Civil Service Development in Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS: Swimming with the Tide?

Abstract

The comparative study of civil service system development in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) (Verheijen, 1999) painted a sober picture of the state of development of professional civil service systems in the region. The analysis was largely limited to Central and Eastern European states, including a study of Russia. These were considered the front runners of reform among the transition states, and, with the exception of Ukraine, they moved early (in 1993) toward a legal framework for managing the civil service. There was little to analyse other Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries.2 In summary, the analysis found that states struggled to overcome the legacy of politicized and discredited state administrations left by the previous regime, that civil servants tended to be demoralized and that civil service suffered from ‘negative selection’, that political will to invest in the creation of civil service systems was absent, with the exception of the Baltic States, and that up to then the EU had devoted little attention to the development of functioning administrative systems in the Candidate States. Further analyses of civil service development in CEE countries, for instance in Baker (2002), Goetz (2001) and Verheijen (2000; 2001) highlighted similar trends. A more recent study on civil service development under coalition governments (Peters, Vass and Verheijen, 2005) draws a more encouraging conclusion. Analyses of developments in CIS countries, with the exception of Russia and Ukraine, remain remarkably absent from the literature.