementation
process.
By 2006 the Romanian legal space had evolved from a simple polity inherited
from the communist regime to a complex and compound polity system. The global
pressures exerted upon the society, the natural domestic traditions and the pressures
coming from the European Union transformed the dominant centralized paradigm
of governance into a decentralized, autonomous, and more European public admin-
istration. Naturally, the process was incomplete; however, at least the legal frame-
work was in place for reforms to follow.
3.2.2 The Challenges of the Europeanization Process
The shortcomings of the Romanian public administration reform and its legal space
tend to be obvious and striking in contrast to its progresses. It is not my purpose to
simply gloss over them, as even if I do not believe these shortcomings are the root
of the problem; rather, I view them as symptoms of deeper, cultural issues that will
be addressed later. Nevertheless, an additional focus on the major legal and admin-
istrative challenges facing the Europeanization process in Romania is required.
Officially, in the year 2000, the European Council decided to begin integration
negotiations with Romania using the Copenhagen Accord of 1993 and the European
acquis communautaire. By 2005 Romania had conditionally completed all chapters
of negotiations and by 2007 it was a fully integrated member into the European
Union. The reforms imposed by this integration event had as their purpose a transi-
tion from a “normative-legal” perspective to an “analytical-managerial” perspective
(Matei & Matei, 2010a, 2010b). There was a strong emphasis on making public
administration more efficient and on streamlining the coordination among public
policies. According to Grabbe’s, 2008 book, Transformational powers of EU.
Europeanization through the Conditions of Accession in Central and Eastern
Europe, the following deficiencies had to be rectified by Romania in its
Europeanization process:
• The predominant legalistic approach of policy-making
• The insufficient coordination and correlation of the public policies with the
budget
• The insufficient coordination of the policy-making between the central and the
local levels; the limited capacity for policy formulation
• The lack of a gradual and staged approach in policy-making
• The evaluation of the policies has not yet become a method of learning and
adjusting the policies or the programs currently under implementation or those to
be pursued
• The lack of a correlation in the design of the budget and the planning of the
policies
• The involvement of the Romanian academia and civil society was still limited
These deficiencies were also highlighted in the State Monitoring Reports, used
by the European Commission for tackling issues on Romania since 1998. The gov-
ernment responded through the “Programmatic Adjustment Loan” (PAL), through
which it committed itself to the reforming of the policy-making process by adopting
new procedures for development, implementation, monitoring, and evaluating
public policy (World Bank, 2004; World Bank Report, 2008). This initiative was a
subcomponent of the overall “Public-Sector Reform” designed to “improve the pre-
dictability and effectiveness of governmental policies.” Naturally, the European
Commission and its Europeanization instruments that I shall discuss in a later sec-
tion of this chapter played out a decisive role in the reforming of the public-policy
process. Worth mentioning here is the twinning program “Strengthening the
Institutional Capacity of the Romanian Government for Managing Public Policies
and the Decision-making Process,” designed to reform the development of institu-
tional structures and the enhancement of the legal and procedural framework.
The first issue that most European Commission reports underline is the lack of
transparency in policy decisions and public administration. The laws and their
implementation methods ought to represent the natural outcome of a civilized, con-
structive, and transparent social negotiation among politicians of all spectrums,
journalists, and representatives of civil society. This in turn is a mechanism that
reduces corruption, an issue that Romanian political and administrative class is still
struggling with. Some of the instruments designed to fight corruption are informa-
tion accessibility, political party financing, IT procurement, wealth statement, dec-
larations of existing conflicts of interests and incompatibilities, etc. According to
Matei (2009a, 2009b), there are three essential prerequisites for reforming the rela-
tions between public institutions and citizens: (1) access to information, (2) consul-
tation and (3) civic participation. Once again, Bădescu, in his 2008 report
Democratization, values and school education, talks about the fact that “civic par-
ticipation” is paramount in reducing corruption and ensuring good governance, yet
that very civil participation in the Romanian society is weak and often uninterested
in the public process. The Europeanization process has changed the perspective of
the civil servant from the old “we know how to decide what’s better for you” to the
European “we consult you and decide with you,” yet few people are interested in
civilized consultation.
The second major issue that is a direct result of the lack of transparency and
conflict of interests among the public administrators and their political masters is
the issue of corruption, a plague that seems to engulf all former communist nations.
The United Nations, through their Global Program against Corruption, gives the
following definition:
the essence of the phenomenon of corruption consists in the abuse of power, achieved with
the purpose to obtain a personal profit, directly or indirectly, for himself/herself or other
person, in the public or private sector.
During the early 2000s, The Freedom House of Washington, DC, Inc., an
independent auditor of the Romanian government and part of the 2001–2004
National Anti-corruption Strategy, concluded the following:
During 2000–2004, Romania has created an impressive arsenal of legal instruments for
transparency, accountability and anticorruption, and it seems that some of them have gener-
ated positive results.
Nevertheless, The Freedom House report does state that corruption is still a
major problem in Romania, which is in line with the European Commission moni-
toring reports that have reached the same conclusion since 1998. The following
have been identified as major challenges to the fight against corruption:
• The level of implementation of the anti-corruption legislation in effect.
• The limited use and availability of administrative levers to fight against
corruption.
• Poor coordination among national and international agencies, governmental
structures, and the competent bodies in the fight against corruption.
• No real autonomy of prosecutors.
• Too many contradictory legislative initiatives and administrative normatives.
The recommendations of these and other reports was obvious and in accord with
what the international community was proposing since the early 1990s. They rec-
ommended the strengthening of the rule of law, where all citizens and institutions
are equal before the law; there is equal respect for all human rights and a clear sys-
tem of checks and balances among the political and administrative powers. Further,
they recommend the significant increase in good governance. with clear and mea-
surable goals, efficient activities, and the capacity to solve the needs of the citizens
in a timely manner. Next was the recommendation to clearly establish the principle
of accountability and apply it to all government activity, starting with policy formu-
lation and all the way to its implementation and evaluation. Finally, and in the view
of this author, most importantly there were recommendations regarding the preven-
tion of corruption acts through the principles of communication, consultation, and
cooperation by all societal actors including especially civil society. In a real sense,
many of these recommendations are still valid today after Romania’s integration
into the European Union. I believe that Romania has the necessary legal space to be
properly integrated into the European Union and, through it, the global world, even
though the implementation of that legal space proves to be challenging.
3.3 Europeanization Principles in Romania
The literature on Romanian public administration reform over the last 15 years has
focused almost exclusively on the impetus of Europeanization to the detriment of
almost any other perspective. This process has been studied, tested, financed, and
implemented in varying shapes and forms in Romania. Previously, this volume
3.3 Europeanization Principles in Romania 79
broadly and briefly outlined the Europeanization process from the European Union’s
point of view along with its legislative, traditional, and historical backgrounds. In
this next section, I shall turn my attention to a brief discussion of the Europeanization
principles of public administration reform from the Romanian perspective, along
with their different nuances and results (Bărbulescu, 2001, 2005; Demmke, 2004;
Iancu, 2010).
According to Andersen (2004), newly integrated member states such as Romania
relinquish part of their sovereignty to the European Union and create a common
society with similarities in economics, agriculture, services, and defense. Implicitly,
they accept European actions and norms as superior to their own and respond by
internalizing them into their national legal and administrative systems according to
the pre-established methods and institutional agreements. According to a number of
authors previously cited, Europeanization is the artifact of this peaceful negotiation
and civilized dialogue (Featherstone & Radaelli, 2003; Knill & Lehmkuhl, 1999;
Olsen, 2002). Generally speaking, Europeanization is supposed to be a two-way,
mutually beneficial, dynamic, and open dialogue between the European Union and
its members. Central to this process is the Europeanization of public administration,
a significant component in the expansion of the European Union and the integration
of new member states. Subsequent to the expansion decisions of Copenhagen,
Madrid, and Luxemburg, the European Council established SIGMA as an evalua-
tion instrument of public administration reform in Central Eastern Europe.
According to the Council, the European public administration space:
… is gradually taking shape. In order to implement Community decisions, the civil servants
of the Member States meet frequently. They get to know each other and exchange views and
experience. Patterns of communication develop which have an impact on decision-making,
so that common solutions are often found. Officials and experts from European Member
States are becoming used to examining issues jointly, including those having to do with
public administration. A European administrative space is emerging, with its own traditions
that build on but surpass the distinctive administrative traditions of the Union. Administrative
reliability, which is necessary for the rule of law, effective implementation of policies and
economic development are some of the key characteristics of this space. (Fournier, 1998)
This space has very pragmatic implications for all Member States and candidate
members alike, as they must adopt and maintain the appropriate administrative laws
to ensure adequate administrative capacity. Accordingly, all administrative rules
must be based on common European principles, and uniformly implemented within
the European territory (Cardona, 1999). These principles provide reliability, pre-
dictability, openness, transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability in
public administration. For my current purposes, I will follow the condensed research
of Matei, Matei, and Iancu in their 2011 study, The Internalization of the European
Administrative Space Principles in National Public Administration. Case Study:
Romania, which focuses on the “rule of law,” “openness to citizens,” and “account-
ability” as main indicators of administrative capacity. I believe that these are the
three fundamental pillars in the Europeanization process of the Romanian public
administration, and the above-mentioned study analyzes the level of acceptability
and implementability of these basic European notions by Romanian public

administrators.
Generally speaking, the rule of law is perceived as the main mechanism for reli-
ability and predictability in any society and any governance system. In the area of
public administration, it produces a healthy bureaucracy where the actions and
behaviors of public administrators occur according to the law and not their own or
someone else’s personal preferences. In the absence of the rule of law, arbitrary
personal power, cronyism, and other subjective deviations might take place. The
rule of law does not exclude discretionary acts by the public administrator, but it
ensures that they are done in good faith for the public’s interest using fair, non-
discriminatory procedures that respect the principle of proportionality. Based on the
SIGMA papers evaluating the creation of the European administrative space in
Romania, as well as the works of other scholars researching administrative reforms
in Central and East European nations, the rule of law refers specifically to the stabil-
ity of the law and the political consensus regarding its creation and implementation.
Romania and its former communist Eastern European counterparts have experi-
enced an unstable and contradictory legal period after the fall of communism. The
Monitoring Reports published by the European Commission during 1998–2004
mention an unstable and unpredictable legal environment as a major correction
point required in Romania’s case (Agh, 2003; The 1998–2004 Monitoring Reports).
On the issue of political consensus regarding the final version of the law and its
implementation methods, Romania experienced a very interesting nuance in the
period before its 2007 integration. Politicians of all stripes and the population in
general were optimistic and positive regarding European integration, focusing
mainly on the benefits of European membership and not so much on its responsibili-
ties. This general euphoria ensured a speedy adoption of all necessary European
laws, without careful consideration on either Romania’s ability to implement them,
or their correct contextualization in the Romanian reality. There were very few pub-
lic debates and consultations, almost no policy simulation, and very little engage-
ment of the general public and individual public administrators (Iancu, 2010). In a
sense, as I shall later expand, this quick legal adoption is part of the Romanian
heritage and tradition that declaratively accepts all terms and conditions of
Europeanization, but in reality will be indifferent if things stay the same. In the year
after European integration, the Europeanization experts realized that the Romanian
political class and its general society has not internalized The Rule of Law as the
paramount legal and administrative principle upon which a modern society is to
be built. Specifically, it pointed to the necessity to clearly separate the roles of the
Romanian Parliament and Government through the reduction of governmental deci-
sions and emergency ordinances.
The second fundamental component of the Europeanization process is openness
toward citizens. In contrast to the centralized, dictatorial form of government that
Romania experienced under communism, the democratic, liberal European govern-
ment set out to cultivate and foster an inclusive and open government. According to
Matei and Matei in their 2010 European Administration. Normative Fundaments
3.3 Europeanization Principles in Romania 81
and Systemic Models, openness and transparency ought to be part of a concrete

reality since public administration is the servant and not the master of a society.
They state:
The development of different social phenomena, such as the corruption or mal-administration,
must be controlled by the society. This urges the administration to become available and to
offer sufficient information to the exterior. As such, openness and transparency refer to these
exact attitudes and constitute the necessary instruments for achieving the rule of law and the
equality before the law and its representatives (Matei & Matei, 2010a, 2010b).
To ensure that “mal-administration” or corruption does not develop in the

European administrative space, statements of reason, open access to public records,
and formal citizen complaint mechanisms were set up to accompany all administra-
tive norms and practices. The OECD of 1996 introduced a new concept of “open
administration,” under which public administration was redefined as a public good,
and the participation of citizens, regardless of their age, gender, ethnic background
or economic status, was the major guarantor of its legitimacy (Iancu, 2010).
In Romania, openness toward the citizen was implemented by pointing to and
sometimes idealizing western principles and practices. Later on, we shall see that
based upon Matei et al.’s (2011) report, there was a significant clash between the
Romanian public administrators’ perception between the quality of domestic and
European public administration. The initial European Commission Monitoring
Report of 1998 underlined that “the Romanian administrative system was character-
ized by administrative weakness, the secret of public information and the deteriora-
tion of the equitable application of the law” (EU Commission Monitoring Report on
Romania, 1998). As a response to that initial report, the Romanian government
adopted the “National Information Strategy,” with the express purpose of quickly
implementing “the information society” and increasing access to issues of efficient
public administration. The subsequent Commission Reports, even if they noticed
the slight improvements in the overall openness toward the citizens in Romania,
pointed to the following corrections still necessary:
• In 1999 there was an issue regarding media censorship
• The increase in visibility of the Ombudsman and the non-discrimination of the
gypsy population in policy-making
• Efficient and transparent financial management in public and private entities,
both at the local and central level
• Access to legal documentation must be made transparent
By the early 2000s the Romanian government responded to these pressures and
increased openness toward its citizens. In 2001 there was an initiative on
“e-administration,” but it lacked the constitutional right to information and informa-
tion on local fiscal policies was not placed online; nevertheless, by 2003 the
Commission concluded that “if properly implemented, Law 52/2003 could signifi-
cantly improve the decision-making process.”
The third issue of accountability, or self-responsibility, which, according to the

OECD of 1999, is the true indicator of observing the principles of the rule of law,
openness, transparency, impartiality, and equality. Romanian public administrators
still had some gaps to fill regarding it. Only upon these fundamental democratic
principles can one build an effective, efficient, reliable, and predictable public
administration. Self-responsibility means that everyone, regardless of position and
department, is open to scrutiny and ready to give account for their actions. All peo-
ple involved in government have someone who they give account to, thereby
protecting both the public interest and their own. The challenge of implementing
such a transformation in a formerly communist nation like Romania is that simply
dictating to people how they should act is not sufficient. The change in the attitudes
of public administrators takes much longer and is not easily measured. According to
Matei et al. (2011), in Romania:
…public employees tend to assume that the responsibility for mal-practices belongs to the
heads of their organizations or even to the citizens themselves. The eventual absence of
internal evaluation and control of practices would most likely conclude the lack of internal
salience of any accountability-related norm (Matei et al., 2011)
The lack of self-responsibility in public administrators is the major source

of corruption. Matei, Roșca, and Tudorel, in their (2009) book, Corruption: An
Economic and Social Analysis, refer to the fact that public administrators in
Romania, as in most transitional nations, face the presumption of corruption given
the past practices of the communist era. They are perceived by society at large
and even by their own employers as more corrupt than they actually are. Self-
responsibility is an issue pertaining foremost to the human resources involved in
public administration, and on that matter, in 2000, the Civil Service By-Laws were
enacted by the Romanian Parliament. Regardless of the specific rules giving the citi-
zenry access to all public information, real accountability of the administrative
authorities did not occur (EU Commission Monitoring Report on Romania, 2001).
The creation of the Ombudsman office to hold all public officials accountable in
contrast was perceived as a positive development in the creation of an accountable
public administration culture. By 2004, the Commission report clearly stated that
“free access to public information proved to be an important mechanism promoting
public accountability” and encouraged the creation of a specific institution that
would implement the law of free access to public information.
The major Europeanization principles that were stressed by the European
Commission Monitoring Reports beginning in 1998 and adopted by Romania were
the rule of law, openness toward their citizens, and accountability in public admin-
istration. Naturally, these were not the only ones and their implementation is still a
work in progress. Even if the legislative framework and the necessary institutions
exist, the practice and implementation of those principles is not yet at European
standards or expectations. However, I am confidently prudent that the principles of
Europeanization will eventually take root in Romanian public life.
3.4 Europeanization Instruments in Romania 83
3.4 Europeanization Instruments in Romania
Next, I will turn my attention to the instruments and processes utilized in

Europeanizing Romania. As mentioned in Chap. 2, the European Union is a com-
plex and dynamic polity, and into this complexity it has integrated Romania with all
its distinctiveness, heritage, and practices with the aim of creating an even better,
stronger, more prosperous Europe. According to Demmke (2004), the European
Union integrates its new members through the following instruments: The European
legislation, the negotiation process, administrative cooperation, the decisions of the
European Court of Justice and the administrative networks it has at its disposal.
After the Copenhagen Accord, where the European Council established the condi-
tions for integrating new members, the European Interim Agreement went into
effect. This agreement between the European Community and candidate nations
stated that:
parties will promote the cooperation between their administrative authorities, including by
exchange programs, in order to improve the level of common knowledge of their systems’
structure and functioning (Article 98.)
This integration mandate materialized in the European Union white paper

Preparation of the Associated Countries of Central and Eastern Europe for
Integration into the Internal Market of the Union, and it outlined the specific instru-
ments utilized in Europeanizing the nations of Central and Eastern Europe. They
included:
• Assistance with appraising the costs and benefits of different scenarios of
integration
• Direct and rapid access to complete and up-to-date European Union legislative
texts
• Legal and technical advice regarding the European Union’s legal system, its
interpretation, and implementation into national law
• Information regarding implementation and enforcement mechanisms
• Institutional exchanges
• Financial assistance and access to European programs such as PHARE, Erasmus,
Socrates, and Leonardo da Vinci
By 1997, the European Council began its enlargement procedures utilizing the
above-mentioned road maps for Romania:
…acknowledging the necessity that the former continues and finalizes, with the
Community’s aid, the transition process to a new political and economic system capable of
respecting the rule of law and the human and minority rights, able to exercise political
pluralism based on free and democratic elections and ensure the economic liberalization for
developing a market economy (European council conclusions, 1997).
Table 3.1 Evolution of the negotiation process

Romania
In … opened And closed …
2000 9 Chapters 6 Chapters: Statistics; Small and Medium Size Enterprises; Science
and Research; Education and Professional Training; External
Relations; External and Common Security Policy
2001 8 Chapters 3 Chapters: Law of Commercial Societies; Fishery; Consumer and
Health Protection
2002 13 Chapters 6 Chapters: Economic and Monetary Union; Social Policy; Industrial
Policy; Telecommunications and IT; Culture and Audio-Visual; Union
2003 5 Chapters: Free Movement of Persons; Free Movement of Capital;
Transportation Policy; Taxes; Financial Control
2004 9 Chapters: Free Movement of Services; Competition Policy;
Agriculture; Energy; Regional Policy and coordination of structural
elements; Environment; Justice and Home Affairs; Financial and
Budgetary dispositions; Others
Source: Matei, Matei and Iancu, 2011
This agreement can be viewed as the first formal interaction with the European
Union and the concrete engagement of Western culture with its advanced civiliza-
tion, pluralistic democracy, and economic prosperity. By 1999, in Helsinki, the
European Council was concluding:
Determined to lend a positive contribution to security and stability on the European
continent and in the light of recent developments as well as the Commission’s reports, the
European Council has decided … to begin negotiations with Romania … on the conditions
for entry into the Union and the ensuing Treaty adjustments (European Council Conclusions,
1999).
After 1999, the practicality of pre-integration activity fell into place for Romanian
legislation and administration. It would benefit us to understand the three major
instruments for the Europeanization of Romania: the adoption of the “acquis com-
munautaire,” “pre-accession funding,” and “institutional twinning.”
The adoption of the acquis communautaire was the first instrument of
Europeanization in Romania. Naturally, upon signing the European Integration
Agreement, Romania has agreed in principle to adopt the acquis communautaire.
In practice, all the steps that have been and are being taken now that Romania is a
full-fledged member of the European Union urge the adoption of the acquis in prac-
tice, both in letter and in spirit. The acquis is comprised of all rights and responsi-
bilities of the European Union member states along with the legal norms, acts, and
policies that govern all the activities of the European institutions. It contains the
declarations, actions, positions, signed conventions, and resolutions adopted by
the European Union along with its international agreements. Matei et al. outline the
progression of the adoption of the acquis communautaire into Romania in the table
below (Table 3.1).
3.4 Europeanization Instruments in Romania 85
Given the financial mismanagement during the communist regimes and the
inefficient allocation of resources, most of the nations in Central and Eastern Europe
were economically below their western counterparts. Given the free movement of
labor, there was concern among some groups in Western European countries that
with Eastern integration, there will be too massive of an east-west migration. For
many western European nations, immigration and the strain it places upon their
welfare state is among their chief administrative concern. In this context, conven-
tional wisdom dictated that financial assistance ought to be provided to the Central
and Eastern European nations before and after integration. Some viewed this prac-
tice as a cunning “coercion” mechanism to quickly implement the Europeanization
principles; others saw it as the European Union’s “soft power” mechanisms helping
it voluntarily spread Europeanization. Regardless, from Romania’s perspective,
these funds along with others from the World Bank and recently from the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) constitute the necessary fuel for the reform
momentum. The pre-accession funds that Romania benefited from before its 2007
integration were PHARE, ISPA, and SAPARD.
The PHARE funds were primarily utilized for public institution development
and consolidation by financing the transformation of the Romanian institutions. The
funds were designed to consolidate institutional collaboration across borders, and at
the regional level in the areas of economic development and social cohesion and
nuclear security. The sum received by Romania in 2000–2003 was slightly over one
billion Euros so it could fulfill its political and economic commitments, and build its
public administration capacity. After 2004, the PHARE funds were spread over
multiple years and targeted key sectors such as public administration, agriculture,
the environment, and neighboring nations such as the Republic of Moldova, Serbia,
Ukraine, etc.
The ISPA funds—organized by the European Council of Regulation—were
designated to remedy the Romanian environment and hard infrastructure that was
neglected by decades of communism. Projects such as the modernization of water
treatment plants, heating plans, solid municipal waste, roads, bridges, railways, etc.
were financed through the ISPA funds. Between the years 2000 and 2006, Romania
received an average of 240 million Euros annually.
The SAPARD funds targeted the agriculture sector for the purpose of rural eco-
nomic development and the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy
into Romanian legislation and public administration. The Romanian “National Plan
for Agriculture and Rural Development,” approved in 2000 and revised in August
2003, served as the basis for implementation of the SAPARD programs. In this
period there was an investment of over two billion Euros in the production and dis-
tribution of agriculture and fishery products, the development of rural infrastructure,
the development of the rural economy, and human resources. Firms with viable
perspectives in the agriculture and forestry products were supported and significant
investment was made toward professional training and assistance.
As stated initially, the building of a new and modern administrative capacity is a

major challenge to both developed and developing nations alike. Candidate coun-
tries for European integration like Romania were no exception as they geared up to
meet the criteria established in Madrid. For that purpose, the European Union estab-
lished “twinning” programs as early as 1998, a sort of on-the-job training programs
for public administrators from candidate countries to shadow their counterparts in
member nations and experience first-hand public administration in a European gov-
ernment. The initial priorities were agriculture, the environment, public finance, the
justice department, and other preparatory procedures for structural funds; by now they
cover all areas of the acquis (EU Commission Monitoring Report on Romania, 1998).
Pragmatically speaking, Romanian public administrators interested primarily in
maximizing their power and welfare would adopt the European models of public
administration only if the benefits outweighed the losses. Naturally, Romania was
not the first nation to be integrated into the European Union, so by 2007 the Union
already had an excellent mechanism through which it would build administrative
capacity in newly integrated member states through various twinning initiatives
proving the benefits of integration versus losses. The PHARE programs, designed
to improve the human resource capital of Romania, financed these initiatives.
According to Twinning (2006), between 1998 and 2005, Romania was the candidate
nation with the most twinning programs (119 out of 1110 possible) in all areas
designed to build and modernize public administration capacity. During these twin-
ning exchanges, new European institutional models were analyzed, experienced,
and adopted while technical and financial expertise was acquired along with periodic
monitoring.
According to Sedelmeier in his 2006 article Europeanization in New Members
and Candidate States, the absorption of European norms in public administration
took place through the external stimulus previously mentioned of a pragmatic cost-
benefit analysis and the modeling of public administrators from other European
nations. Even the annual monitoring reports, along with the country reports pro-
duced by the European Commission, listed the benefits of being a member nation in
an effort to advertise membership benefits. Naturally, these lists of European bene-
fits were highly utilized by politicians to convince their electorate of further
Europeanization. These benefits were: a secure political and economic environment
ensuring durable economic development; a predictable and stable business environ-
ment; access to European expertise, market and capital; the single European cur-
rency and market, and access by its citizens to the European labor market.
3.5 Europeanization Effects in Romania
As shown in the previous sections, the Europeanization of the Romanian society—

particularly its government—has been an intentional, systematic, and well-financed
process. Since the integration process is a recent occurrence, it continues in
various formal and informal manners. However, the obvious question regards the
3.5 Europeanization Effects in Romania 87
effectiveness of this undertaking considering all the energy, time, effort, and expense
invested by both the European Union and Romania. Are Romanian public adminis-
trators more “European” today than they were a decade ago? Are there reform areas
within Romania that still must be addressed in spite of all the efforts? Are there limi-
tations to the administrative instruments the European Union has at its disposal?
These are complex issues that do not have simple answers and straightforward solu-
tions. A recent study by Matei et al. (2011), titled Socio-Statistical Research on the
Internalization of European Administrative Space Principles in Romanian Public
Administration, does provide some answers. Their research analyzes both the cur-
rent perceptions of Romanian public administrators regarding the Europeanization
process and the gaps that still exist in the Europeanization effort in Romania.
The Romanian government and its public administrators ought to be the van-
guards of the adoption of European principles—both formal and informal—so they
can provide the necessary infrastructure and stimulus for Romanian society at large
to adequately integrate into the European polity. Europeanization cannot only be
adopted on paper and in theory:
…in this context, the unformalized European acquis, as expressed by the principles of the
European Administrative Space (EAS), becomes a true standard whose internalization at
national administrative level may give us the relevant information on the depth of the
European integration process… (Matei et al., 2011)
Beginning with the fundamental principles of the European administrative space

outlined earlier (rule of law, openness toward citizens, and self-responsibility)
Matei et al. analyzed the internalization of European administrative principles by
Romanian public administrators. Their research was based upon a primary ques-
tionnaire applied to a representative sample of 634 Romanian public administrators
and public employees from central and local administrations, as well as other public
industries such as education, health, etc. The energy and efforts of Europeanizing
the Romanian public administrators has had mixed results, with some positive out-
comes, yet still with many other facets of Europeanization to be internalized.
On the issues of internalizing the rule of law, the survey asked questions regard-
ing legislative sustainability, the elimination of shortcomings in the national admin-
istrative system, the causes of deficiencies in applying administrative rulings, the
necessary conditions for the well-being of administrative activities and the neces-
sary conditions for stabilizing the legislative framework. Matei et al.’s (2011) study
on the Europeanization of Romanian public administrators found the following:
• On the issues of “legislative sustainability,” their findings revealed a low level of
general knowledge regarding the European administrative principles and a per-
ception that the European system is extremely complex.
• On the issue of “eliminating deficiencies in the national administrative system”
that asked questions regarding political consensus, the legitimacy of administra-
tive acts, and the speed, the verification, and implementation of new legislation,
the majority of the respondents questioned the legality of administrative acts
such as emergency ordinances and government resolutions, and were in favor of
severe control in the legislative decision-making process.
• On the issue of “enforcement of administrative rules,” the findings suggest a lack

of instruments and procedures for legal implementation, and inconsistency in
methodology. They point to chronic contradictory legal procedures as the reason
for an inefficient legal framework and the existence of governmental agencies
and ministries that continually issue contradictory and partisan decisions and
ordinances.
• On the issue of “improving the legal framework specific to the administrative
rules,” it was implicit that the European administrative space, being dynamic and
ever-evolving, will require additional legislation and implementation methodol-
ogy to accurately reflect the realities in the Romanian society. However, the pub-
lic administrators surveyed stressed the need to better correlate legal provisions
and to stabilize the legal framework as the paramount improvement initiatives.
• On the issue of the “stability of the legal framework in public administration,”
several studies already point to the overabundance of legal texts and their
frequent amendments that seriously undermined the adoption of European
administrative space principles. A preliminary conclusion seems to indicate that
legal stability will only come with time and practice. The majority of the respon-
dents (46.8 %) answered that it will take a minimum of 5–10 years (38.6 %) of
practice before stability will truly exist.
Openness toward citizens, according to the European administrative space defi-
nition, is first of all the situations where public administrators—national and
European—actually serve their citizens, treat them equally, and do not discriminate
against them. Secondly, it refers to the degree of multiplication and realization of
non-discriminatory attitudes, institutional transparency, procedural simplification,
political independence, coherence and objectivity in administrative acts. Matei
et al.’s study focused primarily on the Romanian public administrators’ attitudes
and actions concerning citizen interaction, but also evaluated perceptions regarding
institutional efficiency and fairness. The lowest ranking was received by “adminis-
trative simplification,” followed by “organizational dynamics,” and “coherence of
the actions.” It is safe to conclude that the notion of a healthy bureaucracy serving
the Romanian public needs revisiting, and I shall analyze the current debate regar-
ding the refashioning of the Romanian bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the above-
mentioned research findings are in line with both domestic and foreign evaluations
of the low efficiency of the Romanian administrative space and its lack of institu-
tional transparency and objectivity. The study highlights “political interference in
administrative actions” as the major barrier that needs to be overcome to truly inter-
nalize the European principle of openness toward the citizen.
Self-responsibility or accountability refers to the European administrative value
where all participants involved in public policy setting and/or implementation are
willing to be self-responsible and give an account of their actions. Matei et al.’s
research attempted to reveal the internal transformations that have occurred in the
values, beliefs, and behaviors of Romanian public administrators since adopting
European administrative values. The study questions how public administrators
evaluate their responsibilities and what instruments they have to correct mal-
administration in case it happens. It further asks questions regarding the main
3.5 Europeanization Effects in Romania 89
characteristics of Romanian public administrators, their concern for the well-being

of the public they serve and their opinions regarding the importance of the citizen’s
involvement in policy-making and implementation. Their responses were as
follows:
• On the issue of “administrative failure,” referring to the deficiency of democratic
procedures, strategic vision and/or coherent administrative processes, most
respondents (58.6 %) considered the central national government as primarily
responsible. This was followed by the local authorities with a close 47.5 %,
while the public administrators themselves were responsible for administrative
failure for only 28.2 % in the eyes of the respondents. Most revealing was the fact
that, in the opinion of the Romanian public administrators (11.7 %), the citizens
themselves were responsible for administrative failure, a percentage far higher
than the president or the prime-minister.
• On the issue of “responsibility to evaluate and correct administrative failure,”
liability was placed almost exclusively upon central policy-makers, with the
president, the prime-minister, and the parliament leading the list. Paradoxically,
the citizens were absent from the list. In line with the rest of Europe, the respon-
sibility to evaluate administrative failure was diffused among several different
entities.
• On listing the “instruments and procedures for organizing routine public admin-
istration activities,” respondents cited job descriptions, organizational charts,
employee assessment, internal audits, and action plans as the most relevant
instruments for organizing their work. Some experts claim that the adoption
and voluntary internalization of such instruments are the true measures of
Europeanization internalization. Yet, in the case of Romanian public administra-
tors, these measures are mandated by law; therefore we cannot assess the volun-
tary and qualitative utilization of modern administrative tools.
• On the “trademarks of Romanian public administrators,” a relevant issue in the
quest to build a politically independent, meritocratic, professional and ethical
public administration, the survey asked questions regarding objectivity, political
independence, morality, tolerance, professionalism, and integrity. The findings
were in contradiction to conventional wisdom and the generally held beliefs of
the Romanian population, since it characterized the Romanian public adminis-
trators as “professional, tolerant, moral, objective and politically independent.”
One possible explanation that the authors concede to is the fact that their target
group was comprised of managers of public administrators who could have been
biased in their evaluation of themselves and their colleagues.
• On the issues of “subjective attitudes in public service,” perceived to be true in
former communist nations integrated into Europe, the study reveals that
Romanian public administrators admit to being subjective in their daily dealings
with citizens. Some causes of this subjective behavior are: “granting of gifts or
services in exchange for public services, the existence of mutual acquaintances
or direct connections, and/or membership in the same party of interest groups.”
• The issue of “the involvement of citizens in public decision-making and

discussion,” even if clearly stipulated by Romanian and European law, it is per-
ceived by Romanian public administrators as quite negative. There was a general
sense of dissatisfaction with procedures and debates that involved the citizens,
since it was perceived that they delayed decision-making and added little value.
The conclusions of Matei et al.’s study are quite revealing regarding the internal-
ization of the European administrative principles by Romanian public administra-
tors. They conclude:
The Romanian public administration seems to be open toward its citizens (at least in terms
of the existent legal framework), but fails in producing solid proofs for not being subject
to corruption. If things seemed to go in the wrong direction for a sound public administra-
tion development, then the responsibility was considered to be both in the hands of the
central and local governments. Citizens are somehow passive viewers of the public
administration: not sharing any relevant responsibility for the failure of the administration,
they become visible only when being directly affected, interested in the decision-making
process. Then, civil servants perceive them as obstacles in the well-functioning of the
system, and they perceive the system as unfriendly and corrupt (Matei et al., 2011).
Even if tremendous efforts have been made to transform and Europeanize the
public administration of Romania, the sad conclusions of multiple authors and
global agencies is that it is still struggling with corruption and other legacies of the
past. In the following section, I will turn my attention to some of the other less posi-
tive aspects of Romanian integration into the European Union.
3.6 Synthetic Aspects of Europeanization in Romania
The impact of European Union integration through its threatening reports and
financial incentives has produced a number of positive, even if at times misguided,
reforms in the Romanian Government and society. Reforms in the areas of anti-
corruption, justice, public procurement, administration, information access were
primarily political and economic. However, on the periphery, there are certain per-
spectives that point to the hypocrisy of both sides (Pop-Eleches, 2007; Vachudova,
2002). The European Union integrated a nation that was not at its western counter-
parts’ levels for selfishly economic, political, and demographic reasons, while the
Romanian elites pretended to accept European restrictions for personal gains and
the financial spoils of European funding. The most obvious image of this alleged
unnaturalness is the unremitting corruption that still exists, fabricated upon the con-
flict of interests between the political and administrative spheres, and protected by
burdensome and subjective regulations.
Some experts claim that the European Union integrated Romania prematurely
and for the wrong reasons, in a sense abdicating its influence for true, genuine, and
lasting reforms (Gallagher, 2006; Young, 2008a, 2008b). They claim that the
European conditionality has not been given adequate time and that the Romanian
public institutions, along with the hastily adopted legislation, will not create the
desirable legal, political, and administrative space.
3.6 Synthetic Aspects of Europeanization in Romania 91
While it appears that governments of all stripes have readily engaged in the reform activity
promoted by the EU, I show that many reforms were passed strategically to appease EU
concerns, but with no real impetus for reform. The institutions created in this way, while an
improvement over the past, have many loopholes, are still ineffective, and their implemen-
tation is slow. (Young, 2008a, 2008b)
Simultaneously, there seem to be ulterior and concealed motives why an elite,

world-class club such as the European Union, with its traditions of governance and
economic development, would want to integrate a nation like Romania with its dif-
ferent background and culture. It is not my purpose to plunge into conspiracy theo-
ries, but I do believe that, as reformers of Romanian public administration, and
implicitly of Romanian society, we must analyze all possible nuances and under-
stand the Realpolitik of the European Union and its integration impetus.
The first imperceptible reason for the acceptance of an unprepared Romania
might be the geopolitical pressures created by the Balkan war in the mid-1990s. Not
unlike the former Yugoslavia, Romania is also a young nation, some say artificially
created after World War I, with a large ethnic Hungarian population talking of
secession in the early 1990s. Therefore, the Europeanization of nations like
Romania, which displayed a nationalistic model of politics and had the potential for
future explosive conflicts, was obligatory (Gallagher, 2006; Phinnemore, 2003).
Secondly, Gallagher, in his 2006 article The European Union and Romania:
Consolidating Backwardness? underlines the interesting convergence between the
then social-democratic Romanian government and the business-minded forces
operating in Brussels in the early 2000s that actually sealed Romania’s integration
into the European Union. He points to favorable business interests on both sides: the
social-democrats, whom he calls “a network of businessmen who mouth left-wing
platitudes while systematically grabbing the most desirable economic plums for
themselves in a chaotic lurch toward the free-market,” and Gunter Verheugen, the
commissioner for European enlargement in partnership with German chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder. According to Gallagher, in exchange for Romania’s integration,
Schroeder negotiated a one-billion euro contract in border security on behalf of a
German group. A casual observation today would notice that many sectors of the
Romanian economy, such as banking, insurance, real estate, agriculture, manufac-
turing, etc., are dominated by European multinationals. In all fairness, conventional
wisdom dictates that economic interdependency is normal, and as outlined in Chap.
2, the European Union is foremost an economic club. According to Europeanization
experts, the administrative benefits brought by Europeanization outweigh the
economic and political prices that were paid (Ekiert, Kubik & Vachudova, 2007;
Pop-Eleches, 2007; Vachudova, 2002).
To defend against such accusations, the European Union points to its “active-
leverage” instrument, referring to the European Union’s threat to exclude a nation
from itself, as may be the case of Greece (Vachudova, 2002). Vachudova further
points to the indirect consequence of this tool as it affects national politics and
makes rent-seeking strategies of ethnic scape-goating and economic corruption less tena-
ble, and contributed to the victory of opposition political parties that organized themselves
around a pro-EU platform (Vachudova, 2002).
However, in the case of Romania, the “active-leverage” had a limited influence

given the communist and cultural administrative legacy along with the social
antagonism that exists at the grass-roots level between the European and the
Romanian population. These were perhaps some of the factors that contributed to
a slower and often a hypocritical simulation of reforms in Romania, since its politi-
cians were keenly aware of the geopolitical and economic interest of the European
Union.
According to Grabbe (2003), the European Union is partly to blame for the dem-
ocratic deficit in new Member States like Romania, since it often insisted on the
legal adoption of European measures without actually verifying their implementa-
tion and acceptance within a certain nation. This omission is further complicated by
the rich administrative diversity within the European Union, making it difficult to
adopt a single model of public administration, an issue often speculated by domestic
political debates (Grabbe, 2003; O’Dwyer, 2002). The adoption of European rules
and institutions has been a continuous process, and its success can be assessed by an
in-depth analysis of organizational structures, policy manuals, and productivity out-
comes. However, the success of those European rules is predicated upon the exis-
tence of competent and professional decision makers in each policy area and the
political will to adopt European norms and regulations (Jacoby, 2005). Accordingly,
administration reforms in Romania, given the high number of participants and insti-
tutions, can be classified somewhere between “continuous learning” and “open
struggle.”
Europeanizing the Romanian economy and even its public administration has
proved to be an easier task then integrating its political class. Pridham, in his 2005
book, Designing Democracy: EU Enlargement and Regime Change in Post-
Communist Europe, makes a distinction between “pull” and “push” Europeanization
mechanisms. According to him, the push type of integration instruments refers to
the conditionality of integration through rule and institutional adoption, while the
pull instruments refer to the promotion of democracy, civil society engagement,
and political dialogue. He points out that the European Union is a political system
with an imperfect “multi-level governance” and separation between domestic
and international politics. He stresses the need for “informal integration,” the con-
tribution and ownership of both the elites and the masses in the Europeanization
process.
In Romania, the consolidation of new institutions and legislation has taken place
to meet integration criteria, but the internalization of democratic rules and political
transformation is still lagging behind. Most experts share an overly optimistic view
of the transformation powers of the European administrative machine, while paying
little attention to the impact of local politics upon governance (Dimitrova, 2005;
Ekiert et al., 2007). Dimitrova and Pridham talk about “political hypocrisy” and
point to the fact that Romania “has a reputation in EU circles for producing fine-
sounding documents that remain on paper.” When policy implementation failure
occurs, budget deficits or low wages are the first to be blamed, when in fact the
3.6 Synthetic Aspects of Europeanization in Romania 93
political class who espoused the policy in the first place never intended
to see it implemented. It seems that politicians do not only block the legislation
process but also ensure dependency:
through adoption of contradictory or weak enforcement and monitoring procedures for
various institutions, through purposeful lack of coordination among complementary
reforms, and through the maintenance of regulatory institutions under political control, so
that implementation of laws remains dependent on political configurations (Young, 2008a,
2008b)
On paper, Romania’s integration process has been remarkably prompt and com-
prehensive; in reality there were major gaps. For instance, in 2002 the European
Commission monitoring report noted that justice reform was limited, that the gov-
ernment was intervening in legal matters, that the courts were overburdened, that
the General Prosecutor had dictatorial powers, and that the justice system was
strained (Freedom House, 2003). By 2005 it acknowledged that Romania “has taken
decisive steps to further reform the legal system toward more independence,” but
still highlighted 11 specific shortcomings in the areas of public administration, jus-
tice system, and the fight against corruption. Surprisingly, by September 2006, less
than a year later, all major issues were apparently solved and the European
Commission lifted the safeguard clause to accept Romania as a new member. It did
signal the necessity to full, consistent interpretation and application of the recent
laws, and the establishment of an “integrity agency” that would verify assets and the
potential conflicts of interests in public dignitaries. The report stated that:
“there needs to be a clear political will to demonstrate the sustainability and irreversibility
of the recent positive progress in fighting corruption. In the Parliament there have been
some attempts to substantially reduce the effectiveness of such efforts” (EU Commission
Monitoring Report on Romania, 2006).
Behind the scenes and in a tacit way, the Romanian political class opposed
European reforms and adopted them “in form” simply for European integration
purposes. The 2003 Freedom House report stresses that even if since 1996 there was
an alteration of political power between the center-right and the center-left govern-
ments, meaningful and constructive political opposition has been absent from the
Romanian political landscape. Romanian politicians, engulfed in charges of corrup-
tion and inefficiency, have been characterized by bickering, fragmentations, and
betrayals. The report further notes the inability of the Parliament to properly
scrutinize and democratically debate legislation since one-third of all laws were
adopted through emergency and executive ordinances.
The center-right coalition that took power in 2004 allowed for important reforms
in the period leading up to the 2007 integration date, yet “the whole reform process
(was) met with tremendous opposition” (Freedom House, 2006). The opposition to
reform came in multiple forms ranging from government infighting, the conflict
between the president and the prime-minister, and parliament opposition, to the
slowly changing mentalities in the justice system. In 2005 the prime-minister
refused to organize by-elections, causing the president to accuse him of “selling out
to oligarch business interests,” especially since he also dismissed the finance

minister for allegedly trying to clean up the very corrupt custom services (Freedom
House, 2006). All these led the European Parliament to lament as late as September
2006 that:
…an oligarchy composed of businessmen active in politics – either directly or through com-
pliant allies – fears… that EU efforts to improve standards in public life will alter the rather
lax climate that has enabled them to grow very rich. Inside Tăriceanu’s Liberals, they have
acquired almost full control. … Substantive policy issues are not being given serious atten-
tion, and… the EU may find it hard to identify local partners with whom it can promote a
durable reform agenda (Directorate B, 2006).
President Băsescu, initially an anti-corruption fighter, was himself entangled in

shady business dealings and had a corruption file opened against him. Most concern-
ing is that he made little effort to reform the secret service (the former Securitate).
Quite the opposite, he merged many intelligence services within a single “intelli-
gence community,” leading some to believe that the new Romanian Intelligence
Service (SRI) is infiltrating the parliament, the government, and even the media
(Freedom House, 2006). The establishment, operations, and eventual closing of the
National Agency for Integrity (ANI) is further proof that reforms and anti-corruption
legislation were passed only for integration purposes and were never intended by the
Romanian political class to operate in earnest. This agency was supposed to verify
the wealth declarations of politicians and those employed by the government. Even
before closing down, the agency was accused of being diluted since it exempted
parliamentarians and thus subordinated ANI politically.
In the period leading to and after the integration of 2007, lip service was paid to
the merits of the European democratic political and administrative system, and laws
similar to those in Europe were passed in a hurry to ensure the Union’s approval.
An institutional environment present in Romania designed to prevent and eliminate
corruption is comprised of: The National Control Authority to prevent economic
fraud, smuggling, and fiscal evasion; The National Ombudsman to ensure citizens’
rights; The National Court of Auditors to externally audit public administrators; The
Antifraud Department with the Prime-Minister’s Office; The National Office for the
Prevention of Money Laundering; and other such initiatives.
However, the legal system has sufficient loopholes and contradictions as to
severely limit the effectiveness and efficiency of this environment by creating over-
laps in responsibilities and freedom in interpretation. Then there is the low
administrative capacity, especially outside of Bucharest, due to lack of training and
limited budget allocated by the political class. The deficiency of political indepen-
dence in public administration and the political interference in administrative
appointments further weaken the Europeanization of the Romanian public adminis-
trative space. As Transparency International and other global agencies monitoring
Romania have reiterated the fundamental problem was and is ineffective implemen-
tation. In 2006, evaluating the justice system, Transparency International stated that
the system “is not yet reformed. It may be so on paper or from the legislative point
of view, meanwhile the old practices are still persisting. The level of implementa-
tion of reforms is still very low.”
References 95
The integration of Romania into the European Union is regarded by and large as
a positive occurrence in the history of the nation. Even if I eventually turn to certain
negative and unresolved issues of the Europeanization process, it is not my intent to
diminish the efforts and results accomplished in a relative short period of time and
with the most modern and civilized reform methods. The quality of life in Romania
is certainly better than it was before integration and we all recognize the untold
time, energy, and money invested in the Europeanization of Romanian public
administration. We can certainly be proud of all that has been accomplished and I
believe the time has come when Romanian experts not only “download” best prac-
tices and governance ideology from their older, more mature European siblings, but
also jointly contribute to the development of the dream that is the European Union.
However, the issue of corruption must be addressed and it is the opinion of this
author that it represents the unfinished business of Europeanization.
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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN ECONOMICS

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8876

ISSN 2191-5504 ISSN 2191-5512 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931433

Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London

Printed on acid-free paper

Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media

This work utilizes a theoretical approach, by presenting various theories of public

School of Management, we conducted a survey of 145 top Romanian leaders and

Oradea, Romania Sebastian Văduva, Ph.D.

1 The Twenty-First Century and the Expectations

3 The Europeanization of Romania in the Globalization

Cases ................................................................................................................... 101

Further Reading ................................................................................................ 103

© The Author(s) 2016 1

understanding the international context and the national direction of Romania.

1.2 Globalization, Transformation and the “Flat World”

collaborations. In the era before globalization, proponents argue, natural and

Advances in computers, transportation, and communications (cellular tele-

1.3 Globalization and its Impact on Public Administration

Globalization, change, and transformation can best be understood through from a

the twentieth century was further complicated by issues such as urbanization,

(4) Reconstruct traditional administrative functions to also include economic

1.4 Globalization and its Mandates on Public Administration

Managing public administration and governance in the global environment of

interconnected, but it is increasingly “unknowable” (Stacey, 1992). The complex

As outlined by Farazmand (2009) this “constructive role” of traditional govern-

1.5 The Necessary Capabilities for Strategic Public

…Some [multination corporations, western governments] may even promote functional

1.6 Coalition Building, a Substantial Element of Modern

Partnership building and management are signiﬁcant components of modern

1.7 Tactical Implementation Capacities

The strategic abilities of accurate assessment and intelligent planning have to be

Implementing or executing modern governance strategies requires new thinking

professional, nonpartisan centers and institutes of policy analysis, development, and

1.8 Governance in the Globalization Era: A Synopsis

• Strategic human talent with the necessary entrepreneurial capacity grounded in

new challenges. There is no alternative to preparedness. All of the lessons learned

Globalization, with its technological, economic, and structural forces, is the

© The Author(s) 2016 29

entire continent with varying cultural, geographical, and historical differences.

2.1 Neofunctionalism and Intergovernmentalism

As a theoretical ideology, neofunctionalism was temporarily discredited by the

2.2 Economical Interests and the European Project

integration was a practical and economically calculated response to international

Instead of ﬁghting or resenting this corporate and ﬁnancial powers, Caporaso

2.3 The Pursuit of Identity and Integration

2.3.1 Multi-Level Governance

2.3.2 The Integration Impetus

In the 2007 article A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From

Rome SEA Maastricht Amsterdam Nice Constitutional

2.4 National Identity or Economic Prosperity?

The initial theoreticians of European integration took individual identity and

subjecting themselves to public approvals after Maastricht, the public opinion

The theoretical underpinnings of research on identity in Europe were quite thin.