CIVIL SERVICE.

Centuries pass, and the customary view of the civil service does not change. After the works of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Nikolai Gogol in the nineteenth century and the satires of Georges Courteline at the turn of the twentieth century, subsequent literary efforts portrayed the civil servant as unskilled, irresponsible, corrupt—indeed, often enough all three at once. Sometimes there is an element of tragedy, and the civil servant finds himself inside depersonalized or totalitarian environments. Works by Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Václav Havel, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have described the distress of the isolated individual facing terrifying bureaucratic or police systems. Unfortunately, certain of these descriptions are not wrong.

CHANGING ROLES OF CIVIL SERVICE

As with all myths, that of the civil service has some truth. With Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and later Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, political philosophy has continued to investigate the rise of technocratic civilization concomitant with the entry of the masses into political life. In addition, it is clear that the number of public-sector employees in Europe increased considerably over the course of the twentieth century. Precise figures are not easy to come by, considering the dissimilar criteria among countries for determining who is a civil servant. The number of civil servants in Italy grew tenfold, from 2.2 percent of the active population in 1880 to 22 percent in 1980, but "only" by four and a half times in France during this same period. In the whole of Western Europe, the salaries of civil servants represented an increasing percentage of government expenses. At the beginning of the 1990s, in the ten most industrialized countries in the European Union (EU), civil servants of state and regional agencies (public utilities excluded) accounted for between 5 percent and 8.5 percent of the population, though as high as 13 percent in Denmark.

Remuneration of those traditionally considered civil servants—such as police, magistrates, and administrative officials—does not represent the greatest cost to taxpayers. The most numerous public employees are teachers, postal employees, nurses, social administrators, technicians, and all the various social-service professionals; these occupations became the states' responsibility over the course of the twentieth century. The two world wars led all the countries involved to develop government services in charge of industrial mobilization, weapons manufacture, and administration of the workforce. The postwar state had to take care of widows and orphans, organize the reconstruction of ravaged regions, manage enormous financial deficits, and seek to maintain peace. All these tasks and more fell to the state. This was why, after 1945, many European countries—whether by choice or, on the eastern part of the Continent, under Soviet influence—opted for nationalization and the establishment of vast public state-run enterprises, notably energy, transportation, communication, and banking. Add to these the great expansion of social services.

A tendency to reverse public-sector growth has been at work since the 1980s, particularly in central and Western European countries. However, even here, for all the haste to stop the proliferation of administrative systems, it was not possible to create the tabula rasa that had been the hope of the more radical proponents of anti–big government associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The centuries-long history of the geopolitical construction of Europe, with its empires and nation-states, generated influential models. If we follow Tocqueville, Napoleon I (r. 1804–1814, 1815), by inventing the Civil Code and the préfet (high-ranking civil servant of local administration), essentially continued the centralization process already begun under the ancien régime, and he was always prepared to invent new taxes to finance war.

The colonial influence was equally important. By the seventeenth century Spanish and Portuguese administrations managed and controlled vast New World possessions. In 1813 the East India Company opened a training school for future civil servants serving the colonial regime. This model, created with the help of Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan and Thomas Babington Macaulay, was copied in 1853–1855 by the British government, leading to creation of a civil service that put an end to the old patronage system in the public sphere. Such comparisons can only be pushed so far. If bureaucracies in four of the continental empires on the eve of World War I—the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman—shared an authoritarian character, only Germany, inheriting the long tradition of Prussian cameralist policies, could be considered efficient. In fact, only Germany would recover from the troubled period between the two wars, albeit at the price of Nazi ideology.

Insofar as the civil service during the interwar period is concerned, two major confrontations should be noted. First, on a political basis, there grew an opposition between parliamentary democracy and authoritarianism or totalitarianism. But there also developed increasing tension between efficiency and loyalty. The nature of their mission—to put the law to work—made civil servants lay claim to professionalism, which could in turn lead them to question, in ways subtle and unannounced, the policy of the powers that be. The history of the civil service in Europe during the twentieth century can be understood as a gradual quest for independence from the political system and, at the same time, the outcome of efforts on the part of politicians to find a means to control the public bureaucracy.

CIVIL SERVICE STATUTES

Careers in civil service at once organized and symbolized the establishment of a cadre of professionals that serve the res publica (commonwealth). As to recruitment and training, advancement, remuneration, and discipline, the tendency to regimentation and codification was present at the beginning of the century and continued during the interwar years. Although the first civil service statutes were legislated in the middle of the nineteenth century—they may be dated to 1852 in Spain, 1853 in Piedmont—many were introduced in the years just before and after World War I. Thus, for example, the Italian civil service statutes were passed in 1923, at the beginning of the fascist period, and remained in effect until 1957, well after that period ended. Irish statutes were passed in 1924, Swiss statutes in 1927; in the Netherlands, legislation dates to 1929. France and England were two exceptions. France did not pass civil service legislation until 1941, during the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain; it was revised after the war in 1946. In spite of its extensive civil service, England still has no comparable general statute.

A comparison of the situation in Britain and France, the two oldest and largest democracies in Western Europe, remains instructive. In Britain, without a written constitution and with administrative issues long left to the prerogative of the Crown, the government had a vast field of action, and various innovations evolved into permanent features. By the mid-nineteenth century, the ideal training for high-ranking civil servants was based on the study of humanities and excluded all specialized professional knowledge; a Civil Service College was established only somewhat later. Similarly, the ways in which the civil service functioned and their employees were represented by unions were conceived as early as 1916 and put into operation three years later with the advent of the National Whitley Council. In France, on the contrary, these issues brought about a debate on principles among lawyers, politicians, and functionaries. Banned by the law, civil service unions were unofficially tolerated as early as 1924. In 1945 the École Nationale d'Administration (ENA) was established to train high-ranking civil servants; it took over a task previously entrusted to a private institute, the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, better known as Sciences-Po.

In both Britain and France, as in other liberal democracies, in the early twenty-first century legislation guarantees that public servants be treated equally. For appointments and careers in administration, discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender, or political orientation is banned. Freedom of speech is granted to civil servants who, however, must respect a code of conduct, indeed, of loyalty to the government. The possibility of running for elective office varies from one country to another, and the most permissive in this regard is France, while in England civil servants are forbidden to run for public office.

Although liberalism as a policy model is today found throughout Europe, this was not always the case. During the 1930s, competing ideologies—Nazism, fascism, Stalinism, and the dictatorships in the countries of central Europe—all rejected political pluralism. So it was that Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), for example, put into effect the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" shortly after coming to power in 1933. This legislation permitted a purge based on racial and political criteria and completely deprived civil servants of political freedoms. Although the bureaucracy, which had basically never warmed to the republican regime, at first welcomed the Nazis, it rapidly began to suffer from the polycratic exercise of power in the Hitlerian administration and the rise of the SS (Schutzstaffel). An organization of coercion and terror that eventually coordinated and directed a new level of administration—that of mass murder—the SS never had reason to complain of lack of collaboration from other sectors of the state bureaucracy.

ADAPTABILITY: DEMOCRACY
AND DICTATORSHIP

In a general way, the civil service adapted readily to the numerous transitions from democracy to authoritarian regimes and dictatorships in the twentieth century. Authoritarian regimes were often prompt to denounce bureaucracy and punish civil servants, sometimes with extreme violence—in the Soviet Union, for example, under Joseph Stalin. But in spite of accusations of cowardice, sabotage, and lack of enthusiasm, civil servants remained loyal. Beginning in the 1930s a new class of civil servants appeared. Corruption, nepotism, and outrageous political activism became the rule in Italy and the Soviet Union—two good examples even though ideologically opposed to one another. This was the "managerial" era, according to an influential model conceived by the American political theorist James Burnham; adapted to circumstances in Europe by the Yugoslavian vice president and writer Milovan Djilas and the French social philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, this model became a severe critique of the bureaucracy's usurpation of power, such as occurred in the Soviet-dominated states of Eastern Europe.

In this context, the liberal principles associated with political and religious neutrality in public service on one hand, and of equal access to civil service on the other hand, were questioned at both ends of the political spectrum. For those in favor of an authoritarian state, political pluralism, which implies refusal to expel civil servants whose loyalty might be questioned under a liberal democratic regime—only underscored the perennial weakness of administrations unable to develop a powerful executive system. For Marxists, on the contrary, equality in the civil service seemed chimeric, merely a formal freedom given lip service. In fact, only slowly did women gain access to jobs in civil service, particularly management positions; democratization, when it came to recruiting civil servants, improved only very slowly. Of course, by comparison with past eras, when to be a servant of the state was such an honor that it did not warrant a salary, the advent of entry exams and remuneration opened doors to the less fortunate. Still, the weight of entrenched administrations remained significant, restricting the ability of politicians in power to control the state apparatus presumably at its disposal. Thus was reborn the specter, which the French revolution had tried to put to rest, of a takeover of national sovereignty by privileged, intermediate corporations.

AFTER WORLD WAR II

Government expanded after 1945 to an even greater degree than in the wake of World War I. As Tocqueville had observed in 1850, "War … must invariably and immeasurably increase the powers of civil government; it must almost automatically concentrate the direction of all men and the control of all things in the hands of the government" (p. 650). The war's end did not lead to a decline in numbers in the public-sector workforce. The terror apparatus and systems to control public opinion were indeed destroyed—at least in Western Europe, even while central and Eastern Europe remained under Soviet influence. But new problems arose for postwar governments. The resources of countries destroyed by years of conflict had to be mobilized to rebuild infrastructure and housing; restart manufacturing; manage debts; and provide care for prisoners, deportees, and returning refugees. In addition, for France and Britain, the situation in their colonial holdings would soon prove to be an issue.

Such circumstances made it impossible to return to the liberal economic policies that had proved inefficient during the crisis years of the 1930s, all the more since state intervention also owed to political considerations. Nationalization of monopolies and state planning thus became the order of the day both in Western Europe, with Charles de Gaulle in France and the Labour Party in Britain ascendant, and in Eastern Europe. Thus, the three decades following the war saw a revival of Keynesian economic policies, largely under state direction; this activity slowed only when it started to generate too much tension as a result of inflation. This kind of stop-and-go growth pattern ended with the very strong showing, in the early 1980s, of the resolutely antigovernment monetary models such as that propounded by Margaret Thatcher.

Even when governed by left-wing parties, most countries in Western Europe proceeded with privatizations, justified on both ideological and budgetary grounds, with a free-market model imposed by the European Union as the foundation of economic policy. France was only a temporary exception to this process. After having greatly increased the number of its civil servants and the boundaries of government in public services in 1982, France began, within a few short years, in the mid-1980s, to gradually disengage from state intervention, a move that proved scarcely popular in a state where government ownership had powerful connotations. At the same time, even in the sphère régalienne (the police, army, justice, diplomacy), private-sector management methods emerged, with the diffusion of ambitious but confusing concepts such as "governance" and "new public management." The old ministerial type of administration was viewed as fossilized, centralized, and routine. In its place, although too Manichaean in rhetoric and somewhat artificial in practice, were new attitudes of flexibility and efficiency of agencies in which civil servants were evaluated and remunerated commensurate with their ability to fulfill objectives set by the government or legislature.

Although the education system has not entirely developed along the same lines, the systems of transportation, telecommunications, postal service, and energy are today almost completely open to competition while the civil service settles for a role as regulator, in some areas more comfortably than in others. Since the 1990s, the collapse of the static economies in Eastern Europe encouraged advocates of deregulation. On 1 May 2004 the Europe Union's admission of eight of those nations underscored their ability to adapt to the competitive capitalist system. However, to the disappointment of some, the new management principles have only been partially established in administrative systems (particularly Austro-Hungarian and Russia) that were shaped by the dual tradition in which bureaucracies of the old empires were reinforced by almost a half-century of authoritarian socialism. At the end of the 1990s, two Baltic republics, Latvia and Estonia, had extensively to refurbish their administrative practice, using as inspiration the North American model as well that of Hungary and, to a lesser degree, of the Czech Republic. It is not simple to erase the past, particularly when such overburdened and backward-looking structures as the administrative systems are its incarnation.

Whether we consider the short military-political twentieth century that lasted from 1914 to 1989, or the long technological twentieth century, which began with the industrial revolution in the 1880s and ended with the twenty-first-century communications revolution, Europe saw the implementation of many state systems. There were authoritarian models, dating to the empires of the nineteenth century, and liberal administrations of the pre-1914 era that some countries hoped to revive in the interwar years. There were also the totalitarian states of Hitler, Stalin, and others. The state as economic partner was put to use during the period from 1950 to 1970, rebuilding the old continent. Even if some convergences seem to appear—notably in terms of decentralization—deep differences remain between the various European administrative systems that originated within heterogeneous historical experiences. However, the three processes traditionally associated with the evolution of the civil service in the twentieth century—professionalization, bureaucratization, and specialization—are still relevant criteria at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To this must be added the never-easy alliance between politics and administration—an ambiguous and ambivalent relationship.

See alsoBourgeoisie; Parliamentary Democracy; Totalitarianism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Edited by J. P. Mayer, translated by George Lawrence. Garden City, N.Y., 1969.

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Marc Olivier Baruch