Explaining the Persistence of Unprofessional Bureaucracy in a Modernising State: Romanian Exceptionalism

A Thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

In the Faculty of Humanities

2016

Irina Oana Gheorghe

Alliance Manchester Business School/People, Management and Organisations Table of Contents Chapter 1: The Challenge of Modernising Public Administration in Romania

1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………… 9

1.1 The problem with Romanian Public Administration...... 13

1.2 Aims and Objectives...... 16

1.3 Structure of the Thesis…………………………………………………………… 22

1.4 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………… 26

Chapter 2: Public Administration in Romania: The legacy of the Past

2.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………… 28

2.2 Institutional Theories…………………………………………………………..… 29

2.3 International level of analysis for Public Management…………… 39

2.4 European/Regional level of analysis of Public Management…… 48

2.5 Adapting Managerialism to Public Administration………………… 53

2.6 Towards a Framework of Analysis…………………………………………… 59

2.7 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………… 61

Chapter 3: Research Data and Methodology

3.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………… 63

3.2 Institutionalism and Method…………………………………………………… 66

3.3 Research Design and Method………………………………………………… 67

3.4 Developing the Research Methods: Elite interviewing…………… 73

3.5 The use of Secondary Data……………………………………………………… 75

3.6 Developing the Interview Questions………………………………………. 77

3.7 Bringing in Other Countries…………………………………………………… 81

3.8 Limitations of the Research…………………………………………………… 84

3.9 Ethical Issues………………………………………………………………………….. 86

1 3.9 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………. 89

Chapter 4: The Administrative Context of Romania

4.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………. 90

4.2 Communist Rule (1947-1946)……..…………………………………………… 97

4.3 Dictatorship (1965-1989)………………………………………………………. 99

4.4 Revolution and after (1990-1999)…………………………………………. 102

4.5 Preparation for EU Accession (2000-2006)……………………………. 107

4.6 Post EU Accession (2007-2011)……………………………………………… 112

4.7 Summary…………………………………………………………………………………118

4.8 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………120

Chapter 5: European Accession and Romanian public administration: path-breaking change?

5.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………… 123

5.2 Globalization and Public Administration: Application to Romania 125

5.3 Impact on Romania………………………………………………………………… 127

5.4 European Union Influences………………………………………………………132

5.5 A persistently unprofessional bureaucracy……………………………… 135

5.6 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….153

Chapter 6: Case Study – The role of Culture

6.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………. 156

6.2 Bureaucracy and the Romanian State………………………………………157

6.3 A Clash of Cultures: from Orient to accessing Occident…………. 160

6.4 Culture and Politicianism……………….……………………………………….. 163

2 6.5 Culture and Resistance to Change………..………………………………….171

6.6 Culture in contrast with regulations…………………………………………173

6.7 Path-dependency……………………………………………………………….…… 177

6.8 Dependency through collective resistance to change……………… 183

6.9 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………… 190

Chapter 7: Case Study part II – The Romanian Exceptionalism?

7.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………. 191

7.2 Exceptionalism…………………………………………………………………………192

7.3 Regional and Cultural Exceptionalism……………………………………… 194

7.4 Features of Romanian Exceptionalism……………………………………..196

7.5 The Presidential Campaign of 2014: Another case of exceptionalism?...... 202

7.5 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………… 209

Chapter 8: Conclusions

8.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………. 211

8.2 The research objectives revisited……………………………………………. 211

8.3 Limitations of the Research……………………………………………………..220

8.4 Contributions to Research and Theory……………………………………. 221

8.5 Final Comments……………………………………………………………………….222

Figure 1………………………………………………………………………………………… 93

Figure 2………………………………………………………………………………………. 140

Word count: 68,367

3 4 Appendices

Appendix I……………………………………………………………...... 238

Appendix II…………………………………………………………………………………….240

Appendix III……………………………………………………………………………………245

Appendix IV……………………………………………………………………………………247

Appendix V…………………………………………………………………………………….249

Appendix VI……………………………………………………………………………………253

5 Abstract

There is a tendency in the international literature to generalise about developments and reforms in public administration across groups or types of country, often across those in close geographical proximity. Since the revolutions across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the late 1980s, this tendency is revealed by various labels: ‘transitory states’, ‘post-communist states’, ‘post-socialist states’, which suggests that they all possess similar characteristics, and thus have similar administrative systems. Furthermore, many of these states are now members of the European Union (EU). However, the CEE countries are on differing reform trajectories; they have not all arrived at the same stage at the same time (some await EU membership; chiefly those in South East Europe). This thesis concentrates on Romania to provide a detailed analysis of its public administration trajectory and contends that is too simplistic to regard Romania as ‘similar’ to its CEE neighbours. Moreover, there is no definitive account of the development of public administration in the country, and this is one contribution that this thesis makes.

The thesis engages with institutional theory; both historical and sociological, to provide a framework for analysing the present state of public administration in Romania, characterised as an ‘unprofessional bureaucracy’. The thesis employs the concept of path dependency from the institutionalist framework to explain the lack of change in Romania despite apparently ‘path breaking’ events such as the revolution of 1989 and accession to the EU. The empirical research at the heart of the thesis is based on interviews with members of the bureaucratic and political elites of Romania. The resulting commentary also provides a further important contribution for the thesis as this is the first instance of academic research on public administration in Romania that harnesses such information. By definition, elite interviews are difficult to attain, especially within the political context of Romania. By using institutionalist theory, the thesis clearly explains the current state of public administration in the country, which is far removed from the idealised and internationalised approaches to administrative change typified by reform movements such as New Public Management and Governance.

6 Declaration

I, Irina Oana Gheorghe, hereby declare that no portion of the work referred to in the Thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other University or other Institute of learning.

7 Copyright Statement

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8 Acknowledgements

I wish to express my gratitude to my Supervisors, Prof. Leo McCann and Mrs. Liz Richardson, for their support and for believing in my research.

Also, I wish to thank all the people who have been helping me along this complicated journey, my friends and family, interviewees and colleagues; even to those who didn’t believe in me, as they have motivated me to go on and work harder.

I thank my Partner, for enduring the ‘wrath of Khan’ every day for the past years, and my children, although it will take a while until I will be able to explain to them why Mummy didn’t take them to the park every day, like other Mummies.

And not least, I wish to thank my Mother, for always being there for me, unconditionally, at all times in the day and night; you are never too far from me.

9 Chapter 1: The Challenge of Modernising Public Administration in Romania

1. Introduction:

Both the international environment and the particular cultural and institutional contexts of a country shape its system of public administration. Yet very often, a tension is created between both internal and external drivers for change which may result in no change at all. This tension is more acute in the ‘transitional’ countries of Eastern Europe and the wider post-Soviet arena where rapid democratisation and economic reform has exposed inertia within highly bureaucratised and politicised systems of public administration. In particular, European Union (EU) enlargement has further subjected, or even pressured, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to rapid change.

Romania is part of this transitory group where one could expect to witness spectacular and fundamental reforms of its system in public administration. In 2007, Romania joined the European Union, which was a key milestone in its ‘transition’. It thus became a ‘developed’ country while accepting the terms of the Lisbon Agenda. Member states of the EU are required by the Lisbon Agenda to be ‘developed’, meaning the state displays coherent public policies, which enhance further integration of European regulations, and provide a good background for collaboration with other member states to ensure a flow of national reforms within the European space.

However, EU accession is not the only driver for change. Romania has also been exposed to external influences throughout its relatively short history as a state. Since the 1859 union of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldova (future Kingdom of Romania), the initial influences upon its institutions came from Western Europe; first from France and afterwards from Germany. France was considered the “natural” sister of Romania, while Germany was the native country of the first King

10 of Romania. However, the most important and influential phase, which carries significance for this research, is the Socialist era. Over two separate periods, Romanian institutions were subjected either to the Soviet influence (1947-1965), or to a more embedded or Romanian-style Communist governance (1965-1989). A further problem is that, despite EU accession, Romania can still be considered a ‘transitional’ country according to Parsons’ (1995) general definition of transitional countries. The Romanian transitional period started in the 1990s, following the shift from dictatorial to democratic governance after the revolution in 1989. The apparent steepness of this shift is in line with in the generally held view that a change of a system is not possible unless a ‘revolution’ occurs (Skocpol, 1994). Yet despite the revolution (as with other similar and dramatic forms of change in East- Central Europe following the collapse of state socialism), it became clear that, in many ways very little change has occurred (Holmes, 1997; Elster et al., 1998; Ekiert and Hanson, 2003). This thesis will argue that the 1989 Revolution did little to re- design and reform a system that was deeply scarred by attempted ‘Russification’ and decades of various degrees of totalitarian Communism inflicted on the population.1 The reality shows that adaptation to a democratic regime is so slow that it resembles the secret of Polichinelle: everybody knows it but fails to acknowledge it.2

The main reason for choosing a research project on the post-Revolution Romanian public administration is the absence of a reliable academic literature on the topic of the failure to reform its former Communist administrative system. As discussed in the next chapter, what international literature that is available tends to be dated in that it focuses on the period immediately after the revolution. Both optimism about Romania’s modernisation process along with an interest in Romania’s new democracy drove researchers, both Western and from within the region, to produce commentaries in the 1990s (for example, Nelson (1992)). But over the last 15 years, it seems that Romania has ceased to be of interest to the international

1 ‚Russification’ refers to the process of cultural integration with Russia, or in this case, the former Soviet Union. The idea is explored later in the thesis. 2 From the play by Pierre Wolff 11 academic community, except for rare exceptions such as Lee (2009). The next chapter, the literature review, will make this clear. In short, the expected transformation never emerged and as this thesis will attempt to argue this fact has also contributed to the reproduction of a highly bureaucratic and unreformed public administration that has resisted the forms of ‘professionalization’ prescribed for their ‘modernization’. This has long term consequences on both the internal arena, as well as on the external interaction with international organizations, mainly the EU in the case of this thesis. Despite the lack of a substantial academic literature, the thesis also makes an important contribution in relation to the concept of path dependency. Writers such as Nelson and Winter (1982) and David (1985) drew upon economic theory to explain economic evolution despite the existence of ‘better’ alternatives and this idea found root in historical institutionalist accounts such as the ‘critical juncture’ or sociological perspectives that cause engrained organisational behaviour despite changes in environmental conditions (Pierson, 2000). This conceptual basis guides the thesis to explain resistance to modernisation in Romania, despite violent political revolution. The thesis also challenges the idea that New Public Management offered a universal set of reform doctrines (Hood, 1991) and that international policy learning and transfer was an inevitable outcome of globalisation (Kettl, 1997).

Apart from Romania being the writer’s country of origin, the other main reason for choosing to analyse Romania is the lack of published international research on Romanian public administration in particular, and the central and eastern European (CEE) region in general. However, this requires a consideration of the necessity of understanding the ‘anomalous’ features and trajectory of Romanian civil service reforms. The research base on Romania is also rather limited. Much of the post- socialism literature tends to generalise about the countries in the region, and assumes that they are ‘similar’ (Goldman, 1997; Sobis and de Vries, 2009). This is in addition to the re-shaping of Romanian public administration under the pressures of the continuously changing environment, the regional context, and ultimately meeting the expectations set by European Union membership, which does not produce a uniform response. The complex influences over the institutional shaping

12 of Romanian Public Administration will be analysed in relation to the stated periods of reforms, with an emphasis on the structural changes caused by the former Socialist regime and the disruption created by severing a long tradition of Romanian policy learning from Western Europe prior to World War II.

Although Romania does share some similarities with Central and Eastern European states, what emerges from its particular context (political, economic, social, etc.) is a national policy ‘style’ that determines the policy outcomes of administrative systems.3 However, national policy styles are also shaped by the degree of exposure to the external or international environment. As Hancock et al. (1993: xix) note, policy is ‘influenced by external economic and other factors beyond the control of national policy actors. None the less, national policy-making structures and processes mediate the domestic economic and social consequences of exogenous trends and events’. A relatively new trend in policy analysis (Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996) has identified policy learning as a way of understanding how external influences are absorbed and acted upon by states. While criticised for being under-theorised, policy learning has ‘become a rational choice for most developed countries’ (Evans 2004: 3) although it is conceded that the story is less clear for transition societies. Policy learning, and its outcome, transfer, still provides a conceptual framework for understanding policy choices in an internationalised environment.

The problem that this thesis intends to address is to explain the hiatus between policy choices and political will in relation to public administration in Romania, and to analyse the barriers to systemic improvement. Although a good reason for addressing these themes is to provide a better understanding of democratic failure despite the expected favourable conditions following a revolution. More ironically,

3 Definitions of the term ‘Region’ are contentious, but for the purpose of this thesis, the writer will employ the following definition: regional level refers to the geopolitical area defined by the United Nations (2010) for improving statistical data gathering. This area contains the following states: Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Slovak Republic. However, for the purpose of this research topic, the thesis will focus on the similarities and examples given by the neighbours of Romania (Hungary and Bulgaria) where relevant, which are also member states of the European Union.

13 another reason might be negative lesson drawing, or for Romania to provide a model of ‘how not to reform’ a State. However, a much more fruitful course is to use Romania to provide a convincing account of path dependency that reinforces well established arguments around institutionalism, and to undermine the growing notion that NPM is now ‘internationalised’.

1.1 The Problem with Romanian Public Administration

Why is public administration in Romania a concern? According to Transparency International in 2013, Romania is ranked 69th in the world in terms of its corruption, which is arguably symptomatic of a poorly functioning system. Of its EU neighbours, only Bulgaria has a worse assessment although it finds itself on a par with Italy (Transparency International, 2014). The World Bank’s Governance Indicators show similar findings in relation to corruption; government effectiveness and the rule of law are particularly low for Romania (World Bank, 2013). The indicator of ‘government effectiveness’ is particularly of relevance to this thesis. According to the World Bank, government effectiveness is based not just on the quality of public services but also on the quality of its civil service and its relative immunity from political pressures. Many other international indicators point to poor public service quality and the lack of professional public servants in the country. Calls for change in public administration in the political arena also suffer due to Romania’s relatively poorly-developed civil society. Further change is hampered as Romania remains highly centralised to the extent that the ‛local level’ can be understood here as Romania as a whole, the public institutional network, and not the administrative sub-units of local government, as the process of decentralisation is still taking place without much success. Although this is described in more detail in later chapters (especially chapter 4), , it would appear that Romania is still acting as a centralized state, and this aspect is part of the Socialist inheritance (Verheijen, 1999; Lee, 2009).

14 To provide a clearer view of what type of change the research is looking to analyse, the following section illustrates one example that supports the widely-held assumption that public administration in Romania continues to underperform. Regulatory reforms produced towards the end of 2009 a new unitary payment scheme (Law no. 330/2009). This law addressed the unitary remuneration of the personnel paid from the public budget. In addition to demands for downsizing the state apparatus, as well as other economic factors, the Romanian government appeared to accept also that public servants should be allowed to undertake secondary jobs. Under the previous provisions the only fields of work in which they were allowed to find a secondary job were in academia and journalism. Nowadays it has been acknowledged that as long as an employee can provide at least satisfactory performance in public administration, he/she is free to seek a second job.

On the one hand, it may be argued that such a reform would jeopardize the quality of services provided by public institutions. On the other hand, it may be embraced as an opportunity for public servants to experience private sector employment, and develop transferable skills that could be applied to more than one institutional setting, which otherwise would not be achieved within a highly regulated system. This notion of transferable skills is based on the view that over-specialisation and other factors such as geographical immobility disadvantage organisations (Grant, 1991). While not being ‛best practice’, it may prove to be one of a range of mechanisms which may end embedded centralising practices and confront the inertia associated with public administration. By providing individuals with the alternative to seek better payment, one also provides the system with a natural rotation framework for professionals, which would eventually improve recruiting practices within the public sector and facilitate the transfer of ‘best practice’ between the private and public sectors. Whatever the balance of the argument, this example is indicative of the complex and numerous problems faced by public administration in Romania. It would be unimaginable, say in the UK, that the government would produce a decree to allow civil servants to accept alternative employment alongside their salaried government office. The underlying issues

15 which are emphasized by the existence of this Law are two-fold: the Government is providing a means to tackle corruption and bribery by allowing civil servants to seek an alternative income rather than resort to illegal practices, but at the same time it weakens the apparatus by allowing talented employees to eventually leave the civil service in favour of better pay and work conditions in the private sector. Thus, the legal instrument is a very clear example of a failed modernizing tool due to the lack of a sufficiently effective governmental framework within which it was applied.

The problems with public administration in Romania were also highlighted forcefully in a recent paper by Andrei Plesu (the author is a former Minister of Culture and Minister of Foreign Affairs).4 The paper acknowledges the weight of history in shaping the Romanian administrative system, its deeply politicised nature and the feeling of profound disappointment at the measures taken by the Government to improve public services:

It’s a known fact; the “new” Romania is old. Neither corruption, incompetence brought into power, nor abuses of the press are invented today. There is plenty of evidence to support this, even if it is not necessarily fresh in the public’s memory. Well, precisely for this reason, it is good for us to do our memory practice now and then. No cure works unless you have a deep knowledge of the disease’s history.

Plesu continues by referring to a document entitled ‘The petition from Iasi’, addressed in 1848 to the ruling Prince of Moldova by a group of conservative politicians. This event takes place far before the unification of Romanian principalities in 1918, but it is relevant to the research problem as it demonstrates how certain aspects of the political arena have not changed for centuries in Romania. The strongest statement made by the petitioners (who, as a consequence of their critique of the ruling class, were expelled to Turkey) is the following: ‘Our legislative assemblies so far have spent most of their energy on party feuds and for personal benefit (…)’. They continue that, ‘the biggest evil that completely disorganizes our country’ is ‘the lack of justice’. While this may seem like a common

4 See Plesu in Appendix III 16 political complaint, the closing argument of Plesu’s article, which is actually a question: ‘(...) whom could we blame for this prolonged historical inertia’, brings us full circle. This account of facts which took place 176 years ago calls to attention the topics which are analysed in this research project: the perpetuation of bad practices (cronyism, harassment, corruption, bribery, and not ultimately laziness), excessive political reliance and dependence, and the list goes on. Despite the apparent introduction of western liberal-style democracy with attendant political change in 1989, the landmark accession to the EU in 2007 plus admission to other international clubs such as NATO, the problems surrounding public administration in Romania remains similar to those in the 19th century. Despite the advent of international administrative reform movements, starting with the development of Weberian characteristics and managerial thought, Romania appears to be locked in to 19th century attitudes and behaviour, despite the existence of alternative approaches. The persistence of these historical preferences, as outlined by Plesu (2014), is generally understood as ‘path dependency’, which will be a key concern of this thesis.

1.2 Aims and Objectives:

The over-arching aim of the thesis is to provide an explanation for the lack of genuine change in the Romanian system, one that is marked by a lack of professionalism and the other negative connotations with bureaucracy. Professionalism is a highly contentious term which will be discussed later, but here it can be assumed that it implies that office holders possess qualifications and expertise and that they serve the public purpose, to some extent. This idea of professionalism accords with Weber’s bureaucrats who are properly qualified and trained, and act rationally above personal interest. When writing about the arrival of New Public Management (NPM) in the latter part of the 20th century, Hood (1991) argued that one of its main doctrines was to instil ‘professional management’ in the public sector. Thus, to achieve its overall aim, the thesis will draw upon theoretical aspects in the international and comparative public management literature, such as NPM. However, this literature is relatively sparse

17 with respect to providing a definitive account of the challenges facing administrative reform in the former Soviet and CEE arena, and it routinely overlooks Romania, despite its position as one of the largest new member-states of the European Union.5 There is also a practical aspect to the research in that there is the possibility of developing a model of reforms for transitional countries situated in a similar geopolitical environment. However, this is not to say that Romania is broadly similar in its approach to its post-Soviet neighbours. As mentioned above in relation to Romania being an anomalous state in the region, it is the label ‘Romanian exceptionalism’ which is a recurring theme in the literature that is available. Linz and Stepan (1996) make the following case for Romania when compared to its neighbours (primarily Poland, Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia):

It had the last transition. It had the most violent regime transition. It was the only country that had nothing remotely close to a national round table. It is the country where the successor regime committed the most egregious violations of human rights. It is the only country where the democratic opposition has yet to win an election. It is the only country where a former high Communist official was not only elected to the presidency in the first free election, but re-elected.

Arguably, there are other ‘exceptional’ features to Romania; for instance, it is a culturally Latin country surrounded by largely Slavic neighbours, but it is difficult to see how that feature is relevant to the study of public administration (as Chapter Four discusses, early influences were more likely to come from Germany and France). It is also a relatively large country when compared to its neighbours. Bulgaria, who joined the EU in 2007 with Romania, has a population just over one third of that of Romania. However, it was the very nature of the Communist regime under Ceausescu which marked out Romania in comparison to its CEE neighbours, and this will be explored in Chapter Four. Gledhill and King (2011) also add that a

5 Romania is 7th among EU countries in terms of population, behind Poland in 6th and ahead of the Netherlands in 8th. 18 strong national identity has been maintained despite the ‘boundaries set by more powerful neighbours’ in the past including the Turks, the Soviets and possibly present-day ‘bureaucrats in Brussels’ (pp. 330-1).

To return to the overall aim of the thesis, it is to provide an explanation of the lack of change of the Romanian administrative system, based largely around its reluctance to professionalise. This inertia is even more remarkable as it has persisted at a time when governments across the world are being ‘re-invented’ (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992), as a result of international policy learning. To revisit Plesu’s assertion above, the weight of history appears to have influenced this state of affairs, thus raising the idea that path dependency provides part of the explanation. Thus, the overall aim requires the following set of research objectives to be addressed by the thesis:

 to analyse the mechanisms that prevent Romania from substantially reforming its public administration system

 to determine the evolution of managerial processes shaped by both the internal environment and the European legal framework

 to provide an analysis of the influence of path-dependency and culture over administrative reforms in Romania

 to demonstrate that Romania’s administrative system is ‘exceptional’ and resistant to EU reform influence

None of the objectives are mutually exclusive and each of them will be elaborated in turn. The first objective was developed in the absence of any definitive or even reliable account of policy-making in Romania. Accounts of policy-making in the literature tend to be dominated by Western liberal democracies, for example Parsons (1995). A book chapter by Crowther and Roper (1996) is probably the closest equivalent but is somewhat dated, and lacking in detail. Reaching this objective will provide the important background to the other four objectives, which go to form the core of the thesis.

19 The next objective, then, looks at the barriers to reform in Romanian public administration. I will argue that despite two very fundamental shifts in Romania’s political environment: the 1989 Revolution and accession to the EU in 2007, along with greater exposure to international influence, the system stubbornly refuses to change. Arguably, it was preparation for EU membership rather than the Revolution that provided the greater impetus to change and this is addressed primarily through the third objective, although domestic pressure for change is not discounted.

The fourth objective explicitly refers to the application of institutional theory perspectives to Romanian public administration. Institutional theory appears to provide powerful arguments for the lack of change in Romania but their explanatory power is only partially effective, and their usage demand reflective and critical analysis. One problem related to this research is the difficulty of getting ‘inside’ institutions in the way that classic studies have such as Heclo and Wildavsky (1974, 1981). One area that is emphasised in the current thesis is in relation to understanding culture, and is part of the sociological institutionalist approach, or the idea that bureaucrats are products of a societal culture, which is re-enacted in an organizational setting. Such institutional arrangements then set the boundaries of current policy initiatives, or that policy set in the past influences the present, the phenomenon known as path dependency (Arthur (1994), David (1994, 2001)). Therefore, the last objective suggests that the strength of path dependency in the Romanian system is sufficient to overcome the demands for reform from the EU. This seems paradoxical but Romania’s entry into the EU (arguably along with every other post 2004 accession state) had more to do with wider geo-political and strategic concerns although it could also be argued that the EU would still have an interest in an effective and efficient Romanian bureaucracy. However, the argument here is that Romania’s path dependency is exceptionally powerful, despite EU accession, and the actions of other international agencies.

Central to the analysis is the concept of path dependency. While path dependency has come under challenge from internationalisation and its attendant developments such as the increase in policy learning and the growing power of 20 international institutions as receptacles and promoters of public management approaches (such as the World Bank), it remains remarkably resilient (Peters et al., 2005). Thus, for instance, it may be possible to determine the policy influences on Romania systematically, by an empirical analysis of the key actors involved in the elaboration of policy mechanisms. In addition, it should be possible to identify the existence of a policy community (or overlapping policy networks) to which Romania belongs, and the extent to which Romania follows or responds to international trends and European/Regional pressures towards change. While the thesis sets out to do this to attain its objectives, there needs to be a distinction between the policy learning and policy transfer approaches. As will be discussed in chapter three, the latter is too fraught with difficulties to provide a reliable methodological approach, or in other words, to demonstrate reliably that a policy transfer has taken place. Such challenges are exacerbated by the opaque nature of Romania’s administrative system, which will be considerably expanded upon in this thesis. Although policy transfer is often difficult to improve empirically, it is easier to identify the processes and instances where policy learning takes place, for instance, exposure to World Bank consultants, attendance at OECD workshops on administrative reform, and so forth.

Another challenge in relation to the research is perceptions of Romania by the dominant literature. For instance, when considered in relation to its neighbours, it is a common assumption in the literature that Romania can be generalised within the post-Soviet group of countries. As Mathiasen (2007: 648) and others would argue, such countries ‘recognised that their inherited public management systems were incompatible’ with democratisation and needed to participate in internationalisation to liberalise their economies. In this case, it would be correct to assume that Romania, like its neighbours, found its system of public administration to be ill-prepared for such a dramatic transition. 1989 was a pivotal year in Central and Eastern Europe as in that same year the regimes in Poland, Hungary, Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria collapsed and Romania’s own revolution took place, while at the same time the OECD’s influential Public Management Service was established which captured and disseminated the mood

21 of NPM that was taking hold across the Anglophone world. By the end of the last century, NPM had become a global phenomenon, despite the scepticism of many academics. The international trend of NPM is introduced in the next chapter, but the assumption is that the newly democratising countries in CEE would readily embrace the new prescriptions coming from the OECD and other international organisations. One would also assume that there would be plenty of evidence of this influence to be found in Romania. During this period, although the former communist countries had similar policy prescriptions addressed to them, the research will also demonstrate how the Romanian case is different from neighbouring countries in a number of respects.

It is also important for the thesis to analyse the extent of political influence over policy processes. Ever since Woodrow Wilson (1887) advocated the separation of politics from administration, most reform prescriptions have been concerned with effective mechanisms by which political influence may be gradually removed from administrative policy- making to ensure a purely administrative reform rather than a top-down politically-imposed one. However, the separation of politics from administration appears a distant prospect, especially in Romania. An easy conclusion to make is that the continued politicisation of the bureaucracy in post- Communist states appears to have hampered organisational change in public administration and prevented the adoption of potentially useful approaches to improving management within it. Although the thesis does not propose that managerialist solutions are suitable for Romania, or any other country, it is possible that alternatives are unlikely to be considered. This view is supported by a reliance on administrative law in many parts of Europe, which tends to inhibit managerialist prescriptions for bureaucratic problems. Verheijen’s (2007: 314) opinion that ‘in reality, civil service laws seldom have had the impact they were expected to have’, means in other words, that they provide little basis for the stabilisation, de- politicisation and professionalization of government. The Romanian administrative system remains highly politicised so these objectives are set not just to provide a theoretical analysis of the Romanian administrative environment, but also to

22 provide actual tools for a “healthy” development of professional management within its system of public administration.

A major challenge of undertaking research in Romania is that to gather meaningful data from key policy makers and civil servants is extremely difficult as culturally, by and large, the bureaucracy still behaves as it did in the communist era. Written documentation is scarce and as such, external agencies such as the EU and the World Bank provide more reliable commentaries than the Romanian public service itself. Universities and research institutes within the country are similarly opaque, and where there is analysis, the research design is often poor or the academics exaggerate or misinterpret any progress being made. Commentaries by academics external to Romania are few and far between, and most are dated, with political scientists concentrating on the decade immediately post revolution and then losing interest. Despite the difficulty of gaining insights, the thesis has managed to elicit interviews from key personnel within, and observers of, the policy process concerning administrative reform in Romania (see chapter three).

1.3 Structure of the Thesis

To address the research questions, the thesis is structured in the following way. The next chapter provides a critical review of the literature. There are several theoretical aspects that demand attention. The first of these is the alleged global shift away from ‘old’ public administration to ‘new public management’ (Hood, 1991; Kettle, 1997; Common, 2001). Scholars have highlighted this phenomenon as one of the key theoretical developments in public administration beginning in the late 20th century. It is necessary to locate Romania, not least among the so-called transitional states of central and Eastern Europe within this international trend. A second aspect is to make sense of the theoretical context in which administrative reform takes place, including institutional and cultural theory. One of the most significant texts in the field of international public administration, Pollitt and Bouckaert’s Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis is now in its third edition (2011). It is notable that since the second edition (2004), the authors have

23 modified the subtitle to New Public Management, Governance and the Neo- Weberian State to take subsequent theoretical developments into account. The discussion of the Neo-Weberian state is particularly significant for this thesis, as many writers (including those from Romania) describe public management in post- Soviet states as ‘Neo Weberian’ which is less accommodating to the business techniques and market mechanisms suggested by the more normative accounts of NPM. As the thesis will prove, this view is fallacious as it is often based without a thorough analysis of the country and follows an optimistic account of what political reforms have been achieved. Finally, the chapter makes a critical evaluation of the existing literature on public administration in Romania, and finds it to be considerably lacking. This is a key area in which this thesis can make a considerable intellectual contribution. The literature review reveals the over-optimism of proponents of the globalising effects of New Public Management, and questions the effectiveness of its transmission mechanisms when confronted by path-dependent processes. Thus, the chapter considers Lynn’s (2001) framework of governance which provides a set of organising themes for the empirical research, but reconsidered for the context of Romania.

Building on the theoretical frameworks considered in the review of the literature, there follows a chapter detailing the methodology to be employed in the thesis. As the second chapter will reveal, there are considerable methodological challenges to public administration research in post-communist systems such as Romania. This chapter considers these challenges and documents how qualitative approaches with key actors in the Romanian bureaucracy are deployed to gather the necessary data. The chapter details the research design, the selection of the interviewees and outlines the limitations. The main approach to the research is the elite interviewing method, despite being fraught with challenges and open to criticism. However, Aberbach and Rockman’s (2002: 676) closing remarks to their influential article offers some encouragement in this respect:

You'll meet some of the most interesting people in the country and learn a huge amount about political life and the workings of political institutions.

24 However, conducting elite interviews is even more problematic outside of the well- established liberal democracies. In the CEE countries, the notion of openness and transparency is less established, not to mention the importance of informal networks and even corruption in the delivery of public policy, which provide considerable obstacles to the research. Finally, Romania is treated as a case, following Dahl (1947) as public administration as systemic, or rooted in its own particular set of culture, institutions and historical development.

Thus, the fourth chapter details the administrative context of Romania, and in turn, substantiates the difficulties of research in similar countries. This chapter is crucial in terms of taking a mainly historic institutionalist approach in terms of understanding the trajectory of administrative change within the country. No definitive accounts exist in the literature although Chen (2002) also provides a historical institutionalist account of the Communist legacy and supports the case for Romanian exceptionalism (calling it a ‘peculiar’ case) although public administration is not Chen’s central concern. In addition, if we accept the internationalisation of public management as a reform movement, then it is also necessary to consider how systems of public administration adapt to, or indeed discard, external influences. The chapter also considers how the entrenchment of the communist legacy presents a case for Romanian ‘exceptionalism’ in relation to its regional neighbours and undermines the readily-drawn conclusion that central and eastern European states display very similar characteristics (e.g. Stark and Bruszt, 2001; Verheijen, 2007). The chapter thus demonstrates that despite the revolution of 1989, in terms of its administrative context, very little changed. Arguably, the most important event in terms of understanding contemporary public administration in Romania was the imposition of communism on a weakened state in 1945.

Chapters 5, 6 and 7 contain the most significant parts of the thesis in terms of building on the interview material. In chapter 5, the discussion is focused on Romania’s accession to the EU. Although the chapter also considers the impact of international reforms in public management on Romania, but shows that preparation for EU accession had more of an impact rather than a fundamental

25 reform that would expected following a revolution. The chapter also discusses the post-EU accession phase. In addition, the chapter considers attempts to develop the capacity of the civil service. The chapter shows that despite the resources available to support administrative change, it is the path dependent features of Romanian public administration that have contributed to slow progress in reform, despite the landmark preparation for, and accession to the EU.

The sixth chapter encompasses the main findings of the research project. In this chapter, the thesis begins to introduce and discuss the extensive qualitiative data drawn from my interviews with key policy-makers, public officials and commentators in Romania. This chapter also considers the European Union accession and the post-accession chain of reactions to European requirements. The issues analysed in this chapter are primarily based on these in-depth elite interviews and one of the most notable aspects is that the interviewees appear to support the argument of Romania’s reform process backsliding after accessing the EU. What also emerges is that NPM and similar reform trends left Romania largely untouched, although it is clear that there was a familiarity with the discourses around administrative change. It is written above that the most significant episode in Romania’s history in terms of interpreting its system of public administration was the introduction of the communist state, so the assumption is that EU accession in 2007 would dissolve this historical legacy, once and for all. Based on the qualitative interview data gathered and analysed here, I argue that this historical legacy has not been dissolved.

The seventh chapter constitutes the second part of the case study and it draws attention to the cultural aspects which influence policy making choices, political and administrative behaviour, and lead to historical institutionalism as an overall explanatory factor, rather than its sociological variant. In connection to the cultural dimension the thesis of path dependency is thus explored so as to explain the trajectory Romania has engaged onto after the Revolution in 1989 and to attempt to find out why the past actions still influence the current public administration system, leading to the reproduction of an ‘unprofessional’ bureaucracy. What

26 emerges from the data analysis here is that the EU provides just one source of pressure for change among many; the World Bank, and other international organisations and consultancies all provide variants of the managerialist discourse that has failed to take root in the country. Thus, the chapter also considers Romanian, or ‘home grown’ solutions to the problems associated with the lack of professionalism associated with its administrative system.

The last chapter is chapter eight, focused on the conclusions that could be drawn from the analysis of available literature and the qualitative data contained by the interviews. This involves a systematic review of the research objectives developed at the start of this chapter and provides a challenge to the existing literature. The chapter also provides a theoretical model of reform that may help to generalise the case of Romania in line with Dahl’s (1947) problematicisation of public administration many years ago. In this paper, Dahl suggests that ‘national psychologies’ develop based on its historical development, and that ‘one cannot assume that public administration can escape from the effects of this conditioning; or that it is somehow independent of and isolated from the culture or social setting in which it develops’ (p. 8). Dahl argued for a comparative approach to develop a science of public administration, and while the thesis is not a comparative piece of research, given the context of analysis, and especially with EU accession, neither does the thesis consider Romania in isolation from the wider European context.

1.4 Conclusion

This introductory chapter has provided the scope for the research problem and set research objectives for addressing that problem. As public administration is inextricably linked to political power, and when added to negative or dysfunctional post-communist characteristics, a considerable challenge is presented to researchers when analysing states such as Romania. The development of international public management is not a straightforward process, and although states such as Romania appear receptive to reform, modernization and professionalization, this is far from the case despite absorbing huge allocations of

27 development funding from international agencies. The thesis demonstrates that in an administrative climate such as that of Romania, Western recipes for modernizing are as conflicting as the ‘home grown’ solutions, and that the lack of prioritization given to administrative reform affects the status of Romania within the EU and the wider international arena in a negative way.

Therefore, the thesis aims to explain the lack of real modernisation in Romania, and to demonstrate the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Romanian approach by providing evidence to tell the story of how EU accession did not guarantee instant solutions to embedded bad practices. The argument developed in the thesis serves to emphasize the fallacy and naivety of ‘international best practice’ approaches such as NPM. To begin to address the objectives of the thesis, the next chapter takes a critical stance towards the international public administration literature as well as drawing in other perspectives from institutional and cultural theories to provide a robust theoretical framework on which the thesis will be based. What will become clear from the next chapter is the paucity of reliable academic literature in relation to government and politics in Romania in general (although there was a ‘spike’ of publications in the 1990s related to post-Communism) and public administration in particular. This is at least one significant gap that this thesis is concerned with addressing. In addition, it is anticipated that the thesis will make an original empirical contribution to our understanding of how public administration is shaped in individual countries.

28 Chapter 2: Public Administration in Romania: The Legacy of the Past

2.1. Introduction:

As the previous chapter began to explore, despite multiple claims made by Romanian officials (both in internal and international contexts) that Romania possesses a modernised, professionalised bureaucracy, the evidence appears to point to the opposite. However, to begin to realise the objectives of the thesis, a critical appraisal of the international public administration literature is required as, at least at first glance, it appears overly optimistic in terms of how administrative reform can be achieved across very different administrative contexts. At the centre of this perspective is the belief that applications of managerialism would provide solutions to administrative problems. If this were possible, there would be no research problem to investigate, either in Romania or anywhere else. This chapter is thus organised in the following way. It begins by assessing the usefulness of institutional theory to the proposed research as this highlights the importance of context when assessing the potential for, and the problems, of implementing reforms. In the following section, international perspectives on public management reform are then considered; Hood (1991) was one of the first commentators to recognise the international trend of “New Public Management” (NPM) and the emergence of a new global paradigm was promoted by the publication of Reinventing Government (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). This international literature continues to have considerable influence in shaping the public management agendas of diverse countries across the world, including developing countries (see, for example, Minogue, 2001) or the so-called transitory economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The appearance of NPM has not lead to uniform application across different states with varying political cultures and contexts, as Common (2001) demonstrated in Southeast Asia, for example.

29 The literature review then considers the European and Regional levels of analysis. The expansion of the European Union has led to ‘Europeanization’ or a type of policy convergence caused by the demands of accession. However, EU accession countries, such as Romania, that are former members of the Communist bloc often get clustered for the purposes of analysis, as Central or Eastern European countries, with their own set of common characteristics. Furthermore, the process by which public management is being internationalised can also be analysed using the concept of policy learning. The applicability of the concept of NPM to public services in Romania demands particular attention. As part of the wider international reform packages, NPM (as derived from liberal democratic Anglophone countries) has proved attractive to governments across the world, so it is assumed that Romania is no different. The literature review concludes by proposing the use of Lynn’s (2001) model of governance to provide an analytic framework for the research. Lynn provides a set of organising concepts based on the wider international shifts towards NPM aimed at moving governments away from a reliance on overly-bureaucratic mechanisms to achieve policy outcomes (Heinrich et al, 2004). However, as will be seen, the model is adapted to the situation in Romania.

2.2 InstitutionalTheories

In the introduction to the chapter above, it was noted that institutional theory can help to explain the forms that administrative change actually takes. Indeed, theories of bureaucracy on which most administrative systems rest are derived from the ‘old’ institutionalism of Max Weber and others. The old institutionalism is marked by the economic rationalist assumptions made of administrators and the notion of bureaucracy as efficient organisation and this is where Weber has been heavily criticised (Albrow, 1970). We also need to state what is meant by institutions although Weber did not use this term specifically (Swedberg 1998: 39). Scott (1995: 56) offers what he terms the ‚omnibus’ interpretation:

30 Institutions comprise regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements that, together with associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life.

As industry and economic relations became ever more complex during the 20th century, institutional theory was reconsidered without entirely abandoning ‚old’ institutionalism (Greenwood and Hinings, 1996). As Scott (1995: 57) acknowledges, the definition is ‚dense’ but useful. The old institutionalist approach based on bureaucracy is considered inflexible so if we accept policy-making is ‘more successful when it is tailored to the particular contexts in which ‘problem-solving’ takes place (Parsons 1995: 610), then a detailed institutional analysis is necessary to understand policy choices in Romania. This is in line with institutional perspectives employed in Central and Eastern European countries due to the post-Communist collapse and fragmentation of former institutional arrangements ‘organized around a nation-wide central plan’ (Gelbuda et al. 2008: 1). In public administration, historical and sociological institutionalism have helped to explain the cross- influences between institutions and policies in the case of the former, while the latter emphasises the role of culture, conformity and legitimacy (see discussion in Thoenig, 2003). Ray (1995: 448) also cites Bryant and Mokrzycki (1994) who argue that economic systems emerge organically from particular historical and cultural contexts. In addition, cross-national influences are an important theme in this thesis, as no nation state develops policy sealed from international influences, at least in the 21st century. A sub-area of policy studies has also appeared over the last 20 years or so, known as policy learning. Although this is not a central concern of the thesis, it draws in part, from institutional theory (Evans, 2004) and it is worth noting at this stage that while policy learning does not occur independently of the institutional context, it is a separable and observable phenomenon. Moreover, it is difficult to ignore the role of policy learning entirely in this thesis as nearly every country is open to its influence (Rose, 1993) although the pressure to transfer varies enormously from state to state (Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996).

31 The institutionalist approach to analysing government emphasised the importance of structure or ‘bringing the state back in’ (Skocpol in Evans et al., 1985) as well as a wider range of institutions that affect public policy formulation and implementation. As Blondel (1995) notes, such analysis is complex as it looks not only at structure but how it determines behaviour and practice. From the notion that institutions both shape and are shaped by the behaviour of actors within them, ‘new institutionalism’ emerged in the 1980s, primarily based on the work of, for instance, March and Olsen (1984, 1989), Scott (1995) and Powell and DiMaggio (1991). Crucially, the institutional approach emphasised informal behaviour as well as the formal aspects concerned with the exercise of power and rules, which differentiated it from ‘old’ institutionalism. A related approach to institutionalism is the administrative state approach, which looks at the historical development of European states to account for the differences between them, primarily in relation to degrees of centralisation (Blondel 1995: 24).

Thus, it is clear that there are a variety of institutional approaches, and this chapter does not intend to cover all of them. Rather it will try to identify those approaches that appear to have most relevance to the thesis. The most used institutional theories divide into roughly three categories: historical, sociological and rational choice (Dodds 2013: 238). The rational choice approach is not pursued in this thesis largely because it pre-supposes that policy actors (including bureaucrats) inhabit a developed western liberal democracy (where such theory was developed). Questions such as perfect information, informed economic choices, and so on, are deeply problematic in the Romanian context and would present considerable methodological difficulties. Despite entry into the EU, etc. it is hard to describe Romania as a polity marked by market or economic rationalism (compared to the assumptions made about the US, UK, etc.). Furthermore, Romania will present a difficult research environment and it will be difficult to challenge interviewees on personal motivations. In addition, as the rational choice approach is largely derived from studies of western liberal democracies, primarily the US, it has also been subjected to critical scrutiny (Dunleavy, 1991). Can we dismiss rational choice institutionalism entirely in relation to Romania? In a special issue of the Journal of

32 Public Administration Research and Theory, Ferris and Tang (1993) argue that it goes beyond narrow neo-classical concerns. In this view, the Romanian bureaucrat would be subject to self-interest, ordered preferences, etc. and Ferris and Tang (1993) consider the work of North (1990) who considers the role and costs of information in institutions. The influence of incentives is another area to be considered as they affect managerial performance (Knott, 1993 – same edition). On the surface, an argument can be made for understanding administrative behaviour as being grounded in the pursuit of self- interest. Hay (2004) provides a critical view of the rational choice perspective and his basic argument is that it is too simplistic. In this case, it would be easy to assume that the problems of Romanian public administration could simply be explained away by utility-maximising bureaucrats unconstrained by managerial controls.

To turn to historical institutionalism, we look at the formation of institutions to assess their trajectory (or path dependence) which in turn, constrains future policy options. In short, policy is difficult to change once it is established due to its beneficiaries, who provide political lobbies. Institutions also shape the interests of those within them; the bureaucrats, public officials or civil servants. As a result, policy making tends to be slow or incremental (Streeck and Thelen, 2005) due to organisational processes. Of course, this perspective has been criticised on the grounds that wider influences are just as important, such as class and the economic system, or the influence of supra-national authorities such as the European Court of Justice (Caporaso and Tarrow, 2009). One of the challenges of the thesis is that of providing strong evidence on the phenomenon of embedded resilience from the Romanian system against the modernizing and conforming influences of the European Union and other internataional agencies. Historical instutionalism provides a convincing account, despite the criticisms.

On the other hand, the sociological institutionalist approach looks at cultural or non-rational influences. March and Olsen (1984) recognised how actors would behave in ways considered to be consistent with the institution within which they

33 were working. This is known as ‘appropriate behaviour’ and is acquired through socialisation, organisational routines and so forth. The sociological approach provides a convincing account of the persistence of institutions, even those that are inefficient. Although not explicitly recognised by March and Olsen, national cultures are also refracted through political institutions, and this also reinforces administrative behaviours.

Another important concept derived from sociological institutionalism is the isomorphism identified by the work of DiMaggio and Powell (1991). DiMaggio and Powell attempt to explain growing similarity between organisational forms and managerial practice across nations. The following quote is particularly pertinent to Romania: ‘Bureaucratization and other forms of organizational change occur as the result of processes that make organizations more similar without making them more efficient’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 64-5). The three institutional forces working on organisations are coercive (imposed from an outside agency), mimetic (or copying processes in response to uncertainty) or normative (responding to perceived professional norms or values). This account discounts rationality in terms of explaining organisational change and reform as reforms choices are socialised. Organisational cultures become important in terms of explaining resistance to, or forces acting for change. The work of Lachmann et. al. (1994) emphasises how this helps to explain how practices imported from elsewhere are likely to fail when taken out of context.

When applied to Romania and its neighbours, the literature on institutionalism is rather thin. However, Ibrahim and Galt (2002) provide a rare exception. The authors maintain it is difficult to apply new institutionalism to Romania due to its political-cultural context (which also supports the exceptionalist argument) and the strength of its path dependency. The events of 1997 (the ‘100 laws’ – analysed in later chapters) were supposed to provide deep-seated institutional change in Romania. In short, they conclude that new institutional approaches could not explain resistance to change in Romania and more could have been achieved using 34 ‚old’ or evolutionary institutional perspectives. ‚There is a clear role for the state in the old institutional framework that see it encouraging, supporting and working with the private sector rather than merely establish market institutions and adapting macroeconomic stabilisation policies’ (Ibrahim and Galt 2002, 116). However, such analysis misses the longer term perspective, for instance, the article was written prior to EU accession. Although Ibrahim and Galt argue that institutionalism does have much to offer, Romania will find it difficult to escape from the ‚legacy of the past’.

Because of its cultural and historical background, Romania also still needs to tackle the Socialist legacy, which translates in this case as path-dependency. Building on historical institutional approaches, path dependence appears to offer a convincing account for the slow rate, or even resistance to reforms, in public administration. For instance, Pierson’s (1994, 1998) work on path dependency suggests that in social policy, policies create new welfare recipients who then go on to block further reform. The result is that policy tends to be incremental and politicians avoid censure through technical details and, or, complicated policy institutions. However, path-dependency as analysed by Pierson (2000) may imply several approaches to the problem, and it is considered a ‘victim’ of concept stretching (Sartori, 1970). The work of Arthur (1994) takes an economic point of view, providing explanations for the clustering of industries but the focus on firms means there is little to say about public administration in general. David (2000) is more useful in that he views path dependency as both a historical and an economic process which can be used to explain market failure, and hence government or public policy actions.

For the purposes of this thesis, path dependency might be interpreted as ‚administrative legacy’ and as Peters et al (2005: 1289) point out, it is well suited for explaining the persistence of policies, but less capable of explaining policy change. Citing North (1990), Kay (2005: 553) argues that ‚path dependency is a process that constrains future choice sets’. It is institutions that become path dependent, and this links it back to the concept of historical insititutionalism. Institutions provide the procedures, norms and routines that are contained within organizational

35 structures and the wider institutional environment which subsequently shape their performance (Talbot, 2008). This provides the theoretical basis for arguing that individuals are constrained within such arrangements. As Kay (2005: 558) argues, path dependency can be regarded as a process of accretion which ‚resticts options for future policy-makers’. In other words, according to David (2000) ‚history matters’ although the dominance of economics in developing the concept appears to infer that institutional path dependence leads to economic path dependence. However, as Mantzavinos et al (2004: 79) note, path dependency is useful for looking at how policy choices made within both the formal and informal institutional settings of policy making. Hay and Wincott (1998: 955) provide this explanation of the concept: ‚the order in which things happen affects how they happen; the trajectory of change up to a certain point itself contrains the trajectory after that point; and the strategic choices made at a particular moment eliminate whole ranges of possiblities from later choices...’ As the thesis progresses, we see how path dependency helps to explain why change is constrained in Romanian public administration.

However, the notion of path dependency also accommodates the concept of punctuated equilibrium which suggests that sudden change is possible and existing policy can be replaced by new policy trajectories (Baumgartner and Jones, 2002). Peters et al (2005) argue that such changes require both political and economic triggers. When looking at administrative reform, punctuated equilibrium occurred when the perceived failures of previous styles of managing in the public sector became apparent which coincided with the ideological criticism of public administration by a wave of political leaders elected in the 1980s including Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. The ideas of NPM also provided an apparently workable manifesto for change (Peters et al, 2005).

Path dependency has been subject to considerable criticism in the literature. Kay (2005: 554) provides a powerful critique in relation to the field of policy studies, arguing that it lacks a convincing account of decision making over time and that it fails to account for policy change. In short, the past does not neatly predict the

36 future; or that it has no normative basis. However, the purpose of the thesis is not to suggest the future trajectory of public administration but to provide an account for the lack of change. In addition, policy making in Romania lacks the dynamics associated with Western liberal democracy (for example, limited civil society or pressure and interest group inputs) which means some of the criticisms about decision making lack validity given that most critiques of path dependency tend to come from researchers within this context.

Bevir et al. (2003) criticise the use of path dependency in public administration research as providing easy explanations for explaining administrative reform across differing contexts, without providing historical accounts or insights from elite policy makers. However, this is exactly what this thesis does. The detailed historical account is provided in Chapter 4 and elite interviews provide deep insight into why continuity has been maintained through to the end of the thesis. As Hay and Wincott (1998) point out, ‚change is seen to reside in the relationship between actors and the context within which they find themselves’, which again informs the approach taken by the thesis.

There has been some application of path-dependency to CEE countries, for instance, in the the papers by Stark and Bruszt (2001) and Grabher and Stark (2010). Stark and Bruszt (2001) don’t examine Romania in particular but they discuss the ‘post socialist pathways’ in neighbouring countries. It is worth quoting directly from them as it appears to be a particularly relevant idea for the thesis:

We found the concept of path dependence useful not because it signalled a generalized “history matters” but because it forced us to be rigorous about identifying critical junctures in which the temporality and sequencing of particular events are consequential (Abbott 1995; Sewell 1996). But we were also concerned that a narrow reading of path dependence along the now-famous QWERTY keyboard model would overstate contingency by assuming that political change occurs on a blank slate (see Thelen [1999] for a useful discussion). In our view, innovations, especially organizational and institutional innovations, are not de novo but occur in the context of an array of resources. As we indicated in Postsocialist Pathways, “Actors who seek to introduce change require resources to overcome obstacles to change. This exploitation of existing institutionalized resources is a principal

37 component of the paradox that even instances of transformation are marked by path dependence” (p. 83). In our view, path dependency is a theory neither of determinacy nor indeterminacy…(Stark and Bruszt 2001: 1132)

Grabher and Stark (2010) also analyse institutions in Eastern Europe but once again, avoid any mention of Romania. However, they do argue that institutions that are inefficient cannot simply be replaced, nor should path dependency assume that public institutions are inefficient in terms of allocative efficiency. This body of work usefully suggests the importance of pre-existing social configurations, and it sensitive to the deep complexity and indeterminacy involved in large-scale change of social systems. So deep is the complexity, however, that it is hard to disentangle and make sense of all the various competing social structures that impact and shape action.

For the purpose of this research, therefore, the definition of path dependence needs to be narrowed, and Levi (1997) has proposed an especially straightforward one : “path dependence has to mean, if it is to mean anything, that once a country or region has started down a track, the costs of reversal are very high […].” Rudra (2007: 391) considered path dependence to be an important explanatory factor in developmental states for resisting reform. This is because distributional coalitions (such as the civil service and the military) have a ‘vested interest in maintaining existing institutions and reinforcing them’. In particular, elite civil servants enjoy benefits paid for out of government revenues rather than the insurance principle. Applied to Romania, path-dependency is problematic, as the tendency, after the abolition of the Socialist regime is to keep the same type of apparatus – a huge bureaucratic mechanism that encourages ‘antiquated’ practices such as the State being the dominant employer in this country, centralization, and deep politicization (Verheijen, 1999).

According to Mathiasen (2007), post-Socialist countries need to develop transparent, accountable, and effective reform mechanisms, which bring more emphasis on the need to tackle path-dependency. The dependence on a certain

38 path is common in Eastern European countries, as most of them have been part of the Socialist bloc, which may also explain why, again, most of them are considered ‘transitional’ countries. Róna-Tás (1997) describes the path-dependency of institutions as a vicious cycle based on inertia, resistance to change/external pressures, and the political mechanisms, which are embedded in the system, and subject to the same resistance to external influences. This may be the case of Romania, as up to this point, after 20 years of transition, there is a need for transformation.

Path-dependency encompasses not only the organizational mechanisms, but also politics and the social system. If the social system is resistant to change as well as the political one, there is little space for change. The change in this case may appear to come from the coercive mechanisms used by the European Union to induce reform effectiveness in some of its member states such as Romania (the ‘coercive’ policy transfer approach described by Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996), and wider international pressures for reform.

The Romanian experience appears to prove that each Government builds on the past reforms, a process known as “incrementalism”, described extensively by Lindblom (1959) based on policy making in the United States. However, incrementalism created a pattern that may be extrapolated to other states in the attempt to explain certain administrative behaviours, and this indicates gradual rather than radical change (Peters 2010: 239). While there is nothing remarkable about this, and Romanian public policies are a result of an agreement of (some) of the involved actors upon it, there is no sense of assessing the possible outcomes. While it is often not possible to assess if a new policy is rooted in an old one or not (due to methodological challenges discussed in the next chapter), the concept of incrementalism may be challenged, but Ibrahim and Galt (2002) argue that while institutional change may be necessary for Romania, the embedded nature of its national institutions will continue to support only gradual change.

39 Both variants of institutionalism appear to offer powerful explanations for the problems with public administration in Romania. From historical institutionalism, the concept of path dependency appears robust, while sociological institutionalism, particulary the work of DiMaggio and Powell, considers the role of convergence. Political and administrative cultures also form an important part of this perspective, and this can’t be ignored. As mentioned earlier, the idea of Romanian exceptionalism is a recurring theme in the thesis. This is linked to its own political culture which in turn, ‘explains’ its poor performance in general (Shafir, 1985; Mungiu-Pippidi 2006). Wildavsky (1987) refers to Romanian fatalism and Mungiu- Pippidi (2006: 311) concurs that partially, external intervention in Romanian affairs has led to this cultural trait. This aspect is explored more thoroughly in Chapter 4 which analyses the political and administrative context of Romania but the literature (such as it is) finds it difficult to disaggregate communist socialisation from particular Romanian traits. This dysfunctional political culture is also referred to throughout the thesis and the methodological consequences of that are explored in the next chapter. In short, it is clear from the literature that Romanian policy- making defies the rationalist variants of Western policy analysis that became dominant, such as public choice theory. Unlike the rare application of historical institutionalism in the paper by Ibrahim and Galt (2002), it is not surprising that there is nothing apparent in the literature that applies the sociological perspective to Romania.

2.3 The International level of analysis for Public Management:

While institutional theories form a conceptual basis for the thesis, the research makes the assumption that for Romanian public administration to modernise, it needs to resemble the public services of leading industrialised countries. The starting point in the literature is the International angle, where models and approaches to public management are promoted by international organisations, consultancies and individual governments. This feature of public management was identified by Hood (1991) and is associated with NPM. There is also the European/Regional level(s), also inhabited by international actors such as the

40 European Union, which has a particular view of public administration that broadly emphasises administrative law and then there is the Local or Romanian environment. Arguably, the International environment is subject to globalisation as a phenomenon, which tends to unify trends within various fields of research, such as Public Management and Human Resource Management (Selden, 2007). Public Management has been situated within the wider processes of globalisation fostering change at International, European, and Regional level. The most important feature emphasised by scholars when discussing the implications for public management at all the levels mentioned before is that it requires considerable change when deploying reform mechanisms, and it advocates the shift from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’, from workers to professionals, from massive apparatus to an efficient body of civil servants (Osborne and Brown, 2005). Globalization, if understood as Internationalization, creates pressure on the public administration in each country, producing change in the distribution of public services and an ideological response from governments through their apparatus of public servants (Flynn, 2007). Another belief is that Globalization of the private sector generates pressure from this sector towards the public sector by forcing efficiency improvements and reduction of the scale of the public service, creating the shift from „quantity” to „quality” (Terry, 1998, Kelly 1998). A similar view can be found in Cerny’s (1997) ‘Competition State’ theory.

Public bureaucracies operate increasingly in a global environment that requires greater communication and cooperation among nations. This aspect of globalization of NPM has highlighted the parochial nature of much of the literature, originally designed to apply to single nations or to a small group of similar, usually Anglophone, countries. However, the application of the same literature to non- Western nations means that it rarely fits well, exaggerating the tension between theory and practice (Peters, 2010). Peters (2010) also points out that while Globalization underscores the poor fit between theory and practice, global pressures provide an opportunity to conduct comparative research that is meaningful and useful for managers in all nations regardless of economic, political,

41 and social considerations. Such work can help bridge the gap between Western and non-Western perspectives.

Following Hood’s landmark article in 1991, NPM acquired a label used to describe a plethora of administrative changes in the UK and other Anglophone countries brought about by a concern with levels of public expenditure and public service efficiency. Although originally associated with political leaders on the New Right (Savoie, 1994), it was clear that NPM has been implemented in many countries across the world, to varying degrees, and not exclusively by those associated with neo-liberal or conservative governments. However, a key problem with NPM has been its lack of definition, and various commentators have provided their own over the years (Hoggett 1994; Pollitt 1995, Aucoin 1990) etc. Arguably, it is Hood’s (1991) doctrines of New Public Management that have proved to be the most enduring with professional management at its core. NPM was a blend of a scientific management and public choice theory; with the former providing a normative orientation or a tool-set for public managers and the latter providing some justification in relation to the political and economic benefits of applying the ideas of market management (Dunleavy, 1991; Lynn 2007: 43). Another variant that has appeared in the literature in relation to the public sector is ‘New Managerialism’ although it shares on the surface with NPM, the application of business methods and techniques to the public sector. Deem (2001: 10) notes how ‘new managerialism’ can be applied to the variety of organisational changes taking place to the public sector including the establishment of cost centres, competition and internal markets, team working, and performance management.

NPM has been subjected to extensive criticism, not least on the basis is that the public sector context is very different from the private sector, and the importation of market mechanisms and business approaches are inappropriate. Despite the association with the term, Hood’s (1991) article began the critique of NPM on theoretical grounds, especially the contradiction between the rationalist approaches of scientific management (which has been criticised as being a ‘social

42 doctrine’) and public choice theory (the idea that public managers could ‘budget maximise’) (Merkle 1980, Dunleavy 1991). The former strand also became interpreted as managerialism and the latter as the new institutional economics. Once NPM was applied across a number of Anglophone countries, it’s practical limitations started to form the basis of criticism. For instance, Rhodes (1996) argues that NPM has created problems associated with fragmentation, steering and accountability, largely as a consequence of the contradictions in NPM derived from its imprecise theoretical bases (managerialism and public choice theory). One UK reform that exposes these contradictions is the executive agency initiative that began in 1988. The establishment of principal-agent relationships in government (between a minister and the newly-created role of chief executive), derived from neo-institutional economics and the new managerialism implicit in the establishment of an agency as a cost centre under the discretion of a chief executive marked a shift to managerialism. However, this created fragmentation (by breaking up large government departments into several agencies), steering became problematic as a result (multiple quasi-contracts or ‘framework documents’ providing the basis for performance) and public accountability was dissipated as ministers could shift the blame to agency chief executives (Common, 1995; Polidano, 1999; Gains, 2003).

By the late 1990s, the popularity of NPM appeared to be on the wane; the World Bank report of 1997 started to use the term ‘good governance’ which also had a number of different implications (Hood 2007) based on joining up a fragmented government system through emphasising networks, partnering NGOs and third sector organisations in the delivery of public services (as well as the private sector) and strengthening transparency mechanism and public service ethics. While the subtle shift away from an emphasis on NPM may have been discernible in Western Europe in particular, it remained a basis for reforms elsewhere in Asia, Latin America and Africa. This international movement was ‘globalized’ by the international institutions such as the OECD (Common, 1999; Lynn 2005). Hood (1991) had predicted the international portability and diffusion of NPM and

43 followed this up in 2005 by describing it as a ‘movement’. Osborne and Gaebler (1993) added to the assumption that NPM ‘rational’ or scientific approach meant it could be applied by any government. In this thesis, it is shown that Romania has been exposed to the international reform movement of NPM, or ‘worldview’ (Hood 2005: 18), and while it was assumed NPM provided a basis for modernisation and reform in Romania and its neighbours, considerable obstacles remain despite the apparent receptiveness in these countries during the 1990s (Randma-Liiv, 2008).

The alleged globalisation of NPM would appear to set up a tension with path dependency, but there is evidence to suggest that it is far too simplistic to assert that governments across the world have readily converged on a particular model. Some countries have acted as powerful exemplars, such as New Zealand, but the result is adaptation rather than ‚path-breaking’ change (see Common, 2001, who examined Singapore’s adaptation of New Zealand’s agency model). However, during the 1990s, NPM, despite the lack of agreement over what it meant, appeared to be the dominant trend in public administration and appeared to offer policy-makers ready-made solutions to the problems of wasteful bureaucracies. By the turn of the 21st century, NPM had become discredited in certain countries due to its association with organizational fragmentation, lack of democratic accountability and poor central control, and dysfunctional managerialist systems based on metrics and targets (Kelman and Friedman, 2009). Alternative perspectives also began to appear including joined-up government and public governance (Pollitt, 2003) but in the literature, the alternative that is being described in Romania and its neighbouring countries, is that of neo-Weberianism. Unlike Weber’s bureaucracy, this is not an ideal type, but an analytical model. Although contestable, the ‚neo-Weberian state’ (NWS) is a half-way house between a bureaucratic state (based on Weber’s ideal-type) and the ‚public interest’ state, described by Pollitt and Bouckeart (2011) that is de-centralised, uses market mechanisms to deliver public services, etc. In short, one that has adopted NPM to a large extent: ...’the NWS is a further development of the Weberian State after it has integrated NPM reforms’ (Ongaro 2009: 267).

44 It would be wrong to suggest that the NWS can be conceptualised as a mid-way point between a Weberian, or a bureaucratic state and one that has fully implemented NPM. The Weberian bureaucracy is an ‘ideal type’ of economic organisation characterised by efficiency, which make it no different from a state organised on the basis of NPM (Swedberg 1998: 193, Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004: 62). There are no examples of either existing in their ‘pure form’. The Weberian organisation is characterised by fixed spheres of competence, a defined hierarchy of offices, clear distinction between public office and private roles, specialisation and expertise as the basis for action and the appointment by merit of full-time, career officials (Weber, 1947). However, a key difference between the two concepts is that management was concerned with rule application, and the knowledge required to go with it (Weber, 1947) and NPM pre-supposes that managers have discretion over the use of resources to meet defined policy outputs, by ‘freeing them from the rules and restrictions that government managers face’ (Meier and Hill, 2005: 56). Therefore, the NPM assumes considerable managerial autonomy for officials compared to those inhabiting the Weberian bureaucracy. The NWS is viewed as a reaction to the failures or inappropriateness of NPM rather than Weberian bureaucracy, particularly in relation to European countries and its identification was associated with the work of Pollitt and Bouckaert, (2004) and developed by others, such as Drechsler (2009). Although the NWS ‘represents a particular instance of path dependency’ (Dunn and Miller, 2007: 119 -120), as a model the NWS favoured a professional state for central Europe - ‘modern, efficient and flexible, yet still uniquely identified with the ‘higher purposes’ of the general interest’ (Dunn and Miller 2007: 120), which sets it apart from NPM.

Dunn and Miller (2007: 351) also argue that it ‘builds on key principles for European public administration’ as well as the Acquis Communautaire. The result is a specifically European view of public administration centred upon Weberian principles:  Centrality of the State (to solving policy problems)

45  Reform and Enforcement of Administrative Law  Preservation of Public Service (as a distinctive service)  Representative Democracy (to legitimise policy at various levels)

But there are other principles that appear to be drawn from NPM and these constitute the ‘Neo’ elements:  External orientation towards citizens (away from bureaucratic rules)  Supplemental Public Consultation and Direct Citizen Involvement (not replacing democratic mechanisms)  Results orientation  Management professionalism (the bureaucrat as manager as well as being an expert in law) (Dunn and Miller 2007: 351-2; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004; Lynn 2008)

However, Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011: 119) note that the ‘neo-elements’ of the NWS involve the ‘creation of a professional culture of quality and service and a professionalization of the public service, the bureaucrat becomes a ‘professional manager’, although Pollitt and Bouckaert deny they had a normative orientation. This contrasts with Dunn and Miller (2007), Drechsler (2009) and others who have suggested the NWS is a model for the states of Central and Eastern Europe, whether EU members or aspiring to join. As Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011: 172) explain, ‘the ‘professionalism’ of the NWS manager is…a particularly circumscribed kind of professionalism. It is a professionalism that can only rarely assert the necessity of following its own standard and procedures’ as ultimately the politicians will distort implementation. This observation also makes the key distinction with NPM which assumes managerial autonomy for the bureaucrat. For instance, when discussing Human Resource Management reform, Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011: 196) observe that ‘NWS prioritizes motivation over downsizing (to preserve a high quality public service)’. In other words, the NWS tends to shun the market mechanisms that underpin NPM, and the implicit agenda of reducing the size and scale of the public sector (‘downsizing’). The NWS appears to suggest that public

46 managers need to be encouraged to be more effective by reviewing the mechanisms for staff motivation, which is not dependent on incremental pay and promotion (as in the Weberian hierarchy).

Dreschler and Randma-Liiv (2014) provide one of more balanced accounts of administrative change in the region from the NWS perspective. They argue that three phases of reform can be discerned:

 1988 – 1996 – post-communist change which included political, economic and administrative reforms and changing institutional frameworks

 1997 – 2004/7 – EU accession period – imposition of conditions set by conditionality of the European Commission

 2004/7 – ‘fine tuning’ post accession followed by, from 2008, reaction to global financial crisis

Whether or not these phases have validity in relation to Romania will be revealed in the analytical chapters but Dreschler and Randma-Liiv (2014) make the point that during this period, particularly early on, the concern was to provide a solid basis for a Weberian bureaucracy, rather than one typified by NPM. They continue that NPM did have appeal in the region, particularly its neo-liberal ideolgical basis (p. 12) and it also seemed to provide a pragmatic response to the deep administrative problems that the post-communist era uncovered. However, the application of the NWS is difficult to apply for the same reasons that Ongaro (2009) encounters when analysing the countries of southern Europe; particularly as the NWS pre-supposes the existence of a Weberian State to begin with.

Osborne’s approach (in McLaughlin et al., 2002) to defining Global influences on public administration can be summarised with the following statement: Globalization has the tendency to promote elites. In a shrinking state, professionalization of the public services becomes compulsory. Farazmand (2002)

47 completes the picture by stating that the challenge lies in the change in the characters and activities of the state and public administrations, from a traditional administrative state towards a managerial state. The International/Global trend is to re-think public administrations and produce evidence of ‘modernization’ of the public administration systems (Peters, 2010). ‚Modernisation’ is a contentious term but here the assumption is based on ‚the process by which individuals become acculturated to market relations’ (Przeworski, 1993: 138) which provides a fit with the international promotion of NPM and its variants. The question here is the extent to which policy makers in Romania are conscious of international policy ideas of the kind promulgated by the OECD or international public management ‘exemplars’ (such as Canada) and are willing to absorb those ideas and approaches.

Thus, another important aspect to be analysed in this research will be the influence of policy learning starting from the International epistemic community, and narrowing down the angle to the EU or regional level. Evans (2004) highlights the most important trends in policy transfer practices, as well as comparing policy transfer to the “lesson learning” process described by Rose (1993). In the pursuit of the pattern emerging from the type of reforms adopted by Romania over the last 20 years, the same concepts: “policy transfer”, as defined by Dolowitz and Marsh (2000, 1996) and “lesson learning” (Rose 1993, 1991) as stated above, get consideration from different angles. Although authors’ opinions converge on the same matter, the manner in which non-Western countries apply the concepts may differ from theory.

The two concepts are not mutually-exclusive as “lesson learning” , according to Rose (1991) is a voluntary process deployed over a longer period of time, which involves the will of a State to accumulate experience over other States’ previous similar or good practices. “Policy transfer” as defined by Dolowitz and Marsh (1996) involves mimetic policies in a new environment. More recently, the increase in communication between states, which proves to enhance policy transfer between political systems, is emphasised (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000). Policy learning also fits very well with institutional approaches. This is perhaps exemplified by the

48 article by Mantzavinos et. al. (2004) who argue that institutional learning itself is path dependent. Studies of policy transfer often demonstrate that it is perceptions of similarity that mean that transfer is most likely. While it was stated earlier that although an analysis of policy learning is not a central concern of the thesis, it is difficult to ignore. Although the literature tends to view it as a process of Europeanization and accounts of cross-national policy transfers (for example, from the UK to Romania) do not exist in the literature (and probably do not exist at all), this thesis offers a perspective that goes beyond standard accounts of policy learning and transfer by treating Romania as a case.

2.4 European/Regional level of analysis for Public Management:

While NPM is considered to be the main international trend in public administration, there needs to be a consideration of the literature concerning the European level (more specifically, EU member states) and the Eastern European region. An assumption of the thesis is that forces for administrative change are coming from beyond the nation state, in this case Romania. Although processes of policy learning, both from the EU and cross-nationally from within the region, are of concern here, the emphasis is on looking at policy models and constraints, and from the EU in particular. This is different from looking for the outcomes of International policy learning, which is policy transfer, and which occurs in a variety of guises (see, for instance, Common, 2001). Aligned to the Globalisation of public policy, the rational assumption is that most states will formulate policies by learning from other countries, whether this involves managerialist methods or systemic reforms (Evans, 2004). At the European and the Regional level, it is clear that Romania attempts to learn either from its neighbours or from the EU. This process is generally labelled Europeanization in the literature (Knill and Lehmkuhl, 2002; Schenider and Hage, 2008). Although the literature recognises the problem of isolating Europeanization from Globalisation, the definition that appears to be most useful in the context of this thesis is its impact or imposition on member states

49 (Knill and Lehmkuhl, 2002; Bulmer and Burch, 2000). However, its member states also shape the actions of the EU and as Dodds (2013: 270) explains ‘Europeanization is thus Janus-faced: it impacts upon member states’ policy-making and the power and opportunities held by different policy actors, at the same time as member states shape it in multifarious ways’.

In addition, at the European level the emphasis is on the mechanisms created by governments in order to achieve better management of public administration, and the enhancement of policy transfer within recognized or informal communities of policy transfer (Clarke et al., 2000). There is a persistent link between the sustainability of a new type of management for public administration and political implications, and international opinion is that of forcibly making it work (Clarke et al., 2000). While it may be theoretically difficult to disaggregate policy transfer from Europeanization (i.e. Europeanization as a particular process of policy transfer), the concern in this thesis is not about identifying particular policies, approaches or techniques that cross national boundaries. Rather, the focus is on the influence that trans-national actors, not just the European Union, have on shaping public administration in Romania. This interpretation is closer to the idea of policy convergence which in the case of EU and member states occurs vertically (Marks, 1993). In particular, this encourages regional or subnational governments to lobby for ‘scarce, and often centrally controlled resources’ (Smith, 2007: 381).

Although Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004) would consider the European level appropriate to this research by examining the European Commission as a separate case, they say little about policy diffusion or its role as an exemplar to EU member states. Evans (2004) argues in the support of “emulation”, meaning a State chooses to adopt and adjust policies elaborated at a meso-level (Regional), and implement them at Local level or adoptions from a supra-national entity such as the European Union in this case. This could be the case of Romania, but instead of making assumptions the research aims to determine as well if the policy learning process for Romania is predominantly ‘coercive’ or ‘voluntaristic’ (Rose, 1991; Bennett, 1991).

50 The process of policy learning relies on all the mentioned concepts, but the difficulty arises in determining which type of process prevails. It is expected to discover a certain flow of policy information between Romania and the neighbouring countries, as well as collaboration between Romania and the European Union, and traces of transfer from the International community, or other States of Latin origin (such as France, Spain or Italy, which were considered the traditional inspirational sources for Romania).

Another source of literature that often overlaps with the Europeanization approach is the literature on post-Communist states, sometimes these authors are referred to as ‘transitologists’ as it is assumed that such countries are still in a process of democratisation and marketization. A good example, which is referred to elsewhere in the thesis, is Verheijen (2007). In chapter one it was mentioned that any similarities to be observed with Romania within this group of countries should come from Hungary and Bulgaria as they both border Romania and are EU members. Verheijen (2007: 311) argues that all post-Communist countries suffer from path dependency and the ‘process of developing modern and professional systems of state administration’ remains deeply problematic. The focus in such literature tends to consider administrative change in the first major wave of EU accession states from the region, countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

At the Regional level, it becomes difficult to ignore the policy transfer literature as the newly democratising states in the CEE countries were inundated by international agencies and consultants seeking to offer them the latest managerial tools and reform mechanisms. In this case, I could have considered the process of policy transfer to Romania from the neighbouring countries, if such a process exists. However, there is no reliable literature in this respect and the literature concentrates on ‘learning from the west’ (Hough, 2006). This may, in part, be explained by the influence of the cultural argument that requires consideration (Adolino and Blake, 2001), in other words, the case is made for Romanian

51 ‘exceptionalism’ – that the country is not ‘typical’ of its central and eastern European neighbours. Mossberger and Wolman (2003) and Rose (1993, 1991) argue extensively about policy transfer patterns. While Rose emphasizes in his works that countries make policy transfers based on cultural/contextual similarities, Mossberger and Wolman (2003) argue that geographical proximity in transferring practices is very important, as it creates the opportunity for the occurrence of ‚informal communities’ which enhance development of regional collaboration. This seems to be a weak argument in the case of Romania. Kopstein and Reilly (2003) make the case for explaining policy outcomes in post communist states based on proximity to the West. They also argue that one needs to look at the immediate neighbours of a country to make predictions about the pattern and strength of reforms. Their argument is from a path dependency perspective. Thus Romania falls into a second group identified by Kopstein and Reilly (2003: 127) which predicts lower political and economic reform when compared with countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic or Slovakia. With regards to Romania, the research aims at discovering if this country reflects the early argument based on cultural similarities, or if it has the tendency to integrate into the regional context through transfers from neighbours, in spite of the fact that Romania is an anomalous state in that specific geographical area.

Unlike Europeanization, the literature has largely ignored how policy learning is facilitated within the region, rather than the more straight-forward ‘West to East’ accounts (i.e from the EU, World Bank or other international agencies or consultancies). One agency that provides such a forum is the Network of Institutes of Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee). NISPACee holds an annual conference and produces a range of publications and its own journal, in which the writer has also published. Part of its mission is: ‘to share the knowledge and skills (in the region) and unite the effort to cope with present and future challenges in the field’ (of public administration) (NISPAcee, 2001). The literature it produces is often of a good standard, and contributions are made by western European and US scholars, some of which are referred to in this research. However, very little work has been done on the influence of NISPACee in the

52 region. One research report (Rudzki, 2006) which argues that the network has contributed to the professionalisation of public administration in the region, but scant reference is made to Romania.

At the local level, the literature on public administration reform is scarce. There is also a lack of literature on the emergence of Romania from a post-Socialist background (Tilly, 2007). Romanian academics did not actually engage in analysing the path-dependency developed by the Romanian post-Socialist governments. Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning these secondary sources, titled “Noutăţi în Managementul Public” (“News in the Public Management”) (Androniceanu, 2005), and the contribution of Calin Hintea (in Bouckaert et al., 2008), “Public Management Reforms: Romania”. It should be noted that much of the international literature on Romanian public administration appeared after the revolution in 1989, with Nunberg (1999) being one of the most authoritative accounts, but since that period, it appears that the international scholarly community lost interest leaving the more recent literature to be contributed by Romanian academics. The literature often lacks perspective and analytical rigour. More precisely, the Romanian academics are stretching concepts in an attempt to prove that the Romanian public administration fits in the ‚good practice’ books and is following the latest trends, while statistics and public opinion show that Romania is still 20 years behind the trends. For instance Matei (2009) offers normative solutions to the problems associated with Romanian public administration drawn from the international NPM literature without a deep assessment of why such approaches continue to fail. Popescu (2011) provides a rare critique of the state of public administration in Romania based on public opinion surveys but accepts that for any real change to occur, there needs to be a creation of a ‚civic culture’ but accepts this will require the long-term ‚education’ of both politicians and citizen (Popescu 2011: 130). In this thesis the attempt is to de-mystify and critically analyse Romanian public administration and to assess the impact that the literature makes on the system or, more often, does not. This thesis is also academically different from other Romanian texts as it challenges the optimistic assumption that

53 Romania is administratively aligning itself to the mid 2010s (Matei, 2009) rather than being held in the ‚legacy of the past’.

As mentioned above, the case of Romania is anomalous when compared to its neighbours, and is not easily categorized, due to its particular ‘Socialist legacy’ and the historical and cultural background as defined by Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004), and Hood (1998) for countries in a similar context. For instance, the success or failure in designing an efficient framework for training and career development within the public administration lies in both the previous practices, as well as the ability of a government to induce change and challenge those practices. Romania still holds a huge apparatus which relies on the work of 14% of all employees in the public services, thus making the Romanian government responsible for their training and professional development in public sector organizations (National Institute of Statistics, 2009).

In support of the assumption that the Romanian public administration is ‘deeply politicized’ as concluded by Verheijen (1999), this assumption is based with regards to similar systems within the Regional context. As a result, Peters (2010) draws the attention to the trend of ‘insulating’ civil servants from the political pressures within ‚Easternized’ public administration systems, thus generating problems of accountability and control. Thus, the problems remain the same. What emerges from the non-Romanian literature is the challenge for the Romanian administrative system caused by the inertia of the previous (communist) regime and a poor ability to absorb global influences emanating from European Union accession in 2007 and other international agencies. In the next section the analysis will focus on interpreting NPM and other international trends in public administration and the Romanian ‚solution’ for modernising the public administration in the literature. The following debate also focuses especially on one of the objectives of this research, that of determining the evolution of managerial processes shaped by both the internal and external environment and the European legal framework.

2.5 Adapting Managerialism to Public Administration:

54 In addition to the institutionalist perspective, there are the theoretical approaches to consider in relation to public management that have gained ascendancy in the West since the 1980s. Hood’s article of 1991 was the first to offer the label of ‘New Public Management’ to these approaches, and his first ‚doctrine’ of NPM was the shift towards professional management in the public sector. The concept of ‚professionalism’ needs to be explained in the context of the research. Schӧn (1983, p.21)) describes the concept as follows: ‚professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique’. However, Noordegraaf (2007) warns about the possibility of over- streching the concept and indicates towards a softer approach to the term of ‚professionalism’ by, for example, naming the civil service under the category of ‚hybrid’ professionals.

One of the influential factors of NPM was that administration somehow lacked the professional management associated with business. Hood (1991) argued that the theoretical underpinnings for NPM lay in classical scientific management and the public choice theorists, primarily those of the Chicago economists, such as William Niskanen. While there is a considerable literature that charts the international application of managerialism to public administration (Osborne and Gaebler 1993, etc.), writers such as Peters (2010) accurately describe the International trends in the latest developments of public management and the crossover from the private sector practice in human resource management within public administration, where he analyses the implications of changing the approach towards civil servants’ careers, recruitment within the civil service, and the type of outcomes these processes should have to enhance performance. Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004) also identify HRM, budgeting, performance management, etc. as key trajectories in any administrative reform. These reform movements appear as the basis for effective transformation of systems by taking a rational approach to individual bureaucratic behaviour (Dunleavy, 1991). The literature also suggests that the role of the private sector is important in influencing bureaucratic behaviour. For instance, in terms of International HRM, Jackson (2002) analyses the ways countries implement a Global

55 set of practices, deemed to be good practice, at a local level. One of the assumptions is that the private sector is the exemplar in HRM practices, and the public sector needs to follow such trends and learn how to implement them effectively. In this way, the net result is that administrators would start to behave like ‚professional’ managers as in the private or commercial sectors.

These considerations match the following traits that can be distinguished as cross- national influences on labour markets (Osborne and Brown, 2005 – my additions in parantheses):

 professionalization of public services, by increased infusion of managerialism, buttressed by rafts of performance management e.g. targets, metrics, TQM, benchmarking, and league tables in an attempt to make the system look ‛accountable’, transparent, and to ensure value for money for the taxpayer.  constant change of the traditional working environment and the move from ‛blue-collar’ employees to a ‛white-collar’ mode of operation  shrinking recruitment platform due to the emergence of ‛the minimal state’, causing the need to create an elite of public servants, as well as downsizing the apparatus and outsourcing public services to private contractors  structural changes within public service organizations such as the establishment of agencies (partially independent of ministeries, e.g. the UK Highways Agency)  public administration labour market becomes flexible in terms of employment: professionals need to demonstrate better skills (‛professional policy skills’), while there is an increased exchange of personnel between the private and the public sector.6

Osborne and Brown (2005) thus highlight professionalization as an important facet, while pointing out other wider changes to public administration that have largely

6 Civil Service Learning, UK government 56 been reflected in countries such as the US, the UK, and other mainly Anglophone countries.

More widely, in 2005, The United Nations elaborated a Report called “Unlocking the human potential for public sector performance”. Although not an academic report as such, it is often the case that influential international organisations capture the theoretical zeitgeist and attempt to shape thinking about public administration. In this case, the report demonstrates that the development performance of countries is heavily underpinned by the quality of public institutions and places emphasis on the strengthening of national capacity for public administration. It also points out that public administration has evolved significantly in the past decades, as external and internal pressures have forced governments to redefine the role of the state and recalibrate public administration capacities. This report recommends certain actions by governments, such as upgrading the role of HRM by professionalising or ‚modernizing and managerializing’ the public service, strengthening appointment on merit, balancing motivation and payment, and instilling performance orientation among public servants. Selden (2007) emphasises the need of merit-based performance development of civil service, an aspect that will be further analysed within the research in later chapters.

The above provided a brief overview of the international literature, but earlier in the chapter, it was mentioned that there was a distinct literature around European public administration. Some of the discourse is similar to that found in the NPM literature. The labour market in Europe also stands under the sign of „flexibilization” and „deregulation”, as Schömann et al. (1998) argue, strongly influenced by the private sector in terms of practice. However, at the same time, the same authors emphasise the fact that the European Union is engaging in qualitative provisioning upon the internal labour markets, but cannot control the internal regulatory processes, which problematizes the concept of „open market”. The internal markets have the tendency to be less flexible and to impose certain restrictions concerning public service employment. Although since the 1980s, the public service employment across Europe has been under public scrutiny and the

57 need for change has become more pressing, most European countries remained relatively immune. According to Bach et al. (1999), European countries had an intricate system of legal and administrative regulations; rudimentary forms of human resource management, which still persist, shadowed by very traditional patterns that do not ensure performance and staff retention. Through the years, the impact of the E.U. regulatory framework has begun to influence these internal markets by inducing a certain flexibility, but by largely coercive means. In addition, public services can be subject to private sector influences up to a point. In the US, „Best practice” is often used as a means to ensure quality, but assumes that public managers act professionally, or make ‚reliable, impartial and valid judgements’ (Hood 2005: 20). Moreover, neither can public administration be relocated elsewhere nor can radical changes be made to it without political support, otherwise a technocracy is cultivated (Lynn Jr,. 2005). However, the only distinguishable influence of the E.U. upon labour markets with regards to public services is the shift from public administration to NPM (Hood 1991; Bach et al, 1999) but its impact across Europe has been uneven and divergent (Pollitt, et al, 2007).

Professionalization

In chapter one, it was suggested that a possible definition of professionalism in public administration would imply that office holders possess qualifications and expertise and that they serve the public purpose, to some extent. We return to the concept after having introduced above in relation to NPM. Pugh (1989) explored the professionalization of public administration and provides no definitive definition but follows the above assumption about serving the public purpose by applying knowledge, skills and expertise but devised a set of characteristics against which public administration could be tested against. This includes awareness of being part of a profession and the ethical and moral guidelines that go with it. Indeed, the first of Hood’s (1991) characteristics of NPM was the move towards professionalization in public service delivery, with managers in the public sector required to acquire the skills and aptitudes of their counterparts in the commercial

58 sector. As Sobis and De Vries (2009: 176) remark when analysing the technical assistance flowing to Romania and its neighbours from 1990 onwards, ‘all the outcomes on the process of technical assistance given to CEE countries apparently point to a lack of professionalism’. This aspect is also shared in definitions of neo- Weberian public administration, whereby the ‘neo’ dimension is concerned with the professionalization of public services (Randma-Liiv, 2008). This terminology requires further elaboration as it provides a partial explanation for the research problem. Yet, there is an assumption that the lack of professionalism is somehow symptomatic of the CEE countries. Sobis and De Vries (2009: 188) also point to a lack of professionalism amongst the donor organisations and consultancies while also making the point that politicians themselves had no interest in developing a professional bureaucracy: ‘they were not interested in substance at all and moved the money as they saw fit’. Although it is not clear whether or not some of the politicians who formed their data base were Romanian, it appeared to be a general problem in the countries they analysed (Central and Eastern Europe). kIt is obvious that, following the ‘tradition’ of other States of applying a rational choice when investing resources in the development of programmes increasing professional performance for the civil servants, Romania is in the pursuit of cheaper and higher-qualified services, by implementing (possibly) more effective measures for career development (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004). According to McCourt and Eldridge (2003), transitional countries such as Romania experience the ‚moonlighting’ practice identified in the introduction chapter: low wages in public services lead to individuals accepting a second job, thus not working to their maximum potential for the government.

While this is a dimension that the Romanian or wider post-socialist literature does not address, it is a point worth expanding upon due to its relevance to the thesis. If we take Friedson’s (2010) point that professionalism is concerned with the occupational control of work rather than the managerial control, then the development of a profession within the Romanian public services suffers the contradictions of NPM type reform processes elsewhere. Leicht and Fennell (2001)

59 also develop similar arguments about the bureaucratising of professions, also recognised by public administration commentators. Abbott (1988: 145) describes the UK civil service as ‚quasi-professional’ which is not surprising given its claims that it is a generalist civil service, but arguably its professionalisation, in the light of NPM, is managerialist in nature. Accounts of performance management in the public sector often highlight the tension between professionals and managers in public services (for instance, between doctors and hospital executives). However, for a professional civil servant, it means becoming more defined by his or her policy skills based on a sound evidence base (Head, 2010). However, this type of argument has yet to appear in the literature surrounding civil service development in Romania.

2.6 Towards a Framework of Analysis

Right at the onset it is important to demonstrate that the Local, or Romanian, level is the weak point from the academic literature’s perspective. Romanian academics did not really develop critical analyses of PM in Romania but preferred to assume NPM and its variants had largely been implemented in the bureaucracy with varying degrees of success. In addition, there are but a few pieces of literature, which are considered rather marginal, as they tend to emulate existent international literature. The main weakness here is that it fails to bring to the reader’s attention any practical example from the Romanian public administration organizational practice. In addition, Romanian academics appear to be uncritical in their acceptance of NPM and its derivatives, and report unconvincingly that such changes are largely uncontested.

Despite the scarcity of critical literature pertaining to Romania, the international literature on public management and policy analysis still requires organisation into a framework for the thesis. For instance, Lynn (2001) proposed a model of Governance, which influences the policy mechanism, and this is summarised as ‚levels of the game’:  Global/national/cultural environment 60  Institutional (public choice) level  Managerial level  Technical (primary work) level  Political assessment

Lynn (2001) begins by looking at the context of administration at the top level before drawing out the relationships between the different levels of public administration based on institutional theory. He argues this is a valid starting point for assessing policy convergence and the dynamics within and between different levels of governance (p. 196). The institutional level assumes rationality in terms of the formal mechanisms that shape public organisations. Here, we can assume that the changes required to bring about a professional public service will be addressed in terms of policy change, and then brought to bear at the managerial level. At the managerial level, then the actions of administrators and officials become important and, in turn, they influence the outcomes of the organisation or agency. This, in turn, is subject to some form of political assessment. While Lynn’s article is constructive and useful, with regard to Romania, I suggest that an amended model of Governance is required:  Global/national/cultural environment  Political assessment  Insitutional (public choice) level  Managerial level  Technical (primary work) level

The key difference here is the re-positioning of the level of political assessment. It is assumed that the post-communist legacy pre-supposes the outcomes of administrative change and that the lack of political development lacks dynamism in terms of assessing its system of public administration. The high political involvement in policy learning and policy implementation in Romania leads to a high level of bias and discontinuity in both processes. In addition, this is an effect of the path-dependency explained earlier in this chapter. As Chapter 4 will go on to explain, under the former Communist regime, a party elite took all governmental decisions, and nowadays this country still experiences reminiscence of high political implication in decision-making. Thus, it is expected that the kind of institutional

61 changes necessary for the professionalisation of the bureaucracy will be reluctantly pursued as they will provide a potential threat to the primacy of the politicians (Skelcher and Torfing, 2010).

It is necessary to consider the extent to which the ‘political assessment’ factor influences the reform mechanism in Romania, and how this restrains the potential for reform within public administration. Despite the requirement for transparency and a non-politicized apparatus, practice and observation still reveal the deep involvement of politicians in the development of policies for the Romanian civil service. This will provide considerable methodological challenges which we will turn to in the next chapter.

2.7 Conclusion

What emerges from this literature review is that Romania possesses an over- bearing civil service which has been deliberately sustained by the Government since the revolution of 1989. Moreover, the deep politicization of Romanian public administration remains inherited from the Communist system, with the result that there is a lack of transparency across political institutions, in addition to other problems such as low levels of professionalism in the sense of attitude and preparation of the civil servants towards providing the expected standard of service quality. To take a historical institutionalist approach to account for developments in the Romanian state appears to offer a robust theoretical explanation for change, or indeed resistance to change. Sociological institutionalism also provides a helpful perspective, particularly through the scope for cultural analysis, and for providing accounts of organisational change, or the isomorphism of DiMaggio and Powell. Rational choice institutionalism does not seem to offer a sound framework for the research, mainly because it appears to offer simplistic conclusions.

The second level of the theoretical literature concerns the international public management literature. Since the advent of bureaucracy, followed by NPM, it has frequently been criticised for its universalist and normative approach, for which

62 Hood (1991) provided an early warning. In addition, convincing and critical analyses of administrative change in Central and Eastern Europe, let alone Romania, are hampered by the dominance of international paradigms, as transmitted by the international organisations such as the OECD and the EU. Another direction of change is labelled under the ‘Europeanization’ literature, which appears broad- brush in its analysis. More recently, and this was signalled by the change in title of Pollitt and Bouckaert’s influential book, the literature pointed to the existence of neo-Weberian administrative systems, which reject the market approaches underpinning NPM. As the research is concerned with explaining the lack of real change in relation to NPM-related concepts of professionalism in the Romanian public service, then a sound framework needs to be utilised.

Lynn’s (2001) approach which attempts to offer an account of administrative change in an international context appears helpful. By using Lynn’s model of governance and by acknowledging Pollitt and Bouckeart’s (2011) model of change appear to offer convincing research frameworks, despite being developed in a Western liberal context. To understand the institutionalist perspective (in any variant) will require analysing elite behaviour and attitudes, which is discussed in the next chapter.

63 Chapter 3: Research Data and Methodology

3.1 Introduction:

As the previous two chapters have demonstrated, this thesis deals with potentially sensitive and contested political topics such as the over-bureaucratization and path dependency of the Romanian civil service. These topics are ‘sensitive’ as they are fundamentally critical of a system where bureaucracy and ‚professional powers’ (Freidson, 1988) have found ways to block meaningful reform and protect incumbents from change. To highlight both these aspects in Romania would be to offer a unflattering critique of its system of public administration. In terms of methodology, the sensitive nature of the study will present considerable challenges when compared to analysing EU pre- and post-accession policy development, for instance. However, the research is concerned with getting to the root of the deep- seated administrative problems rather than providing policy analysis.

The idea for elaborating the project research took shape over several years of personal observation in the way public policies are being elaborated and implemented in Romania and the wider region. Based on these personal observations, it was also evident that the European Union uses coercive mechanisms to impose policies, which, at least on the surface, are un-critically accepted by the member states (primarily in the case of the 21st century accession states) and implemented as they are, without consideration for the political and social environment. This is a point made by Randma-Liiv (2005) with respect to Estonia and is part of the wider coercive policy transfer thesis when economically weak states are faced by powerful transnational actors (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000). Thus, the thesis not only offers a critique of administration in Romania on this basis, but a wider examination of how international institutions, such as the EU, attempts to impose policies on member states.

64 To restate from chapter one, the overall aim of the thesis is to provide an explanation for the lack of genuine change in the Romanian system, a system marked by a lack of professionalism and other negative associations (over-staffed, corrupt, etc.) To explain this lack of change, when Western countries appear to be continuously reviewing their public services, the following objectives were developed in the first chapter:

 to elucidate key aspects of administrative policy making in Romania  to analyse the mechanisms that prevent Romania from substantially reforming its public administration system  to determine the evolution of managerial processes shaped by both the internal environment and the European legal framework  to provide an analysis of the influence of path-dependency and culture over administrative reforms in Romania  to demonstrate that a persistent unprofessional bureaucracy in Romania is a result of the clash between path-dependency and EU regulations  to demonstrate that Romania’s administrative system is ‘exceptional’ and resistant to EU reform influence

In relation to the last but one objective above, the research will seek to understand why, in the face of compelling pressure from the EU, the Romanian public service is so overwhelmingly path dependent that it remains unchanged. It is also clear from the review of the literature in the previous chapter that the existing literature has insufficient explanatory power when applied to Romania. If we take each objective in terms, it is virtually impossible to elucidate key aspects of policy making as the system remains largely opaque. Although the mechanisms that prevent change are perhaps more readily identified, more information needs to be acquired to understand why this is the case. There has been no systemic analysis of how internal dynamics in Romania interface with EU requirements. Although the cultural considerations that contribute to path dependency can be assumed from

65 the generic CEE literature, it is not underpinned by empirical research. In this thesis, qualitative research will be used to understand fully the stubbornness of unprofessionalism, which will not be explained by official documentation from donor organisations or political and academic sources within Romania.

Moreover, it emerged from the previous chapter that in addition to cultural assumptions, there are other assumptions that also require careful consideration and are linked to path dependence. These include the existence of an over-bearing civil service which has been artificially sustained by the Government over the past 20 years since the abolition of the Socialist regime; (while it is noted that at the same time ‚new’ democracies encourage the administrative systems to liberalize and allow the market to self-adjust, yet the post-Communist societies suffer from the ‚interventionist’ trauma (Elster et al., 1998)). Other assumptions are the deep politicization of Romanian public administration, and the lack of transparency across political institutions.

However, a critical stance will be taken but such a stance can compromise the development of a reliable methodology in terms of gaining access to potential interviewees and data sources, or if that access is granted, the reponses may be guarded or even false. Nevertheless, as the writer is both an ‘insider’ (a Romanian national with a civil service background) and writing from a critical position (from a leading British university), makes the research possible. While the benefits of being an insider are well established in the qualitative research literature, there are potential drawbacks. Being an insider may inherently bias the view of the researcher. It also brings into question the motivations of the researcher and those who they interview. Citing the work of Merton in relation to sociological research, Labaree (2002) considers the advantages of ‘insider’ status. This research would not claim to have ‘exclusive knowledge’ of senior policy-makers in Romania but is closer to the ‘professional stranger’ described by Kaufmann (1994, cited in Labaree, 2002). In addition, a degree of being an insider also allowed the cultural nuances to be picked up that may be missed by an outsider, or more objective researcher. Labaree (2002) also continues that disengagement is an important consideration for

66 a researcher, but for a doctoral researcher, this is not a consideration, but one had to be careful in terms of discussing potential research outcomes with those who agreed to be interviewed.

3.2 Institutionalism and Method

The proposed method for the research employs historical institutionalism to analyse the factors that shape public administration in Romania. In particular, the role of path-dependency in how policy choices are made is important. One of the criticisms of institutionalism is that it appears to be better at explaining stability rather than change (Hill 2009: 76). However, a number of institutionalist writers are able to explain why change and reform are ‚constant’ over time (John 1998: 195). The research will also explore the extent to which path-dependency influences the development of the reforms, which Romania is elaborating and implementing to meet the standards which the European Union imposes on all the member states. In addition, Lynn’s (2001) institutionalist model to account for policy change and convergence in public administration was offered as a framework in the previous chapter: ‚the value of this framework...lies in directing attention to the dynamic relations both within and between the institutional, managerial and operational levels of governance’ (Lynn, 2001: 196).

Historical institutionalism is also applied to comparisons and for the research outcome to be generalizable it should be possible to compare Romania against other countries. However, this is not the intention of the research, which treats Romania as a single case (although inferences will be drawn from other countries – see above). In addition, Romania may be situated within a policy learning network, and the work of NISPACee, also mentioned in the previous chapter, may provide a basis for this. Thus, it is not possible to dismiss mentioning changes in other countries, where relevant. For instance, Bulmer and Padgett (2004) use policy learning analysis to describe the relationship between the EU and individual nation states that emphasises institutional arrangements, including ‘coercion’ or imposition by the EU.

67 The nature and direction of reform within the Romanian public service also needs to be identified. Despite the considerable barriers identified above in relation to the communist legacy, deep politicisation, etc. work on policy learning provides a framework in which to situate and appraise reform processes from external sources. While Carroll and Common (2013: 193) recognises the proliferation of policy learning studies in relation to the EU, they point to accession transfer as a different set of processes aimed at policy convergence when compared with the outcomes of voluntary policy learning. Thus, because transfer takes place within institutional contexts, this has to be borne in mind when considering methodological approaches. However, Evans (2004, pp. 27) proposes approximately 25 different pathways by which policy transfer can occur, thus leaving open a range of empirical possibilities of assessing which pathway Romania may have adopted, but this clearly would provide considerable methodological challenges beyond this thesis.

3.3 Research Design and Method

As the research aims to provide an explanatory case study (Yin, 1994) to achieve its stated objectives, the intention was to analyse the causes of the re-shaping of Romanian public administration since the revolution of December 1989. A further intention was the development of a detailed case study, based on qualitative methods of data analysis, with a critical outcome (Cassell et al., 2006). Within the qualitative approach, the study employed essentially mixed methods research, based on data collected primarily through elite interviews and documentary analysis (see below).

The research also attempts to offer a holistic approach to a series of events, providing ‛thick description’ of various phenomena being studied (Gummesson, 2000). The greatest challenge of the research topic is to draw up the research design for a single country case study, as the intention of conducting the research is to focus on the topic in a chronological case study (Cassell and Symon, 2004), which

68 is useful in demonstrating causation (Lincoln and Guba (1985). However, this does not apply to the interviews which were conducted at a specific point in time (2010). This inevitably means a somewhat open ended discussion of the results of the study, as in the relatively short time scale of the fieldwork period not all aspects can be thoroughly analyzed. Some of the questions will remain partially unanswered. On the other hand, this shortcoming will be offset by the detail, richness, and immediacy of the data drawn from elites who are deeply enmeshed in the historical and contemporary developments of Romanian public service. As policy is a fluid situation, and with Presidential elections due at the end of this year (2014), clearly the study is unable to confirm or deny hypotheses. However, it does provide a highly detailed and nuanced account of the realities of public service reform attempts in Romania that can shed new light on how path dependency can be applied and the wider failure of international policy learning.

The main analytical tool for the case study is in-depth, semi-structured elite interviews. From a methodology perspective, a qualitative approach was chosen because ‘knowledge, views, understandings, interpretations, experiences and interactions are meaningful properties of the social reality’ and they allow the generation of useful knowledge through such interactions (Mason 2002: 63-64). Although the rationale for using elite interviewing has been introduced, it is worth emphasising that semi-structured interviews differ from structured interviews in an important respect. That is only the topics are predetermined and it is through a series of open-ended questions that the researcher can gain new insights and analysis (Nabasa et. al. 1995; Pretty et.al. 1995). Semi-structured interviewing also allows a dialogue to be developed within particular institutional contexts and thus this method resonates with the theoretical basis of the research. In addition, the validity of the data gathered from interviews should result from the professional position of the interviewees, as well as by being compared with secondary sources (regulations, national and European reports etc).

To return to the issues around elite interviews, although the composition of the policy-making elite in Romania requires a clear definition, and there are many

69 conflicting ones, Romania is no exception in that the elite tend to be politically influential, well educated, are wealthier compared to the majority of the population and have disproportionate influence over public policy formulation. Thus, the results of elite interviews will allow the expected richness of information to provide an understanding of decision making concerning administrative reforms. Furthermore, elite interviews are required because the actors involved in policymaking and policy implementation are high-ranked civil servants and politicians.

This raises the question, why were non-elites not selected for interview? There are various views of the policy process that suggest that bureaucrats or public servants are able to influence policy making – or ‘the street level bureaucrat’ (Lipsky, 1980), or that different levels of the administration need to be considered (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1974) but most of these studies were conducted in liberal democracies. Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004) maintain that public administration reform is an elite process, and this is somewhat amplified in countries such as Romania, used to strong central control over policy by party elites.

The target of the fieldwork was initially approximately 30 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with relevant individuals from different professional backgrounds. The eventual stated number of interviews (20) reinforces the popularised view that Romanians are traditionally reluctant in answering questions related to the reform mechanisms and processes, or indeed any matter related to policy. Thus, foreseeing the possibility of professionals not wanting to cooperate with the research, a larger sample was not proposed, which ultimately would not be accessible. In addition, the scope of the research was not simply to approach a large sample of professionals, but elite decision makers who could make an informed and significant contribution. The “Snowball effect” was also useful during the process of selecting and contacting the relevant professionals to be interviewed, and of course, it was also anticipated that the number of interviews could increase. According to Richards (1996), the number of interviews should not affect the

70 quality of the information; in short, it is not the figures that count, but the type of answers, and the quality of the gathered information.

The targeted interviewees in Romania belonged to different categories of professionals. Some of them are civil servants working for the three institutions involved in the supervision of the reforms of the public service in Romania. Broadly, the profile of the respondents was as follows:

 public managers working in the Unit for Public Policies within the General Secretariat of the Government,  senior civil servants working for the Ministry of Administration and the Interior,  public managers and high-ranked civil servants working for the National Agency for Civil Servants

Another category of interviewees was composed of professionals working in the private sector, but who are directly involved in consultancy for public organizations and national programmes aimed at the improvement of the quality of management within the public administration. Thus, not only were they considered to have appropriate insights into the bureaucracy, they were also thought to be more capable of expressing more objective opinions.

Despite the recent economic crisis (from 2008 until 2012), although the civil servants’ trade unions have lost most of their negotiating powers since 2003 when they were allowed to be established, and their voice is weaker than in the past, they were also considered. Despite their relative loss of power, trade unions remain active and it was considered relevant to acquire an image of how their representatives envisage the shape and content of managerial reforms in the Romanian public sector. The civil servants trade unions targeted for this research trade were SED LEX, SNFP – Sindicatul National al Functionarilor Publici (The National Trade Union of the Civil Servants), and The Union of Civil Servant Trade Unions. From a EU perspective, the European Works Council (EWC) Directive also 71 requires employee consultation procedures for organisations employing more than 1,000 workers. Unfortunately, it proved not to be possible to include any trade union representatives in this research.

In addition to this group of potential interviewees, the intention was to contact senior academics from the National School for Political and Administrative Studies (NSPAS) (Bucharest), to counter-balance data from practitioners with data obtained from members of academia involved in the training of future civil servants. As a graduate of this School, the researcher has observed that public institutions do not send their employees to get qualifications from this institution, and the School does not specially provide training for civil servants. Virtually any individual may graduate from this School without joining the civil service afterwards – there is no special condition for this. The purpose of interviewing employees from this School is to elucidate if the institution intends to attract civil servants as students, or if it is involved in any governmental programmes for the professional training of civil servants. In addition, it was necessary to ascertain if the School will take a more active role in improving the quality of personnel working within the civil service. Through the fieldwork, the intention was also to establish the reasons for which Romania does not have an adequate institutional environment for management development in terms of professional training for civil servants.

The effort to find academic members of the School willing to be interviewed proved to be fruitless to a large extent. In Romania, members of academia are even more elusive than the politicians, and tend to display political ambitions which also challenges their reliability. Only two interviewees from this category, Renaldo Nita and Iulian Chifu, were willing to be interviewed. At that time the first was an Associate Lecturer (as well as being my former Human Resource Management trainer on the Young Professional Scheme).7 The latter was a Reader at the School, as well as Advisor to the Vice-President of the Senate. These two interviewees have

7 The Young Professional Scheme, which was a development programme for civil servants, is describe in full in Chapter 5. 72 compensated for the lack of response from their colleagues by providing very rich and extensive responses to the interviews.

Finally, officials in the relevant EU institutions were also considered for this research. This involved establishing contacts with Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities in the European Commission, as this division is responsible for the European HR policies. The reasons for choosing this division relate to the fact that Romania does not have distinct national programmes specially designed for the professional training of civil servants. From the Romanian side it is worth noting that the EU accession institutions tend to be more professional and efficient and staff tend to be ‘high status, are multilingual and have higher skills and educational levels than general civil service staff’ (Nunberg 2000: 20). Once again, these characteristics also present the problems associated with elite interviewing, as the planned approach to this level of professionals turned out to be unsuccessful. Not only it is very hard to find contact addresses or telephone numbers for these individuals, once approached, their attitude towards the sample of the interview questions raised controversy and apprehension.

As mentioned before, the National School for Political and Administrative Studies in Romania does not specifically address the training needs of civil servants. This area causes a major problem for conducting research. Moreover, the new unitary payment scheme, which abrogated the mandatory staging of professional courses for civil servants, made it difficult to establish who will be responsible for training. Other organizations involved in the development of training programmes for the Romanian civil servants required identification along with how the European Union strategies/policies/programmes help to improve the quality of civil servants training. To date, little evidence was found on the new developments of civil service training related to the special Units and departments in each Romanian Ministry that have been delegated to administering the operational sectoral programme for Human Resource development by means of absorbing European funds.

73 Thus a further problem is that the most notable current trends in the management of the civil service are the dilution of centralized training for civil servants by means of the devolution of training responsibilities from the central government to the ministries and agencies. These organisations then have to individually assess training needs, develop training programmes and implement them. However, the lack of specifications on what exactly professional training for civil servants should cover and the dissolution of the Institute of Administration which dealt with the training of civil servants negates any appearance of legitimacy of the concern for the uniform professionalism of the civil service. Furthermore, reliable statistics both at national and institutional level are not available and there is little, if any, coherent public information, making it harder to identify eventual examples and to assess them, and indeed contact those responsible for interview. There is no organisation that is analogous to the Office for National Statistics in the UK.

3.4 Developing the Research Methods: Elite Interviewing

To understand the nature, motives and details of policy formulation (or non-policy making) it is necessary to consider potential interviewees as being drawn from an administrative elite. For instance, Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004, pp. 25) situated elite decision-making at the centre of the administrative reform mechanism. Therefore, this research will analyse the quality of elite decision making in Romania, and the influence of this type of decision on public administration, as well as the type of pressures that it generates towards change. Thus an important factor for the research to consider was the status of the interviewees themselves. To appreciate the nature of policy formulation requires eliciting opinions from highly influential actors who, in turn, have a high status in politics in any individual country. Therefore, elite interviewing is a key qualitative research method in public administration (Burnham et al, 2008) and has a long history going back to Heclo and Wildavsky’s classic study of the Whitehall ‘village’ in 1974. Elite interviewing is also based on semi-structured interview approaches. A purposive sample was originallydesigned on the basis of targeting potential interviews in key government ministries, as well as reliable academic commentators, but in the event the

74 interviewees ended up as a mix of purposive and snowball sampling. Snowballing was often the result of reluctance on the part of the potential interviewees. As a result, twenty government officials (current and ex) and commentators, were interviewed for the purposes of the research during the time frame of the fieldwork research.

All the interviews were conducted face-to-face; the interviews lasted for approximately one hour. Note-taking and subsequent transcriptions, i.e. detailed interview summaries have served as a generic method for interpreting the interview content and turning transcriptions into an analytic narrative. Interviews with civil servants, government officials, etc. were conducted in Romanian, the writer’s native language, and thus required translation before transcription. Elite interviews are useful also for gleaning perceptions from senior policy makers. It is likely that if citizens or service users are asked for opinions about public service reform, researchers would get very different views. One could argue that by interviewing citizens, one could get a sense of the impact of reform programmes, successful or otherwise. While this is important in terms of understanding how and where public services could be improved, policy makers can choose to ignore them, especially if there is no political interest. For instance, in the UK, the National Health Service remains one of the most salient public services in terms of service users and the politicians. Romania is different. In a rare article that attempts to elicit public service users opinions in Romania (Sandor and Tripon, 2008) they compare those responses with those of the policy makers when interviewees were asked the same question. The authors observed that the biggest difference between elites and service users was that whereas elites thought that the reforms made sense and were efficient, service users disagreed (Sandor and Tripon, 2008: 116). However, the quantitative approach taken by the authors missed the nuances or broader explanations for each response.

Elite interviewing is not without its challenges. As Costa and Kiss (2011: 245) put it: ‘in Romania, the dialogue between researchers and policy-makers is quite uneven

75 and deficient, mostly because of unequal power relations’. While this observation could be generalised to most countries, there is the problem that by even asking questions about policy, the researcher could be construed as being ‘critical’. Despite democratisation, there remains a culture of secrecy within public administration elites in Romania, reinforced by the lack of academic scrutiny. In many cases, independent researchers may be viewed with suspicion, which may also partially account for the poorly developed literature on public administration reform in Romania, discussed in the previous chapter.

3.5 The Use of Secondary Data

If conducting primary research in Romania faces obstacles, another key challenge of the research comes from the scarcity of Romanian secondary sources, such as country case studies on the reforms of Romanian public administration, which leads to the necessity of finding relevant primary sources to build the analysis on. In addition, a certain amount of regulatory data was translated from Romanian and assessed in terms of content to ensure validity of information, but this does not cover the aspect of the existing literature gap. However, the most significant secondary sources at this point were Law no. 188/1999 amended and re-published as the Status of Civil Servants and Law no. 330/2009 regarding the unitary remuneration of the personnel paid from the public budget. These two acts regulate not only the status of the civil servants, but also affect the stratification of civil service positions in Romania. Legislation is in the public domain and can be easily accessed.

At the EU level, the secondary data that was analysed was taken from the Eurostat database, which contains statistical information and country reports on a quarterly basis, as well as end of the year reports. These documents are important as they are elaborated by teams of EU workers working closely with – in this case – Romanian academics and statisticians. Additionally the researcher contacted the Romanian Permanent Mission at the European Union in order to be able to analyse

76 the Drafts of the reform proposals drawn up on behalf of the Romanian Government. Other statistics were obtained from secondary sources provided by the Romanian National Institute of Statistics, and other relevant entities but as noted earlier, this agency does not have the reliability or comprehensiveness of the information provided by the UK Office of National Statistics. In addition, Romania does not have practitioner journals – neither for the public sector, nor for the private sector, which constitutes another of the drawbacks for this research. The only indication of written proof of professional communication and dissemination of the trends in management, and HRM especially, is contained in private blogs. These do not constitute reliable and valid sources from the academic standpoint, but they are the only indication of a professional communication between practitioners. In this format, it is highly questionable if information is disseminated beyond the boundaries of a circle of individuals interested in this topic.

However, Romanian journals and journalists keep a keen eye on the latest developments of the trajectory imposed by the Government on the administrative reforms. The most important tabloids constitute the barometer of the civil society, as well as voice of the contesters against the new ‘regime’.8 Although I was not able to get a response to requests for interviews with key journalists, the following publications were considered: “Evenimentul Zilei”, “Adevarul”,“Ziarul Financiar” and “Economistul”.

While the first two are national circulation dailies taking a constant interest in the course of policy-making in Romania, the latter two are specialised journals (daily and, respectively, weekly). There is an obvious drawback, insofar as none of them have editorial policies which require them to focus on public management and HRM-related topics. However, the approach to the reform processes in Romania, the combined attention lent to public administration and professionalization of the state apparatus – be it mainly stemming from economic concerns – occasions significant contributions from noteworthy academics and specialists.

8 The UK distinction between tabloids and the ‘quality’ press does not really exist in Romania 77 Since NGOs and think tanks continue to play an important part in charting the European course of Romania, it is considered important to tackle at least a couple of the most prominent ones, such as the European Institute in Romania (EIR) and the Romanian Academic Society (SAR). In particular, EIR has an interest in EU policy transfer and implementation. As of 2009, when the government started focusing on regulations for HR performance and efficiency in the public sector, SAR is committed to analysing the practical facets of the administrative reform in Romania.

One of the shortcomings the researcher will had to cope with is the story-based approach NGOs may take to the topics of interest for this thesis. This is because NGOs and think tanks seek to create a critical mass of informed supporters of change amid a vast category of interested and discontented people who lack the theoretical background for understanding the core matters under discussion. Hence, due to the ‘piecemeal’ character of the papers they release, the researcher was required to perform a rigorous assessment of their validity. A number of NGOs advertise their projects through reports, but once contacted to attend potential interviews the reply is always negative. One particular example is highly relevant to this research. I attempted to contact the representative of Amnesty International in Romania. Although the email address posted on the website and the telephone numbers of the Secretariate of the organization seemed to be working, nobody has ever replied to my attempts of contact. Even more, during the week in which I attempted to establish contact with Amnesty International the representative has been charged with embezzelment and parliamentary incompatibility. Under such circumstances the validity of information provided to the public via reports is highly questionable.

3.6 Developing the interview questions

The interview questions were developed based on the assumptions developed by the researcher’s prior knowledge and findings from the literature review. As the research follows institutionalist accounts, the interviews will elucidate behaviour

78 and attitudes within institutional settings, and how those behaviour and attitudes are either constrained or enabled. This is a complex area as Scott (2001) attests:

Most treatments of institutions emphasize their capacity to control and constrain behavior. Institutions impose restrictions by defining legal, moral, and cultural boundaries, distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. But it is equally important to recognize that institutions also support and empower activities and actors. Institutions provide stimulus, guidelines, and resources for acting as well as prohibitions and constraints on action.

Desk-based or secondary analysis will provide the institutional description that forms the context of the analysis (in Chapter 4).

The following questions were addressed during the interviews, although it was possible that the ‘questions package’ differed slightly in accordance to the interviewee’s position and professional background. However, this is the nature of semi-structured interviews and such an inductive approach is required for research of this nature (Bryman, 2004). For the three main target groups that were identified (senior civil servants, professional commentators and government officials), it was decided that a core set of questions would be used. However, these sample questions were initially set at a very general level to reflect the main objectives of the research. The relationship of the questions to the research objectives appear in brackets after the question:

 To what extent do you think that the administrative reforms in Romania are influenced by the past Communist regime and in what way? (to assess path dependency)

 How would you qualify the administrative process in Romania? (stable or unstable, incremental or bringing elements of novelty each time a new

79 Government is elected?) (to assess path dependency and extent of international influence)

 How would you describe public policy making in Romania? (to ascertain the inputs into policy making and public administration and how shaped by institutionalist factors)

 Where do you think Romania adopts policies from and why? (to assess extent of policy learning)

 How much should the policy making and implementation processes be influenced by politics (rather than being evidence-based, research-based, based on civil service expertise, etc)? (to highlight key administrative problems and link them to institutional factors)

 What institution or institutions should be responsible for the professional development of the civil servants? (to determine how Romania can claim to be aligned with international trends in public management)

The rich sociological dimension of the information targeted by utilizing elite Interviews raised the issue of how best to interpret the acquired material. Furthermore, the fact that two major themes were developed through the division of the questions: public administration reform and HR developments, implied that the interpretation of the information would be very sensitive and open to interpretation. Following Robson’s (1993) approach, the pattern of different responses (thematic) emerged that can be related back to the conceptual framework of the thesis.

While transcribing and coding the interviews the following sub-themes emerged:

 path-dependency  challenges to Public Administration

80  reform processes  politicization  political ideology  culture  resistance to change  systemic flaws  exceptionalism

Similar statements were grouped under each sub-theme for swift and convenient usage. This approach was preferred to the more traditional key-word coding, as due to the nature of the Romanian language and the different backgrounds of the interviewees a key-word search would have created confusion. For instance, it is to be noted again that some of the interviewees refused to acknowledge the unitary sense of the word ‚reform’, but claimed that there are various types of reforms for each sector of governmental activity (rather than conceding that these are programmes, rather than ‚reforms’) thus making it impossible to code it under the initially assigned sense. A theme-based approach also allowed flexibility for the interpretation of information as well as allowing the interviewees to give their views in an unconstrained manner.

The method of interpretation is also open to the use of grounded theory, as in the case of this thesis (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). In addition, this method does not pre- determine the themes and sub-themes, but allows the interpreter to juggle with the discourse and to group the answers around the most frequently occuring views expressed by the interviewees. Althoough the thesis is concerned with eliciting the experience of others (the interviewees), it is also concerned with exploring rich data and contestable interpretations of events, documents, etc.

81 3.7 Bringing in other countries

Earlier, it was stated that Romania would be examined as a case-study and subjected to analysis to explain the phenomena of administrative reform and how it is shaped by institutions. However, to observe path dependency requires some acknowledgement of other units of analysis. To quote Hill (2009: 82) at length, the potential value of the comparative approach to the thesis is considerable:

If propositions about ‘pathways’ are to stand up as more than observations…then observations about differences in different institutional structures are needed. These may be observations about different points of time in the same country, hence the importance of historical institutionalism but generally they need to involve comparisons between different places (which normally means comparisons between nation states).

For effective comparison, Peters (1994) highlighted the importance of understanding and comparing theoretical contexts with the focus on examining structures and behaviour within more than one cultural and political setting. At a minimum, comparative public management involves comparing public administration in a country different from that of the researcher, which implies comparison with the system known to the researcher. While the objective of the thesis is not a comparative study, it is important to draw comparisons when looking at cross-national policy learning to understand the contexts in which policy learning takes place.

In addition, from an empirical and practical point of view, a comparative analysis would be extremely difficult to conduct. First of all, the challenges of obtaining reliable documentary material in Romania itself were considerable; to do so in a neighbouring country those challenges would be further exacerbated. In practical terms, this problem would also apply in terms of gaining access to elite interviewees, and it is likely those challenges would be more considerable as the

82 researcher would be considered an ‘outsider’. Thus, the practical implications of an effective and detailed comparison would probably be insurmountable, and in turn, would affect, ‘case selection, coding decisions and concept-indicator linkages’ (Bunce, 1995: 113). In addition, as with the case of Romania, any countries comparable to Romania in CEE also suffer from a lack of reliable academic literature (i.e. Bulgaria).

On the other hand, by focusing on a single country, it allows a richness of analysis, not least because of the tacit knowledge the researcher has of that country. It also allowed for the more detailed analysis of the historical and political background of Romania, which was necessary to understand the research problems and the context of its system of public administration. This detail is provided in Chapter 4. Gerring (2004: 348) lends support to the ‘depth’ of analysis that a single country case can bring, which is quickly lost when comparisons are made across units, i.e. countries. It then becomes possible to generalise, if necessary, from a single case. Writing from the perspective of public administration in particular, Jensen and Rodgers (2001: 244) argue that not only can we generalise from single cases, ‘if we discourage researchers from conducting case studies, we will exhaust the supply of intellectual gold’.

However, with respect to the regional angle, the researcher considered policy developments in Bulgaria and Hungary, to compare their experiences with the developments in Romania. Some of the chosen countries reflect the proximity with Romania (Bulgaria and Hungary are geographic neighbours), as well as the degree of development in policy formulation. Bulgaria is a post-Socialist Slavic country that joined the E.U at the same time as Romania. This country represents for this research the Slavic background that Romania does not share, and at the same time a basis for comparing policy processes taking place under the same pressures applied by the E.U. to both states.

83 Italy and Spain are countries of Latin origin and they represent the “traditional” sources of inspiration in policy learning towards Romania.9 Romania is the only Latin country in the region and according to the Latin inheritance prefers to learn from France, Italy and Spain, and less so from the Slavic and Hungarian neighbours. This follows the notion that it is cultural proximity rather than geographic proximity that allows policy learning (Beuselinck et al, 2007). However, given the depth of influence over Romania of the former Communist system, it will become apparent that any comparison with a developed EU state would be inappropriate. One of the purposes of the research is to provide a rich and detailed description of the Romanian public administration reforms that so far has been mostly lacking across public administration literature. Romania is part of a community of policy learning (within the EU). This may involve only the states situated in geographical proximity (i.e. Central Europe), even if they do not share the same Latin background with Romania, as Italy, Spain and France do. However, the mention of the “Latin” background is important for the research as it represents the researcher’s assumption that cultural background shapes both collective behaviour and the managerial practices, and that for example, Romania chooses to connect more easily with countries with a similar background rather than its neighbours, which are mainly Slavic countries. It is part of the cultural and institutional context that Romania’s public administration ‚style’ has more in common with countries with similar background rather than its neighbours, which are mainly Slavic countries. In the same way, it was noted that the UK prefers to look at other Anglophone countries such as Australia and the US, rather than its near European neighbours, such as France, for policy inspiration (Wollman, 2002)

9 There is scant evidence in published literature to validate the use of the term „traditional” in this context, but the historical perspective and the fact that Italy and Spain share a common Roman background with Romania lead to the use of this term as adequate to the described situation. 84 3.8 Limitations of the Research

It was clear from the beginning of this research project that by choosing elite interviewing as a method of acquiring the necessary information to develop a case study of the scale of the present one, the main issues to tackle would be the availability of interviewees, their willingness to answer questions that might relate to sensitive information, and the number of interviews to acquire. If the initial proposal indicated a potential of 28 interviews to be held, during the fieldwork stage the researcher managed to secure and perform 20 elite interviews.

The use of purposive sampling followed by the ‘snowball’ effect, and indeed the fact that some of the interviewees have spread the word about the research project brought up more willing interviewees, resulted in some rich and useful interviews. But unfortunately, due to the lack of trust in the Romanian political culture, the research has also triggered negative responses from potential interviewees who have turned down the invitation to take part in the project. One major set-back was the fact that a few high-calibre dignitaries at the time when interviews were scheduled to take place have ‘disappeared’ from the political arena, and as a result they have become unreachable or have declined to take part in the research project.

In addition to the drawbacks of elite interviewing, other limitations of the research include:

 the possible limitation of access to relevant professionals due to their position within the system,  possible language barriers (unfamiliarity with English terms that have no direct translation in Romanian)  the reluctance of Romanian civil servants to give opinions on the actual situation of the public administration and the way the Government is conducting the reform of the public administration

85  the limited access to Romanian secondary sources  the need to translate relevant documents from Romanian or other languages to English

It is important to reveal the circumstances in which some interviews have not taken place, in order to fully account for how I have addressed and partially overcome the above challenges.

Not only it is very hard to reach politicians in Romania, it is even harder to secure an interview once the background of the research is explained to these persons. Let me provide an illustration. At the time when the fieldwork was been undertaken the Romanian government, under EU pressure to reform the Justice system started investigating former dignitaries under suspicion of fraudulent acts, embezzlement, requesting illegal favours, blackmail etc. As it will be explained in the rest of the thesis, in Romania once a political party or a coalition accedes to power, the Opposition immediately comes under scrutiny with various accusations of having performed various illegal acts. In the circumstances mentioned in this sub-chapter a former high-ranking politician was approached for interview in his capacity as a former leading politician and due to his involvement in the early reform of the Romanian system initiated with the accession into NATO. It needs mentioning that it has taken several weeks of networking and persuasion to acquire any meaningful contact but unfortunately the interview never took place, as before the day of the scheduled event the potential interviewe attempted suicide. Since that moment in 2011 and until now the potential subject has been in prison. Another interview that did not take place, but due to less dramatic circumstances, was with Ms Sulfina Barbu, former Ministry of Labour for a brief stint in 2011, having also held the position of Minister for Environment and Water Management between 2004 and 2007. A campaigning feminist, with liberal views and having actively supported reforms to promote the younger generations into politics, she seemed to be an ideal candidate for one of the elite interviews for this research project. After having established contact with her, that time without any intervention from third parties, and after having sent to her a sample of interview questions, with which she has 86 completely agreed, her position as Minister in the cabinet changed, thus triggering a non-response to my further attempts to contact her.

The researcher believes it is important to draw attention to the attitudes of the interviewees towards taking part in this project, as Aberbach and Rockman (2002) emphasize the need to look at the positive aspects of being turned down for an elite interview, but at the same time, in the view of the researcher, it is of equal importance to note that some of the characters interviewed or not interviewed for this research project display the same condescending and dismissive attitude not only towards myself and my research, but towards the larger audience and the electorate.

3.9 Ethical Issues

Moreover, even if the researcher is bound by ethical considerations and needs to be objective throughout the acquiring of information, as well as when interpreting the obtained data, the type of response triggered by the questions is reflected into the answers given by the interviewees. Although the method of interpreting the interviews was not discourse analysis, the quality of some interviews was affected by the attitude of the interviewees towards the researcher. For example, when one interviewee was approached in view of a meeting, he was very happy to take part in the project as a named subject. By the end of the interview he requested to be anonymised. In addition, throughout the one hour interview he attempted to contradict and vex the interviewer by choosing to follow a completely different line of interpretation of the addressed questions from that of the interview layout. Given the fact that he is a former member of the Cabinet of late 90s and holds the position of University Professor, it was expected for him to digress from the original conversation, but not to the extent that he did during the interview. Eventually the acquired material was very rich in information and provided a new perspective to the proposed topic, but the efforts of digression were revealed at a later date. There were interesting attempts to deceive the researcher, as the anonymous

87 interviewee had become at that time the subject of an official enquiry over his possible position as an intelligence agent during the late Communist regime.

One of the most revealing aspects of the fieldwork stage was the readiness of some of the interviewees in offering unsolicited advice over how the interviewer should conduct the interviews, to the extent where they were effectively trying to force the interviewer into interpreting the answers the way they have wanted them to sound. To revisit the words of one of the interviewees, Romanians know everything about anything and as a consequence the person in front of you will always be the one who needs unsolicited advice and criticism. In addition, suspiciousness is a national trait and a legacy of the former communist system. The most notable limitation of the fieldwork was the fact that the vast majority of the interviewees needed to be assured and re-assured that the researcher was not an undercover journalist attempting to extract precious personal information and then sell it to the mass-media, nor was the researcher an undercover member of the prosecution trying to organize a ‘you’ve been framed’ moment. Despite documenting these challenges, that would be unlikely to be experienced to such an extent by a researcher in public administration in the UK, it was often the actions and reactions of the interviewees that often provided an evidential base without a record of what they actually said.

Wiles (2012) discusses some of the ethical issues related to the kind of qualitative research conducted in the thesis. As many issues were likely to be emergent, such as admissions of corruption, or more mildly, incompetence, it was necessary to be prepared if such issues were raised. Although corruption was not a focus for the research, it was highly possible this might be raised in a public administration context in particular. De Laine (2000: 93) notes that it is not possible to predict emergent themes, in this case, around corruption, although an advance understanding can ‘smooth the way to dealing with some pitfalls that revolve around sensitive topics’. The advice is to address problems as they arise and that they will be dealt with situationally, or if the interviewees volunteer information. In

88 addition, corruption is an extremely complex issue and highly context dependent (both culturally and organisationally).

However, privacy and confidentiality were important issues that required consideration. Confidentiality is ‘taken to mean that information given to another person will not be repeated without their permission’ (Wiles 2012: 42). All the research participants were given the choice of allowing their names to be used, or to remain anonymous. When related to the possible challenges to research ethics presented by issues such as corruption, it is assumed that interviewees would wish to be anonymised if they voluntarily admitted to being involved in embezzlement and so forth.

De Laine (2000: 64) makes the point that participants (in this thesis, interviewees) ‘have their own pre-conceptualizations of researchers and what is expected of them’, which may temper their responses and will present themselves in the best possible way. Unfortunately, none of this can be controlled. If we take De Laine’s perspective further, interviewees were likely to be self-selecting in so far it could be assumed they were implicitly supporting the aim of the researcher.

Taking an insider perspective brings with it certain ethical dilemmas, in particular ‘any false representations of the phenomena could lead to feelings of betrayal on the part of the participants’, (Labaree 2002 p. 110). It is thus important to make the research agenda as clear as possible in advance to participants, who were given advance notice of the aims of the research. One advantage of the insider perspective is the knowledge of ‘context specific cultural and interpersonal scripts’ if we take De Laine’s (2000: 65) account of qualitative research being akin to a dramatic play.

89 3.9 Conclusion

It is clear that the expected results from the fieldwork combined with secondary data analysis applied to method have occured, but in a slightly different manner than intended. While the complexity and difficulty of the research setting meant that I did not manage to secure quite the extent and breadth of data that I was aiming for, it is fair to say that the research process did generate signifcant, detailed, rich, and valuable data on the contemporary reality of Romanian public administration. The abruptness of some of the interviewees has laid the basis for emphasizing the entrenched mass behaviour of the prior communist regime. It is not enough to claim that change is taking place as long as the outward attitude of both institutional and individual has undergone little or no improvement.

The research also needed to identify the foundations of public administration in Romania, as the relationship between political institutions and the system of public administration will determine the nature and direction of administrative change. As Thoenig (2003: 89) observes ‚policy choices made in the past shape choices made today’. Two layers of complexity were added to the research: the influence of EU membership and the desire by successive governments to meet imposed criteria and the perceptions of political leadership in terms of regional influences, both political and economic. To understand this complexity, qualitative research was necessary, not only to appreciate in analytical depth the situation of Romania, of policy learning activity and EU harmonization in a EU format, but also some potential building blocks for innovation which reflects a ‚Romanian style’ in the management and training of civil servants. However, to develop a critical understanding of how institutions in Romania shape or resist the development of public management, an understanding of the political and social context is required. This is provided in the next chapter.

90 Chapter 4: The Administrative Context of Romania

4.1 Introduction

When considering the administrative context of a country, the system of government is normally described but this chapter also considers the key political events that shape Romania’s public administration and attempts to elicit some of the cultural features that influence the process of administrative change. Following the historical-institutionalist perspective and to evaluate and asses the value of the notion of path dependency in relation to understanding administrative changes, this chapter provides an analysis of the development of Romanian public administration from the communist era through to the present. By considering how politics has shaped patterns of public administration the chapter helps to explain how these patterns have ossified to the present. In addition, a sociological- institutionalist perspective explains an enduring political culture which continues to explain present day policy choices. In turn, such a perspective also legitimises dominant bureaucrat elites while allowing the discourse of reform to be used to shore up risk-averse administrative behaviour. As Pollitt (2003: 165) observes: ‘choosing an organizational form that represents a big leap away from the existing cultural tradition is highly risky. Culture cannot be just ‘switched off’.’ Romanian public administration, on the surface at least, appears to follow these theoretical developments, although it is often grouped together under the category of ‘post- communist states’ along with its Eastern European neighbours.

The objectives of the thesis are concerned with the ways in which Romania has developed individualised policy mechanisms and to analyse the influence of path- dependency on the reform process. By examining the context of the development of public administration in Romania, the chapter will also provide an account of the reasons behind the ‘individualised’ or ‘exceptional’ nature of the policy process in Romania, a phrase that recurs in the literature. The chapter will also consider the

91 persistence of the socialist legacy. As the chapter reveals this is closely related to the ‘individualised’ nature of the policy process. Finally, the explanatory power of path-dependency is revealed through a critical account of the context.

Path dependency theory provides a broadly convincing explanation of why a country is willing or unwilling to follow international public management reforms. For example, Nef (2007) examines administrative culture in Latin America and concludes that:

 Despite appearing Western in outlook, its core components are the persistence of ascription and ‘influence peddling’ – social relationships are more important (in recruitment) than education, fitness to attain a certain position, or experience thus bureaucracy is open to nepotism, corruption, patronage and abuse  Hierarchical ‘status officialdom’ leads to formalism on the outside and private exceptionalism on the inside  Excessive centralism – which supports social elites  Undue influence of professional groups – engineers, military etc.10

At a superficial level, with the exception of the latter point, these assumptions could be applied to most CEE countries or at least those that stand outside the ‘public interest’ countries identified by Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004). While such generalisations may be considered unhelpful when making a case for ‘exceptionalism’, they provide a useful analytical starting point.

As path dependency is the outcome of the interplay between institutional and political-cultural factors that embed systems of public administration, it explains important differences between countries. Arguably, reform also depends on the political will to improve administrative transparency and to introduce Weberian bureaucratic principles before any international trends can be followed and

10 Words in parentheses are my addition 92 implemented. This assumption has taken root with the notion of the neo-Weberian state that has been applied to many EU accession states, or those seeking accession. It is not the purpose of the chapter to account for the possible emergence of the neo-Weberian state (NWS) in Romania, and this issue was addressed in Chapter Two. Although the concept of the NWS is subject to historical institutional accounts and Lynn (2008) argues that such a term offers a point of reference, it is more pertinent to consider the extent to which the implementation of Weberian bureaucratic principles is under challenge in Romania rather than provide an account of the NWS.

The chapter is structured chronologically but divided into key eras in terms of the dominant political characteristics of the country beginning with Communist rule. This is then characterised as a dictatorship under Ceausescu until the Revolution of 1989. For the purposes of thesis, the next periods are then described as preparation for EU accession followed by post EU accession.

93 These key eras are outlined in Figure 1 below:

Period Features of Sources of Reform Dominant Public institutional outcomes Institutional Administration change explanation for path dependency Communist Centralised The former Industrialisation Formal rule (1947- planning and Soviet Union Creation of institutionalism 1964) bureaucracy (‘Russification’) nomenklatura – bureaucracy as political control Dictatorship As above, but North Korea, Further As above (1965-1989) directed to will of etc. industrialisation political leader rather than party Revolution Greater pluralism, International Privatisation Sociological and After some financial Creation of institutionalism (1990-1999) decentralisation institutions economic Creation of public (IFIs), markets managers consultants, etc. Preparation Attempts to EU (primarily New Legislation Historical for EU professionalise the EC) but governing public institutionalism accession and to build influence from servants (2000-2006) capacity of public IFIs remain Capacity building managers Post EU Attempts to IFIs Medium Term Historical accession improve financial Expenditure institutionalism (2007 to management and Framework 2011)11 incentivise public (MTEF), etc. servants Source: developed by author

The apparent shift in institutional perspectives from after the revolution in the 1990s to the era characterised by preparation for EU accession is explained by the fact that there was very little formal institutional change in the 1990s, at least until 1999. Thus, path dependency is better explained using a sociological perspective as that era preserved the former culture of the communist era and was basically unaltered to a large extent, as the rest of this chapter will explain.

At first glance, it seems that within a relatively short space of time, political change in Romania appears to be dramatic. But the division of Romania’s political

11 Developments up to 2014 are considered, although the data collected from interviews stops at 2011. 94 development into distinct eras also masks deep, underlying characteristics in its political culture that have persisted since the country’s formation in the late 19th century. A further argument developed within this chapter is a case for Romanian exceptionalism; while the country shares some important features with its neighbours, such as a lack of consensus building and problems around reform design (including an over-reliance on legislation); there are distinctive contextual features which makes generalisations difficult. The chapter thus analyses each of these key periods in relation to shifts in key contextual variables, in this case, institutional and political change.

However, before considering each of these eras, it is worth making a brief introduction to the early development of the country. Before Romania became a communist state, the state was in turn a Monarchy, an authoritarian-monarchy, as well as a Military dictatorship. Romania is also a relatively young country, with the modern state of Romania only unified and established in 1861. It is important to note these stages prior to the Communist era, as while under the Communist rule the old institutional frameworks disappeared, the Romanian authoritarian and dictatorial traits of its former systems were pretty much kept untouched. Initially, this appears to support the view that path-dependency transcends rule of law and is embedded in social behaviour.

It needs to be emphasized at this point that until this day, any objective literature about the rise of Communism in Romania is scarce. Even historians have a tendency to be too passionate and biased about this topic. It is true that Communism has affected the lives of millions of people, but the lack of personal detachment and even propaganda has made research very difficult and unreliable. In Romania, there are personal accounts that stand outside political and administrative analysis, such as the novel by Moscovici (2009), but rarely is such material objective. In addition, it is difficult to trace any international journal papers on public administration in Romania that were published in the 20th century. Moreover, and only once the chapter considers the administrative context following the revolution of 1989, even then, reliable published information continues to be scant. In the

95 literature that is available the recurring themes that appear in relation to administrative problems in the democratic era include high degrees of politicisation in the administration, poor financial management (including public procurement), preferential privatisation and concessions from the sale of state property and advantages through preferential regulation. As Verheijen’s (2007: 313) assessment of post-Communist systems notes that government publications such as strategic documents ‘remain a rare commodity in the region’. This lack of availability of both reliable literature and government documentation presents a challenge for this research. For instance, the SAR (Romanian Academic Society) is considered to be one of the longest-established and reliable policy think-tanks in the country but concedes that: ‘unfortunately we have very little systematic data collection on any of these areas, except for press reports and some occasional...studies by think- tanks’ (SAR 2011, 9). Despite the limitations when developing the chapter, there is sufficient material to build a narrative of the progress (or lack of) administrative reform in Romania.

Before analysing the first era outlined in this chapter, that of communist rule, it is worth noting what existed prior to 1947. Romania began life under governorship and it was not proclaimed a kingdom until 1881 under King Carol (for example, see the account by Bulei, 2005). However, under the rule of the King political parties had flourished, up until World War II. Under monarchy, public administration was largely concerned with the system of prefectures that functioned as fiefdoms (arguably a problem that persists until the present). The vast majority of government employees were poorly paid. According to Gallagher’s (1985: 24) account of public administration in the early 20th century:

Smecherie (crafty dealing) and bacsis (bribery) were terms seen as defining the behaviour of certain categories of civil servants as well as their political masters. In Weberian terms, Romania was evolving into a ‘patrimonial’ rather than a ‘bureaucratic’ state-nation.

96 Poor leadership from the monarchy further exacerbated these problems from the perspective of an increasingly professionalised and educated young population. The lack of commensurate positions in government that was available to this new demographic also created frustration (Gallagher 1985: 33).

Despite the poor performance of the public administration system, Romania provided a suitable environment for political parties to express themselves in. After all, if it was not for the development of a party system, there would not have been any Monarchy to legitimize Romania’s position in Europe. The multi-party Parliament consisted of both Left and Right wing parties. However, unlike in the neighbouring countries, the Leftist parties had little influence over politics. It is also important to note that the number of initial political parties in inter-War Romania was relatively small and the tendency for them to split and fuse has been transmitted to the post-revolution Romania of today. Political instability is not new in the Romanian context if compared to enduring main parties in western liberal democracies.

It was not until the establishment of the Communist International in Moscow in 1921, that the Communist Party in Romania was founded. But contrary to the expectations of their representatives, in 1924 it was forced to go underground due to its anti-governmental opinions (Bulei, 2005). Up until the end of the Second World War, the monarchy continued to dominate politics although there were attempts to modernise government, including a new constitution in 1923, which proved to be highly centralising (Sanborne 2004: 40). Centralisation, lack of professionalism in administration and patronage seem to be features that had already become embedded in Romanian culture before we turn to our discussion of the first main era in this chapter, that of communist rule.

97 4.2 Communist rule (1947-1964)

In many ways, the events of the end of World War II and the establishment of the communist government were more dramatic and significant for the development of public administration than the revolution of 1989. Romania’s Second World War history is documented elsewhere (for example, Bulei (2005)), but Carol II was forced to abdicate in 1940 leaving his young son, Mihai, as King. Romania joined the Allies in 1943 but the monarchy was severely weakened by the end of the war. At Yalta in 1945, Churchill allowed Stalin to take control of Romania in return for leaving Greece alone, and the first Communist dominated government took power later that year. However, it was not until two years later that the King was removed and the People’s Republic of Romania was established (Light 2006: 11). Arguably, the process towards subservience to the Soviet Union had begun towards the end of World War II following demands from the Soviet foreign minister to King Mihai (Gallagher 2005: 47). However, when the Communist Party re-emerged in 1944 and became the ruling party, it was actually peripheral to Romanian society and considered a section of the Communist International, thereby promoting Moscow’s interests. For instance, a Soviet-Romanian company (SOVROM) was established in July 1945 with the aim of exploiting Romanian assets to Moscow.

Although a coalition appeared to be in power during the war, Moscow enforced their choice of premier on the government in March 1945, Groza. However, by the end of World War II, the bloc of parties effectively served as a front for the Communist party and this lead to the bloc gaining a huge majority in the parliamentary elections held in November 1946. Gheorghiu-Dej was installed as the general secretary of the communist party and a year later both he and Groza forced King Mihai to abdicate and to go into exile.

The establishment of the People’s Republic of Romania, under pressure from the Soviet Union in 1947 was the beginning of the transformation of the country into a totalitarian communist state and a satellite of Moscow. When the Communist party assumed total power, public administration fell into line with the demands of

98 a socialist command and control system. The state was not dismantled but was subjected to total transformation. This also involved a campaign of Russification, which included eliminating the historical Latin influence from Romanian culture and even the language. Soviet dominance in all aspects of Romanian politics continued until the late 1950s, until the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1958, at the request of the Romanian leadership. Following this period, up until 1965, there was also a gradual shift towards a more independent foreign policy for Romania. De- Russification was also pursued and completed by 1963. However, this growing liberalisation was to end in 1965 following the death of Gheorghiu-Dej (Bolovan et al., 1997).

Arguably, communist rule simply reinforced an administrative culture that had existed before World War II. A highly institutionalised bureaucratic style of public administration, in line with countries influenced by Germany, had already started to take shape in Romania before communist rule. However, bureaucratisation, in this sense, includes the formal aspects of organisation but ignores procedure in favour of personal or informal contacts. Under single party rule in the Communist era, this undoubtedly took place but it came to be even more entrenched once Ceausescu rose to power in 1965. Thus, the main features of public administration became established in this era as being characterised by centralised planning and the development of an entrenched bureaucracy. The main source of institutional change came from the former Soviet Union along with the cultural process of Russification. The result of which was heavy industrialisation and the creation of a nomenklatura within the political sphere. The overall outcome was the embedding of formal institutions underpinned by a highly politicised bureaucracy characterised by central planning. The influence (‘Russification’) of the former Soviet Union was the only source of institutional change, albeit a gradual one. Thereby, the path for Romanian public administration into the 21st century was firmly set.

99 4.3 Dictatorship (1965-1989)

Ceausescu’s appointment as general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (reverting to its former name prior to the creation of the party bloc in 1948) appeared to offer a contrast between a more liberal communist leader as opposed to the apparently Stalinist Gheorghiu-Dej (Bolovan et al., 1997: 533). However, when Ceausescu came to power in 1965, he strengthened his grip on the bureaucracy through a series of authoritarian measures. Despite this approach, the new General Secretary appeared to embrace change and allowed Western influences into the country and was cast as a reformer, at least initially.

However, this more-outward perspective changed in the early 1970s, apparently following visits to China and North Korea (Bolovan et al. 1997: 541; Light 2006: 13). As Shafir (1985: 97) observed, Ceausescu’s creation of the office of President in 1974 could be regarded as the ‚institutionalisation of the personality cult’ and added that presidential decree became common practice. In addition, senior state positions were allocated to members of his family and a nomenklatura was created. The higher echelons of the bureaucracy were rotated to prevent alternative power bases developing while maintaining a highly centralised state. It was also clear that public administration was concerned with industrial production, repression through the Securitate and vanity projects, such as the razing of parts of the historic city to build the ‚ House of the People’ (Light 2006: 14). Once communism started to collapse in Central and Eastern Europe, under Ceausescu, Romania appeared as its last bastion.

The type of communist rule applied in Romania after de-Russification is quite debatable. Kitschelt et al. (1999) present several varieties of communism from which the researcher selects the following two: patrimonial and bureaucratic- authoritarian. Up to a certain extent both of them could fit the Romanian situation. Under patrimonial rule, the leader is the overall ‘master’ of the game and has dominant executive and legislative powers, as well as control over the military. This would appear to be an apt description of Ceausescu at his peak. On the other hand,

100 under the bureaucratic-authoritarian regime there is a certain elite surrounding the party ruler, and an apparatus which holds extensive powers and which can overturn the tables should the party leader show signs of weakness. This latter perspective is important to the research project from the angle of providing an explanation for the post-Revolution events. I consider that Romania was a bureaucratic- authoritarian Communist regime, as the emergent post-revolution leaders have emerged from that layer of party elite, and were called ‘neo-communists’ by the new opposition created by the disappearance of Ceausescu and his camarilla12.

The dictatorial regime aimed at keeping the masses in a continuous state of confusion and submission, but the means of delivering the Dictator’s message was chosen by the party elites and not by the ruler as such. It was only in 1974 that Ceausescu was ‘elected’ (or more likely appointed) President. Rady (1992) emphasizes that the post was especially created for him by the party elites, which declared Ceausescu ‘the most brilliant son of Romania’ (pp. 49).

Analyzing the statements made by various authors, the rise of Ceausescu’s dictatorship, as it is nowadays classified as, was with the blessing of the Communist Party elites. It is to be questioned further whether the de-Russification was really effective or if the development of the path-dependency further discussed in this thesis had already stemmed from these actions or even earlier in the history of Romania. It was aforementioned that the Romanians chose to ‘bargain’ for a Western king by means of the political parties leaders bidding around Europe for the most suitable candidate. Up to a certain extent the same phenomenon took place in the case of Ceausescu, but as it has been proven by several events, the choice was not one of the most fortunate ones.

12 The term ‘camarilla’ is the diminutive of the Spanish word cámara (chamber) and it means ‘small chamber’. It has first been used to describe the small cabinet of King Ferdinand VII of Spain (1814 - 1833). It is currently known as cronyism, but the author of the Thesis chose to utilize the Spanish wording, as during the reign of King Carol II of Romania the contemporaries of the King have chosen to call the King’s entourage ‘camarilla’. The King’s contemporaries were addressing the private counsellors of the King by this name to emphasize disdain at the quality of the entourage, and later on the term has been applied to Ceauşescu’s cabinet both because the former Communist leader wanted to present himself as not being one of the subjects and due to the lack of respect that the regime was triggering from the Romanian citizens. 101 What triggered the 1989 Revolution were not only the strong personality cult surrounding Ceausescu and his dynasty, but also the measures of ‘systematization’ (removal of villages and re-grouping of rural regions for the benefit of agricultural development), constant human rights infringement and the general isolation of Romania (Nelson, 1992; Rady, 1992). Fifteen years of dictatorship lead to the outburst of social anger on the 17th of December 1989, although signs of an arising opposition to the regime started earlier in the year.

This era marked public administration, rather than the communist party, as an extension of the political leader. In addition, the influence of both China and North Korea on Ceausescu is not to be underestimated. Although further industrialisation of Romania followed, the formal institutionalisation of public administration was embedded along the path created by Communism. While Western countries were starting to experiment with New Public Management during this period, there remains a dearth of literature and analysis regarding public administration in Romania right up to the revolution. In any case, it is highly unlikely that it was being monitored or any other international reform movements. Romania, along with its CEE neighbours, was simply assumed to have highly centralised, highly politicised bureaucracies with nothing to suggest the contrary. Despite the leadership transition to Ceausescu along with other macro-policy changes during the lifetime of the Communist government, there are very few reference points. However, as the name of the period suggests, public administration became more concerned with the exercising the will of the leader rather than the party. Ceausescu himself deliberately started to look away from the former Soviet Union following the trip to North Korea. However, formal institutionalism continued to mark and explain the path that the country was dependent upon. However, without going more into other historical details, the discussion will continue with the events that had the potential to shape public administration after the Revolution and what lead to Romania pushing forward to join the European Union.

102 4.4 Revolution and After (1990-1999)

Standard Western accounts of policy change would regard the election of a new leader, let alone a revolution, as being followed by fundamental policy and administrative change. To analyse the key political events of 1989 is beyond the remit of the thesis but these events culminated in the execution of the Ceausescus on Christmas Day, 1989. Following the revolution, a group emerged called the National Salvation Front, itself lead by a former Communist, Iliescu, but apparently committed to pluralist government. A decree law declared on 3rd January 1990 allowed political parties to re-establish themselves. However, Romania remained relatively isolated in the years immediately following the revolution which was exacerbated by the problems of transition to democratic governance and the lack of a political culture (Bolovan et al. 1997: 558).

Romania’s revolution is regarded as symptomatic of Romanian ‚exceptionalism’ – a label that differentiates it from its Central European neighbours. To begin with, the transition to democratic governance was more problematic when compared to its neighbours during the 1990s. As noted in the previous section, Romanian communism was seen as serving the nation rather than the Soviet Union (de- Russification) which allowed ex-communists to have some credibility with the electorate. However, in public administration this meant there was no purging of personnel as occurred elsewhere in countries such as Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. Thus the rate of transition was slow in comparison (Bolovan et al. 1997: 559). However, one point of comparison with its neighbours in efforts at improving public administration in CEE came following the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1989 which created the real possibility of the former ‚Soviet bloc’ countries becoming members of the EU. However, the gradual evolution of administrative systems which occurred in stable democracies was denied within this group of countries. The systems of public administration that were inherited by new administrations were quickly exposed as inadequate (Mathieson, p. 648) or incompatible with democratisation. In many ways, in Romania, the transition was more abrupt when compared to its neighbours.

103 The Romanian Revolution was a violent one, as opposed to the peaceful transition of the neighbouring countries from Communism to democracy. According to Mungiu-Pippidi (2006) and McFaul (2002) Romania has experienced an ‘Europeanization without Decommunization’ by transferring the Communist elites to a new democratic environment without attacking its core psyche. Mr X has an additional explanation of the latter statement:

Romania has also suffered from the absence of Diaspora in the West. Or better yet, the existent Diaspora refused to come back in the aftermath of the Revolution, considering that the country was a post-Communist entity in the worst negative meaning possible, if we can admit that there is any positive connotation of the expression post-Communist state. The Diaspora has accused the new instituted government of Crypto-Communism and it has refused to take part in any way to the start-up of a process of reform13.

The most notable changes or perhaps lack of change is observed not at a political level, because politics had to be reconstructed after the Revolution, after 40 years of complete absence, but at a behavioural and social level. Gallagher (2005) comments that the break-up from the Communist system was only formal and it had a short-lived victory as it benefitted a group of elites, out of which the most prominent character was the new President of Romania, former second in command under the Ceausescu regime. Iliescu, the new President was seeking to apply a semi-authoritarian rule, easy to design and to enforce on the masses, already used to oppression.

Out of the relative chaos of the first months after the Revolution the political arena started re-building itself, despite the newly-instituted democracy, rather than the establishment of new political institutions. The influence of this instance of Romanian exceptionalism on public administration was a ‘low quality of

13 Interview, Anonymous 104 governance’ which was to be revealed when preparing for EU accession (Mungiu- Pippidi 2006: 21). Unlike its CEE neighbours, Romania’s bureaucracy emerged unscathed from a violent revolution. Another impact is that the bureaucrats lost control over the economy as public enterprises were placed in the hands of managers while they could also ‘reorient themselves in the new environment and to convert their inherited advantages’ that would allow the maximisation of self- interest (Pop 2006: 21). Pop (2006: 21) adds that old and new institutions co- existed side by side up until 1996 due to weak governance. Although this is unremarkable amongst the former socialist states, evidence from Ekiert (2003: 95- 96) shows Romania to be a laggard in terms of economic changes, even when compared to neighbours such as Bulgaria.

Nunberg’s (1999: 56) account supports this view of weak governance shored up by path dependent obstacles: ‘deeply rooted bureaucratic practices and ways of thinking...are not so easily changed’. A key problem was that the new state structure following the revolution was simply grafted upon the former Communist Council of Ministers structure (p. 57). The challenges presented by the post- revolution government overloaded ‘a relatively small staff with little experience of policy work’ often without the requisite professional backgrounds (p. 58). The attractiveness of private sector employment in relation to public sector remuneration was a further problem identified by Nunberg (p.79).

Although the basic pattern of public administration was largely left intact during the 1990s, partly as a result of the ambiguity surrounding possible EU membership, Romania witnessed waves of privatisation as a result of the interventions of the international institutions, along with the activities of multi-national consultancies. This had left a mark on public administration but was limited to the establishment of new institutions such as a national agency, but ‘it has done little to remove or diminish the pervasive use of social networks’ (Kideckel, 1992: 79). Sanborne (2004: 120) argues that the nomenklatura had little incentive to move quickly on privatisation, particularly when compared to its neighbours.

105 In 1996, further elections proved pivotal, with Iliescu being replaced as President by Emil Constantinescu. Weak governance had resulted in poor central policy coordination, a lack of a unified civil service and poor budgetary systems (OECD 1998, World Bank 1998). It was also clear, as Pop argues (2006: 104) that bureaucrats struggled to remain impartial under continuing pressure from sectorial interests within a fragmented bureaucracy. In Nunberg’s (1999: 2-3) assessment of five post-Communist states (Poland, Romania, Hungary, Russia and Germany (the former GDR)), the bald assertion was to report there had been no significant administrative change when compared to the other four cases (although she concedes that Russia offered a particularly difficult interpretation).

Paradoxically, the politicisation of the bureaucracy had grown apace with each change of government. The civil service was not unified and lacked central direction and coordination (Pop, 104). Familiar criticisms resurfaced when Daianu, finance minister briefly from December 1997 to September 1998, criticised standards of behaviour in public administration and reform was reduced to power politics (Gallagher 2005: 197). Moreover, reform would damage administrative culture which was based on ‘postponing decisions, avoiding responsibility, often favouring special interests, and allowing the operation of parallel agencies to neutralise change’ (Gallagher 1999: 370). Ionascu (2006) argues that it was not until the late 1990s that any serious attempts at reform were made to the central bureaucracy.

However, the new government in 1996 engaged in anti-corruption drives and began to engage the international institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the EU to provide support for economic and social reform programmes. It is notable that the privatisation picked up again in 1997 only to be slowed down again following Iliescu’s re-election in 2000 (Sanborne, 2004). In addition, foreign investment continued to be deterred by bureaucratic obstacles and corruption.

Although Romania had become more open to external influences as the 1990s progressed, rather than preparation for EU accession being paramount, the

106 activities of the international institutions, primarily the World Bank and the IMF started to alter the administrative landscape. Although loan activity was aimed at stabilising the economy, the possibility for the exchange and diffusion of the then new developments such as NPM began. For instance, public sector reforms were an element of the structural adjustment loan from the World Bank in 1992 (Pop, p. 129). Throughout the 1990s, it appeared there was an over-reliance on the expertise offered by the international institutions. As Nunberg (1999: 264) notes, the CEE countries have generally avoided NPM models, largely on the grounds of the lack of HR capacity or financial management skills. This is particularly pertinent to Romania.

The relationship with the EU during the 1990s was also one based on aid. Although a Europe Agreement had been signed with the EC in 1993, it was not until 1999 that Romania was invited to begin accession discussions with the EU. This is because the Europe Agreements were not regarded as pre-accession agreements by the EC, but they signalled the intent of the country that accession was an objective; Romania’s formal application for membership was submitted in June 1995 (Maresceau, 1997). However, the reform of public administration was non-existent and it was not until European Commission reports in 1998 that such reforms became a pre-requisite for accession negotiations. The result was the 1999 Laws described in the next section (as they provided a watershed in Romania’s reform programme).

It appears that the period from the revolution until 1999 was marked by a high degree of externalisation of Romanian public administration to a variety of international influences. In addition to the EU, the OECD and other agents, the World Bank has added to layer of complexity to produce ‘policy incoherence’ (Lee, 2009). Nunberg (1999: 262) also points to the problems of inconsistency and a lack of systematic and comparative frameworks in CEE countries that also fail to address cultural and institutional appropriateness. During the late 1990s, the presence of the IMF started to be directly associated to the Ciorbea government of 1996 to 1998 and viewed as interfering in the country’s affairs. Pop (2006: 134) regards the

107 technical assistance offered by both the World Bank and the IMF as helping to build the capacity of Romanian public administration, certainly by the late 1990s. Other agencies identified by Hintea (2008) include SIGMA-OECD, USAID and NATO (the latter introducing PPBS and MBO). The situation with the EU was different due to the complexity of the bureaucracy in Brussels itself although the generally optimistic view of policy transfer is based on a survey of documents from the international organisations (Pop 2006: 135).

In the first ten years after the revolution, although the context of public administration in Romania had been transformed, the system of public administration had proved to be remarkably resilient to change; an administrative culture which functioned on informal systems (patronage, politicisation, an embedded nomenklatura, etc.) proved unwilling to embrace the sort of transformational change that the new political situation demanded. As Figure 1 suggested, there was greater pluralism along with marginal decentralisation to a system of local government. The concept of public management appeared to be on the reform agenda. However, such changes seemed to be driven by international institutions such as the World Bank and consultancies with the focus on privatisation and marketization, without concomitant changes in public administration. According to Thoenig (2003: 91) if we accept a sociological- institutionalist explanation for the lack of change in post-revolutionary Romania, change will either come from within the system due to dissatisfaction, or exogenous factors will provide a strong enough push. However, this period continued with an administrative culture cemented in the socialist era. Yet the expectation across CEE countries, not least in Romania, was that EU accession would provide that push in a way that the 1989 revolution did not.

4.5 Preparation for EU accession (2000-2006)

If the collapse of the Soviet Bloc was a key driver in administrative reform, the prospect of EU membership quickly became another one. Nunberg (1999) regarded preparation for EU accession as having the greatest potential to drive reform in an

108 administratively moribund Romania. However, Grabbe (2003) is cautious about overestimating the influence of the EU and it is important to note the role of other international organisations whose activity in Romania was coterminous with preparation for EU accession. In line with the Romanian ‚exceptionalism’ argument, Mungiu-Pippidi (2006: 17) explains that, what is exceptional is not the struggle to differentiate its democratic government from its communist past but its entry into the European Union. This can only be understood by considering its neighbours. It is thus remarkable, for instance, that Croatia is the first new EU member state since Romania and Bulgaria joined in 2007.

The literature typically labels the alignment of public administration with the demands of the EU as the process of Europeanisation, which represents a form of policy convergence caused by EU membership (Radaelli, 2003). This is primarily achieved through twinning programmes to facilitate the acquis communautaire (the accumulated body of EU law). Despite criticism of the concept, Europeanisation provides ‘a valuable resource in understanding the complex and unpredictable process of post-communist transition in central and Eastern Europe’ (Papadimitriou and Phinnemore, 2004: 635). We reconsider the idea of Europeanisation in the next chapter, but it does provide a conceptual starting point in trying to understand Romania’s administrative context.

The European Union is also trying to unify the reform mechanisms employed by its member states for public administration systems, but since it lacks the power to impose strict regulations, the national level of policy reform depends directly on national practices. According to the Romanian pre-EU adjoining internal regulatory framework, all European Directives need to be approved by the Parliament in order to be further interpreted and enforced by the Government – the aquis stage. The EU did not have the legal mechanisms to impose these regulations, as the Government had the power to interpret the European regulations and apply them in the spirit of their elaboration. Yet much depends on the ability and willingness of the Government and its institutional capacity to instil reform. Beginning in 2007,

109 when Romania became a member of the EU, the European regulations started being applied as such. But, even at this point, due to the very diverse internal environments, the political doctrines and the path chosen by the Government in reforming the system ultimately influences the quality of reform packages.

Once Romania was granted candidate status in 1999, the expectation was that reform would happen quickly which would modernise public administration in a fundamental way. For instance, corruption became an important issue when benchmarked against the current EU membership. As Grabbe (2003: 305) notes, Romania along with its fellow candidate countries (Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Slovakia) that began EU accession negotiations in February 2000, were under greater pressure to converge with the EU due to the Union’s ‘advanced state of policy development’. The EU also had more leverage over both Romania and Bulgaria than over other previous applicants because of the existing issues identified as hindrances to a smooth accession (corruption, lack of transparency in governmental affairs etc.) and because of the openly eagerness of the Romanians to be part of Europe This is further explored in the following chapter. Thus, Europeanisation was presented as inevitable at the start of the 21st century.

EU pressure resulted in a law in 1999 which appeared to address the stubborn and persistent negative characteristics of Romanian bureaucracy that had persisted since the revolution and highlighted by Gallagher and others. The law was designed to professionalise the civil service which included depoliticisation and to address shortcomings that affected civil service behaviour such as poor motivation and lack of competence. In fact, this was Romania’s first post-communist Statute on civil servants (L188/1999). The law appeared to enshrine Weberian characteristics in addition to establishing a National Agency of Civil Servants. However, it lacked detail on recruitment and selection procedures (Iancu and Ungureanu, 2011).

Further legislation came in 2002, this time under the leadership of Nastase. This was ironic as his party (PSD) had threatened to reverse the 1999 Law when they assumed power in 2000. In addition to further attempts to depoliticise the public

110 service, the legislation was also concerned with the policy process. One obvious legacy of the Communist system was the top-down nature of policy implementation, something that had been challenged in Western countries since the 1970s. Despite these attempts, Noutcheva and Bechev (2008) note how the respected independent think-tank, the Romanian Academic Society, found little evidence of success. However, Ionascu (2006) goes on to posit that we cannot disconnect preparation for EU accession from attempts to reform a highly politicised bureaucracy staffed by patronage.

One tangible outcome of the preparation for EU accession was decentralisation, or the strengthening of local government. Although the constitution of 1991 formally restructured local authorities and allowed a degree of latitude regarding the raising of local taxation, it is unclear how much influence potential EU accession had. Further impetus did come from the 2002 Law to harmonise with EU requirements. Thus, the main approach to prepare the bureaucracy for reform to meet EU demands was through administrative law rather than through the development and training of civil servants or deep cultural change in the public service. However, as Gallagher (2005: 230) notes there is scepticism that laws in Romania rarely extend beyond the term of office of the government that sponsors them. In addition, the Rechsstaat administrative culture is typified by this approach to reform in Romania.14 Moreover, and particularly early on in the EU accession process, Romanian administration did not have the capacity to deal with the complexity of the process (Orban 2006: 90). Noutcheva and Bechev (2008: 124) argue that Romania (and Bulgaria) during this period only accelerated reform when they felt the ‘stick’ of EU conditionality.

Moreover, once in the 21st century, it was clear that politicisation remained a deep rooted problem in the Romanian administration. The Social Democratic Party (PSD) actively sought to dominate the bureaucracy during this period, despite the existence of the laws. This appears to support Gallagher’s (2005: 316) view that

14 This term denotes a European approach to policy making underpinned by a ‘large and separate body…of administrative law’ (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011: 52) 111 membership of the party was ‘seen as necessary for ambitious graduates intent on a public service career’ and little had changed from the communist system. The role of prefect or Mayoral systems (coordinating central and local government relations) was also seen as vulnerable to venality (Kideckel, 1992). Gallagher (2005: 338) makes the point that the continuity with 18th century practice is striking.

SIGMA (OECD) interventions also appear to promote convergence within a European ‘administrative space’. Unlike the EU conditions for accession, the role of SIGMA is to provide expertise and knowledge about public sector reforms in OECD countries, and presented as ‘exemplars’ or examples of good practice. Thus, the impact of SIGMA is much less tangible when compared to other international institutions such as the EU and World Bank. Established in 1992, it is aimed at improving the technical capacity of public administration in Central and Eastern Europe. Its current work, for instance, are for aspiring EU members such as Kosovo and Turkey. Whether or not SIGMA had an impact, in the run-up to accession Romania showed signs of progress, particularly in the area of corruption (European Commission, 2006).

There were clear signs of attempts to professionalise and to build capacity in public administration during this period, primarily driven by EU requirements although the international institutions continued to exert an influence. This was underpinned by legislation and thus a shift in institutional emphasis can be appraised. Romania joined the EU on the 1st January 2007, a pivotal moment in the country’s history. An assumption could be made that along with the institutional and political requirements of the accession, Romania’s bureaucracy was starting to resemble that of international exemplars such as the Netherlands, Sweden or the UK. However, the case remained that not enough had been done and once part of the EU, the reform process would falter.

112 4.6 Post EU accession (2007-2011)

From 2007, Romania joined the EU as full-member, thus fulfilling a long-awaited recognition of its role and place in the region. It is interesting that once this milestone has been achieved, Romania felt compelled to ‘fit’ into the European culture by adopting the Directives ad-literam and without much consideration of the impact which they would have on the national public administration system without proper interpretation and adaptation. Literature on the post-accession events is not very well developed and statistics on the reform packages that have been issued in light of the accession, although they are of public interest, are not available. This is interesting as the international literature peaked during the 2000s prior to accession, and then the academic community appeared to lose interest. It is well documented that Romania was granted the EU membership with great reluctance and because of this, although the Romanian literature does not admit it, sanctions were enforced on the Romanian Government and there were great expectations of reform from the Romanian officials. Hintea (2008) claims that reforms were ‘stimulated’, not coercively imposed on Romania and that the apparatus was more than ready to adhere to the new demands as they had already been experienced by the public administration through pre-accession ‘exercises’. The author suggests that ‘there are no specific adhesion standards in this field’ (Hintea 2008, p.275), while it is known that the EU has imposed certain terms of accession on Romania and Bulgaria including de-politicisation of the civil service, criminalisation of corruption, improving administrative capacity, and better EU-fund absorption.

The discourse of Romanian writers is often apologetic and protective of the measures the Government has taken to adapt to the EU requirements, but it often does not reflect the reality. Again, it is very important to stress the lack of reports on Twinning programmes, SIGMA collaboration etc., while the names of international organisations that are claimed to have helped Romania in the transitional process are often dropped in the conversation.

113 Hintea (2008) claims that ‘the reform documents’ have been drafted using ‘European standards’, but these standards are not clearly defined and they integrate concepts such as transparency, accountability, effectiveness. This statement supports the current thesis by suggesting that Romanian officials and civil servants are mistaken upon what reform means. They should be talking about a process, not a bureaucratic flow of documents that justify little or lack of policy implementation.

In effect, the administrative reform process only began in earnest in 1999, and in addition to legal measures, other institutional reforms have included the creation of governmental organizations which would allegedly help the Europeanization process and compliance with the EU requirements. Among them are the Central Unit for the Reform of Public Administration (attached to the Ministry of Administration and Interior), the Unit for Public Policy (belonging to the General Secretariat of the Government), the Superior Council for the Reform of Public Administration, Coordination of Public Policies, and Structural Adjustment (which is actually technically coordinated by the Unit for Public Policy and the Central Unit previously mentioned). It is to be noted that the latter organization is actually unheard of in the wider public administration picture in Romania, and there is no evidence that it has actually produced any reports or has improved in any way the quality of policy issuing and implementation. The name of this body of civil servants is mentioned in the Government’s document no. 1623/2003, but except for strengthening the idea that Romania is indeed a Rechsstaat state, which functions on the basis of the rule of law, and in this particular case, the rule of issuing as many bills as possible to justify politically driven actions, it does not exist otherwise. In fact, when compared to its neighbours, Romania’s legal context is considered to be too complex to the extent that it deters reforms (Nemec, 2008).

With regards to creating a body of professional civil servants, while prior to the EU accession the Romanian trend was to overlook the acquisition of skills by low-rank civil servants and focusing on training only high-ranked civil servants, in 2007 the Government engaged in public-private partnerships to provide training for all civil

114 service levels. Also, through PHARE programmes, the Young Professionals Scheme was instituted. The legal framework for it was created in 2001, but it only started working in 2005. The researcher was part of the second cycle of YPS scholars and is living proof of the failure of the system to ensure that professional civil servants are really employed in the civil service and are provided with the means to fulfil their mission.

The lack of stability and balance within the public administration stems from the old Communist regime and unfortunately it is projected into the future and it affects all areas of interest for this research: public administration, civil service and politics. The persistence of an unprofessional bureaucracy appears to be exacerbated by a key problem – having achieved EU accession; EU states lose the incentive to continue with reforms (Romania, along with Bulgaria). In the scant academic literature that has appeared post-accession, Iancu (2011) for instance, concludes that once EU conditionality ended, public administration in Romania simply reverted to politicisation. This position also gets support from Andrei et al (2012). They argue that Article IV of Emergency Government Ordinance no. 37/2009 helped to provide a legal justification yet effectively turned the clock back on to prior to the EU accession period which saw attempts to professionalise public management. As post-accession monitoring excludes public administration reforms, then such a conclusion is even less surprising.

Formally, the successive Romanian governments since the Revolution have attempted to address the issues raised by the International community with regards to the lack of professionalism in the public administration, corruption and other aspects. Yet, the question which still rises after all these years of stated reform is: where are the specific, exact results of this reform process? This question has yet to be answered. SAR (the Romanian Academic Society, 2011) provided the most recent and reliable report on Romania’s system of governance from 2004:

115 Politicization, manifested in the expensive replacements of many people in a top position in the public sector at each change in government (and indeed of government coalition composition), has continued undiminished after the EU accession, despite Romania’s commitments to the contrary. If anything, transaction costs only increased as the governments had to amend the anti- politicization legislation earlier adopted at EU’s bidding, a process disputed by the political opposition, the Constitutional Court and the envisaged civil servants themselves (SAR, 2011, page 20).

The Report calls on the EU to be more proactive in relation to dealing with Romania’s continued governance problems including rent-seeking from politicians and officials alike, lack of concern for the rule of law and general corruption. The report’s authors also claim that anti-corruption methods have not changed since 2004.

Therefore, it is not surprising that The World Bank (2009) also reports that since 2007, reform fatigue has set in. Nemec (2008:347) goes further by suggesting that ‚the EU pressures for changes almost disappeared, and reforming public administration became a more ‚voluntary’...process’. Continued EU structural fund allocations (2007-2013) are aimed at driving efficiency and improving capacity, so complex reforms are not attempted (Nemec,2008: 347). However, post EU accession, it has become clear that Romania needs to improve its public financial and budgeting management.

While the Romanian government harbours ambitions to join the Eurozone, the World Bank notes that there are attempts to develop its public financial management. The report also claims that there is a recognisation of the weaknesses in managing public spending which have contributed to fiscal deficits and the poor delivery of public services.

Under the IMF programme, the World Bank notes there has been:

116 (i) the approval of a Fiscal Responsibility Law (FRL). The FRL would provide a framework for improved multi-year budgeting, fiscal rules on expenditures, public debt and the primary deficit, and for managing guarantees and other contingent liabilities. The FRL would also set limits on the frequency of intra-year budget rectifications, and create an independent Fiscal Council; (ii) the adoption of legislation for the introduction of unified, simplified public compensation, which would consolidate most payments under the base salary.

It is worth citing the report at length here. To begin with, it anticipates that the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) process will be strengthened so that it guides strategic planning in line ministries and prioritization of expenditures. As an intermediate step towards performance-based budgeting, the MTEF would provide line ministries with incentives to prioritize expenditures within their policy agenda, better plan capital investment projects, arbitrate trade-offs between personnel costs and capital expenditures, and allow a priori agreements between the Government and the Parliament on the budget priorities in the case of unexpected changes in revenues. In the short-term, the MTEF should facilitate the mobilization of the significant EU Funds available to Romania; in the medium-term, the MTEF should enhance the strategic allocation of resources and fiscal discipline. The challenge is, however, to aggressively implement the MTEF agenda, whose main elements have already been drawn up in the context of the program with the IFIs.

The second strand of the public financial management reforms is to improve transparency and motivation in public sector reward systems. This is to be achieved by removing disparities in pay and promote performance. A unitary public sector pay system will be gradually introduced, using analytical work provided by the Bank as a basis for reform. The Government has already taken steps to reduce non-wage compensation and integrate allowances into base salaries and has engaged trade unions in consultations. Beyond the establishment of the unitary pay system, there

117 is also scope to rationalize the public administration in line with current priorities and needs, and strengthen its capacity to perform. Functional reviews of central government institutions will be undertaken to improve performance and resource allocation across public sector entities, reduce bureaucracy, cut administrative costs and lead to savings which can be used to, for example, implement the unitary pay system and advance decentralization (to sub-national government).

However, there is scant evidence for the satisfactory implementation of the MTEF in Romania. Originating from Australia, MTEFs have been diffused internationally by both the World Bank (mainly, but not exclusively) in developing countries and the European Commission. The Australian MTEF was a clear success and provided a powerful demonstration effect which helped in its international transferability. However, as Schiavo-Campo (2009) points out, its success in Australia was the product of strong institutional factors, notably:

 high level of public integrity;  high propensity to rule-compliance;  robust administrative accountability mechanisms;  political discipline of a well-organized executive apparatus;  prodding and vetting by an active and representative legislature; and  contestability arising from a vibrant civil society possessing both exit opportunities and voice channels.

Schiavo-Campo (2009) also adds a number of economic and technical factors such as strong technical capacity in finance and core ministries. The point here, of course, is that most of these factors are weak or absent in Romania.

Finally, what of the impact of contemporary international management trends in the public sector on Romania? Over the last ten years, governance, networks and leadership have dominated approaches to public administration in the West. For instance, leadership dominated the ‚Professional Skills for Government’ programme

118 in the UK and the theme has been continued under the new Capability Framework promoted in the Civil Service Reform Plan of June 2012. Once again, evidence for the implementation of reform innovations remains scarce. For instance, Mos and Padurean (2012) assess the applicability of leadership to the Romanian public service. However, the authors are vague on how leadership might be embedded in the public service in Romania but it is clear that the present administrative culture presents a considerable obstacle. It appears that the administrative problems that existed prior to the revolution still exist.

4.7 Summary

Table 1 summarises the key periods analysed in this chapter. The limitations to understanding the context of public administration in Romania notwithstanding, the appearance is of very gradual change to the extent that one could argue the bureaucracy has not changed its behaviour significantly since the inter-World War period. The communist legacy persists right up until the present day, at least in relation to central government when compared to local government. In fact 1999 was a more pivotal year than the actual revolution in terms of administrative reform as Romania began attempts to modernise and professionalise its civil service. Accession to the EU was undoubtedly a key external driver and the activities of the World Bank and other international organisations and consultancies had some impact. What is of concern is how the reforms have not been sustained post accession and that many of the dysfunctions of public administration are still evident. The right hand column of Figure 1 speculates on institutionalist accounts on the evidence available. The shift from formal institutionalism to sociological institutionalism followed Ceausescu’s dominance of the Communist party nomenklatura by populating it with family, friend and allies. In such cases, cultural explanations start to become useful in understanding administrative behaviour (the sociological perspective). Although the revolution of 1989 effectively purged the political system of Ceausescu’s relations and supporters, little else changed. Liberal economic policies such as privatisation served to benefit those nomenklatura either left behind or brought in by the post-revolution government. As the chapter

119 suggests, once becoming beneficiaries of economic change, further reform such as de-regulation, greater audit and inspection, etc. were subsequently resisted. Attempts to rid the public service of informality and cronyism, often on anti- corruption platforms, were only seriously addressed once EU accession became a possibility.

As this account begins with communist rule, and in line with other states who came under the influence of the former Soviet Union, Romania found the state administration modelled on the Soviet constitution of 1936. In addition, nationalisation (including small enterprises) and collectivisation of agriculture swiftly followed. Dictatorship under Ceausescu initially saw the country to start look outwards again beyond the Soviet Union and there was a gradual process of deRussification. However, the Soviet Union was unconcerned as ‘Romania consistently maintained the structures of the system established by the Kremlin’ (Bulei, 2005: 164). After visiting China and North Korea in 1971, Ceausescu changed direction and enforced his leadership cult in government through the appointment of friends and relatives, including his wife. By the end of Ceausescu’s reign, both politicisation (through the communist system) and cronyism (through personal networks) had been institutionalised within the bureaucracy. Following the revolution, the basis was thus laid for explaining path dependency through the sociological perspective. The first post revolution leader, Ion Iliescu, was a high ranking former Communist who had implicit backing from Moscow. With the introduction of democracy, the influence of the previous forty years or so was considerable. This was also the period when Romania started to take EU membership seriously as it appeared to mark the greatest opportunity for change, but the existing structures and institutions acted as obstacles to the potential waves of reform emanating from the EU, the World Bank, and the IMF etc. As Noutcheva and Bechev (2008) explain, post-communist transitions tend to produce groups of winners (normally the nomenklatura from the previous regime), who then go on to resist further reforms. High levels of politicisation and other bureaucratic dysfunctions have persisted beyond EU accession to the present.

120 4.8 Conclusion

Reform in Romania continually starts off in spring and dies off in autumn with the cold weather, when it falls back into the paralyzing sleep of hibernation (Senior Official quoted in Sanborne, 2004, p. 119)

It is clear from this chapter that the administrative context of Romania has shifted substantially within the time frame of this analysis. The transitions from a single- party communist state followed by a dictatorship and then a revolution to democracy provide plenty of dramatic shifts in the political context, culminating in EU accession. Yet, the impact on public administration, apart from a brief period from 1999 up to 2007 appears to be minimal. The bureaucracy, or at least those who populate it, has changed very little. This assertion accords with some of the critical literature on administrative reform that argues that what is more important for administrative reform (i.e. managerialist reforms) is a supportive administrative culture. Without this, then reform efforts quickly flounder or dissipate. A feature of Romanian public administration that has been central is the extent of politicisation, an accusation still levelled at the present government. Countries that have adopted managerialist reforms tend to invoke the Wilsonian distinction between politics and administration yet this has neither been explicitly an aim of the reforms in Romania nor a desire on the part of entrenched bureaucratic elites. Fusion between politics and administration was endemic under the communist system. Following the revolution, the development of interest group, pressure groups and social movements did not happen overnight and more widely, civil society remains arguably undeveloped in Romania.

Another aspect of the administrative context is cultural. Despite over twenty years of exposure to international management methods and practices, cultural blocks remain. Many of these have been inherited from the communist system such as hierarchy, deference, but in particular the reluctance to share information and knowledge and a general suspicion regarding peers and colleagues. This legacy means that human resource management, strategy and change management ring

121 hollow in the Romanian context although there are slow signs of change (Dalton and Kennedy, 2007).

Thus, if we return to Nef’s (2007) account of path dependency at the start of the chapter, despite EU accession, Romania’s Western outlook appears rather superficial and its system of public administration largely intact from the Communist era. A possible tentative conclusion is that the nature of Romania’s communist legacy, converging with a poorly developed political culture, are mutually reinforcing phenomena. If we take Thoenig’s (2003: 89) argument that ‘modes of conflict-cooperation and the structure of outcomes are persistently identical throughout time’ and thus ‘radical changes in public administration are a hopeless endeavour in such contexts’ then Romania is a case in point. The slow evolution of public administration in Romania, which was exacerbated by the creation of ‘economic opportunities for political acolytes’ only served to slow the pace of change despite the opportunity provided by the revolution (Pop 2006: 103). In addition, as Dodds (2013: 294) suggests, Europeanisation has been used as a form of rhetoric and to strengthen the strategic position of politicians. Verheijen (2007) observes that for post-Communist countries, such as Romania, the collapse of the Soviet Union did not provide the anticipated trigger for far-reaching administrative reform as neo-liberal priorities effectively overshadowed any political desire for administrative reform.

The strength of the Rechsstaat culture in Romania is not to be underestimated as part of the institutional context and why reform attempts flounder. As Nemec (2008) notes, and as the interviewees attest (as we see in the following chapters), the discourse of public management is not understood by political and administrative elites who seem to be unable to move away from their dependence on the path of the legal approach to administrative report. To return to the first objective of the thesis in relation to individualised policy decisions, then the exceptionalist case also seems to hold due to the depth of politicisation and the grip of informality within Romanian public administration.

122 Along with recent claims that Romania has shifted to a neo-Weberian bureaucracy, it seems that Europeanisation has also been overstated in the case of Romania. The irony here is that western European countries such as France and Germany had already influenced public administration in Romania, so the country was never going to move fully in the direction of NPM, or similar reforms. Proeller and Schedler (2005: 712) also make the point that while providing a Weberian basis for administrative reform in CEE countries is more appropriate to their circumstances (low managerial capacity, poorly developed markets), they also support the path dependency argument which leads to the fundamental preservation, rather than change, in the national characteristics of administrative systems.

Claims by other writers that Romania has shifted towards a neo-Weberian state appear to be rather spurious. Social relationships remain important; hierarchy and officialdom remain ingrained along with strong centralisation. The only criteria put forward by Nef (2007) that appears to be absent in Romania is the undue influence of professional groups in public administration. However, that has not been the subject of this research and little evidence has been found. The next chapter takes a closer look at explaining the resistance to change in Romanian public administration based on interview data. Despite the rhetoric of modernisation and professionalism being promulgated by politicians and senior bureaucrats alike, the interview data also makes the Neo-Weberian state thesis appear even less plausible. The strength of path dependency is also further supported.

123 Chapter 5: European accession and Romanian public administration: path-breaking change?

5.1 Introduction:

In this chapter the discussion will be focused on the impact on the nature of public administration during the accession of Romania to the European Union and on the results of this event. Chapter 4 describes how in 2007, Romania, despite being a post-Communist country, met the requirements of, and joined the European Union. It thus became a developed country while accepting the terms of the Lisbon Agenda with regards to various reforms which have to take place across Europe. The shaping of modern institutions had begun between 1859-1866, when Romania gained its independence, elaborated its first Constitution, and introduced the concept of Public Administration. Starting in 1866 the state functioned as a Kingdom. This period is significant because it was the first time Romania was unified and public administration began to serve all citizens. It was then that the first influences upon institutions came from Western Europe; first from France and afterwards from Germany. France was considered the “natural” sister of Romania, while Germany was the native country of the first King of Romania.

However, the most important or influential phase in the country’s development, which carries significance for this research, is the Communist era. Over two separate periods of time, the Romanian institutions suffered either from the communist influence (1947-1965), or the embedded and naturalized Communist governance style under dictatorship up until the revolution. These aspects have already been analyzed in the path-dependency section, but they are still mentioned in this section as the information gathered from the interviews carried out by the researcher emphasize the paramount importance of the historical events over the development of the current public administration system. The point of this reiteration is that the European influence has been part of a steady historical process.

124 However, despite the changes brought by the 1989 revolution, a recurring observation in the thesis is the lack of change or reform. Apart from Romanian based academics and commentators, who tend to present a favourable assessment of reform programmes, there have been other more independent assessments conducted. For instance, according to the 2005 Romania Country Assistance Evaluation performed by the Country Evaluation and Regional Relations Operations Evaluation Department within the World Bank, Romania has registered a „moderately satisfactory” qualification for the topic „Governance and Institution Building”, with an important progress in institutional development, but still holding a „weak governance” indicator.

In 2007, according to the Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs: 2007 Strategic Report Country-Assessment of the National Reform Programmes, the following conclusions were drawn about Romania:

- the National Reform Programme focuses on the right challenges, but…the need to strengthen administrative capacity still exists and, according to the assessors, „the programme lacks ambition”. Information about the measures, the timelines and budgetary support is scarce and it is hard to assess whether measures will bring solutions to the problems and challenges identified;

- one of the most important challenges identified, besides raising administrative capacity, is that of raising skills level; the proposed measures focus areas such as implementing an integrated approach to increasing employment, activity rates and productivity levels, especially by accelerating reforms of the education system to respond better to labour market needs, by reducing early school leaving, by significantly increasing adult

125 participation in education and training; and by transforming subsistence/semi-subsistence farming into sustainable employment.15

The first section of this chapter focuses not only on the accession to EU per se, but also on the challenges to transformation of the Romanian civil service in light of the EU requirements, as well as under the global trend of attempting to shift public administration systems towards an emphasis on policy outcomes and better governance. The next section considers the extent to which EU accession heralded Romania aligning with international trends in public management and revisits the case for internally developed Romanian approaches to reform in light of the accession process. The latter part of the chapter focuses on the Young Professional Scheme (YPS) as an indigenous response to the demands for the professionalisation of the bureaucracy. In short, it would be erroneous to suggest that the source of demands for reform was mainly derived from international agencies such as the EU; an examination of internally generated reform attempts is also warranted to assess the depth of path dependency.

5.2 Globalization and Public Administration: Implications for Romania

The process of reform under the influence of the EU should not be isolated from international trends in public management. Following classical institutional analyses of public administration from Weber onwards, public administration can be understood from the perspective of elite theories of the state. Osborne’s (2002) approach to defining Global influences on public administration can be summarised with the following statement: Globalization has the tendency to promote elites. At the same time, in a shrinking state, professionalization of the public services also becomes compulsory. Farazmand (2002) completes the picture by stating that the challenge lies in the change in the characters and activities of the state and public

15http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/07/569&format=HTML&aged= 0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en, accessed 25.08.09

126 administrations, from a traditional administrative state towards a managerial state. In short, managerialism would act as a brake on the excesses of elites in power.

In Chapter Two, it was shown how these considerations also match the traits identified by Osborne and Brown (2005) as cross-national influences on labour markets including the professionalization of public services. As also outlined in Chapter Two, it is anticipated that such influences are felt universally, although they pre-suppose a liberal state. Since the 1980s public service employment across Europe has been under public scrutiny and the need for change has become more pressuring. However, most European countries, according to Bach et al. (1999), had an intricate system of legal and administrative regulations, rudimentary forms of human resource management, which still persist, shadowed by very traditional patterns which do not ensure performance and staff retention. Through the years the impact of the E.U. regulatory framework has begun to influence the internal markets by inducing a certain flexibility, arguably by coercive means such as infringment procedures, economic sanctions, and possible exclusion from voting on key European topics. Also, public services can be subject to private sector influences up to a point where only „best practice” can be used as a quality generator, but not as a framework agent of change. Public administration can neither be relocated nor can radical changes be made to it. The only distiguishable influence of the E.U. upon labour markets with regards to public services is the shift from public administration to public management, labelled as the New Public Management (NPM) (Bach et al, 1999) but the effect has been far from uniform. With the exception of the UK, the Netherlands, and possibly local government in Germany, the impact has been limited despite the production of academic literature that suggests the contrary. For instance, NPM often appears to be adopted in a superficial way to give governments legitimacy and to imply they are modernised and efficient, to attract foreign direct investment and to ensure ongoing political support (Common, 2001). As Ray (1995) notes it is poor state legitimacy in eastern Europe that undermines governmental effectiveness as regulator in the new ‘market’ economies.

127 The tradition of top-down decisions faces great challenges when a supra-national entity such as the European Union regulates the overall framework for developing national public policies. This also carries a considerable threat to national elites who are keen to demonstrate that they can address national problems with national solutions. Thus the global nature of public administration reform appears as an international elite discourse that largely flounders on the institutional context in the way that Bach et al. (1999) describe above.

If we accept that late 20th century reform movements such as NPM can be considered as an international elite discourse, then Romania would have felt its effects. Considering these theoretical approaches, based on economic rationalism, one would expect them to be mirrored in the reform process which has been ongoing in Romania since the 1990s. It is assumed in such approaches that the way to success is to shift to an ‘entrepreneurial’ approach implied by the international promoters of NPM and its variants. However, if we draw on observations from the interviews, this is far from straightforward. Chifu argues that in the case of Romania:

‘the public administration cannot compete with the private sector in terms of offering a comfortable income to highly skilled people. Hence, those who work as civil servants are mostly second-hand professionals with average qualifications and low professional aspirations.’ 16

5.3 European Union and other Influences:

Arguably, the modernising of Romania started in 1991 with the issuing of the first democratic Constitution. This represented the spine of the young democracy and the framework for future regulations abiding by the principles of integrity, equality and independence. Although a fundamental Law such as this one is presumed to be permanent and flawless, in 2003 the constitution was revised so as to contain provisions on the EU Accession, in light of the successful negotiation of EU

16 Interview, Chifu 128 accession which ended in October 2004, and the NATO integration which was agreed in 2004, with effect from 2005. Underlying topics, more close to the political interests were the incoming general elections, expected to overthrow the Social- Democratic Party from power, in favour of the increasingly popular Liberal- Democrat Party. Of course, even in 2014 the Social-Democrats claim that should have not it been for a Social-Democrat government to start the negotiation process, the EU accession would have taken even more time than it did, and it may have not even happened.

Although politics do not constitute the main topic of the basis of the thesis, it is important to mention that between December 1989, when the first democratic Cabinet was elected and 2014, there have been 15 acting Cabinets, with a life span as little as three months. These shifts of power and constant battles over the political affiliation of the Cabinet, as well as forced alliances between unlikely parties have affected the Romanian trajectory within the EU. In 2013, such political turmoil even triggered an EU threat of impeachment over the attempted overthrow of the former President by the Prime Minister belonging to the rival party. Under such circumstances it is obviously hard to have a coherent, cohesive and continuous reform programme.

The beginning of the road towards EU accession was in 1993, when Romania has signed the Agreement of Association to the European Union. Considering that it was only in 2004 that negotiations to accession ended, it has taken Romania a long time to fully become a member of the EU since each member state needed to ratify the agreement individually, with finality in 2007.

In light of the political struggles, national regulations deriving from EU Directives or even mere recommendations have always had the tendency to present the facts in an overly-positive manner. Romania has developed a tendency to swiftly create institutions required by the EU so as to prove its modernizing credentials, but due to the Rechsstaat nature of the State, the regulatory framework makes the integration of newly created organizations very slow to achieve. On the other hand,

129 the swiftness of regulation issuing meant that PHARE funds aimed at strengthening the administrative capacity in newly accessed EU countries were quick to access. It does not mean that the results of PHARE funds absorption have proven positive, but considerations on the negative aspects are to follow.

In 2001 the Romanian government adopted a strategy regarding the acceleration of the reform of public administration, which proved not to be the best for the challenges presented by the ever changing political environment. After three years, the government had to change direction and focus on three main areas of reform, established by negotiation with the European Commission (E.C.):

1. the reform of the civil service – focused mainly on the creation of a professional body of public servants; 2. the reform of local public administration – focused on enhancing public management at the local level and the decentralization and de- concentration of public services; 3. the enhancement of the process of public policy formulation – focused on the improvement of the coordination systems of governmental activities and the improvement of managerial capacity of governmental agencies.

The previous chapter examined how preparation for EU accession influenced policy making in Romania, the difficulty of shedding old habits is directly related to the lack of expertise or capacity and will to change. The interview with Podgorean underlines this phenomenon and its implications:

‘Often reforms performed under the pressure of the European integration processes were either formal or shallow, or made to serve the political interest at the moment. Each government, under a different political affiliation has systematically revised the previous reforms thus inducing a permanent state of contradiction and conflict (see the Education reform, Healthcare, Welfare, the structure of the Government and Ministries, Agencies and decentralised services). The effect of leadership change inevitably induced incoherent reforms and excessive fluctuation of human resources in public administration.’17

17 Interview, Podgorean 130 The direction has not always come in Romania from the EU. In 2005, The United Nations elaborated a Report called “Unlocking the human potential for public sector performance”. The Report demonstrates that the development performance of countries is heavily underpinned by the quality of public institutions and places emphasis on the strengthening of national capacity for public administration. Also, it points out that HRM has evolved significantly in the past decades, as external and internal pressures have forced governments to redefine the role of the state and recalibrate public administration capacities. This Report recommends certain actions to be taken by governments, such as upgrading the role of HRM by professionalising the public service, strengthening appointment on merit, balancing motivation and payment and instilling performance orientation among public servants. Despite the tone of the report, EU influence had already been exerted for a considerable amount of time.

The EU has created tools such as ‘technical assistance’ so as to ensure an effective administrative capacity development in countries such as Romania. This kind of enforced help was offered via Twinning programmes, PHARE funds, other type of European funding and consultancy by SIGMA, OECD, and USAID. Hintea (2008) enumerates the type of aid offered, but during the interviews and while researching for evidence, the researcher could not find any reports released to summarize the success or failure of such programmes. For a system which is forced to become transparent it is a major failure not to be able to provide written evidence about the efforts to reform.

Barbu describes the effect of technical assistance

‘Technical assistance is a tool and nothing but a tool; a smart one though, which can assist in acquiring bits and pieces, in improving processes or in drawing up strategies. It could of course help the Romanian public

131 administration if properly understood and applied. Unfortunately, in the absence of a clear political will, it did not prove effective so far.’ 18

Again the role of politicization resurfaces and confounds the naïve view that the EU can actually coerce states into being ‘efficient’. Mrs Y has another approach to the impact of EU policies:

‘Any World Bank or IMF or EU report is seen as worthy of more attention, although generally and a priori considered to give a distorted image of what Romania does. This has prompted the conclusion that Romanians are misunderstood and underrated, but it has not curbed the tendency to work and improve things according to this allegedly distorted foreign picture of Romania. Briefly put, we don’t like what foreigners say about us and loathe their recommendations, but the only time when we work diligently is when we have either to change their perception of us, or when we are compelled to implement what they say for fear of losing something – status, investments, etc.’ 19

This interviewee still believes that an element of coercion plays an important role in re-shaping the public administration. To a certain extent it is notable how quickly Romania adopts and implements European Directives, thereby formally claiming efficiency. As an example, in January 2014, Romania issued regulations with regards to the preservation of dolphins in the Romanian part of the Black Sea. With similar speed, Norway adopted the same regulations with regards to the whales. However, when analysing the progress of public policy effectiveness with regards to the civil service, it is to discover that there is either lack of evidence of any progress or the reality shows that instead of modernizing Romania, it has backslided into the connotations associated with poor administration.

Sedelmeier (2014) analyses the relationship between the EU and Romania, but asks a very important question: can the EU ‘anchor’ democratic principles and continue

18 Interview, Barbu 19 Interview, Anonymous (Mrs Y) 132 to push transformation in a country after it had accessed the Union? The question is partially answered by Mrs Y. With a hint to a support for path-dependency and accompanying resistance to change, Mrs Y explains the lack of transformation from both a political and cultural perspective:

‘[...] the southern/Mediterranean traits that Romania historically acquired and the Socialist legacy has resulted in a popular culture that does not value responsibility, accountability and timely fulfilment of tasks. (Popular sayings are an indication: it turns out well it’s my merit, if not it’s your fault; say what they want to hear and do things you own way; wait three days before fulfilling a task, it may not be required afterwards…).’20

5.4 Domestic Reform Attempts

Governments are traditionally reluctant to acknowledge openly that they are being influenced externally in relation to reforms, even if such influence is welcome and from the EU, the membership of which was aspired to. Politicians prefer to create the impression that reforms are generated as part of domestic politics. However, according to the project of the Civil service development strategy, the specific objectives for the period 2007-2010 and the estimated changes after the implementation of the measures proposed are summarised by the author:

a) strengthening the civil service system, by:  Consolidating the administrative capacity of NAPS: implementing the integrated IT system for the human resource management, training the Agency personnel, connection to the networks of similar EU institutions, development of the capacity to devise public policies/strategies/projects, standardizing the procedures;  Consolidating the human resource department of the public authorities and institutions in the context of the de-centralization of

20 Interview, Anonymous (Mrs Y) 133 the NAPS liabilities: improving the professional training system for civil servants, a better legal stability, improved inter-institutional communication, identifying and promoting good practices;  Improving the image of the civil service: actions for promoting the civil position, information campaigns, public recruitment offer, making the civil service portal operational

b) Modernizing the civil service:  Increasing the career development perspectives: updating the recruitment, promotion and evaluation system, introducing the individual career plan and provisional management of the civil service positions, strengthening the ability to achieve mobility in the civil service position;  Increasing the degree of training for civil servants: analyzing the training needs at the level of the public administration, making training of civil servants a priority, enhancing the inter-institutional collaboration;  Motivating civil servants: pay, flexible hours and partial work schedule  Preventing and combating corruption: updating the provisions regarding incompatibility and conflict of interests.

The strategy is presented rationally, and in line with similar statements from other countries. In addition, it is difficult to identify direct EU influence in the strategy, so it is also worth highlighting the former Romanian President’s message to the body of civil servants in 2013. This statement is prominent on the website of the NACS and is sufficiently relevant to this thesis to quote at length:

Romanian public administration modernisation, in fact a major concern of the Government, will become a priority for the National Agency of Civil Servants. (emphasis by NACS)

134 ‘A modern and efficient administration should be based, no doubt, on a quality human resource, a professional body of civil servants, capable to raise the level of institutional accomplishments and fully meet the interests of citizens. Therefore, our efforts will be concentrated towards professionalising the civil servants body involving a greater focus on continuous training, and rethinking the recruitment and assessment systems. And because such a system does not function properly without some consistent rules to regulate it, we will be involved in creating a well-defined legal framework which will ensure the prestige the civil servants deserve, but also will be an incentive for their performance! (Emphasis by NACS) At the same time, the steps NACS will take in all actions concerning the management of civil service and civil servants will strongly support the idea that public sector reform should consider increasing local autonomy together with an actual release of the decentralization process. These are the lines of action of NACS for the period ahead! (emphasis by NACS) And we will do all this together with civil servants, in a permanent relationship with civil society, with openness and transparency, but especially promptly and efficiently towards Romanian citizens!’ (http://www.anfp.gov.ro/Default.aspx) (emphasis by NACS)21

One would think that such a message would have been addressed much sooner after the Revolution. However, the then President felt the need to stress the importance of civil servants being aware that they are part of a reform mechanism, as well as part of a transparent and professional body employees. These aspects should be self-evident by the tenure of a position in the civil service. While it is not unusual for political leaders to keep restating the purpose and meaning of public administration, yet evidence shows that it is not enough for the President of Romania to encourage the reform, as for example, when accessing the NACS website, one has the option to search the website in English. Unfortunately transparency ends with the Romanian language, as for English speakers the search options and availability of information is vastly restricted. However, it is well

21 Message of support for NACS from the former Romanian President, Traian Basescu 135 established in the literature that political will is often a pre-requisite to change the institution of the civil service but other factors need to be in place. One disadvantage that Romania faced was not so much a lack of political will but the absence of a market economy upon which professional management is pre- determined. For instance, Mr X states:

‘It is very hard to transition from an inflexible regime to a market economy in the absence of individuals with knowledge about an open market and a market economy.’22

5.5 Characteristics of Romanian Public Administration

As Hințea (in Bouckaert et al., 2008) argues, the Romanian administrative environment has a tradition of failing to act as a catalyst for change and reform, due to the legacy of a centralised and mainly politically driven administrative system. If we return to the first attempt at addressing these inherited characteristics, then the Law regulating the status of public servants in 1999 (Law no. 188/1999) requires consideration. Under the provisions of this Law, which is still applicable to the public servants in Romania, the public functions were brought to a certain degree of equivalence. Under the previous regulations, employees of the public sector organizations were mainly contractual workers. This act changed their status and initiated the unification of public employment processes. At the same time, by unifying public sector employment, the dimensions of the employment within the public sector could really be measured.

The State is the largest employer in the country. According to national statistics in 2006 (National Institute of Statistics, 2006), the total number of Romania’s working population was 9.313 million, out of which 269,000 individuals represented the number of high-ranked public servants (aged 15-64) and 391,000 were the low-

22 Interview, Anonymous (Mr X) 136 ranked public servants (aged 15-24).23 Out of these numbers, 188,000 individuals were high-ranked male public servants, opposed to 81,000 individuals high-ranked female public servants. The ratios differ with regards to low-ranked public servants, as females counted up to 277,000 and males up to 188,000. The Romanian legal framework does not assimilate, for example, medical doctors to civil/public servants. Post office employees are not public servants either.

Another characteristic that places Romania at odds with international reform recommendations is the lack of hierarchical relationships among the local authorities and the central government bodies. The relationship between central and local authorities is based on the principles of legality, autonomy, and collaboration in dealing with public affairs. Despite this, there has been a push towards decentralisation. As enshrined in the constitution of 1991, Romania is a unitary state. However, there are now 41 counties (plus Bucharest) despite being centralised under the communist system. A clear impetus to this arrangement (as mentioned in Chapter 4) was the need to harmonise with EU structures, particularly in relation to regional funding. Thus a Green Paper in 1997 outlined eight development regions based on groupings of the existing counties but the regions are not administrative units. A study by Dragoman (2011) found that public management performance at county level (the only unit of analysis for local government) had little to do with managerial capacity. Rather, the study found that performance was best explained by political competition in that the dominant party in central government will devote resources to counties that provide electoral support. In effect, local government is as politicised as the central government.

The labour market with regards to local public administration is also influenced by central government and people are hired according to the provisions of Law no.188/1999 regarding the status of public servants. Local authorities can draw attention to the regional specificity, but decisions are still top-down imposed and strategic planning does not take into account local initiatives. The employment

23 The National Institute of Statistics does not appear to produce reliable civil service statistics on a routine basis. 137 strategy is done at the beginning of each year and all institutions are obliged to respect the central government decisions.

Another characteristic is poor HR development. According to Impact Study no. 3 conducted by the European Institute in Romania (2006), HR development represents a group of processes through which public servants typically improve their job-specific skills, knowledge and transferable skills in the areas where they presently possess certain basic qualifications in order to acquire the objectives set by their job description to a higher standard. The authors of the study imply that through these processes a higher compliancy with job standards and organizational effectiveness might be achieved. However, as Lee (2009: 284) argues the vagueness of defining professional terms in the Romanian context is that specific skills, such as engineering or economics tended to be more highly valued rather than generic management skills, as implied by proponents of NPM. This has implications for capacity building, which is examined later in the chapter.

According to Borins (cited in Osborne and Brown, 2005), public sector organisations fail to implement change and innovation with regards to internal processes due to the following factors: the political context of public sector organisations, which focuses power of the organisation in the political area, not at an internal level; constraint of individual flexibility in order to cover areas such as accountability of public money and protection for vulnerable service users; the lack of rewards for innovation in career structures. All these conditions persist in Romania; the high degrees of politicisation, constraints on managerial behaviour and the lack of incentives have not been addressed by training and development. Indeed, Lee (2009: 275) regards Romania as an ‘outlier’ among the CEE countries in terms of politicisation of the public bureaucracy that hinders managerialism. If we were to accept that the E.U. pressures managers in public sector organisations to behave as „public entrepreneurs” (Osborne and Brown, 2005), by holding characteristics such as critical analytic thinking, leadership and creativity, these are not reflected in the content of the training programmes described later in the chapter.

138 Public Sector Employment

Returning to the central administration, recruitment is done following strict regulations elaborated by the National Agency for Civil Servants (NACS), the entity which supervises public service employment relations. This regulatory body provides every public institution with the number of permitted employments/year, agreed by the NACS, the Cabinet and the management of each organization.

The only bodies which can influence central government in changing employment policies are the Trade Unions. Public bargaining is still viable in Romania and each public organization tends to create its own Union. Nonetheless, recruitment and employment are done according to national regulations. Candidates have to attend contests, which every institution organizes according to the same rules as every other public body. There are no variations in the structure of the employment contest. In sum, the public administration labour market does not resemble the private sector market. Lee (2009) examined the HRM aspects of administrative change in Romania and came to the conclusion that ‘favouritism and non-merit- based selection’ (p. 285) remained an important feature of the labour market.

According to Bouckaert et al. (2008), European pressures also proved insufficient in shaping the Labour Market in European countries. Initially, reforms appeared efficient due to the need of Romania, for example, to join the E.U. After the initial efforts, the overall impression was that the E.U. offered little in terms of a model for implementing Public Management in the internal organizational environment. Moreover, the government in Romania intervenes dramatically in public sector labour markets unlike its western EU neighbours. For instance, in 2009, the Cabinet recommended the reduction of public jobs by 20%, a fact that caused a severe disruption in the Romanian overall labour market. This recommendation came as a response to an IMF report which showed that the budget deficit of Romania was close to a ratio of 8%, which was double the size of the estimates in the beginning of the year 2009. Also, Romania had 244 governmental agencies which were mere

139 satellites of the 19 ministries in the Romanian Government and by the end of 2010 the number had to be cut down to 107 (there is no official Decree to impose this change, and discussions inside the cabinet are ongoing). However, compared to the UK for instance, there are no reliable statistical databases for the number of civil servants or reliable indicators that show the exact percentage of public sector employment against commercial employment.

Public administration employment policies also changed considerably beginning in mid-2009 with the enforcement of a new organic law to regulate public services. The entire salary system will change, in the pursuit of a uniform payroll scale. The level of public service ranks will change, by the addition of a new level. Previously there were three levels of public servants: high-school graduates, college graduates and undergraduates and above. It is not yet known to whom the new fourth-level employment is addressed. It is unclear if these changes have occured and in what sense they were meant to affect the layering of civil service positions.

It is clear that reform was pushed by the EU both pre and post accession and not by the desire of the Romanian authorities to contribute to the furthering of modernization within an administrative system whose characteristics were unlikely to be responsive. Although this is explained in chapter 4 from the perspective of path dependency, it is clear that the system is highly resistant to change. So, a reasonable assumption to make about the impact of international trends in public management on Romania is that it is minimal, and any reforms that have occurred are due to the direct or indirect influence of the EU.

Capacity Building

If EU accession has largely failed to professionalise the bureaucracy, there are other routes to improve capacity, both internal and external. Over the last three decades or so, the internationalisation of HRM has brought a new perspective on training, and its influence has been felt in Romania. If, before the reforms of public administration in the 80’s, employees were expected to be professional, but not over-qualified, nowadays individuals are expected to master certain skills and

140 abilities, including communication skills and management concepts. Everybody is also expected to be able to multi-task in line with current approaches to management (technical proficiency) and leadership (inspiring and motivating people; communication) (e.g. Kotter, 1990).

The figure below summarizes the NAPS strategy for reforming public service.

Figure 1: National Agency of Public Servants diagram showing the flow of reforms to be undertaken by the Public Service in Romania between 2004-201024

Political management of the public administrative reform Human resource Human resource development management 2004 – 2006 Development of the capacity Development of the high Change of forms of public policies by ranking servants’ careers management consolidating the role of the - developing specialized strategies high ranking servants and training programs for the high managing civil servants. ranking servants, managing Implementing the legal civil servants provisions regarding the - developing career career of management civil opportunities for managing servants civil servants through the young professionals scheme (YPS) - developing a training system for the management of civil servants 2007 – 2010 Human resource Training civil servants (NIPA Stabilizing and management within the and other providers of strengthening public administration (NAPS continuous training) strategies together with other public administration institutions involved)

Until 2012 the emphasis was placed on training schemes for fast-trackers and high- ranked/highly skilled professionals, as the tendency of Governments is to minimize

24 Table extracted from NAPS regarding the reforms undertaken between 004, when the European Council at Brussels confirmed the end of negotiations with Romania with regards to EU accession and confirmed the signing of the accession agreement in 2005, with full effect from 2007. (http://www.anfp.gov.ro/portal/page?_pageid=161,275314&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL&publicationid=11 534&categid=165)

141 the public sector apparatus and to induce professionalism. It is unfortunate that since 2012 when the last group of fast-trackers has graduated from the professional scheme such professional training programmes have ceased to exist, mainly because they were dependant on PHARE funding and the PHARE subsidizing has stopped due to deadline fulfilment, as well as the main provider of professional education, the National Institute of Public Administration (NIPA) has disappeared as a separate entity, being absorbed in 2010 by the National Agency for Civil Servants (NACS) under the name of the Directorate for Continuous Training.

The latest assessments available of Romanian administrative capacity indicate the persistence of unprofessional bureaucracy in Romania.25 This report also supports one of the few academic articles to also examine the phenomena from outside the country (Lee, 2009). To address this ongoing problem, these assessments highlight the substantial EU funding of the Administrative Capacity Operational Programme in addition to World Bank technical assistance (also financed by EU structural funds). This amounted to EUR 208m between 2007 and 2013. Functional reviews were carried out in 2010-2011 by the World Bank and they reached the following conclusions:

25 Internal EU document made available to the researcher, (‘EU Anti-Corruption Report’) 13. 2. 14. 142 Summary of World Bank functional reviews of Romanian public administration 2010-1126

1.1.1. Sector and institution governance

 Lack of oversight and accountability for results and low enforcement of public policies

 Governance issues in both government institutions and state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and inadequate separation of roles and division of responsibilities among institutions

 Poor coordination within and across sectors and insufficient inter-ministerial collaboration to manage effectively cross-sector topics (e.g. climate change and energy efficiency)

2. Strategies and decision-making

 Lack of sector wide strategies

 High politicisation of the administration

 Low quality of, and insufficient usage of, information for decision-making

 Inadequate policy formulation and insufficient stakeholder consultation

3. Organisation

 Lack of strategic human resource management

 Organisational structure not aligned with the evolving needs of the sectors

 Insufficient professional management in SOEs

4. Learning and use of best practice

 Domestic best practice not identified or emulated

 Insufficient cooperation between different sectors in the public administration

 Inadequate assessment of performance differences

26 Summary reports available at www.sgg.ro (Secretary General of the Romanian Government) 143 However, despite the relevant departments and agencies being required to develop action plans by the World Bank assessment, political disruption has led to slow implementation. The trend for countries which follow the Lisbon Agenda, one of the tasks for the next few years is that of reforming public services. To acquire this target, Governments have either founded specific institutions or programmes focused on on-the-job training or more academic studies, provided by universities. Thus, the EU has had a tangible impact on the nature and character of Romanian public administration, but arguably it is largely superficial or instrumental. In the following sub-section there will be an analysis of attempts generated by Romanian public administration to ensure professional development for civil servants. In doing so, a partial account of the failure of successive post-Revolution governments to abide to the EU regulations and provisions regarding capacity building in the civil service and implicitly the public administration as a whole is also provided.

Training and Development

If concepts such as efficiency and performance measurement were successfully implemented in the public-sector, by transferring best practices from the private- sector, the same cannot be said about training and the measurement of training performance/success. Governments acknowledge the need for better trained employees. Better training, in addition to improving services provided by the public administration employees, is likely to result in higher job motivation, as it results in increased knowledge and increased decision autonomy for the civil servants.

‘Best practice’ training should ensure quality, performance and staff retention. Although the public service is known as a “lifetime employer”, providing training and career guidance does not guarantee retention. There are numerous cases of individuals shifting from public sector to private sector. One of the reasons is that by being provided with high-quality training, a professional can find career- satisfaction in another domain. Training does not guarantee employee engagement and requires the right organisational culture (Marchington and Wilkinson 2012: 312).

144 Training is also acknowledged as a critical and vital component to enhance human resource development and to ensure good governance. Practice has shown that, even if training should be assured for every public servant, as provisioned by law, some managers believe training to be a strong motivational tool, which should be used only to reward good results. According to Bouckaert et al. (2008), one of the most important reforms relates to development of a professional body of civil servants, competitive with the private sector workers.

Here, the chapter will concentrate on one internal, or home-grown solution for building administrative capacity although other development programmes for civil servants will also be mentioned. The main scheme that was intended to provide the basis for a professional cohort of civil servants is the Young Professionals Scheme (YPS). So what is the purpose of the YPS? The aim of this Project is to accelerate the reform of the public function within the public administration labour market via employment of a new body of highly-skilled public servants specifically called “Public Managers”. Also, each public institution in Romania should include in its organizational chart a Public Manager position, to be filled by public servants as well as new candidates who wish to join the public administration system.

According to the initiators of the Programme, this Scheme played an important part in the process of meeting the requirements for joining the European Union, as well as the other projects set up to improve the public system’s institutional capacity. In fact, the post EU accession Administrative Capacity Operational Programme, has very similar aims. This underlines the waste involved of duplicating and overlapping various training and development schemes. The strategic objective of this scheme is to develop a body of professionals who are politically neutral and are able to implement modern policies and practices in the Romanian public administration.

However, one drawback when conducting research on the scheme, which is also typical of similar schemes in CEE countries, is the lack of written documentation, which is also in line with the general lack of concern over transparency in Romanian

145 public administration. However, YPS started in 2001, established by the initiative of The Ministry for Administration and Interior as a tier of reforming the body of public servants and inducing performance in their activity. The Programme is monitored by the National Agency of Public Servants (NAPS) and the Central Unit for Reform in Public Administration, which is a department of the Ministry of Administration and Interior. The money for this Project comes from PHARE funds. Since 2001 there have been three cycles of training and in 2009 the fourth one started.

To begin with, the evolution of the YPS needs to be addressed. In the Romanian public sector, professional training is offered both by public agencies and entities, as well as private ones. The most important public agency providing professional training was the National Institute for Public Administration (NIPA). This entity deals with both senior and low-rank public servants’ training. According to the Law for Public Servants, each public servant should benefit from specific training at least once a year, for a period of at least 7 working days. Also, for each of the 7 development regions in Romania there is one regional training centre, financially autonomous, but subordinated to NIPA. Eventually, some rethinking of the activities of these institutions should occur, because they come to overlap attributions. If further decentralization is pursued, there will be a clear need to separate their tasks on the basis of specific regional needs/preferences. With a body of 300 trainers, NIPA constituted the largest provider of professional training for public servants. At the same time, there are also 8 Regional Training Centres providing special programmes for public servants, established on a basis of partnership between NIPA and regional training providers. Sometimes they overlap with NIPA, but the trends in training public servants are established by NIPA on an annual basis and the Regional centres have to follow these decisions.

In addition, while the research for the thesis started in 2009, in 2010 NIPA, previously mentioned in the chapter, has ceased to exist. Instead of the furthering of decentralization, the Government has enforced concentration of powers into the hands of NACS by allowing this organization to take over NIPA under the name of

146 the Directorate for Continuous Training. As many other decisions taken with regards to the future of the civil service this is a deeply politicized one. The reasons for abolishing the institution are tri-fold: politically, the former Directors of NIPA acquired far too many powers in contrast with other public institutions providing professional training, i.e. NACS; a lot of the EU funds aimed at HR development were channelled towards NIPA rather than other overlapping institutions, thus creating frictions between top-managers and the Cabinet.

Professionally, the outcomes of NIPA provided training were not properly analysed and registered. NIPA mainly acted as financial agent for the Ministry of Administration and of Interior (MAI) in administering the fast-track programme, the YPS. The stake was high as this programme, as it will be shown further in the thesis, aimed at ‘producing’ high-skilled professionals to save the system from the fatality of old practices by injecting PHARE non-refundable funds into lengthy professional training programmes. Such being the case, it meant that NIPA accessed millions of Euros which otherwise could have been distributed among other regional institutions.

Statistically, and perhaps more indicative of the scale of the disaster and wasted EU money, after three cycles of YPS providing an approximate number of over 600 public manager graduates, within the actual public administration system, since 2005 when the first 200 were employed and 2013 only a third of the total number is actually working in the public system. The much acclaimed strengthening of the institutional capacity via injection of human capital proved hard to implement, as embedded reluctance to accept new developments has prevented these professionals from spreading throughout the country and working in regional civil service organizations. Also, the fourth cycle of YPS brought a new provision with it: while in the first three cycle graduates were bound to work for at least five years in the public administration, the fourth cycle was allowed an opt-out clause should they not be provided with a suitable job position within six months from graduation. In addition, the YPS by sending part of its trainees abroad to study in Western universities has created the opportunity for some of them to stay and

147 work abroad rather than go back to Romania and face months of uncertainty and unemployment.

Up to this date there have been 220 graduates, with a further 108 new graduates in 2009.27 The first cohort now works in key positions within Central and Local Government. These ‘Public Managers’ are expected to be the change agents for the Romanian public administration. Their role is to assess the administration environment and develop policies and strategies to help induce performance in all key institutions. Even though the number of graduates is not high, they represent key strata of professionals who should be drivers and exemplars of the new discourse of NPM and ‘professional’ general management (including Human Resource Management). The Programme offers high-quality training both in Romania as well as in other countries. The Programme is structured to support the existing public servants attending, by sending them to undergo internships in other European countries, within public entities and sends the soon-to-be public servants to attend Masters level courses in European universities. Universities are supposed to make competitive bids to host the YPS.28

The less known sibling of the YPS is the programme called Bursaries of the Romanian Government (BRG). This programme is fostered by the Ministry of Education and Research in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since 2005, but unfortunately the researcher could not establish the exact start date of this project. While it is not as regimented as the YPS, and it does not involve on-the-job training for future public managers, it aims at providing exceptional young people aged between 18-35 with outstanding education in a Top 500 university abroad under the provision that at the end of their studies they return to Romania for between 3 to 5 years to take over a high- ranking civil service position. There are no statistics available in relation to the number of graduates and more importantly, the number of individuals actually returning to fulfil their obligation to work within the civil service.

27 According to NIPA (www.yps.ro, source in Romanian only) 28 Manchester Business School made an unsuccessful bid for YPS in 2011. 148 Officially, BRG addresses all citizens of Romania who wish to perform in the public administration. It is guided by the same principles as the Young Professionals Scheme, but the implementation process and the structure differ. The attendants have to prove not to have any political affiliation and have to accept to uphold the principles of equity and professionalism.

The attendants have to choose between a higher-education level, Masters Degree or PhD. They are provided with the means to attend a prestigious university in Europe, as long as they accomplish something in the area of Public Administration or do research on this topic. The graduates of the Programme are supposed to come back to Romania and complete all the tests for becoming a Public Manager, just like those attending the Young Professionals Scheme.

There is a statutory clause attached to these two Programmes: graduates have to support Romania in becoming more proficient in terms of the employees retained by the public service and to assume an active role in reforming public administration. The graduates have to continue studying and taking exams when they come back to Romania and NIPA is responsible for their continuous training and examinations. The target is for the graduates to become Public Managers, just like the YPS graduates. However, the process is different. The YPS scholars are monitored and evaluated according to fixed deadlines, while the attendants of the BGR are able to access the university of their choice and after graduating the chosen Programme to come to Romania and undergo the final examinations to become Public Managers.

There is, however, an outstanding example of how the provisions of the contract are not really enforced: one beneficiary of the Bursary is a nationally known actress and TV presenter who accessed the programme in 2005 and who, after graduating, left Romania for good to live in Italy. Both officially and un-officially she didn’t suffer any consequences for breaching the contract, as well as there was no

149 financial recovery of the loss suffered by the Romanian government by granting this scholarship to an individual in breach of contract.

There is also the National School for Political and Administrative Studies (NSPAS), which provides academic education for undergraduates and postgraduates, no matter if they are public servants or not. By choosing not to directly address civil servants the NSPAS is launching in a strategy to attract as many professionals as possible. But there is no direct link between NSPAS and any entity from the official apparatus, hence the government does not feel the need to engage in cooperation with this academic institution. What is outstanding about this institution is the fact that prior to the ’89 Revolution it was called the ‘Stefan Gheorghiu Academy’ and it was the top academic institution for the Communist elites and high-ranking secret service officers. The current public opinion about this organization is that it harbours the same Communist principles as ever and it also employs mostly old- school individuals, adepts of the past regime. As a graduate of the School, the researcher can state that although the Departments and Faculties within the School bear titles related to public administration, the programmes are mostly general and have little to do with the realities of the Romanian or otherwise foreign civil service systems. In addition, at the NISPA Conference held in Warsaw in 2009, the researcher had the opportunity to meet lecturers from NSPAS who claimed that the undergraduate graduates of the School have no incentive to work in the civil service and choose not to, while the only civil servants who access the School’s programmes are top-ranking civil servants seeking promotion to even higher positions and are forced by law to attend and graduate from NSPAS. Considering such facts we can observe the pattern of path-dependency at this level. If under the Communist rule the high-ranking camarilla had to attend the Academy previously mentioned, in the current age the elites have to attend NSPAS.

Despite these initiatives in capacity building through training and development, Chifu remarks in an interview:

150 ‘Romanian organizations do not have expert employees. There aren’t professionals who know how to acquire and integrate knowledge from consultants or foreign aid agencies. They do not know how to involve the Academia and researchers in the policy making process. Also, they don’t know how to use the produce of research in a satisfactory or beneficial way.’ 29

There are no statistics to compare the number of public servants who actually benefited from professional training, nor do internal practices encourage staff to undertake higher education. Also, there is no official feed-back from employees. Besides the Programmes developed for fast-track public servants there are a lot of other opportunities for individuals who wish to work for the public sector. According to NAPS in Romania, the Fast track or stream Programme constitutes a strategic action in the development of a professional body of public servants but such an emphasis overlooks the acquisition of skills by low-rank public servants. This fact can be assessed by reading the National Institute for Public Administration ‘Strategy and Objectives Statement’. Until 2007, the main objective was that of providing specialized training for high-ranked public servants only. However, beginning in 2007, local government is also encouraged to seek alternative training providers for their employees. YPS transcended the accession period, and the momentum to modernisation continued post EU accession, which contradicts some assumptions that having achieved the goal of EU membership, reform could be relaxed.

Managing Performance

Why have Romanian approaches to capacity building appeared to be ineffective? It has been suggested by those who support the concept of HRM that the bureaucratic, reactive, centralized and prescriptive role of traditional personnel departments did not encourage the development of a performance based culture (Clark, 1993). From the Romanian perspective, as Hințea (in Bouckaert et al., 2008) argues, following the revolution in 1989 the reform packages lacked a coherent

29 Interview, Chifu 151 vision regarding its content, the direction in which change was headed, and also concrete implementation tools. Contemporaries of the revolution, such as Mr X, claim it was a ‚slow failure’. One of the reasons presented in the interview is that:

It is very hard to transition from an inflexible regime to a market economy in the absence of individuals with knowledge about an open market and a market economy. Poland and Hungary had opened their borders for their people to go in the West and study and come back. While Romania has kept its borders closed and insulated from any outside contact, as well as preventing Romanians to go and explore other systems.30

The general impression of that period is that the Romanian administrative system was struggling to move away from a stage under which managerial approaches seemed not to fit very well. The reform was closely intertwined with the creation of the legal framework, the assumption was that any challenge needs to be addressed through the creation of a new piece of legislation. Numerous external pressures, coming especially from the European Union (E.U.), but also from other international stakeholders, have made the administrative reform a top priority, closely linked to the process of adhesion to the E.U. In sum, managing performance will always be challenged in administrative systems (Talbot 2005: 505).

However, Romanian scholars consider the YPS as a partial step in implementing NPM ideas in the public administration system and professionalization (for instance, Morariu, 2011). But, it can be argued that this is not enough to produce a fundamental change over embedded practices. Several barriers rise to block the path of reforming public administration and managing its performance. According to Mora (2008), the biggest blockage is produced by the lack of managerial culture at the level of both public administration and political decision-makers. Also, the influence of politics on public administration creates resistance towards change and political appointments of public servants do not match the ideas of NPM and HRM.

30 Interview, Anonymous 152 With regards to Romanian institutions it is notable that in 2006 the Ministry of Administration and Interior (MAI), through its Central Unit for Public Administration Reform (CUPAR) instituted the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) for each public institution in Romania. The introduction of this free assessment tool designed by the Innovative Public Services Group (IPSG) in partnership with the European Foundation of Quality Management (EFQM) is regarded as a step forward in building Romania’s administrative capacity and embracing good practice stemming from older EU members. Moreover, CAF is viewed as a necessity to introducing Total Quality Management (TQM) in the Romanian civil service. In light of the EU accession in 2007 CAF is considered a success story, even if the value of the framework has not been fully assessed since its introduction. The CAF is not compulsory in Romania, and it is mostly applied by local government authorities, meaning the Commissioners’ Offices in each of the 42 counties (including Bucharest) in Romania; it is still at the stage of being voluntarily tested by the public institutions which express their wish to use this performance assessment tool. The basic process refers to self-evaluation from the part of the organization in terms of financial planning, service delivery, and workforce engagement.

Under the CAF provisions, the performance assessment criteria are also uncertain, but at a minimum it should evaluate:

 the employee individual objectives fulfilled on a medium term;  the possibilities of innovating the promotion system of public servants;  the possibilities of reducing the authorities’ apparatus to ensure higher skilled employees for a better organizational management.

It appears that the assessment criteria are both vague and open to subjective interpretation. They are not binding as well. The lack of objectivity is conditioned by the second clause above, where seniority and educational status persist as a basis for promotion and the last clause can also be disputed, although management

153 is beginning to be more valued (see also Lee, 2009). However, the criteria still avoid prescription.

The efforts of the Romanian government to change post-based employment into career-based employment within the public service are notable, but due to the global recession which began in the late 2000s, the reforms have slowed down. This is an interesting point, as many accounts of managerialism in the public sector, beginning with Hood (1991), point to economic crisis as an important trigger for managerialist approaches (along with privatisation, de-regulation and the usual litany of public sector reform programmes aimed at marketization).

Finally, according to a survey conducted by NIA (2008) with regards to the perception of Romanian citizens upon public servants, 61.6% of the respondents said that they are not at all pleased by the quality of services provided by Romanian public servants. Also, the study revealed that citizens think that performance of civil servants is enhanced by their political affiliation in the first place, the support of the management, and least by competency. This provides a considerable indictment of the modernisation of the Romanian government over the last two decades or so, whether or not it was driven by EU accession. The problem of professionalization is also exacerbated by the lack of change in the institutional contexts. As Ray (1997: 552) observes trust is a necessary precondition for professionalization and this depends on systems having sufficient trust in ‘the efficacy of internal controls such as audit, collegial regulation and…governance’. However, this pre-supposes the existence of a ‘legitimate and legal-rational state, relative (or perceived) absence of corruption in public life…’ and other important features that support a professional body of civil servants.

5.6 Conclusion

The findings of this chapter are somewhat mixed. The chapter begins by considering the impact of international reforms in public management on Romania, but instead the gradual efforts made are more related to preparation for EU

154 accession rather than the immediate and systematic review of the administrative system expected following the revolution. The chapter also identified several patterns including the law-making approach (associated with the following first decade after the revolution) culminating in the 1999 civil service law and then a second period in the 2000s leading up to EU accession in 2007 which appeared to mark a shift to a professional bureau through HRM and development. A third, post EU accession phase also seems to be in progress supported (symbolically at least) by Presidential approval. However, this renewed effort has little to do with greater European integration and harmonisation and more to do with economic demands arising from the global recession that began the year Romania joined the EU. However, the EU continues to remain involved through the continued funding of administrative capacity building. This includes the continued involvement by the World Bank through the Administrative Capacity Operational Programme.

What this chapter has attempted to demonstrate is that apparently domestic solutions to developing the managerial and professional capacity of its civil service, such as the YPS, remain seriously compromised. The picture that emerges from this chapter is that reform is driven both internally and externally and the one unifying feature is the attempt to push reform in Romania in the direction of the international reform consensus around NPM, explored briefly at the start of the chapter. For Romania, the opportunity presents itself to capitalize on its EU partners’ experience while reshaping public administration under the spur of financial crisis and budget deficit. This is a good rationale to look at both the type of training dispensed to public servants, and the performance of people and of institutions. This is important as the weakness of public service training in this regard has been pointed out by external agencies (Lee 2009: 279). Programmes need to be developed to address the problems of public administration in Romania rather than to simply repeat the NPM doctrines identified by Hood (1991). Post- accession, the influence of the EU remains crucial, not least because of its funding but the power of its country specific recommendations (CSRs). The European Semester (the annual cycle of economic policy coordination in the EU) for 2014 is in progress at the time of writing. The results of the Commission's assessment will be

155 presented on 2 June 2014 together with proposals for CSRs to be endorsed by the European Council. So it appears that resources to support administrative change are not the problem, rather the path dependent features of Romanian public administration itself.

156 Chapter 6: Case Study – The Role of Culture

6.1 Introduction

This chapter attempts to support the conceptual view that institutions are shaped by social systems to the extent they become path-dependent. If the ‘road’ to administrative modernization is ‘paved with good intentions’, the literature describes policy fiasco and failure which often goes beyond a lack of resource (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1984). Having established in the previous chapter the main factors that appear to mitigate against the development of a professional bureaucracy in Romania, the focus now turns to the role of culture. The chapter also represents a key stage of the dissertation as it builds more substantially on the data analysis derived from elite interviews, and it analyses why those ‘good intentions’ were not met. Moreover the story of over 20 years of change and struggle through which Romania has gone through in the pursuit of European acceptance and in building a new democracy out of scratch lacks substantiation in the literature, such as it is. However, richer accounts were provided by key observers working in different layers of government and academia in Romania, who have experienced various stages of development of the State after the Revolution in 1989.

Inevitably, there are so many aspects to be considered when building an accurate description of what is a highly arguable and contentious state of affairs in post- revolutionary Romania; aspects such as high levels of corruption, mis- interpretations of political freedom and the desire to belong to a supra-national body such as the European Union in order to acquire legitimacy. Thus, the research had to focus on the richest issues that lead to explaining the persistence of unprofessional bureaucracy: path-dependence and culture. While these variables have been widely explored in other academic disciplines and are generally accepted as belonging to the essential components of the field of Public Administration,

157 there is a further dimension that demands attention and thorough analysis as it isolates Romania, and similar post-communist systems, from standard accounts of administrative inertia. In the case of this thesis, the connotations with path- dependency are mostly negative, as it will be shown how more than 20 years of change and reform have resulted only in chaotic interaction between the forces who want change and stability and the forces who want to replicate and perpetuate the ‘old ways’. This chapter treats Romanian public administration as a case of a persistently stagnant bureaucracy by demonstrating how contextual inertia supports this phenomenon. It does so by hightlighting how social relationships within a particular administrative culture becomes an important factor.

The chapter begins by briefly assessing bureaucracy in the Romanian context before accounting for its administrative culture. It then moves to an examination of how Romania’s culture provides a fundamental point of resistance to administrative change. The chapter then critically explores a domestic approach to stimulating change, - the Young Professionals Scheme. The next major part of the chapter then evaluates the role of path dependency, itself an outcome of administrative culture, and how this continues to influence bureaucratic behaviour to the present day.

6.2 Bureaucracy and the Romanian state

It is important to state that the aspiration of the Romanian government, theoretically speaking, is that of proving that the Romanian model is based on Weberian principles, with some evidence of the influence of New Public Management (Gheorghe, 2012). At first glance, the Romanian bureaucracy does appear to be Weberian in character, in line with most European states. According to Max Weber in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, bureaucracy is a technical device which guarantees speed, uniformity, specialization, low cost and freedom from arbitrary decision-making based on political corrupt mechanisms. Another important aspect is that of the civil servants’ admission in the service within the Weberian system, based on certification, exams, and the prospective of a lifetime-career (Bensman, 1987).

158 Weber’s bureaucracy appears to comprise of equal treatment for both employees and clients and merit-based promotion within the civil service. While these characteristics appear to be in place, in the case of Romania we may consider an ‘Easternized’ Weberian model; since the legislation states the concepts above, as well as the civil service being a bureaucratic mechanism yet it is Easternized because the classic model bears the national and cultural imprint of the former Eastern European communist system. In addition, Romania is a ‘Rechtsstaat’ state, implying that the legalistic tradition is so well embedded that actually all packages of reforms and policies need to be supported by an existing law or regulation. This administrative culture is in line with most continental European countries (Pollitt and Bouckeart, 2004: 52). It is also clear that while Romanian public administration has been influenced by NPM, very little has been implemented despite the claims of mainly Romanian academics.

While it appears that a neo-Weberian state would constitute a near ideal framework for Romania, this chapter will also reveal how the country is resisting change and is deepening the blurred image of an over-politicized dysfunctional system, that rejects the values on which it acquired international recognition (including EU accession). While other academics continue to optimistically label the administrative systems of eastern Europe as ‘neo-Weberian’ (a popular discourse at academic conferences), this label at least in the case of Romania, is somewhat fallacious. However, before exploring the concept of exceptionalism in the next chapter, both culture and institutional theory (path dependency) also offer compelling explanations for the situation in Romania.

A further observation needs to be made about the extent of the Romanian bureaucracy. Historically and culturally Romanian governments, irrespective of political inclination, have supported enlarged public administration systems. This situation of the huge apparatus displayed by Romania is part of the Socialist legacy, and an inheritance of the typical Latin welfare state which presumably supports a huge central Government (Adolino and Blake, 2001). Because of this, citizens expect the State to provide them with a work place and consider working in the civil

159 service a life-long commitment, which provides stability both in terms of wages as well as career-path. During Communism the Party, which was the State as well, provided education and jobs for virtually all citizens. Citizens who aspired to better paid jobs and displayed exemplary behaviour and obedience were also Communist Party members, and this meant that the system encompassed the entire population of the country. Nita explains the propagation of the model:

‘ the communists used to operate with some 900,000 staff in the public administration all over the country. Twenty years after the execution of Ceausescu, the number of staff in the public administration reached some 1,350,000 people. In the same time, their efficiency decreased’.31

However, in the light of recent economic recession the Romanian Government issued several laws through which a reduction of the civil service took place during 2009-2010, both regarding the number of civil servants, as well as the number of ministries and agencies. Downsizing occurred mostly for financial reasons rather than the acceptance of the need for improvement. Unfortunately the exact number of public sector organizations fluctuates so much during a year that at this moment in time it is hardly possible to nominate an exact number. Also, it is important to mention that according to the latest Romanian census which took place in 2012, 44% of the population lives in the rural areas and the total number of Romanian citizens living in Romania has fallen from 24 million in the 90’s to 21 million. This emphasizes the strain put on the public system as the largest employer of workforce in this country and the reliance of the citizens on the public administration to provide jobs.32

31 Interview, Nita 32 It is difficult to get reliable statistics: external sources such as the CIA World Factbook are often viewed as more reliable than government sources 160 6.3 A Clash of Cultures: from Orient to accessing Occident

When researching public administration, Culture is one of the most important aspects that need to be explored and explained (Peters, 2010). Schedler and Proeller (2007) helped to place cultural theory centre stage in public management studies. In the same volume, Bouckaert (2007: 31) helpfully provides a layered version of culture: at the macro level we have ‘national’ cultures (or ‘civilizations’), which also demands a historical perspective. At the meso-level, we find administrative culture and within the micro-level, is organizational culture. While there is a strong interplay between the institutional and cultural contexts, the literature tends to analyse at the macro-level. Thus, Bouckaert (2007: 36) provides evidence about the extent to which managerialist reforms fail beyond their point of origin (usually the US) due to cultural factors. Yet the attractiveness of largely Anglophone reforms persists as ‘there is an assumption of a generic managerial space which allows to influence administrative and political cultures and values’ and that generic models are ‘dominant and tempting’ (p.37).

For instance, Beuselinck et al. (2007) provide a cultural account of the transferability of coordination mechanisms in four OECD countries. Their analytical framework also informs the argumentation presented here. One of their starting premises is that culture may explain why certain countries may consider particular policies based on ‘familiarity’ or cultural similarity. It is acknowledged that culture may also imply ‘a complete lock-in situation or the unfeasibility of change’ (Beuselinck et al. (2007: 80). Despite the attractions of modernisation or learning from the public services of Western liberal democracies, culture is a powerful source of resistance to change and appears to be pertinent to Romania (explored in chapter 4).

With respect to Romania, Weiner (1997) and Todorova (1994) emphasize that Romania is lacking a culture rooted in the Western values and displays traits of political culture which bear negative connotations, primarily those associated with ‘Balkanism’. This leads to the historical argument that in Romania, since its

161 unification in 1918 and until nowadays the ‘real country’ has never fully juxtaposed the ‘legal country’, thus creating dysfunction and paradoxical interaction between the executive, regulators and the society. In other words, the state finds it difficult to accommodate the differing demands of groups in society within a single, meaningful legal framework. As Weiner (1997: 5) argues, the dysfunctionality of the Balkanist Romanian state can only be resolved by civil society rather than economic performance that promotes narrow self-interest. This also complicates the cultural explanation as it is assumed that national cultures tend to be fairly homogenous. However, Romania is far from homogenous and it has significant populations of ethnic Hungarians and Roma. Although heavily diminished in numbers since before the communist era, an influential German minority also remains.

The term ‘Balkanism’ also encompasses notions such as corruption, petty bribery, and the attitude of ‘laissez-faire’ or ’what you can’t do today, do tomorrow or never’. Podgorean talks about this phenomenon in similar terms, shedding light over what the public administration has learned from the nearly 40 years of Communism:

‘Public administration possesses a certain cultural brand. The ‚laid-back’ attitude and propensity towards ‚tipping’, the authoritarian attitude of the civil servant towards the citizen and the submissive attitude in front of the superiors, the lack of initiative which defines public administration, as well as the lack of reaction from the part of the citizen, the desire to bend the rule and give bribe, they all constitute a pattern of Balkanised-Communism which still lingers and stalls any reform process which may occur’.33

In addition, Romania also displays a deeply politicised bureaucracy (Hintea, 2008), as a result of the former one-party Socialist system. Also, as Hancock et al. (1993: xix) note, although policy is ‘influenced by external economic and other factors

33 Podgorean, Interview 162 beyond the control of national policy actors. None the less, national policy-making structures and processes mediate the domestic economic and social consequences of exogenous trends and events’. Because of the cultural and historical background, Romania still needs to tackle the Communist legacies, which also serves to strengthen its path-dependency. Hancock et al’s statement also sets the background of the problem underlying the contradictory and conflict-laden nature of reform applied to an environment which suffers from the already mentioned ailments such as corruption, lack of professionalism, and so forth.

However, part of the historical legacy is that administrative culture in Romania has always been closely linked to politics so that both politicians and civil society assume that the administration represents politics. There has been no historic attempts in Romania to assert the Wilsonian politics-administration dichotomy. Puscas describes the issue in a few revealing words:

‘In Romania politics is tantamount to politicianism, therefore very little real politics comes to influence the public policy design, hence the gangrene of institutions and even civil servants’.34

‘Politicianism’ describes the falling of politics into petty personal representation of what the society should believe in and should support. This behaviour may be described as ‘the norm’ in Romania, and it has been transcending centuries of personality cult and legitimization through personal interests transformed into policy. This ‘norm’ has made history since the Communist regime, when the leader of the Party was also the president of the State. Prior to the Revolution in 1989, the extent to which the State was ruled by the personality cult of Ceausescu was so ingrained that the Dictator was also envisaging a hereditary Dictatorship for the future. Unfortunately, the overturn of the regime has pushed forward a generation of people who were part of the former Communist party, who were former

34 Interview, Puscas 163 supporters and members of the Party and who have continued this tradition of imposing personality beyond democratisation to the present day.

Thus being said, there is scope for change. As Nita observes, this will only happen when there is an

‘...infusion of young blood (i.e. young people) in the most important parties, in the public administration system and in the government has been made for advertising reasons rather than for leadership reasons. The “connoisseurs” of the political scene used to talk about the “young dinosaurs” phenomenon. These are the young people who have managed to penetrate the hierarchies of the current political parties and who often are more conservative than the senior representatives. As senior (party member), as “young dinosaurs”. The filters used in the parties’ recruitment and selection processes are carefully monitored by the seniors who don’t want competition into their parties. As a result the young party members are created in the senior image, after their likeness. Sometimes even worse than that. The whole system has become even more bureaucratic than in the communists era.’35

6.4 Culture and ‘Politicianism’

The term ‘politicianism’ also demands further interpretation in relation to culture. Romanian culture, in relationship with public administration, is also defined through politics in a negative sense. Communism meant the abolition of political parties and the creation of a supreme party, imposing a new restrictive ideology and altering a not so old exposure to the Western world. Romania had been unified in 1918 under a German king who accepted to become ‘Romanian’ and who managed to set the foundations of a modernising monarchy, a parliamentary monarchy. After less than 100 years from that moment Communism had erased all

35 Interview, Nita 164 the market principles and democratic behaviour by what one of the interviewees, Mr X calls ‘late-Stalinism’. This event constituted a massive and irreversible break in the momentum towards modern state building towards the middle of the 20th century.

After the Revolution in 1989 there was scope for re-defining what Romania wanted to look like and what the resurrection of politics meant. In first instance, the extinct political parties were brought back to life: The Peasants Party and the Liberal Party. Alongside them part of the leaders of the revolutionaries created the National Salvation Front. Its leader, Ion Iliescu was elected the first democratic President, in 1990. His election was controversial and raised questions about the true beliefs of the new president. Sanborne (2004, p. 87)) quotes one of the prominent Romanian scholars, Vladimir Tismaneanu: ‘there was very little in terms of counter-elite to create a real reform party.[...] That explains why you have the exit of Ceausescu and the entrance of Iliescu’. The opponents of the new president called the new regime ‘neocommunism’ and exposed Iliescu as one of the former apprentices of Ceausescu. Describing the political arena from 1990 to 2011 is not the topic of this research. But it is important to mention this first step in democracy as it underlies the perpetual struggle over these years to demonstrate that Romania has got rid of the influence of Communism. This constant back and fro between the so called neocommunists and the Opposition has created a chasm in the political ideology and has lead to the propagation of a chaotic mix of new personality cults and the creation of a plethora of parasite parties, which survive only until the leaders of these entities see their goals achieved. Mr X points out

‘Some people see in politics a way to affirm themselves as well as a mean to get rich. Some characters want to become MPs because to them the Parliament is like a ‘Ltd’. This is called traffic of influence and it has nothing to do with Communism.’36

36 Interview, Anonymous (Mr. X) 165 This statement depicts the general feeling of the citizens with regards to politics in nowadays Romania. It is interesting though that Mr X does not blame Communism for the falling of politics into the depths of personal interest.

Culturally and politically Romania is hard to fit in a model, despite apparently similar situations in neighbouring countries. My perspective emphasizes the lack of a tradition of a professional public administration without political interference, hence the absence of the State as a neutral instrument within a pluralist state. Romania stands outside the kind of rational decision-making advocated by US commentators (Parsons 1995: 254).

If we revisit the term ‘Balkanism’, we find it encompasses notions of patriarchal, conservative relationships among the actors in the public administration and the political arena. However, it also assumes an expectation of bribery and networking to ‘get things done’ and a casual attitude adopted by public servants mixed with an attitude of fatalism (Hood’s cultural theory). Moreover, it should be added that the notion is summarized in the Latin saying ‘panem et circenses’, which mean ‘bread and circus’. ‘Balkanism’ thus has much wider connotations beyond the fragmentation of administrative systems, and it is this wider interpretation that can be applied to Romania.

Although this research does not analyze events that have taken place before the Ceausescu regime, it is of use to note an article depicting the behaviour of some politicians during the local elections in the inter-War period, because the attitude of the Romanian political people of our days is very similar to that of their ancestors in 1928. For example, migration from one political party to another was a widespread practice. Attracting the electorate was done through bombastic propaganda and by means of organising events where the citizens were invited to sample lamb stew and wine, without ever mentioning the true message of the party this emphasizes that political culture was poorly developed even before the Communist era.

166 Mr X gives an explanation for the paradox of public administration and politics in the Romanian context:

‘Firstly, logically, it is said that public administration should be rid of political influence. There needs to be a positive autonomy of system functioning. On the other hand, a politician can’t be subtracted from the administrative and political context. This politician has reached his position by being part of a political party or faction. We might idealistically desire moral and illuminist37 style politicians. Truth is except for a minority of them, politicians serve personal or peer-group aspirations.’38

Another important issue about the aggressive interference of politicians in the public administration and its main tools, policies, is linked to the potential lack of political structure through ideology. As Nita notes:

‘In Romania, the political ideologies and the name of the parties are simply brands used to sell obsolete “products” under attractive labels.’39

Lack of political ideology is one of the reasons for which individuals, as stated on the previous pages, can breach into the system for pure personal purposes while destroying the chances of improvement and modernization of the public administration. Again, Nita makes a point: ‘The former communist regime was changed with a “virtual” democracy.’ Stanciu also supports the idea of blurred or non-existent ideology, which supports the idea of chaotic decision making made by the researcher

‘The political arena of the last 10 years or so has stopped differentiating between the left-wing parties, promoting social policies, and the right-wing parties, promoting measures to support the business environment in the

37 The interviewee is referring to an ‘enligthened’or innovative, or modern thinking politicians. 38 Interview, Anonymous (Mr X) 39 Interview, Nita 167 detriment of social policies. We can see that the right-wing decisions sometimes fall into the socialist ideology, and those promoted by the leftist are essentially liberal. In conclusion, the separation of the two is purely theoretical in Romania.’40

The historical lack of a strong political culture, as it was demonstrated above, has created the foundations for a weak-willed State, subject to the politicianism that Puscas described. Thus, the weakness of the state resulted in a rigid and politicized system. Key areas such as reform and public policies, which are the basis of a healthy functional public administration system, are rife with political intervention in the aforementioned sense. Over the next few pages the data demonstrates how politicization stymied the prospects for reform.

The process of reform comprising policy making is characterized by Mrs Y in polite words:

‘The administrative process is stable insofar as it tends to stick by its own mistakes, and unstable because it discards visions as soon as the political leadership of the country changes. It is not yet innovative and not fully planned yet.’ 41

Even if the tone is mild, and even if it doesn’t specifically point at politics as being the major culprit for failure, it does point towards the replication and perpetuation of mistakes within the system but remain unspecified.

Dudau gives his opinions on the status of public administration in a very adamant tone: ‘The idea that each public policies package needs to be politically committed to by the government constitutes a consensus of the political level in Romania, which leads to the fact that technocracy is immediately disregarded as lacking in public representation. [...]Usually, public policies in Romania are a bunch of flawed

40 Interview, Stanciu 41 Interview, Anonymous (Mrs Y) 168 solutions attempting to patch up some immediate issues.’ It can be added that the ‘immediate issues’ are always subject to interpretation according to which party constitutes the majority in the Parliament and what political inclination the president of Romania has.

Mrs Y has another approach towards giving an account of the state of affairs and she ironically states: ‘there is a clear influence of political ideology over the reform standard-bearers, meaning that no successful or worthy reform act is ever attributed outside the ruling political circle.’ From another angle, Podgorean identifies another possible explanation of the entrenched political attitude of the public administration: ‘Romania hasn’t developed policies, but has politicized the technical and administrative decisions.’ More so, he adds:

‘Public administration reform was mainly an institutional politicizing instrument of the administrative structures. Civil servants, especially those holding executive responsibilities are appointed on the basis of political affiliation and lack vision on their professional perspective’.42

The implications of this statement raise even more concerns about the extent to which the public administration is compromised, as it implies that the overall attempts to bring change have actually been undermined by their creators and are just a formal exhibition of appropriate behaviour instead of a real tool for promoting true quality. With regards to the usefulness of political affiliation, he also says:

‘The main difference is that 20 years ago the main requirement was to be a member of the Romanian Communist Party. Nowadays political affiliation may constitute a plus or a draw-back. This created the political migration of the administration’s leadership from one party to another.’43

42 Interview, Podgorean 43 Interview, Podgorean 169 Udreanu summarizes the deep politicisation of the state: ‘Policymakers in Romania usually focus on the short-term reforms (commonly, the time until the next election) instead of focusing on long-term tangible results and outcomes.’ Celac on the other hand comments upon the benefits of politicised policy making, but not without stating the dangers of mis-using politics within the public system

‘The primacy of politics over policy making and implementation is natural in a democracy. The same applies to the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats. The trouble starts when the distinction between those two vital elements of effective governance gets blurred beyond recognition. When blind obedience and party discipline are better rewarded than professional excellence and sheer hard work, the whole system and its underlying values become dangerously distorted.’44

Another issue of great importance to this thesis is that of the quality of the public servants working within the Romanian public administration system. The high resistance to change of the system is not due only because of political interference, but it is also a result of its own members. Barbu points out that ‘The bad communication of the political will (if any) has a good effect in not affecting the resistant medium layer of public servants.’

To make a personal observation, I worked in the Romanian civil service for two years, between 2005 and 2007, prior to the European Union accession. It appeared fortunate that I was appointed within the Human Resource department of the Romanian Agency for Payments and Intervention in Agriculture. It is considered fortunate because irrespective of qualifications, a considerable number of employees in the Agency are and were either relatives of some politician or were active supporters of an influential politician. Considering that I had no political affiliation in Romania and was unaware of such practices, but still well qualified for the job, proves the exception to the rule. But on the day of starting the job, the first

44 Interview, Celac 170 question addressed by the future line managers to each new civil servant in the Agency was invariably the same: ‘who’s protégée are you?’. Despite Law 188/1999 regarding the status of the Civil Servant, which clearly states that civil servants are prohibited from actively supporting any political party or exhibiting any political behaviour, ironically the Agency as well as the vast majority of public organizations in Romania suffer from the same illness – to be ‘backed’ by someone in an important position, with strong political affiliation. It has become anecdotal that even the janitors have to be political supporters of someone or to accept to join a certain political party so as to access the ‘system’.

This personal account is backed by one statement made by Chifu, although it does not specifically refer to a similar type of political fraud

‘Professionalism and professionals, that’s what is missing, The current political and governmental structures, not the bureaucracy, have got limited direct and in-direct access – because we are talking about political alliances, nepotism – and they haven’t learned to benefit from think tanks or experts. They are either not willing or do not know how to contact experts and how to use even aid offered for free. When contracting consultancy there is always this dimension of corruption, as contracts are drawn up to legitimize politicization and extra income from fraudulent means.’ 45

On the other hand, Mr X points out towards the politicians, again, when talking about the flaws within the civil service, by mentioning that at the end of the day the power game is related to ‘resources’ and civil servants are a means of reaching the goal

‘In a poor country such as Romania, these aspirations are related to managing resources. Under these circumstances, you want to access resources in spite of any morals. How do you do it? You place your ‘servants’

45 Interview, Chifu 171 in key positions, loyalty being the paramount feature of such characters. Such situations are not encountered only in Romania or similarly poor countries.’46

This section has explored one overriding negative aspect of the administrative culture in Romania, its weakness in the face of ‘politicianism’. While most liberal democracies attempt to separate politics from administration (following Woodrow Wilson in the late 19th century in practice and Weber in theory), it is clear that Romania has yet to shake off its communist heritage when politics and administration were meshed together. Another aspect to be considered below is how the administrative culture contributes to the preservation of the system by avoiding change.

6.5 Culture and Resistance to Change

The Romanian cultural behaviour is deeply rooted in legends and myths stemming from the agricultural tradition. Hutu (2010) has applied Hofstede’s dimensions on a large sample of individuals working in public sector organizations, as well as private organizations, in the attempt to explain the Romanian attitude towards change and interaction with Western concepts such as managerialism and leadership. Although this research does not specifically deal with leadership, one finding is of particular interest to this thesis. Hutu has explained the resistance to change through a Romanian folk ballad, titled ‘Miorita’. Without going into exhaustive detail, the story of the ballad unfolds before the time of the Romanian unification in 1918, in an unspecified location and time dimension and the main character of the ballad is a Romanian shepherd working alongside a Hungarian and a Vlach sheepherder. The Romanian flock is doing much better than the other flocks of sheep and the foreign sheepherders begrudge the Romanian mate for his success. One particular sheep holds magic foresight powers and acts like an oracle for the Romanian sheepherder, making him aware of his murder unless he changes the course of his actions, and

46 Interview, Anonymous (Mr X) 172 she offers him alternatives to prevent the tragic event from happening. Unfortunately the sheepherder is stuck in his own beliefs and refuses to comply with any of the plans of action offered by the magical beast and eventually falls victim in the hands of his colleagues. Getting back to Hutu’s longitudinal study, it suggests that Romanians appear to suffer from fatalistic refusal to heed warnings and comply with official requirements, blindly believing that their way of doing things is the best way. This attitude is widespread and continues to be replicated despite attempts from both internal agents of change and external international organizations to reform the Romanian public administration.

In addition to the ballad, the overall attitude of the civil service as part of the public administration is resumed by Rusandu in a Romanian saying: ‘if it works like this, why change it?’

Such attitudes lead to the conclusion that the Romanian public administration is resistant to change. In support of this statement there are not only documented attitudes, but by way of contradiction, a lack of documented evidence that the Romanian authorities acknowledge their shortcomings and are dealing with the consequences of years of denial with regards to the extent of the damage created by replicating the ‘old ways’. In explaining resistance to change, although key words such as ‘reform’ and ‘attitude’, managerialism, challenges to public administration and so forth season the discourse of public administration in Romania, the interviewees provide a colourful and quite complete image of where the fault lies.

One of the antidotes for resistance to change may be organizational learning. However, this has proved to be difficult to implement in the public sector, largely because it would require not only deep structural change but cultural change as well. Moreover, based on Common’s (2004) view that the political environment hinders organisational learning and this view also includes the extent to which the public sector is capable of learning from the past. Mr X blames the past about the failure of reform: ‘It is very hard to transition from an inflexible regime to a market economy in the absence of individuals with knowledge about an open market and a

173 market economy.’ Such statements suggest that Romania has not benefitted from a sufficiently educated sample of professionals who may heal the system from inside-out. The lack of contact with Western culture and practice is hard to overcome in 20 years or so. In addition, Mr. X point out the fact that Romania is attempting to bring new practices, new programmes helping towards modernization of the public administration and create a generation of professionals via project such as the ‘Young Professionals Scheme’ (YPS). As discussed in the chapter on EU influence, this project started in 2001 and ended in 2008 and aimed at training either active civil servants or graduates to become ‘public managers’ within the public administration. Their role would have been that of consultants to public organizations and of fixing the obvious flaws within the public policy processes.

‘If 15 years ago you would have asked the Romanian public administration about such professionals, you would have been laughed in your face. In our case we had the ‘cadre’, controlled by the Communists and of course reliable Party members. The assessor of human capital didn’t have the knowledge to do it. Leaping from no knowledge to using new blood requires time.’ 47

Thus, it is not a surprise that Nunberg’s (1999) assessment of the first ten years of Romanian public administration reform is revealed by the sub-title to her chapter, ‘the go-slow administrative transition’. All this evidence shows that reform takes time, but it also reveals that Romania is not equipped with the necessary tools and skills to reach the next level of performance. Indeed, there also appears to be a collective lack of will to change.

6.6 Culture in contrast with Regulations

In referring to the public administration generally and specifically to the civil service supporting the functionality of the system, Podgorean indicates that ‘it is a system

47 Interview, Anonymous (Mr X) 174 which suffers from structural inadequacy. ’Returning to the YPS, as one of the indicators of reform, the researcher is a graduate of this Scheme and as a result of lack of long-term vision and lack of means to create the actual job positions for YPS graduates, has not undertaken a job in the Romanian civil service. This does not necessarily indicate the failure of the project, but it is widely known that the rate of retention of the graduates from four consecutive cycles of training is quite low relatively to the vastness of the apparatus. This comes in support of Podgorean’s statement and it indicates the failure to forcibly modernize an entity which refuses to naturally change. Each of the first three cycles trained a number of 140 individuals, and the last one a number of 70. The numbers are approximated, as official documents of the Scheme were not made available to the trainees either during the training or after graduating. Considering that the number of civil servants is relatively small, if we are to believe Nita (the researcher attempted to acquire official statistics from the National Institute of Statistics, has actually paid for reports from 2009, 2010 and 2011, but was never rendered the material (see methodology chapter)) then this represents an approximate 6.428% of the employed population in Romania; a meagre 0.03% of professionals attempting to develop a modern civil service is almost as if it didn’t exist. Lee’s (2009: 279) evidence suggests that the figure is even smaller (with the exception of the last statistic).

One of the principles underlying the projects was that of mobility, meaning that the YPS graduates would have to be spread out the country, in various public administration organizations so as to provide assistance and consultancy where it was most needed. The figures do not need much interpretation to prove that the project has actually technically failed and proved the point that change does not mean just reports stating that the mission has been completed.

Moreover, the failure does not stem only from the futility of the mobility principle, but also from the response of the public organizations to the potential acquirement of such professionals. While the actively employed civil servants who have joined the scheme were guaranteed a job position within their old institution under the

175 provisions of a special law, the rest of the ‘debutants’ have been subject of ‘offer and demand’ from public organizations. One of the first results was that, at least in which concerns the third cycle of graduates, none of them has been hired in the position of public manager during the first year from graduation. In addition, although most of the graduates were citizens of other cities than Bucharest and were keen on returning to their cities to apply for a managerial job, this opportunity has been denied to most of them. Eventually the ones who accepted a position of public manager had to work in the Central administration, in Bucharest. This reveals another failure of this project for modernization, as it has failed one of the most important purposes that of providing assistance in more remote areas, where knowledge might be less advanced than at the centre of the public affairs.

When talking about change and the relation with reform processes, and applied to the aforementioned training of professionals, again Podgorean sustains that ‘younger people do not choose to return to Romania, and the other categories suffer either from ‘spleen‘’ or are victims of institutional reforms.’ In this case, the interviewee uses ‘spleen’ to mean anger and frustration. By ‘younger people’ the interviewee refers to that infusion of ‘new blood’ that the educated observers of the reform process have been waiting for since the falling of the Communist regime. Unfortunately the system is resisting the infiltration of potentially better prepared individuals. Adding to the state of distrust in younger professionals, the educational system constitutes a barrier to improvement and the lack of flexible and ‘smart’ regulations, aiming at acquiring professionals in the civil service is the icing on the cake.

Following the tradition of Rechtsstaat states, Romania has been stuck in rigid regulation formulation which prevents the flexible decision-making associated with professional bureaucracies. If it is to refer to the strictness of regulations, lack of understanding of flexible principles stated by Human Resource Management theories, and the access to high-responsibility jobs in the public sector, it needs to be shown how an interviewee, who is involved in assessing the effectiveness of HR

176 policies in the civil service fails to understand the importance of loosening the prevalence of regulations against quick and feasible solution. Stanciu claims

‘Pragmatically speaking the concept of HRM is relatively new for the public sector and it refers to an integrated approach of personnel issues, involving including the very top-management in finding optimum solutions for the employees, not just the HR manager. Involving all levels of decision in this process made it possible to develop the regulatory framework which allows an efficient management of the human resource.’48

This statement appears to show how embedded formal regulation is in Romania despite the apparent endorsement of HRM. HRM requires a flexible organisational environment and the necessary behavioural change within most organisations is rarely achieved by coercion. However, the suggestion of hierarchy within the above statement further mitigates against the kind of supportive organisational culture which would allow HRM to take root.

The same interviewee claims in another answer that the National Agency for Civil Servants (NACS) is doing a good job at assessing the needs of professionals within the civil service and is effectively applying performance indicators aimed at assessing the activity of public organizations. The reality proves that such performance indicators do not exist, documents proving how they were developed and how they were applied, if any, are not available for public consultation and the criteria for civil servants recruitment hasn’t changed since 1990. The claims come from a high-ranking civil servant working at the Ministry of Development. Considering the position the person holds and given the protected, superior status, it is easy to defend a system which allows one to be above any suspicion.

Resistance to change is a problem that is applicable to most organisations, but in Romanian public administration it is pervasive, and this is supported by its culture.

48 Interview, Stanciu 177 While earlier it was established that despite the revolution, the system remains deeply politicised, the perverse incentives that exist to resist change has only served to sustain, or ossify, the administrative system. Injections of managerialism rarely work, or as demonstrated above, attempts to professionalise the civil service create opportunities that are counter-productive (i.e. professionals leaving the country or entering the bureaucracy but failing to revitalise their agencies, work units, etc.) Culture provides a convincing, but incomplete, account for lack of administrative modernisation in Romania.

6.7 Path-dependency

Describing the impact and implications of path-dependency in relation to a Public Administration system is challenging due to the theoretical implications raised by this concept and its roots in historical institutionalism. The basic assumption of historical institutionalism is that a system is naturally of a conservative inclination and thus it will tend to resist change.

To return to Levi’s (1997) idea: “path dependence has to mean, if it is to mean anything, that once a country or region has started down a track, the costs of reversal are very high […].” Thus, it is worth re-emphasising at this stage that the past influences the political and managerial choices in public administration. However, it has also been pointed out that path dependency appears to offer an easy explanation when accounting for the lack of change in countries such as Romania. It was also established that the best approach in attempting to explain the existence of path-dependence and institutionalism in a modernizing environment – in this thesis Romanian public administration – is by relying on data obtained from case studies.

Chapter 4 outlined how communist Romania attained and supported a perfectly centralized public administration. Even local decisions at commune level (a group of villages gathered under the administration of a mayor) would not decide upon local matter without the express approval of one of Ceausescu’s minions working at the

178 Central Committee of the Communist Republic of Romania. The Revolution intended to demolish this centralization and, in the first years after the event it seemed that things would change. But demolishing means starting with a white canvas an re-designing the main organizations within the state. Chapter 5 also discussed marginal decentralization post Revolution, largely in anticipation of EU accession. However, the focus in this chapter is on cultural or sociological explanations for path dependency.

The first step to detach from the old regime was that of founding the first post- Revolution organization – the National Salvation Front. Since the beginning the democratical foundation principals were challenged, as the head of this organization was Ion Iliescu, the personality s named and described in a previous sub-chapter. The NSF declared ‘all power structures of the former dictatorial regime’ to be abolished. An Executive Office was formed, but the 145 members of the Council of the NSF comprised the supreme power of the state. As Rady (1992) notes, the entity replicated the Communist party ruling body and the fact that the members of the Council were ‘veteran communists’ (even though allegedly in disgrace before the falling of the regime) didn’t help in building credibility and legitimacy. These political aspects, though, do not fundamentally make up the topic of this research project. Rather, they are presented for illustrative purposes and to build a clearer image of how Communism was so entrenched in the memory of the new democrats in power that is very hard to believe the effect of such history would be easily removed.

Path-dependency was not only political. It has plagued the appearance of new public sector organizations, it has affected the form of the civil service and recruitment practices, and not the least affected the behaviour of younger generations. These aspects have been discussed during the interviews and the findings will be analyzed in the following pages.

179 While each interviewee has strong opinions about the impact of the Communism and whether Romania has coped well with and recovered from its effects, Mr X summarizes the impact of the Revolution as following:

‘One of the issues of the transition and reforming the system is that the overall shortcoming of the Revolutions, in the entire Communist block of countries lies in the fact that the reforms have been started by individuals who have thoroughly supported the Communism. Under these circumstances, in my opinion, you cannot achieve significant change unless you get rid of the old chips off the block.’ 49

The interpretation of this statement leads to acknowledging that much of the interview data suggests that past practices and mentalities haven’t died. In support of this statement comes, for example, the fact that the former President of Romania, Traian Basescu, used to be a ship commander during the Ceausescu regime. Holding such a job position meant that he was frequently out of the country, but career wise he had to be well positioned in the Communist Party in order to access such a high-ranking position in the Romania Fleet. He is not the only example, but it is the strongest one that comes to mind. If the head of the state may constitute a ‘chip off the old block’, it is hard to envisage how things may change for the better.

On the other hand, Chifu argues: ‘Now, at more than 21 years after the Revolution, most of the Communist dignitaries have either died or retired and whatever degree pressure they might try to exert over the system is very low’ 50

This statement sounds positive and may indicate that the state of affairs is on the mend. But the mentioning of nearly 21 years gone by and the fact that only the death of the minions of the old regime may help modernization is not encouraging

49 Interview, Anonymous (Mr X) 50 Interview, Chifu 180 enough. When asked about the impact of Communism and whether Romania is still suffering from Communist behaviour, Mrs Y replied quite lengthily, but in detail:

‘Yes, although frequently one hears people say that invoking the Socialist legacy almost 22 years after the change of regime is a proof of ill-will. The dominant mentality – unbeknownst to people – is largely evincing socialist mindsets (reform “is imposed topdown”; hierarchies do not consult with rank-and-file because they know best; training is a theoretical concoction tending to fill the minds with largely the same vocabulary, but not to help solving problems; lessons learned is not a concept motivating the furtherance of reform, but rather inducing discontinuance of some reform paths before they actually had the time to bear fruit and be assessed). Since mentalities take more time to change, I would say that the first 20 years after the 1989 revolution were clearly marked by the Socialist legacy, and Romanians have just entered a mentality transition stage which will yield visible results at best around 2020. For the time being, path dependency is often only obvious in hindsight.’51

The legacy of Communism is revealed by the ways in which successive Romanian governments have thought about reforming the State. It was mentioned before that in the Ceausescu days the Communist Party encompassed the executive and regulatory powers, and all levels of decision making were top-down controlled by the central body named the Communist Committee.

In the post-Revolution days, the shift from centralization did not happen. Podgorean indicates problems that stem from the old mentality

‘Governments, regardless of their political affiliation, are characterised by lack of ideological continuance and an excessive orientation towards elective/representative goals. In reality it is not the ideological support that

51 Interview, Anonymous (Mrs X) 181 gives character to each Government, but the personality of the political leaders.’52

One of the main barriers towards change, as described by Podgorean, is the prevalence of the ‘personality cult’ instituted by Ceausescu. Even if new leaders do not replicate the model in total, contradicting the leader and vexing the leader by not displaying utter obedience and admiration of his achievements may lead to destitution. It is true that Ceausescu named himself the number one Academician of Romania, the first son of Romania and afterwards has left the minions in charge of dismantling whatever credibility Romania may have had in the eyes of the democratic regimes and that nowadays we do not encounter such extreme displays of madness. But it stays true that all the successive Romanian leaders since the Revolution want to be followed blindly and are averse to being antagonized.

Another aspect that Podgorean emphasizes is that the successive governments, in the pursuit of democracy have become so keen on demolishing the foundations set by previous governments that one cannot distinguish any kind of ideology in function. In addition, constant abolishing of policies and programmes drawn-up by another government leads to the fact that Romania is in a constant state of ‘transition’. In mid-90’ there was an anecdote circulating among Romanian intellectuals with regards to this: ‘with one foot in Communism and one in transition, for how much longer are we going to keep our legs apart?’.

Mr X, although accrediting the old regime with traits that have affected the post- Revolution Romania, states that after more than 20 years from the event Communism is not the sole responsible for the failure of the transition:

‘It is very easy to blame Communism for the system’s faults instead of re- assessing the modern system. We’ll probably end reaching 2040 still blaming Communism for everything that is going wrong.’53

52 Interview, Podgorean 53 Interview, Anonymous (Mr X) 182 More important than changing the Communist behaviour to a democratic one and changing the mental paradigm of an entire nation is the fact that the Communist legacy is preventing the new governments since 1990 onwards to understand what the term ‘reform’ means. Chifu puts the finger on the problem:

‘The concept of Reform is misunderstood. Nobody accepts it is a tool in the process of fundamentally changing a status quo.’54

According to the Democracy Index elaborated by The Economist (2010) in 2010, Romania held position 56 out of 167 countries subject to scrutiny, below Bulgaria, for example, who accessed the European Union alongside Romania in 2007 and who got rid of its Communist regime in the autumn of 1989. The topics analyzed in this report are: electoral process and pluralism; functioning of government; political participation; political culture and civil liberties. Romania has scored only 3.75 points out of 10 in the category ‘political culture’; 5.00 points in political participation; but a 9.58 points in functioning of government. The report has classified Romania as a ‘flawed democracy’, fact that can be easily deducted from the data reported in the document. Yet, the paradox lies in the fact that the highest score was allocated to the functioning of the government, whilst the category of political participation is a meagre 5 points, thus indicating that the electoral process and pluralism are flawed.

The Communist legacy has affected the perception of individuals over what politics mean and how they support the good functioning of a government and has also affected the perception upon democracy. Actually, it is very hard to imagine what ‘democracy’ should mean while one has never had the experience of it.

54 Interview, Chifu 183 6.8 Dependency through collective resistance to change:

If we accept the classification of Kitschelt et al. (1999: 36) of Romania as typifying patrimonial communism before 1989, then there are legacies that we would expect to observe. In relation to public administration, ‘the level of rational-bureaucratic institutionalization in state and party remains low because the ruling clique penetrates the apparatus through nepotistic appointments’ (p. 23). If this was the case under the Caesescu regime, then could the same observation be made today? Kitschelt et al. (1999: 24) continue that following the collapse of communism, patrimonial regimes faced little opposition, or at least one that could advocate a professional bureau capable of political and economic modernisation. In addition, citing Voslensky (1984), Ray (1997) also notes that in patrimonial systems ‘administrative staff accumulated assets and preserved privileges through the nomenklatura system’. If we regard this situation as the result of the previous mix of repression and clientalism in the former regime, the same question also persists, do these assertions have contemporary validity?

Another imprint of Communism over the ways in which Romania has chosen to recover from years of obedience to the Ceausescu regime is embedded in the way the successive governments have thought about approaching the reform of the civil service.

Barbu gives a short but meaningful definition of the issue

‘Collective mentality that the State should take care of everyone’s destiny turns most average individuals into rather passive ones.’55

Uglea gives a longer account of the extent of path-dependency related to the civil service existence and recruitment practices

55 Interview, Barbu 184 ‘In the period before 1989 the positions were occupied on the basis of the marks obtained during the university years. The universities had a very important role by giving recommendation for jobs according to the competences of the student. Now there are at least three stages for selection, provided by law: evaluation of the dossiers, a written paper and interview. What remains constant is the system of recommendation from political parties.’56

Under the Communist regime the State was the only employer, as well as a life-long employer. With no Quangos or private sector organizations on the market, each individual was assessed, trained and allocated to a field of work by the Party. Holding a University degree was a desire of the lower classes, as although it would not guarantee that the graduate would be better educated at the end of the process, it would guarantee access to the middle of the pay-grid and a cosy well paid life-long job. What Uglea does not explain in detail is the fact that the new post-Revolution regulations have not changed the criteria too much. It is true that job specifications have changed, but none of the institutions existing in the civil service put down specific criteria for recruitment other than ‘holding a higher education degree’.

In light of the statements and explanations above, it can be said that as a result of decades of collective thinking and reliance on the Party to provide work and shelter, the newer generations display traits of the same behaviour as their parents. Constantinescu consolidates the conclusions of the other interviewees over the reliance on the hands of the State to provide:

‘In my opinion we cannot be talk about an innovative process of evolution within the Romanian public administration. It is a rather self-replicating process, meaning the administrative procedures, the ideology in place during the ‘90s (the transition period) are more rapidly transmitting from one generation to

56 Interview, Uglea 185 another than the more emancipated formulas, which are based on performance criteria.’57

This thesis thus considers the sociological implications of more than 20 years of dictatorship, and it assesses the vastness of the moral scarring it has left on generations of individuals working for post-Revolution governments. Constantinescu adds to the topic the concept that mostly concerns this thesis: bureaucracy. The bureaucratic element under the definition of Weber constitutes a positive and value-generating mechanism, in which meritocracy is the basis of development, and professionalism constitutes the norm in work relationships. However, in the words of the interviewee, a rather negative view of ‘bureaucracy’ emerges; it is no longer a mechanism, but an entrenched ideology supporting dysfuntional values such as inefficiency, laziness and nepotism:

‘There still are some Communist practices which involve networking for obtaining better services/treatment based on political intervention. The embedded bureaucracy affects the functioning of the public administration and the lack of transparency in some sectors favours the maintenance of corruption traits very specific to the Communist regime experienced by Romania.’58

Although nepotism was not the creation of Communism, as Romania has previously experienced Oriental-style governance, it was enhanced by the minions of the Communist Party. This reminds us of the saying told by Rusandu, which was explained in the resistance to change sub-chapter: ‘if it works, why change it?’. Under Communism, getting better services or getting a better job was reliant on counter-services offered for the favour, or presents. But before one could offer a present the person needed to be indicated whom to ‘talk’ to so as to effectively place the present. Nowadays nepotism may be mistaken for ‘networking’. Dudau voices another concern related to the legacy of Ceausescu

57 Interview, Constantinescu 58 Interview, Constantinescu 186 ‘The State seen as a ‚lifetime employer’ due to the regulatory framework (according to which civil servants can be made redundant only for exceptional misconduct or due to radical re-structuring of the apparatus) is a legacy of the Socialist system. Then, the political culture supports the idea of the Central or Local government as being the main aid (‚social aid’) for the misfits who cannot find a proper job in the private sector or who need to be saved from unemployment. All these have caused a disproportionate and accelerated growth of the apparatus.’59

If we take Dudau’s latter point, this should be possible to observe empirically. Without enumerating all the organizations supported by the Communist regime, and although there is lack of literature documenting the exact number of central organizations, it is noted that Ceausescu’s cabinet comprised of eight ministries named ‘Departments’. They were founded in 1948, before Ceausescu came in power, and until 1989 they suffered various mergers or splitting, but fundamentally stayed the same. In 1989 the NFS kept the exact number of institutions and only changed their names. The real transformation comes in the pre-accession period, when following the EU recommendations for transparency the government started increasing the number of ministries. However, there is a lack of reliable data on these important changes, which would be taken for granted by a researcher in western Europe, for instance. Moreover, there is a lack of statistics on the number of ministries functioning in 2011. I could find information only for the current year, when the Romanian government is composed of 17 ministries. Thus, it is difficult to prove empirically how the size and scope of the Romanian state has changed, but one thing is clear, despite the Revolution, the State apparatus remains largely unscathed. Privatisation has proceeded cautiously while preserving the social networks between former state managers and bureaucrats (Rady, 1992).

59 Interview, Dudau 187 The vastness of the apparatus and the effects it had on Romania in comparison with the Communist era is comprised in what Chifu states about the Communist legacy

‘The Communist hyper-bureaucratisation, which started dismantling once Romania opened to the free market, was re-instituted by the accession to the EU, with its own layers of bureaucracy – the new European institutionalism. This EU influence has resurrected a type of bureaucracy hooked probably in path-dependency. This bureaucracy is a huge draw-back at this moment in time and it acts like a hand-break in the equation State- services provided by the State to the citizens.’60

It is as if Communism was not the biggest mistake that has ever happened and that the governments that have followed have actually ‘learned’ so well from their predecessors that the blame put on the old regime is unsubstantiated.

As it has been shown in a previous sub-chapter, the number of civil servants has increased from 990.000 in 1989 to 1.350.000 in 2010. At the same time, the numerous Cabinets have created or abolished vast numbers of governmental agencies and Ministries. The only Ministry that has stayed the same and has actually increased in powers and personnel is the Ministry of Administration and of Interior (MAI).This institution is the epitome of Communist legacy in terms of proving excessive centralization. MAI regulates and administrates the activity of the Police, the NACS, the former Institute of Public Administration (IPA), the Prefectures as locally devolved Police sub-representations, and at the end of the day, whichever other agency that the existing Prime Minister might deem ‘dysfunctional’ and in need of adjustments.

In other wording, Celac supports all the above said, but points out that Communism is not the only to blame for the lagging behind of the civil service:

60 Interview, Chifu 188 ‘It is true that some of the problems that plague public administration in Romania used to be also present in the functioning of the old communist regime, but it would be false to blame all the very real shortcoming of today on the dire legacy of the past. Probably the most nefarious inherited notion is that the state and its functionaries are placed somewhere above the citizens and can boss them around with impunity. Widespread political patronage and nepotism in the public service reinforce that perception. The quasi-absence of public pressure for meaningful reform of the public service may also be partially explained by the abiding memory of the omnipotent state.’61

Celac raises concerns related to the comatose state of probably the most important stakeholders: the civil society. Unfortunately the ‘blame culture’ is propagated by the citizens who were used not to be able to voice their disdain and reprimand the regime, but the very hard to explain aspect is that of the children of these formerly- oppressed citizens have learned to be passive and wait to be told what to do and how to behave.

Going back to the lack of reform due to the mis-understanding of the term and linking this topic to that of unprofessional civil servants and a flawed apparatus, during the interviews the researcher has noted the lack of understanding of the word ‘reform’ by active civil servants, as well as consultants from the private sector, paid by public organizations to help them develop policies in support of the modernization of Romania. If such individuals are the first ones to misunderstand what change is supposed to mean, it makes it very hard to understand who should be in charge of educating the public sector employees, as well as the citizens so as to move forward in the pursuit of modernization. One of the most compelling answers came from Stanciu, who replied that she did not understand to what the researcher is referring when asking about reform, as there are several reforms ongoing, depending on the problem identified by a specific organization: ‘There are

61 Interview, Celac 189 a number of reform programmes currently. To which are you referring to, cultural reform, administrative or to changing mentalities?’62

On a larger scale, Rusandu comments about the slow reforming of the system in comparison to the EU requirements thus making the transition to the next hot-topic of the research

‘The fact that Romania had to deal with the communist regime for so many years, explains why we are so far behind other European countries, in terms of development and why we now need to take measures to recover all those wasted years. Because we are not used to reforms, we find it very hard now to learn to conceive them, to accept them, to implement them in order to obtain the desired results.’63

Path dependency appears as an obvious explanation for the state of Romanian public administration. However, the analysis appears to bear out the path dependent approach taken by Kitschelt et al (1999:36) in relation to the legacy of patrimonial communism. In short, that the consequences of formal bureaucratization of the state apparatus have in fact resulted in low levels of formal professional bureaucratization and high levels of corruption. In terms of its public service, the result is high levels of corruption and the existence of a ‘predatory elite’ within the bureaucracy (Mungiu-Pippidi 2006: 327). However, path dependency masks many complexities and culture and institutions are hard to separate. A key problem here is to provide detailed data in terms of how institutions have changed, or new ones created or old ones abolished. However, the interviews reveal a consistent pattern and this is further reinforced by examining the civil servants themselves. Developing managers or building institutional capacity remains problematic in the Romanian case.

62 Interview, Stanciu 63 Interview, Rusandu 190 6.9 Conclusion

This chapter renders the cultural perspective of the thesis and has attempted to unpack and explain the relation between culture and the choices made by the Romanian governments over the years, based on past experiences rather than building upon new ones. It seems that Romania finds it difficult to overcome its unique political and cultural development and legacy. In that case, we might find what North (1993) would describe as incremental institutional change. A key finding is the deep politicisation of the Romanian administration, supported by its Balkan cultural variable, a feature seen as vital to understanding Romania as asserted by Weiner (1997). The next key finding is the communist legacy, something that is shared with its CEE neighbours but what set Romania apart was Ceausescu’s own personal legacy built around his personality cult. While revolutions, such as Romania’s in 1989, would appear to act as considerable disruptions to analyses that rely on path dependency, in fact very little changed in the administrative system. This was largely because former members of the previous Communist regime continued to wield political power. The argument that Romania has somehow moved from a communist or even a ‘Ceausescuist’ bureaucracy to a neo-Weberian one, as claimed by many commentators, appears to be particularly unsustainable.

The chapter thus reveals profound resistance to change in the administrative system, despite the revolution. Modernisation and professionalisation in the civil service requires a benign political context, and this has proved to be demonstrably lacking in Romania. Path dependency conditions most of the activities of the civil service, from recruitment, policy formulation to organisational re-structuring. The latter is exhibited in excessive centralisation and a silo mentality among departments and agencies and poor policy coordination. Thus, this chapter provides a comprehensive explanation as to why reform is so difficult in the Romanian public service.

191 Chapter 7: Case Study part II -The Romanian Exceptionalism?

7.1 Introduction:

This chapter sets out the case for Romanian exceptionalism. Although previous chapters have tried to sustain this argument, the purpose of this chapter is to support a key objective of the thesis. Of course, exceptionalism remains a highly contestable term when describing individual nation states, but even countries considered to be most comparable will often have significant differences and trajectories in relation to public administration. The thesis also takes the view that the literature that emerged on ‘post communist’ systems in the 1990s made sweeping assumptions about the similarities between countries, particularly in CEE. The academic literature notes many examples of ‘exceptionalism’: the American exceptionalism, the New Zealand exceptionalism, the East Asian exceptionalism and so forth. More recent literature give evidence on the Northern European exceptionalism, but at a closer glance there is a plethora of papers supporting or dismantling ‘exceptional’ systems. Thus, to reiterate, one of the objectives of the thesis is ‘to demonstrate that Romania’s administrative system is ‘exceptional’ and resistant to EU reform influence’. But what makes a system exceptional, except for the statements of the inhabitants of a system claiming as such?

This chapter will also pursue the further goal of demonstrating that Romania is exceptional, not just because it is part of a wider trend, but because of its particular resilience despite decades of attempts of modernization. Path dependency in this case also supports the case for exceptionalism. As Ray (1995: 442) observes, ‘post- communist societies are not, of course, developing towards a single organizational future’, in other words, they are more divergent than assumed. This chapter now analyses the claims for Romania’s regional and cultural exceptionalism. It then considers whether the case for exceptionalism can be sustained for Romania within a wider European Union (and, as discussed in earlier chapters, where claims for Europeanisation exist). Finally, the chapter will provide an overview of recent

192 political events, especially those surrounding the Presidential Election of 2014, that confirm its relative unique character. At the same time, the influence of religion is also discussed. Although it appears to support a view that path dependency may be eroded, at the same time, the influence of religion may confirm the case for exceptionalism.

7.2 Exceptionalism

To begin with, while the concept is linked to nationalism and resistance to globalisation, exceptionalism demands some attention. One of the most highlighted cases of exceptionalism is argued to be that of New Zealand. The exceptional features of the state are deemed to range from language idioms to the melting pot of indigenous and foreign population (Fairburn,2008). Another noteworthy case is the American exceptionalism. With one of the most recent histories in the life of nations around the world, the United States have already been classified as ‘exceptional’ by due to various features such as federalization, affluence of ethnic cultures, level of public administration development, and these are not the only traits to be counted. As Lipset (1963) described the US, exceptionalism was the result of it being ‘the first new nation’. If the United States and New Zealand can be regarded as examples of exceptions, although the Romanian trajectory has been rather different, its lack of reform impetus as outlined in this thesis, has made it exceptional in character when compared to its neighbours. But if we are to consider the New Zealand example as a ’best’ case of exceptionalism, based on the features mentioned above, then Romania also has a strong case for exceptionalism. However, the literature continues to struggle to account for this as it assumes that countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia start from the same base point despite showing diversity (Kitschelt, 2003).

The concept of exceptionalism also runs counter to the assumptions that emerged around ‘globalisation’ towards the end of the last century. In relation to public administration, the emergence of international trends such as NPM appeared to

193 confirm that the management of the problems of nation states were becoming more similar. Although DiMaggio and Powell (1991) were not writing about public administration in particular, they pointed to the idea of organisational isomorphism as a result of the real or perceived international pressures to reform following internationalised prescriptions. Thus, similar problems received similar responses. ‘Exceptionalism’ thus implies an opposite process to the simplistic policy convergence argument, and emphasises divergence rather than convergence. At the European level, the convergence argument becomes more salient as it assumed that Europeanisation is a process that denies ‘exceptionalism’. Thus, this concept builds upon the arguments about why Romania appears to resist international or modernising trends in public administration.

The thesis of exceptionalism is also rooted in the idea of nationalism, subject to wide and contradictory debate starting around the 18th century. In his Addresses to the German Nation, Fichte centred his argument on the idea that politics are secondary to the people’s will. Volk (the people) imprint their own particularities within a country, thus making it unique (Fichte, 1999). If one is to accept this debate, then by deduction, all nations are different and entitled to be exceptional, underpinned by language and culture. Another trend of thought associates ‘exceptionalism’ in public administration systems with the historical predominance of foreign elites taking over the governing of certain states (Schmidt, 1956). This idea also relates to the process of de-colonisation and how systems of public administration are ‘indigenised’ following independence, albeit while retaining the former colonial apparatus. The assumption is based, again, on Fichte’s idea of nationalism emerging as a response to European countries being ruled by foreigners (in this case, the French occupation of Berlin in 1807-8), but can be extended to former colonies, or indeed ‘satellite states’ of powerful and dominant countries, such as the former Soviet Union (Abizadeh, 2005).

194 7.3 Regional and cultural exceptionalism

It is vital that this section of the chapter begins by re-iterating the concepts of historical institutionalism and path dependency applied in the previous chapter, by enforcing the implications of the impact that the Communist and the more distant past has made on the Romanian public administration system. The net result has been to emphasise the distinctive characteristics of the Romanian political system, even when placed aside its regional neighbours. However, this clearly has not always been the case. Certainly in the period immediately after World War II and up to Ceausescu’s dictatorship from the mid-1960s, one could argue that Romania was a Soviet satellite and no case for exceptionalism could be made. Although this assumption remains a bedrock of the academic literature, Goldman (1997: 268) is still able to argue that ‘Romania’s Stalinistic dictatorship had a unique edge to it’.

As noted in chapter four, Romania converged for a brief period with the Soviet Union, for ten years at the most following World War II. The first challenge to this apparent convergence came under Dej in 1957 who defied the Soviet Union’s plan for industrialisation (Goldman 1997: 269). Yet historically Romania has been isolated for centuries in various ways: geographically, by being the last bastion before the Ottoman and the Russian empires; culturally, divided from the West because of the internal division of regions until the late 19th century; politically, by decades of hard-line Communism and closed borders, followed by the accession to power to the called ‘neocommunists’, which threatened to take over power again (at the moment of writing) by winning the Presidential elections of the 16th of November 2014 (a more detailed discussion of these events are addressed towards the end of the chapter). Holmes (1997) points out that the West cannot possibly understand the extent to which the Romanian population was communist – all the citizens, with the exception of ‘deviants’ were members of the Communist Party, which makes the transition to a multi-party system still problematic.

If we move from political to social culture, with a tradition of accommodating different ethnic minorities, maybe not always whole-heartedly, but certainly with

195 tolerance, Romania is benefiting from an array of cultures contributing to the continuance of traditions. On the other hand, considering for how many years the majoritarian Romanian population (approx. 89.5%) has shared the same country with various ethnic minorities amounting to 10.5% of the population, the lack of integration and cross-cultural policies is overwhelming. Accused by the EU of intolerance, Romania finds it hard to integrate the Roma community (approx. 3.6% of the population), and is constantly battling with the Hungarian minority (approx. 6.6% of the population) over the potential right of the Hungarian minority to separate the Transylvanian plateau from Romania and creating an autonomous region. Goldman (1997) indicates that resentment instead of shared unity goals between minorities and Romanians stem from the Ceausescu era, when the dictator emphasized the importance of nationalism as a mechanism to deter the populations’ attention from important issues such as economic decline, forced industrialization and many more. The phenomena is named by Goldman ‘mythologic overcompensation’, a process through which Ceausescu managed to legitimize his regime. The effects of it can still be traced, and is consistent with myth-creation in Romania (see Appendix II).

Under the Ceausescu regime the ‘mythologic overcompensation’ resulted in the ousting of the Jewish and German population, and in the poor relationship with the Hungarian minority. Currently the Romanian government makes efforts to prevent the so-called ‘re-Hungarization’ of Transylvania, described above, while completely overlooking that Harghita and Covasna County (where the Hungarian population outnumbers the Romanians) are among the poorest counties in Romania. Thus, it is remarkable that in an era when governments and international organizations are pushing the agenda for co-operation and convergence, Romania flounts intolerance that has, in effect, continued from the Communist era, while maintaining EU compliance. This leads to a further point, can a claim for exceptionalism be made now that Romania is a full member of the EU, although claims for Europeanisation are often unsustainable (Richards and Smith 2002: 169).

196 Thus, the aim of this section is not to revisit the ideas put forward in the European Accession chapter of the thesis, but to consider the discussion over the potential causes of Romanian exceptionalism from the stand-point of a newly accessed country of the EU, which appears a contradictory statement. Of course, another question which might arise in this stage is how long does it take a state to be both considered not a ‘newly accessed’ among its peer European states, as well as how should such a state behave after seven years from accession to the EU? In light of European regulations where the newcomers into the agreement are closely monitored and rated, could it be possible that a reaction would be that of resistance and prevention of loss of national identity that triggers divergence? Goldman’s (1997) discussion of nationalistic instincts in Romania would support that view.

7.4 Features of Romanian Exceptionalism

As previously noted, an assumption of globalization suggests that countries may adopt a divergent behaviour when faced with the requirements of uniform convergence. This supports the 18th century idea of Fichte that the future will attract unification of nations (in his case, he suggested unification under Christianism, which is highly debatable in the present day), which immediately triggered a wave of nationalism among European countries (McCrone, 1998). Romania is not the only country fighting back a world and a society in motion, but it is one of the few that appears to run the risk of de-modernization. This idea runs counter to much of the theory about post-communism and modernity, as outlined by Holmes (1997).

A lot of the issues acting as a brake rather than a steering agent for Romania revolve around the past, which continues to have a strong influence on the present. But instead of drawing lessons from the past and never repeating them again, the system has acquired this capacity for replicating poor practices and creating modern myths about the existence of exceptionalism. The idea that Romanians are exceptional (without being validated yet by any authority or international forum) is

197 so widespread within the layers of the Romanian society that it needs to be analyzed and discussed even on public debates on Romanian television channels. I have recently stumbled across a transcription of such a debate, which is translated and attached in the Appendices of the Thesis. Although the validity of the information might be questionable, I have decided to use it in support of the Romanian historical and cultural exceptionalism explained by Romanian historians and journalists for the masses. It represents a social exercise in attempting to understand what pushes certain nations to desire to be different while the Globalisation ‘norm’ is that of attempting to be convergent and similar along with the modernising arguments of Huntington and others analysed in Holmes (1997) when looking for a theory regarding the collapse of communism.

Thus, it appears that exceptionalism is a conscious process in Romanian policy making. Nita has an explanation for the aforementioned observation above:

As I said, Romania historically inherited the French system and is still continuing to use it. On the other hand, Romania was forced to introduce some changes imposed by the EU before entering the EU. However, most of these changes have been changed back again or “adapted” based on a “traditional Romanian recipe” of creating new systems instead of using systems that have been validated in other countries. As a result the whole system is an unfortunate mix of various concepts from various countries backed up by a very complicated legislation.64

In other words, Romanians have a nationalistic self-belief which defies international pressures. In relation to the European integration and myth creation, what makes Romanians different is that for centuries, up to the present day, they have believed of being a ‘bridge between the East and the West’. This is a theme explored by Ekiert and Hanson (2003: 36) who cite Rupnik (1989:4) who described this notion as

64 Interview, Nita 198 ‘more a state of mind than a scientific concept’ but its implications for Romania are clear.

It was noted in Chapter Two that some commentators suggested that CEE countries were converging on the Neo-Weberian state, and this was further explored in Chapter 4 when discussing the administrative context of Romania. The argument was made that it was difficult to make this claim for Romania. However, in the context of exceptionalism, this notion should be revisited by comparing Romania to another country with NSW characteristics. To reiterate the earlier discussion, when outlining the major administrative reform movements, such as NPM and the New Public Governance, Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011:19) regarded the NWS as ‘an attempt to modernize traditional bureaucracy by making it more professional, efficient, and citizen-friendly’. The NWS is considered to characterise Western European and Nordic countries, which tend to be more ‘optimistic and trusting’ of the state when compared to NPM although ‘business like methods may have a subsidiary role in this’ but the model remained ‘Weberian’ because authority is still ‘exercised through a disciplined hierarchy of impartial officials’ (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011: 22). One example of a neo-Weberian state is France, which has largely resisted NPM due to a strong administrative tradition underscored by a centralised bureaucracy (Lynn, 2008).

Although Romania, at least superficially, appears more receptive to the ideas of NPM and other market influenced methods, France has tended to follow its own approach to administrative reform, although favouring the use of business methods (such as devolved budgeting) rather than outright privatisation (such as the sale of the activities of public sector agencies to the private sector) (Clark, 1998: 103). It appears that in France, reaffirming the reputation of the central bureaucracy is equally important as growing professionalization within it (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011: 272). Unlike Romania, France has a strong administrative tradition that has developed over the last two centuries since Napoleon. It also possesses a grands corps which dominates the bureaucracy which is underpinned by its administrative

199 law which acts as a brake on management reform (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011: 273) In line with the NWS, it has a state-centric conception of governance and a system of administrative law for regulating the policy process (Rouban 2008: 134). In addition, there is a strong ‘public service’ notion which emphasises state intervention to ‘preserve the welfare state and to foster solidarity among citizens’ (Rouban 2008: 134). Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011) identify decentralization and modernization as key reform themes in France but successive governments have continued to keep France as a strong administrative state with centralized control of personnel and in these general respects, it looks similar to Romania. However, Romania remains much more centralised when compared to France, lacking any intermediary level such as the regional governments first established in France in 1982. As Rouban (2008: 138) notes, decentralisation in France has allowed public management to be implemented more easily in the periphery than in central ministries or agencies. However, France remains a unitary state and subsequent decentralisation initiatives in 2003 proved difficult for the French government to negotiate. In relation to modernisation, ‘most French managers have been trained under the umbrella of the administrative law tradition and they do not share a strong public management culture’ (Rouban 2008: 139). However, Forest (2008: 337) argues that management practices such as performance-related pay have proved difficult to implement, despite the rhetoric of modernisation.

If we accept France as an example of a Neo-Weberian state it appears the differences outweigh the similarities with Romania. Rouban (2008: 147) argues that the EU integration process has served to reinforce the emphasis on administrative law. It could be argued that both countries are Rechsstaat states, but this is where the similarity starts to dissipate. Although this characteristic could be used to explain why international reform trends have not gripped either country to the same extent as others, Romania lags behind France in terms of both decentralization and modernization although it is granted that Romania’s engagement with administrative change is much more recent than that of France. To return to the concept of the Neo-Weberian state, there is a perception in France

200 that modernisation is hampered by perceptions of politicisation at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy (Rouban 2008). Reforms such as the loi organique sur les lois de finances (LOLF) voted in 2003 appear to have moved public servants to a more results-oriented perspective although Rouban (2008: 139) argues that this is not the result of a paradigm shift towards managerialism within the bureaucracy. Another facet of exceptionalism in Romania is cultural. In the 21st century, where globalization, integration into wider economic communities and other processes happens at such a quick pace, one of the elite Romanian historians, Zoe Petre, made this statement:

‘Our origins must by all means be ‘noble’ and ‘pure’, whether we speak of the Latin or the Dacian origins, the Christian or even the Orthodox ones: few people would accept to imagine the Romanian people as the result of complex and repeated combinations, in spite of the fact that such ethnic- linguistic and cultural mixtures must have been very active in the past, to say nothing of the present.’65

There is also an ingrained complex of inferiority in the national psyche which leads to exceptionalistic myth-making. Another notable historian, Lucian Boia, who took part in the debate mentioned above, makes the following point: ‘This mythology of the origins has known very intense manifestations with us because it compensates several inferiority complexes vis-à-vis the surrounding powers’. 66 Moreover, Boia draws attention to the almost hypochondriac Romanian tendency of analysing history and culture from every possible angle in search of the most satisfactory explanation – in this case, the pursuit of exception: ‘This interest in the national psychology – so persistent as to amaze the Westerners – originates in a pseudo- science typical of the 19th century, which has gone down to us rather in the attempts at defining the Romanian as a special being. Hence several themes that

65 Translation of the transcription of the televised discussion over the Founding Myths of the Romanians may be found in the Appendices section. 66In 2001 Lucian Boia managed to scandalize Romanian society by publishing a book titled ‘History and Myth in the Romanian Consciousness’, in which he dismantles the embedded beliefs of the population over the exceptional decadence of the Romanians and many more controversial aspects. 201 have become reference points in this discourse, such as ‘the Mioritza space”, with Lucian Blaga, or ‘the Romanian sense of being’, with Noica. Hence, we represent ourselves as ‘a bridge between East and West’, yet not belonging to either. Truth is, of course, that we are no monolith group; we are very diverse, just like the other people.

The relationship with ‘the West’ (Europe, as such) has also been subject to constant debate and arguing within the Romanian society, always brushing the topic of localization of Romania on the map of influential relations in Europe and the wider international society. Romanians always attempt to find indication that the West is culturally closer to them than expected: ‘Our big cultural traditions (quite distinct from the small rural ones) are also based on a self-flattering social representation, that of an exceptional relationship between ourselves and the West, which seeks to belittle the other small cultures, neighbours to us, and to throw us in a special light’, opines political scientist Alina Mungiu-Pippidi.67 If a case can be made for exceptionalism in the sense that Romania has a political culture reflected both in its institutional development that was cemented by the communist era, then it would be expected that this would be expressed politically up to the present day. It seems that writers such as Goldman (1997) were premature when he declared the end of the neo-communist era in Romania when one looks at very recent events.

Returning to the conceptual debate of exceptional features of Romania, it is to be noted that only after seven years from accession the system seems to be suffering from compliance fatigue without ever having really appropriated the European values in any depth. Chifu supports this idea in the following statement

‚The EU is imposing on us where to look. As an example, the best system for managing anything is directed by the EU, there is no specific area of management or any specific institution being pointed at as a model. It varies from one critical area to another, you look at the available models and you

67 See Appendix II 202 choose the closest to your problem or the most feasible as such. In Romania policy transfer can be compared to a jigsaw puzzle.’68

In the discussion of the Presidential campaign of 2014 below, it also appears to underscore the persistence of the former communist regime at a cultural and behavioural level. While most of the events described in the next section are open to scrutiny and intepretation, the appellation of the ‚young dinosaur’ has echoes of the nomenklatura under the communist era. Despite EU accession, and wider integration into other international organisations, including NATO membership, the WTO, the political culture has changed in only the most superficial way. Above, Chifu mentions policy transfer. As with administration change, policy learning and transfer can only meet with success if the institutional conditions are conducive to the adoption of progressive ideas from elsewhere. It seems the case is also true of political behaviour. However, the institutional conditions remain peculiarly Romanian.

7.5 The Presidential Campaign of 2014: Another case of exceptionalism?69

If Mungiu-Pippidi is right, and that Romania instinctively looks to Europe, then one would expect to observe a closer convergence in political cultures. To interrogate this possiblity, this section considers some current events (at the time of writing), the impending election of the new President of Romania in mid-November 2014. It is ‘exceptional’ in that after 25 years from the Romanian revolution, in the second round of elections the candidate that is considered to have the clear lead with the electorate is a ‘young dinosaur’, as one of the interviewees categorized the new generation of politicians and civil servants in chapter 6. A party loyalist (Victor Ponta) since the mid-1990s, when a Law school graduate, he chose the doctrine of the former Front of National Salvation which was the dominant faction after the revolution. This political grouping became the Social-Democratic Party in 1992,

68 Interview, Chifu 69 This section is largely derived from a mixture of ad hoc media reports, personal accounts and observations. The events described are a matter of public record but the academic literature (to date) has barely addressed this political event. 203 and he rose through its ranks until the point when he was appointed Prime Minister in 2012. One of the prominent aspects of his appointment is that when it happened him and his allies tried to impeach the current President, Traian Basescu. Without going into too much detail, as the scope of the thesis is not to debate over Romanian politics, the current PM turned potential new President, was awarded a PhD from the University of Bucharest, but ever since his success in the political arena his title has been under scrutiny and part of an enquiry over the validity of his thesis. Two academic panels have proved that he has plagiarised his thesis and recommended that he is stripped off his title of Doctor, in line with similar incidents in Germany and Austria, also involving cabinet ministers. At the time of writing, he still has a PhD, following an investigation by the Ministry of Education, which dismissed the plagiarism claims. This incident also resonates with wider topics associated with public administration such as corruption and false academic autonomy in Romania, since the panel looking into the legitimacy of the doctoral title was chaired by the Minister of Education, a member of the same party as the PM and herself also under inquiry over embezzlement. This kind of political campaigning, whereby candidates become ‘prey’ for their opponents is thought to be part of Romanian political culture (Buja 2015: 18).

Not only at the national level, but at EU level as well, the political direction and the social agenda adopted by the above mentioned candidate, Ponta, has raised concerns (Gherghina, 2015: 111). On the eve of the second round of elections, the PM appeared to shed any political ideology and struck electoral deals with the far- right parties, the centre-right parties and the Democratic Union of the Hungarians in Romania. His centre-right opponent apparently facing electoral defeat after members of his party have deserted him in favour of promises by the PM to be appointed in Cabinet positions upon presidential election success.

Although it would be easy to consider more anecdotes from the recent Presidential elections, it is worth noting that the current PM also raised the possibility of Romania leaving the EU. On the 4th November 2014, this was part of his address to supporters:

204 ‚Mr. Iohannis is speaking to things70, I am speaking to people. Mr. Iohannis is a thing, I am a Romanian. (…) I want to talk about the Romanians and about Romania, not about things, and I don’t want us to be ordered again from abroad, from the EPP and other individuals who derided Romania in 2012 as well, about how to live in Romania. We thank them, but we alone know what’s best for Romania and their orders and their scorn of the Romanians are something we are not going to accept anymore.’71

With one phrase, the PM managed to insult his political opponent (Iohannis), as well as challenging the moral values of ethnicity and the European credo in Romania. Given Romania’ s recent EU accession, the prospect of ‘Euroscepticism’ was introduced by a potential new President of Romania. The implications thus appear to threaten the integrity of the process of administrative modernization. In addition, in the context of his wife being an MEP, and a member of the European Socialists Party, attacking another European party is an act which may undermine Romania’s credibility at a moment when the EU is continuously questioning Romania’s dedication to the process of reform and modernization.

The current PM, Mr Ponta, had strong beliefs against allowing the counting of votes from Romanian expatriates. Although there seems to be a lack of documents available to support this assertion, during the impeachment procedure the PM has stated that Romanians living abroad should not be allowed to vote in elections, due to the fact that they are detached or removed from the issues that Romania is facing. In addition, the current President, Mr Basescu, who first supported the initiative of allowing Romanian expatriates to vote by postal ballots only in 2008, has not followed up on this.

70 Alluding to the competitor’s electoral slogan “The Romania of things well done” 71 The Romanian Prime Minister’s address to the Social Democrat Party county leaders at an electoral assembly, on the 4th of November 2014. Link http://www.evz.ro/victor-ponta-nu-vreau-sa- primim-din-nou-ordine-din-afara-tarii-noi-stim-mai-bine-ce-sa-facem-in-romania.html, find translation in Appendices. 205 However, during the first election round, a number of irregularities were notified by expatriates to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, such as poor queueing arrangements, the insufficient number of polling stations and the lack of fast-tracking of the disabled and families with small children. This observation is in line with the poor organisation of the election (Giugal, 2015). In Paris, the Embassy had called the Gendarmes to intervene, claiming that the expatriates were preventing the elections from taking place in an orderly manner. What the press has reported from the polling stations in Paris was that the Gendarmes were called at 9pm in the evening, when polling was due to close and to remove any Romanians found inside the embassy. Legally, the citizens found inside the polling station at the time of closing will still be allowed to vote. It appeared that many Romanians were prevented from casting their vote that evening.

These actions sparked large protests in Romania, drawing out on the streets students and young professionals in particular, in an attempt to keep the polling stations open until all the potential voters could fulfill their duty of voting. The demands were met with apparent government disdain, but resulting in the eventual resignation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The reason for the resignation resulted in arguments between the former Minister with the Central Electoral Bureau over procedural matters, with the latter organisation claiming that the Law allows the Minister of Foreign Affairs to open new polling stations, while the former Minister claimed that the polling stations can be opened only within the premises of Embassies and Consulates. However, the attempt to engineer the overseas vote by politicians and officials alike is a demonstration of the lack of transparency and openness that persists in Romanian political culture.

As a voter in the first round, I experienced casting my vote in Leeds Civic Hall (West Yorkshire), rented by the Romanian authorities especially for that occasion. After this first round of elections, the current PM was declared winner, with a result of 40% of the votes in his favour (out of 14 candidates in the first round). During the official two weeks length of time allowed between the rounds of elections, the Minister of Foreign Affairs who stepped down from the post, was replaced by one

206 of the former presidential candidates, implying that the current PM has acquired even greater confidence in the final results of the elections. Despite daily protests around Romania, asking the Government to open more polling stations for the diaspora, their pleas were not answered.

The second round of elections took place on the 16th of November 2014. I was not able to vote on that occasion, due to the length of the queue at the same polling station I attended before. Indeed, the same faults could be found with the organization of the process of voting. Insufficient room for more than four voters at the same time within the station (while outside there was a queue of some hundreds of people), absence of fast-tracking of the disabled, elderly and family with dependants. After two hours of waiting, I decided to leave when officials closed the doors and requested the presence of security services (while outside the building people were calm and there was a lack of incidents). At the same time, in Paris and Turin, Romanian officials had called the special forces to throw tear gas at the voters outside the buildings, in order to disperse them and keep them away from the polling station.

When examining the official list of international polling stations, it is notable that in Italy, where the Romanian Government had opened 50 polling stations, a number of incidents were reported. In comparison, in France, only eight stations were opened and in Great Britain only 11. Yet in smaller countries such as Israel and the Czech republic, three stations were open. 72 On the other hand, similar incidents were registered in the Republic of Moldova, where considering the relatively small size of the country, there were 21 stations open for expatriate voters. The problem with the expatriate vote was widely noted (Gherghina, 2015). What is revealing is

72 Available on the official website of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at http://www.mae.ro/sites/default/files/file/evenimente/alegeri_prezidentiale/2014.09.18_lista_secti i_votare_alegeri.pdf 207 that according to the Central Electoral Bureau, 97% of expatriate Romanians have voted against the current PM.73

Path Breaking Change? The Influence of the Church

Although the situation created by the Presidential elections of 2014 appears to underline path dependence within the Romanian government, by acting to preserve the dominance of the Social Democratic Party, it was ultimately unsuccessful due to expatriate votes. The elections were eventually won by the Christian Liberal Alliance (comprising the National Liberal Party and the Democrat Liberal Party), although it is too early to suggest that there has been a fundamental political shift. However, it is also worth noting that for the first time since the 19th century, a member of an ethnic minority has been elected as President. In addition, in a country where the Christian Orthodox Church is dominant, to have a future Lutheran president is a unique prospect for Romania. According to the 2011 census on faiths in Romania, 86.5% of the population is Christian Orthodox, while the Lutheran faith is not even stated in the census, being absorbed in the category ‘other faiths’.74 It is important to make this note, as after the 1989 Revolution the vast majority of the population has turned highly religious, motivated by the oppression of Communism which prevented them to express their faith (Rady 1992: 163).

It has been noted that data from the National Institute of Statistics is very hard to access, and more often a certain category of information has still not been compiled, despite becoming ‘old story’. Therefore, official data is unavailable on public opinion regarding organised religion. However, an independent social opinion monitoring organization, INSCOP, has applied a survey assessing the levels

73 Results available on the Central Electoral Bureau website, at http://www.bec2014.ro/rezultate- turul-ii-2/; accessed on the 19th of November 2014, the results were still the provisional final results, although they were supposed to be made permanent on the 17th of November 2014 74 Data available at http://www.recensamantromania.ro/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/TS8.pdf, accessed on 19/11/2014 208 of confidence of the Romanian population in the activity of the authorities. The Orthodox Church has registered a level of confidence of 63.4%, above Universities (41%) for example.75 While this aspect has not been a central concern of the thesis, one feature of Romanian civil society that has marked a break with the communist legacy is the emergence of the church as an important and influential social institution (Elster et al. 1998).

It is well established that the Orthodox Church has attempted to influence the state following the Revolution, usually by constant support for the Social Democrat Party and encouraging church and congregation members to vote for their candidates, thus breaching moral and legal regulations of non-interference in statal affairs. It will be interesting to see how the leaders of the Romanian Church will adapt to the new Presidency, as during the electoral campaign they have been proferring threats in the direction of ‘the German’, while on the 16th of November 2014, the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church has publicly stated the following:

‘In the history of the Romanian people, as a result of the prayers for freedom and national unity, God’s will has often worked even through individuals who are strangers to our nation. For example, the Unification of Romania has been achieved with the help of the great leaders King Ferdinand and Queen Mary, who didn’t have an ounce of Romanian blood in their veins. When God decides to raise his favour upon a nation, His will is done through the individual He chooses, when and where He chooses, so that we learn that not only our kin and relatives could help, but more so even strangers from our blood, who love [Romanians] and want to help.’76

Both the tone of the message and the allusion to the President’s election an hour before the preliminary results were announced appeared to take commentators by surprise. The discourse may have been aimed at appeasing the conscience of

75 Data available at http://www.ziare.com/articole/sondaj+incredere+biserica, accessed on 19/11/2014 76 Article available at http://psnews.ro/declaratie-total-neasteptata-preafericitului-daniel/, accessed on the 19/11/2014 Partial translation in English by myself, third paragraph from top, in bold font. 209 church members, convinced that an Orthodox follower would be a pre-requisite for the Presidency, and by extension, a Romanian. On the other hand, the Christian Liberal Alliance presented during the electoral campaign an end to corruption and the de-politicization of public administration, proposals that stood in sharp contrast to the concerns highlighted above. However, compromise would have to be reached, as reported in The New York Times: ‘Mr. Ponta’s party, the Social Democrats, has a working majority in Parliament, and he remains prime minister, so he and Mr. Iohannis will have to try to find a way to work together, probably until the next parliamentary elections in 2016.’77

7.6 Conclusions

It might be easy to posit that if this chapter establishes the case for Romanian exceptionalism, it simply explains why resistance to change is overwhelming. The strength of path dependency is such that despite a revoluton in 1989, and EU accession in 2007, very little has changed. In their analysis of institutional design in post-communist societies, Elster et al (1998: 293) suggest that outcomes are the product of ‘legacies, institutions or decisions’ although these variables are overlapping. What this chapter has established is that the same behavioural or cultural traits have not disappeared in Romania during the transition process (although Romania’s was the least smooth transition in the CEE region). These same attitudes have persisted and have expressed themselves in the lastest round of Presidential elections. It is worth quoting Elster et al. (1998: 294) at length by way of a conclusion:

…the transformation process will be slow and highly path-dependent, and lasting differences in the degree of economic, political and cultural modernization must be largely attributed to petrified country-specific

77 ‘Favourite Concedes Presidency in Romania’, by Kit Gillet, at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/world/europe/favorite-concedes-presidency-in- romania.html?_r=0, accessed 19/11/2014 210 historical differences as they were formed before 1989 – and often before 1945 or before 1918.

Finally, this chapter was not about establishing a case for Romanian exceptionalism per se, but to provide an explanation for the lack of reform outcomes. This is to challenge the over-determined assumptions around modernisation in Romania in particular, although such an argument has generalisability to other post-communist states. It is notable that in the plethora of academic literature that appeared in the 1990s that made such assumptions were premature. It is significant that at the time of writing, Romania is about to mark the 25th anniversary of its revolution but the question is, what has changed? It is hoped that the next chapter offers a conclusion that provides a definitive answer.

211 Chapter 8: Conclusions

8.1 Introduction

The last chapter finished with the unremarkable conclusion that resistance to change in Romanian public administration is overwhelming, despite the predictions of international modernisers, democratisers and so forth. It is the depth of this resistance, explained by path dependency, that makes the case for ‚exceptionalism’. So, what is remarkable about Romania within the context of the so-called transition states of CEE is the depth and breadth of that resistance, and again, it defies the generally accepted literature that focuses on the region that dispenses concepts such as Europeanisation and neo-Weberianism that seem rather deterministic in the light of the findings of this thesis. Even the notion of the transitory state has proved to be highly contestable (Holmes, 1997). Within this conceptual terrain lies the argument for Romanian ‘exceptionalism’, that despite the often ‘broad brush’ commentaries around CEE countries, there is a strong case for anomaly in the case of Romania. This concluding chapter begins by revisiting the original objectives of the thesis and puts them against the main findings, and the literature, where relevant. The chapter then considers the limitations of the research and the potential contribution of the thesis to theory and to assess the generalizability of its findings.

8.2 The research objectives revisited

This section reiterates the objectives stated in Chapter One beginning with:

 to elucidate key aspects of administrative policy making in Romania

In some ways, this was the most difficult of the objectives to address, largely because of the persistence of the post-communist legacy and the lack of evidence, written or otherwise. Unlike western liberal democracies where there is a developed academic literature on this subject, along with government publications,

212 White Papers and so forth, such material proved to be scarce. However, despite these challenges, the key aspects to emerge were:

- A lack of transparency. Although easily attributed to the legacy of the communist state, the 1989 revolution and preparation for EU accession did little to dispel the opaque nature of administrative change in Romania. Moreover, the persistence of the use of administrative law to change the nature of public administration means that there has been very little convergence with Western policy making approaches. The legalistic approach is not sufficient to trigger the type of deep-seated cultural and behavioural changes to encourage greater transpacency and the other attributes associated with administrative modernisation.

- A lack of concern with efficiency and effectiveness. Despite the lip service paid to international reform agendas, this aspect also remains neglected in the Romanian context. Outside observers assume that administrative policy- making serves to reinforce rent-seeking from officials, along with associated corruption and supported by a lack of Weberian bureaucratic mechanisms, etc. Although this assumption is disputed (Grabher and Stark, 2010), ‚better’ public service delivery remains a secondary concern.

- A continued reliance on legal mechanisms. As noted above, this approach is inadequate and has yet to be replaced by the sort of administrative or political cultural change that has resulted in the ‘public interest’ model that was identified by Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004). In fact, this seems a remote impossibility, and while Romania is certainly not alone if it diverges from Western models, the thesis supports the view that this key aspect is set to continue.

Each of these points are now expanded. Chapter 4 was central to addressing this first objective of the thesis. From the establishment of Communist rule (effectively

213 from the end of World War 2) through to the revolution in 1989, administrative policy-making was marked by the kind of deep politicisation and centralisation associated with totalitarian states, further exacerbated by Ceausescu’s dictatorship. In fact, it was over four decades of communist rule that had more of an impact on administrative policy-making when compared to the revolution and EU accession. The lack of transparency comes as no surprise. Writers such as McFaul (2002) described it as a process of Europeanisation without decommunization. As far as administrative policy making is concerned, the word ‚revolution’ is a misnomer as it was not ‘path breaking’.

Developing administrative efficiency and effectiveness was not on the agenda following the revolution, at least initially. Nunberg (1999) compared Romania to four other post-Communist states (Poland, Hungary and the former GDR) and found that Romania’s administrative system had not changed when compared to the other states during the post-revolutionary period. Despite the work of international organisations such as the World Bank during the post-transition period, informalism marked public administration in Romania (patronage, politicisation, nomenklatura, etc.) It was expected that the granting of EU candidate status to Romania in 1999 would shift Romania towards a more transparent bureaucracy that adhered to Weberian principles, but as Chapter 4 reveals, administrative policy-making continued to rely on legal mechanisms and once Romania joined the EU in 2007, there have been accusations of ‘back-sliding’. In line with many other European countries, the Rechtsstaat culture (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004) remains entrenched in Romania and helps to explain its approach to administrative policy making (or lack of it) in the same way other accounts from developed democracies such as France, Germany and Italy explain slow or reluctant adoptions of NPM or other managerialist approaches.

The second objective of the thesis was:

 to analyse the mechanisms that prevent Romania from substantially reforming its public administration system

214 The mechanisms identified in the thesis were: - poor personnel/HR practices. The continued politicisation of the bureaucracy was clearly identified by the thesis as a key obstacle. Attempts to bring in appointment by merit, reward by performance and the other elements of the ‘universalist’ approach of HRM based on ‘best practice’ is clearly disputed by the Romanian context where patronage and favouritism continue to have a huge bearing on recruitment, selection and career development.

- multiple and conflicting advice from international organisations/consultancies: Romania has not been helped in this respect. Although the thesis has concentrated on the EU’s influence on administrative reform, the World Bank and international consultancies have also been influential and have undoubtedly contributed to contradictory practices. The creation of a European administrative space has not been an achievable goal in Romania due in part to inconsistencies and the difficulty of transferring knowledge from training and development into a resistant bureaucracy.

- lack of incentives: although this is a controversial point, the relatively low level of remuneration and a lack of transparent reward mechanisms make the implementation of change difficult. Despite innovations such as the YPS, Romania has not been successful in making public administration an attractive career choice for talented young people. Many former YPS graduates have chosen careers outside the Romanian civil service representing a poor return on investment.

In Chapter 6, it was demonstrated that path dependence and administrative culture provided the conceptual background to Romania’s reluctance to reform. Beyond legalistic approaches, other mechanisms that were available to reformers that included the introduction of HRM, also have little traction. The literature (i.e. Bouckaert, 2007) provides evidence why managerialist reforms often fail beyond

215 their point of origin (the Anglophone world; or the core reform countries of the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia). The main point is that mechanisms such as HRM rely on a receptive culture for it to flourish but as Chapter 6 points out, the culture is not receptive and the term ‘Balkanism’ was introduced (Todorova, 1994). Interviewees such as Podgorean expanded upon this term which is ‘the desire to bend the rule and give bribe…(which) constitute(s) a pattern of Balkanised- Communism which still lingers and stalls any reform process…’

The next objective was

 to determine the evolution of managerial processes shaped by both the internal environment and the European legal framework

The thesis identified the following processes:

- slow/incremental evolution, partially internally generated. It would be disingenous to suggest that nothing has changed, particularly following the revolution and the lead up to EU accession. The European framework has produced some changes in the form of coercive policy transfer (that carried the threat of non-accession had changed not occurred) and attempts at greater professionalisation (e.g. the YPS) were internally generated. - lack of decentralisation: this applies to both managerial and administrative decentralisation. The EU created the basis for some degree of local government but the strong hierarchy of the former communist administrative state remains largely intact. - preparation of EU accession significant but ‘back sliding’ post 2007: this process implies that some of the changes have not been sustained following EU accession. This is largely mirrored in the political environment, and the account of the presidential elections of 2014 in the previous chapter appear to confirm this view.

216 Chapters 4 and 5 concentrated on the very slow and incremental changes identified. To concentrate on EU accession, it was noted that communist rule had more of an impact on public administration in Romania rather than any subsequent developments, but the influence of the EU cannot be ignored. A central reform concept in international public administration has been decentralisation, but this has made very little headway in Romania and where it has, it is limited to territorial decentralisation with the creation of counties along with a need to converge on EU regional funding policy. The EU insisted on the acquis78 and other requisites for accession as well as offering PHARE funds, etc. but it was not the only external actor, as Chapter 5 demonstrates. The Europeanisation argument is also undermined to some extent in the case of Romania as the thesis has identified the important contextual factors that have mitigated against this process.

Not all reforms solutions were externally generated. Chapter 5 also examines internal, or domestic, approaches to reform problems. These did not appear until well after the revolution and includes developments such as the YPS up until the recent declaration on public administration made by the outgoing Romanian president last year. With the latter, it could be seen as a response to Romania being accused of back-sliding on the few gains it has made since EU accession. The World Bank has continued involvement in this area, such as with the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) and the New Capability Framework of 2012.

The next objective was

 to provide an analysis of the influence of path-dependency and culture over administrative reforms in Romania (exceptionalism argument)

To deal with path dependency as a key explanatory variable first. The Romanian trajectory differs considerably from its neighbouring countries and supports the exceptionalist argument. On the evidence, the case for Romanian ‘exceptionalism’ does appear convincing. The interviewees appear exasperated or cynical about the

78The more popular use of the term ‛acquis communautaire’ (French) or EU acquis, which describes the entirety of EU regulations, treaties, practices. In short, EU Law. 217 ability of the country to reform, even when compared to its CEE neighbours. The Romanian case for exceptionalism goes at least as far back as the Gheorgheiu-Dej leadership under communism, Ceasescu’s predecessor (Granville, 2011). The leadership in Romania was also regarded as an exception to the self-legitimation argument in Eastern Europe as ‚it seemed not to lose faith in itself’ (Holmes, 1997: 82). Exceptionalism is thus used as an explanatory variable for Romania’s often paradoxical approach to its political economy more widely. The real affirmation of the exceptionalist argument (or that Romania cannot be compared to other countries) is eroded by the implicit convergence with EU member states. However, there appears to be sufficient evidence in the case study that exceptionalism persists and that even with the country most frequently compared to Romania - Bulgaria - significant differences remain. Under the communist regime, Albania was also offered as a comparison to Romania, but that tentative comparison has long gone. As Holmes (1997: 83) also notes, Romania differs ‚qualitatively’ from its neighbours in terms of the violence of the revolution which indicates the depth of repression that had been experienced by the public. The overall result has been a damaging path-dependency over-laden by cultural considerations which make reform efforts even more halting.

The thesis appears to support the work of Stark and Bruszt (2001: 1132) and others who find path dependence a useful explanation for the state of public administration, and quoting their earlier work:

Actors who seek to introduce change require resources to overcome obstacles to change. This exploitation of existing institutionalized resources is a principal component of the paradox that even instances of transformation are marked by path dependence.

Of course, what is absent from this particular account is that although Stark and Bruszt attempted to explain variation in the ‘post-socialist’ eastern Europe, Romania was not one of the countries included in their comparative study, but the thesis appears to support their overall conclusions.

218 However, if we put these research findings alongside another contributor of David Stark’s, Grabher, we find an inherent contradiction. Grabher and Stark (2010) argued that path dependency prevents the very type of neo-liberal policies from being implemented as part of the economic transition. If we associate developments such as New Public Management as being part of the neo-liberal public policy trend, with its notions of a professionally managed bureau, then path dependency helps to account for their failure to take root. Alternatively, the new forms of organisations and networks discussed by Grabher and Stark (2010) are not discernible in Romania, but again as with the work done with Bruszt, David Stark appears not to have looked at Romania. This lack of analysis actually supports the exceptionalist argument, that Romania was too difficult or different to make a comparative analysis convincing.

The second aspect of the objective relates to culture, which supports path dependency and provides an institutionalist explanation. If we assume that political and/or administrative cultures adds to bureaucratic inertia, supported by certain national cultural characteristics, then this provides a convincing account of the lack of reform attempts. In the case of Romania, this is strongly linked to path dependency. This, in turn, leads to the final objective of the thesis which was

 to demonstrate that a persistent unprofessional bureaucracy in Romania is a result of the clash between path-dependency and EU regulations - the interviews demonstrated widespread evidence to suggest the prevalence of poor managerial development within the bureaucracy. - In turn, poor capacity building thus explains the strength of path dependency and lack of change despite EU regulation and the activities of international organisations and consultancies - The persistence of an unprofessional bureaucracy is not fully explained by strength of path dependency alone; other factors have come into play. As Freidson (1999: 118) sees ‘professionalism’ as an ideal type, and if we accept his definition to include ‘the occupational control of work’, then the evidence from Romania would support that a lack of professionalism will

219 continue to persist. Freidson’s approach appears to be supported here to the extent that it is the institutional variables in the Romanian bureaucracy that prevent the full development of professionalization. This has been discussed in the previous chapters, for instance, politicisation. Despite democratisation and the other key political developments also outlined in this thesis, it appears that Romania remains in Freidson’s ‘activist/hierarchical state’ (after Damaska, 1986). However, Freidson (1999: 124) does not accept the argument that deprofessionalisation occurs simply because professions are not independent of the state, as in the case of Romania. - Chapter 6 explored how the administrative culture of Romania favours the legalistic approach and the development of rigid regulations that undermine the professional discretion associated with modernised bureaucracies. This means that international approaches such as HRM are difficult to apply. The interview with Stanciu supports this contradictory view in that the perception was (by this senior official) that HRM need to rest on ‘a regulatory framework which allows an efficient management of the human resource’. There was no sense that discretion could be devolved to managers, which is not surprising given the lack of trust within government agencies.

Overall, the introduction of the communist totalitarian system of public administration remains the most influential development in Romania, and the behavioural and cultural changes demanded of administration following the historic events of 1989 and 2007 have done little to change matters. In addition, this appears to be a particularly Romanian phenomenon, supported by political and cultural variables that were institutionalised during communism, but their antecedents could also be observed early in the country’s development.

220 8.3 Limitations of the Research

Following from the above, and as noted elsewhere, there is no integrated or consistent body of knowledge to build upon in relation to Romania. Empirical research of this nature, given the context of public administration in Romania that has been described and analysed in this thesis, is by definition limited. One suspects that had more senior officials and commentators been interviewed, there would have been little to add or the accounts would become similar. Reliable documentation remains equally scarce and as a recent article in The Guardian written by Matei Rosca (2014) revealed, experienced journalists had to rely on the opening up of the National College for Studying the Securitate Archives to find out what happened during the Communist era. This only occurred in 2014 and it may have been a useful resource for this thesis.

There are also behavioural and psychological factors hindering the research process. Romanians are very circumspect when approached for an interview, possibly a reminiscence from the Communist era, when telephones were tapped, neighbourly chats were recorded, and everybody could have been a member of the Secret Police, the ‚Securitate’. Thus, interviewees tended to be cautious and it is possible that despite being a Romanian national, I would have been viewed with some degree of suspicion, especially if I requested an interview as a student of a UK university.

Finally, there is very little academic literature available on Romanian public administration. Although this limitation has been explored in chapter two, it provides very little opportunity to cross reference the main findings and analysis of the thesis. The Romanian academic literature tends to over-state or provide very positive accounts of administrative change that often have no basis in reality. This literature also uses survey based evidence which inevitably produces unreliable results due to a range of factors including poor survey instrument design that invites respondents to give responses favourable to government. Lee (2009)

221 provides a rare example of some of the challenges involved in this kind of quantitative research within the Romanian administrative context.

8.4 Contribution to Research and Theory

The thesis makes a strong case for exceptionalism which differentiates it from much of the literature that tends to group Romania with other post-communist countries. Romania is unlike its CEE neighbours in a number of key respects but in relation to the thesis, it has proved to be the most resistant to change, despite some academic commentaries. Its own particular post-communist legacy, marked by the dictatorship of Ceausescu, its cultural characteristics, the nature of its revolution, and its path to EU membership, mark it out as anomalous in the CEE region. Thus, the thesis contradicts the inevitability of the convergence around Europeanisation and the more recent trend to the appearance of the neo-Weberian state in CEE countries. At the same time, the thesis supports the explanatory power of both historical and sociological institutionalism, and these concepts are convincing. There appear to be no other compelling explanations at a theoretical level.

It is possible that the case for Romanian exceptionalism will survive deepening EU integration, but this appears to the legacy of the country. To help shed some light on the argument of ‘exceptionalism’ in Romania comes the following quote from Schifirnet:

‘For almost 200 years, the Romanian society has known a slow and uneven modernization process, imposed by both internal needs and external challenges. The Romanians have acted for modern development by building the legal and political body necessary for attaining crucial strategic goals: winning the independence and uniting all the Romanians within the same state. The internal modernization processes have been oriented, at the onset of each transition period, from old to new regimes, to deep-going change of the old institutions, but for various reasons the concrete modernization acts

222 have actually translated into the adoption of Western laws and imitation of Western institutions, with no project seeking to know and critically assess the specific situations of the Romanian society.’79

This powerful statement supports the argument presented in this thesis. This is not to say that what has been observed in this thesis can be applied to other countries, but its general argumentation based on path dependency and developing an account of historical institutionalism could be applied to other CEE countries to explain the important differences between them. For instance, despite their very different historical and cultural legacies, Romania and Bulgaria are often treated as similar, an assumption reinforced by their relatively late entry into the EU in 2007 and geographical proximity. As Rose (1997) argued, it is social-psychological empathy that explains similarities in reform outcomes and policy learning activity rather than geographical proximity. However, within the wider processes of convergence assumed to be taking place within the EU, or under the guidance of the international organisations, path dependency explains why outcomes vary so considerably, or far from what was intended.

8.5 Final Comments

The thesis represents an attempt to provide a definitive account of administrative change in Romania. On arrival in the UK in 2008, it was obvious that most standard accounts of international public management and policy making in relation to public services could not explain the situation in Romania, or even provide reliable normative accounts. If faced with the opportunity of influencing the political debate over public services in Romania as a result of the thesis, the first task would be a root and branch review of its relationship with its political sphere as this is a link that remains unbroken since the communist regimes. Such cultural change would not be easy but if it is possible to build a polity that puts serving its citizens first rather than political interests, then other positive outcomes should follow.

79 See Appendix V 223 Secondly, the professionalisation of the public service is not simply related to emulating western democracies, or the ‚public interest’ model feted by other commentators. Professionalism is in itself culturally and socially constructed but if realised practically it may restore confidence in a public service that remains untrustworthy. What is clear is that external influences, whether it be from the EU or other agencies, have had very limited impact. Indeed, relationships with other western countries and the international organisations are often ambivalent, which requires a reorientation of these relationships. It is also clear that embedded institutionalism, whether historical or sociological in origin, is a powerful explanatory factor for systems that do not change.

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238 Appendix I

Table of Elite Interviews conducted December 2010 – November 2011

No. Name Job Position Date Conducted 1 Radu Podgorean MP, Chairman of the 17 December 2010 Chamber of Deputies for Foreign Affairs 2 Sergiu Celac Former Minister of 09 January 2011 Foreign Affairs to Romania, former Ambassador of Romania in the UK 3 Simona Stanciu Manager, Ministry of 10 January 2011 Regional Development 4 Iulian Chifu Adviser to the Vice- 11 January 2011 Chairman of the Romanian Senate 5 Radu Dudau Associate Professor at 15 January 2011 the University of Bucharest, Co-founder

239 and Director of the Energy Policy Group 6 Mihnea Constantinescu State Counsellor to the 16 January 2011 Prime Minister 7 Renaldo Nita Human Resource 28 January 2011 Management Trainer for the Young Professional Scheme Programme 2007-2008 8 Simona Uglea Public Manager, The 09 February 2011 Ministry for Sports, Central Government 9 Petru Nechifor Public Manager, Brasov 18 February 2011 County Council, Local Government 10 Elena Camarasan Public Manager, Ministry 07 March 2011 of Health and the Family, Central Government 11 Olivia Rusandu Public Manager, Ministry 29 May 2011 of Education and Research, Central Government 12 Mr X University Professor at 19 August 2011 the Academy for Economic Studies (Bucharest), former Senior politician 13 Vasile Puscas University Professor at 13 September Babes-Bolyai University 2011 (Cluj), former Chief Negotiator for EU Accession 14 Iustina Lutan KPMG Senior Auditor, 17 September Expert in European 2011 Funds 15 Cristine Barbu KPMG Senior Auditor, 19 September Expert in European 2011 Funds 16 Alina Tarabuta KPMG Senior Auditor, 19 September Expert in European 2011 Funds 17 Lucia Udreanu KPMG Senior Auditor, 24 September Expert in European 2011 Funds 18 Mrs Y Doctor of Sociology 14 November 2011 19 Monica Jifcu KPMG Senior Auditor, 19 November 2011 Expert in European

240 Funds 20 Lucia Udreanu KPMG Senior Auditor, 20 November 2011 Expert in European Funds

241 Appendix II

Romanian Founding Myths

A compilation of debates on the origins of Romanians and the social implications of personal beliefs over the way the Romanians perceive themselves-

What’s Left of the Romanians’ Founding Myths

Latinity, Dacianism, ruralness, the national poet, a.o. They hold, for our culture, the value of founding myths and their influence on a popular level is still strong. There are things which we learn at school and then we deem self-evident: we, the Romanians, are an island of Latinity in a Slavic sea, but also the descendants of the Dacians, the bravest and justest of all Thracians. The Romanian spirituality’s roots are steeped in village life. We dedicate a cult to Eminescu, our one-of-a-kind poet, who is considered a saint. We are kind and tolerant like nobody else. “The founding myths of our culture are connected to that kind of nationalistic romanticism that accompanied and complemented the establishment of the modern Romanian state. The mechanisms validating them are school and all the forms of production and self-reproduction of the cultural elite, from writers’ associations to literary magazines”, are according to politologist Cristian Preda. The debate on the legitimating myths of the Romanian nation and their substance began in the ‘90s, with the publication of Lucian Boia’s books. The historian’s writings caused uproar because of his approach, never taken before: deconstructing a mythology generally accepted by the Romanian community.

Rome’s Descendants. The idea of the Romans’ “imperial” past had emerged before the modern period in the country’s history. “All Romanians do descend from Rome”, said the chronicler, and invoking these noble origins, when Walachia and Moldavia were subjected to the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania to the Hapsburg one, has evolved into some sort of historical revenge against the mighty ones, whose forebears were, however, much humbler. “This mythology of the origins has known very intense manifestations with us because it compensates several inferiority complexes vis-à-vis the surrounding powers”, historian Lucian Boia wrote. “It has been a solution to elevate the Romanian space through noble origins. The founding myth of Latin origins originated with the Transylvanian School, in the 18th century. Further on it evolved in the concept that we are not only the Romans’ descendants, but also the continuators of their history”. Invoking the Latin origins also held a political importance in the 19th century, throughout the country’s modernisation process. “Vasile Parvan says that what lay at the foundation of modern Romanian culture was ‘the Rome idea’. That means a myth of origins, the Forefather Myth, so to speak, which lies at the foundation of all so-called ‘ethnic nations’. In order to secure our future modernity we had to find a forefather in the past – and Trajan was just one of them. There followed others, the founding myth of the Forefather being essential first and foremost, much more than stating who exactly was this ‘forefather’”, informs anthropologist Vintila Mihailescu.

242 The Bravest and Justest of the Thracians. In the mythology of the Romanians’ origins Romans have a strong competitor: the Dacians. The popularity of Dacianism is explained also by the fact that there is scarce information about these forebears of ours and, because of that; they can be invoked to argue pretty much anything. “The other myth of our origins refers to the return to the autochthonous zone, looking unto the Dacians as our forebears. Just like in the case of Romans, this insistent contemplation of the past has developed out of the desire to upgrade an unsatisfactory present”, Lucian Boia opines. In turn, historian Zoe Petre explains the mechanism which validates this mythology: “Our origins must by all means be ‘noble’ and ‘pure’, whether we speak of the Latin or the Dacian origins, the Christian or even the Orthodox ones: few people would accept to imagine the Romanian people as the result of complex and repeated combinations, in spite of the fact that such ethnic-linguistic and cultural mixtures must have been very active in the past, to say nothing of the present”.

The Romanian Sense of Being. Another myth that has been long entrenched in the Romanians’ minds is that of our people’s exceptional character. It strikes root in the romantic period. “This interest in the national psychology – so persistent as to amaze the Westerners – originates in a pseudo-science typical of the 19th century, which has gone down to us rather in the attempts at defining the Romanian as a special being. Hence several themes that have become reference points in this discourse, such as ‘the Mioritza space”, with Lucian Blaga, or ‘the Romanian sense of being’, with Noica. Hence our own representation of ourselves as ‘a bridge between East and West’, as not belongs to any of these areas. Truth is, of course, that we are no monolith group, we are very diverse, just like the other peoples”, indicates Lucian Boia. Quite often, this image of the Romanians as a people out-of-common played the role of differentiator from the surrounding peoples with similar destinies, and meant to associate us with the West: “our big cultural traditions (quite distinct from the small rural ones) are also based on a self-flattering social representation, that of an exceptional relationship between ourselves and the West, which seeks to belittle the other small cultures, neighbours to us, and to throw us in a special light”, opines politologist Alina Mungiu-Pippidi. “Since the dawn of modernity we have always related to the central models like the French and German ones, we have compared ourselves with the big ones, not with the neighbours, and I think that this is an initial flaw of the modern Romanian culture”, literary critic Paul Cernat argues, too.

Standing watch to Europe “You had the time to build cathedrals because we defended you against the Turks” – a trenchant statement, in fact a reproach to the West, has grown, in turn, into a founding myth, quite often connected to the Romanian exceptionalism or our role of perpetual victim of history. The Romanians are not the only ones who espoused this manner of relating to themselves. “The myth of the sentry keeping watch has strong correspondents in the myths of our neighbours – Hungarians, Poles, Serbs. It disguises a complex which we share with these peoples, the compensation myths typical of small countries. The myths of big powers are different, they assert a direct superiority”, says essayist Andrei Cornea. “A correlated syndrome is the one which I would define with the words of the poet, ‘poverty and needs and kin’. We stand ‘in the path of evils’, a crucified and martyred crossroad. Our poverty is unlike any other, it has nothing to do with laziness or lack of skill, it is a fatal datum always imposed by the Other – from Turks to Soviets or 243 ‘the predator imperialism’ of big powers – but it is fully assumed, in proud deliberation, as a superior form of asceticism. Self-compassion has always been a constant feature of Romanian Bovary-ism”, indicates Zoe Petre.

Eternity is born in the countryside The Romanian spirituality is rural, or, according to an entrenched expression, “eminently agrarian”. The myth of ruralness, which stems from the obvious fact that the Romanian society has had a pre-eminently farmer structure, has ended in opposing the village, seen as a repository of all virtues, to the city, seen as a place of perdition and estrangement from the country. The conflict between the autochthonists and the cosmopolitan “modernists” pervades the entire modern Romanian culture, to this day. “Romania, like all the rural societies, has a small tradition, enshrined in the rural traditional way of life, and a big tradition, which identifies with a national culture, the one created outside the villages. The Romanian pasunisti (translator’s note: from pasune, which means pasture ground), a vast category with us, had – just like Lucian Blaga – a representation of the small tradition as being the Romanian national culture. Tradition goes down, in linearity, to the Museum of the Romanian Peasant conceived by Horia Bernea”, affirms Alina Mungiu-Pippidi. Communism attempted to stem this identification of the Romanians with the rural world: “The ruralness myth was brutally replaced, in the Communist period, with the myth of the industrial worker, especially in the ‘50s”, says Lucian Boia.

Let Eminescu judge us! Mihai Eminescu is not only the national poet or “the well-rounded man of Romanian culture”. In a song coming from Bessarabia (translator’s note: historically a Romanian province, now the Republic of Moldova), which became a popular hit after the Revolution, he came to be designated as “The Lord of our redemption”, called upon to judge the Romanians like a Messiah. How did we get here? “Eminescu represents the central myth that we know today because his personality is linked to the myth of the founder”, opines Paul Cernat. “The founder figures, those who broke the ground, even if of less substance than those who followed, are revered by us. One such example is Vasile Carlova, founder of romantic poetry with the Romanians, who is inferior to most poets who followed, but unlike them, he holds a more important place in the histories of literature. The myth of the frontrunner, of the founder, dominates our literature and at the same time disguises the complex of a minor, marginal culture”, opines Paul Cernat. The Romanians’ cult of Eminescu, adding to his being so little understood abroad, brings out another local frustration – “lack of recognition for our values”, which is invoked by some authors even today. “The genius author revered by a perfectly solidary society who, in spite of this, is not acknowledged abroad - which results in laments that he is neither translated, nor read in the world – this is the exemplary portrait of the Romanian man of culture. In other words, our myths are not connected to a cultural content, but to status. Their theme is not a founding event, but a present day drama”, indicates Cristian Preda.

The Romanian mythology and European integration Quite a short time ago Romania has become a member of the European Union, and hundreds of thousands of Romanians already work and live in the Union area. Will this entail a transformation of our self- representations and our representations of others? “Myths do not disappear so readily, because they are an intrinsic part of the human being, they morph or they change their

244 appearance, but they remain hidden in the collective subconscious, like rivers that flow part at the surface, part underground”, Andrei Cornea believes. “They can be detrimental when they prevent critical reflection, but the same critical reflection must accept that they are part of the human substance and cannot be controlled, see the case of religion”. “I am pretty sceptical as to the way in which Romania’s European future can change this state of affairs. I think that European integration, in the short term at least, will result in more acute complexes. We expect help to come from outside, we expect too much to come from a ‘father’. The most telling example is the political life, where – contrary to what we all expected – things have degenerated”, says Paul Cernat.

“Romania – Fabulospirit”. The publicity campaigns to promote the image of Romania suffer from the same ailment, believes Lucian Boia: they play on a mythology easy to understand by the Romanians, but have no meaning for the foreigners, who are invited to “acknowledge” us. “Frustration with the lack of acknowledgement of our values has resulted in ridiculous solutions, such as ‘Eternal and fascinating Romania’ and this bizarre ‘Fabulospirit’ story, tactics which, to put it mildly, are not overly intelligent. They focus on an injustice seemingly done to us, while in effect only we are responsible for the fact that, engrossed in this special interest for national specificity and our ‘exceptionalism’, we promote subjects which are not at all interesting for the others”. In turn, Alina Mungiu- Pippidi believes that the public is more pragmatic in this respect than a certain part of the cultural elite: “These representations are already left in the past by the majority of the people. There still are groups with autochthonist grand illusions who spend public money to translate works that do not interest anyone in the rest of the world or believe that our mission is to re-Christianise Europe. Their share in the Romanian culture is still disproportionately high, and I think that it will stay so for some time yet because of the mechanism that makes European intellectuals leave the country, and autochthonists to stay”, continues the politologist.

The Good Prince vs the Bad Boyars, from Cuza to Traian Basescu. A lasting myth resonating widely in the Romanians’ mentality is that of the good prince, a father of the people, clashing with the bad boyars who strive to thwart his laudable intentions. It has been used by the European leaders ever since the end of the Middle Ages, when kings started open disputes with the noblemen, as power became increasingly more centralized. We know that Stephen the Great and Michael the Brave were involved in such conflicts, and the strength of this idea has kept influencing modern Romania, too. “A myth that still works today is that of the leader in hostile relations with the boyars, the noblemen, the ‘oligarchs’. It is widely spread, easy to recognize in many circumstances, Machiavelli himself advised the prince to make an alliance with the people, not with the noblemen”, explains Andrei Cornea. “There are plenty of examples, we can mention all the well-known voivodes; in fact this antagonism with the boyars, with the noblemen, is common to all the South-East European area. We see this struggle with the ‘local oligarchy’ in the case of Al. I. Cuza, Carol I, and now the man playing this part, quite successfully, is Basescu. I am not discussing here who is right in this dispute, but Traian Basescu substantiates a strong myth, namely that the prince is the good one, rather than the boyars”.

245 Ceausescu, the myth manipulator The Romanians’ representations with mythological value have been used for political purposes by many leaders and in various historical stages. Sometimes with good intentions, when a popular mobilisation was necessary to attain an important goal of the Romanian nation, like for instance during the country’s modernisation. Other times, however, unscrupulous politicians used them for evil purposes. The examples could be Ion Antonescu and Carol II, but the one who succeeded in a masterly manner to use the Romanian mythology in order to consolidate his own power was Nicolae Ceausescu, and the consequences of this can be seen even today. He used, in turn, the myth of Latinity, that of Dacian localism, depending on momentary political interests and well aware of their wide echo in the collective Romanian mind. “When, in the years ’65-’68, Ceausescu needed national legitimacy, he strongly emphasized the myth of Latinity, because ‘the Latin island’ took us out of the Slavic sea – the USSR. Later, when he became obsessed with the idea of independence and autonomy, he used the autochthonist myth – Dacianism, Thracianism. Ceausescu is the clearest – although not the only – case of using myths for political goals, as dictated by circumstantial interests”, explains Andrei Cornea.

Accessed on 11th of November 2014, at http://stiri.acasa.ro/social-125/ce-mai-ramane-din-miturile-fondatoare-ale-romanilor- 94867.html

246 Appendix III

Old and New Anxieties

By Andrei Plesu

It’s a known fact; the “new” Romania is old. Neither corruption, incompetence did not bring into power, nor is abuse of the press invented today. There is plenty of evidence to support this, even if it is not necessarily fresh in the public’s memory. Well, precisely for this reason, it is good for us to do our memory practice now and then. No cure works unless you have a deep knowledge of the disease’s history.

The other day I was leafing through the first volume, recently reprinted, of Bucharest of Yore, in which Constantin Bacalbasa had gathered enlightening and graphic memories of the capital city’s public life in the years 1871-1877: politics, literature, anecdotes, urban landscape, daily morals and manners. At some point he mentioned a document known as “the Iasi Petition”. It was the appeal, by a group of Conservatives led by Prince Grigore Sturdza, to the country’s legislative bodies. Certainly, the document records an episode of political battle, an anti-Liberal attack. But some of its paragraphs are remarkably topical, which is why I wish to offer them, without further ado, for consideration and analysis of today’s reader. The petitioners speak as “voters”, entitled to voice their discontent and requests: “…as our mandatories, you are in duty bound to keep in mind the country’s needs and take imperious legislative action to heal its suffering”. “We, who only have one desire, to live freely as Romanian citizens in our homeland and to see the honour, life and property of each and everyone guaranteed by the country’s institutions, we, who are fed up with seeing the levies imposed on us grow on a par with the State debt, are more than entitled to ask you to heal this disease, we are in the most favourable position to see and judge things objectively (…) Our legislative assemblies so far have spent most of their energy on party feuds and for personal benefit (…)”

The text is an inventory of shortcomings manifest in several areas and it contains a full range of concrete proposals for legislative improvement. From the signatories’ vantage point, “the biggest evil that completely disorganizes our country” is “the lack of justice”. “Any civilized society, if it wishes to live, has two primordial needs: freedom, since it cannot develop in its absence, and justice, without which it dissolves. Equality is a branch of justice, consequently it is good only insofar as it is right, like equality in front of the law; once it turns unjust, it is evil. Therefore it is unjust for the one who owns nothing to vote for taxes at the expense of the one

247 who has some property; such equality is definitely not good. (…) Where there is no justice, freedom degenerates into license. This is our situation now. The restraining force of justice is missing and impunity is granted for all crime, petty or serious. This is how with us the license of the press has grown to outrageous proportions. We do not state this in order to ask for restraining measures against the press, because we are in favour of full freedom of expressing one’s ideas, but we do state that we wish the personal insult, slander, calumny and press libels on one’s character to be tried not by a jury, since they always pronounce an acquittal, thus increasing the gravity of the libel, but to have them tried by courts of summary jurisdiction, like in civilized countries”.

There is no need for many comments. Under names different than the ones used today, the text targets habits and institutions that were inadequate in the past century, and that keep being inadequate today. We deal with “traditional” deficiencies: the rift between the Parliament and their electorate, the political life squandered on party feuds and private conflicts (or ambitions), the reckless increase in taxes, the misuse of freedom, the inflation of libelous press and their impunity, guaranteed by the very “jury” established to sanction them, a.s.o. Has anything improved in the 140 years elapsed since “the Iasi Petition”? If not, what is left for us to hope for? And whom could we blame for this prolonged historical inertia?

http://adevarul.ro/news/societate/nelinisti-vechi-noi- 1_53423ced0d133766a890a5e9/index.html

Accessed on April 7, 2014; translated on April 22, 2014

248 Appendix IV

How Politics were made in Brasov in the Inter-War Period. Adverts, sarcastic reports, quarrels and street parties are no news to Romania

By Simona Suciu

Even if in those times Television was non-existent, electoral years were not short of journalistic campaigns, public speeches and street parties for the electors. Brasov has actually registered some of the most violent elections in Romania.

After the Unification (nb. In 1918), the most prominent political parties in Brasov were the Romanian National Party, the Social Democrat Party, the National Peasant’ Party, the Liberal party and the Peoples Party. The Hungarian and German ethnic minorities would usually cast their votes for the candidates of the Hungarian and German Parties, which is still happening nowadays.

Very often the politically related meetings between supporters of certain parties would end up in fight. In 1926 such a meeting organised by Mr Aurel Dobrescu in the commune of Porumbacul de Jos (Fagaras County) hosted fiery debates. The Students and intellectuals attending the meeting were stoned by the peasants and sent off. A lot of young people suffered from broken skulls. According to the Mayor’s report of the events, the Brasov MP of the National Party instigated the peasants against the Averescu government claiming that they have ‚imposed burdening taxes on the peasants households as well as increased the price of alcohol’, reports casasfatului.ro.

Electoral ‚charity’ or street parties have been a practice since forever in Romania. During elections, the restaurants White Lamb, the Crown and Liess were filled with the people of Brasov who were invited by the candidates. In 1928, the Liberals distributed plenty of wine and savoury meals to the voters. This gesture was an attempt to ensure that they would mark the appropriate box. The Transylvanian Gazette ironically commented upon this event in an article titled ‘The Liberal Stew from Brasov’. In a rhyme (which cannot be translated in English as a rhyme) the reporter stated: ‘in the eve of elections everybody will jump on the lamb stew and barbequed turkeys, all come and join the feast in the sound of the fanfare’.

Social and economic issues were exploited in full by the politicians. In 1924, the Peasants’ Party was putting the blame on the government for the destruction of the industrial sector and the high unemployment.

Political migration is not new either. […] For example, Mr. Nicolae Lupu of Brasov had been a party member of four political parties in a row: Liberal, Socialist, Peasants and National Peasants parties.

Attacks via the journals were quite often too. A politician from Brasov, Mihai Popovici, was one of the most aggressive critics of General Averescu, the president of the Peoples Party.

249 ‘My brothers’, he said, ‘beware that General Averescu is hand in hand with the landlords in his pursuit of power. He was chosen and imposed by them to safe-keep their wealth, which Mihalache (his opponent) actually wants to give back to you’ on the 8th of April 1920 in the publication ‘The New Country’ held by the Peasants Party.

During the ‘30s these attacks became juicier and more vicious. The national peasant’s party politician Grigore Iunian was the perfect target. ‘Mr. Iunian is 1.60 meters. No matter how much he struggles he can’t reach any higher than that. He keeps his nose in the wind, tip- toeing, in the hope that he can overcome his shortcomings. But it is pointless. Nobody can be taller than the hat on his head. His psyche, his pettiness and viciousness spring from his shortness.’ This was published on the 14th of April 1937 in the journal ‘Dreptatea’.

Accessed in Adevarul Online, 15.05.2013, http://adevarul.ro/locale/brasov/brasov-politica- 1_519356d7053c7dd83f9d2d3f/index.html#

250 Appendix V

Romanianization and Europeanization

By Constantin Schifirnet

The studies on Europeanization only tangentially discuss the interests, motivations, and aspirations of the Romanian society to become European, the internal economic, social and historical contexts in which Europeanization in Romania occurs and develops. Political Europeanization is given priority, no attention being paid to other types of Europeanization – social, cultural, economic.

Europeanization is an institutional construction, not just a political one, if we consider the salient features of its historical evolution. The Europeanization process is comprised of a broad range of actions: urbanization, training, industrialization, means of communication, democracy, stability, structural differentiation, development models, European integration, closing of the internal gaps and elimination of discrepancies with other European states.

Modern Romania was built following internal needs which found a solution only in a favourable European context. The Romanian nation state was built in stages. In 1859 two states united: Moldova and Walachia, in order to constitute the Romanian state. A period of Romanianization was necessary, meaning cultural, political and territorial homogenization, a fact that was radically to change the mentality and behaviour of the inhabitants of the two Principalities, integrated in a totally new society that had to be built and supported by all means. After the Union, the fundamental line of action of the new state aimed, before anything else, at the real unification of all the social groups, while preserving the values and enduring traditions of the two Principalities.

In 1918 a new Union took place, this time between the Kingdom of Romania and the Romanian provinces Transylvania, Banat, Bucovina and Bessarabia. A new homogenization was required at that time, therefore a cultural nationalization in the territories that had belonged – prior to 1918 – to certain empires. Let us mention that the Romanization acts developed according to the nationalities’ principle, a European principle the nation states were grounded on.

For almost 200 years, the Romanian society has known a slow and uneven modernization process, imposed by both internal needs and external challenges. The Romanians have acted for modern development by building the legal and political body necessary for attaining crucial strategic goals: winning the independence and uniting all the Romanians within the same state. The internal modernization processes have been oriented, at the onset of each transition period, from old to new regimes, to deep-going change of the old institutions, but for various reasons the concrete modernization acts have actually translated into the adoption of Western laws and imitation of Western institutions, with no project seeking to know and critically assess the specific situations of the Romanian society.

251 The Romanians have had to bear the consequences of their own historical legacies, because of multiple transitions: the Ottoman legacy, the Phanariot legacy, the 1848 legacy, the legacies of the two Principalities after the 1859 Union, the legacies of the four civilisations of the provinces incorporated to the Romanian state through the 1918 Union, the inter-war legacy – in the Communist period, the Communist legacy – after 1989. Also, among historical legacies should be noted the frailty of political life and of parliamentary democracy, the low civic spirit of vast parts of the population, the internal and external constraints which society and its leaders were called to find solutions to. But throughout all those periods the Romanians’ general orientation has been to the ideas and values of the European space.

Europeanization is a complex and time-taking process, especially in a country like Romania, which has known, in a relatively short span of time, the nationalization and Romanianization processes. Romanianism expresses the national feeling of the Romanians, while Europeanism reflects the Romanians’ feeling for the European values.

A society of trend modernity, Romania faces integration and Europeanization problems unknown to other European states, which it has to cope with according to the standards set by its being a member of the European Union and also with the specific situation within the local community.

Europeanization occurs in a national public arena dominated by “Europeanized” social actors, such as the intellectual and political elites, the multinational organizations, the contingents of Romanians working in other European countries, but has little real impact on vast areas of the Romanian social groups and public opinion. The Romanian society’s Europeanization should focus on solving the social problems which have not found a solution throughout the modern period, like, for instance, upgrading the social and material status of all social categories.

Another line of Europeanization is the building of a modern society, based on European principles and norms, not just on adoption of a given model, like, for instance, the French model of strongly centralized administration. The Romanian society has been constantly under external pressure to change the institutional framework.

The Romanian society’s Europeanization materializes in a national public space where there are debates and deliberations on the whole of Europe and whose referential system includes more than the Western culture and civilization. The Europeanization of the Romanian society proceeds from the European background acquired in its relations with all the countries on the European continent. The Europeanization process includes all the countries of the European Union. The projects, strategies and development solutions are measured against European principles and norms. There are, quite naturally, distinctions between the Romanian society and the European countries’, just like similarities deriving from the Latin ancestry, the cultural, economic and technology exchanges that have occurred in time.

The Romanian society’s Europeanization occurs in the context of the building of a new European identity, distinct from the European identity prior to the European Union’s

252 enlargement, since it expresses the preservation of the fundamental traits of a new type of European and of a new community.

The Romanian society’s Europeanization emerges as a fundamental development line in the post-accession period, based on the consensus of all social groups. How is this project being developed? The internal evolutions after 2007 evince a lack of own vision of Europeanization, the latter being still seen as a Westernization, with no understanding of the fact that, because of their integration with the European Union, the Western European countries themselves undergo a new Europeanization.

Similarly, it should be mentioned that no proper theory of Romania’s economic and social development as a country member of the European Union has been developed. Many institutions and institutes have been set up, just like European agencies, consultancies, moral and religious foundations, but all of them pay little, if any, attention to the strategies for Romania’s European development. An agrarian society, rapidly morphed into an industrial one during the Communist period, yet which has undergone a strong de- industrialization in the post-Communist period, with the agrarian sector and the rural communities holding a large share, the Romanian society is being assessed according to European standards and criteria. Consequently, the development policies are grounded on recommendations and principles of the international institutions which have very little in common with the historical specificities of the Romanians.

While the setting up of the Romanian nation state and Romanianism have relied on the Western models based on the nationalities’ principle, Europeanization is a process defined as belonging to the common space of the European society.

The Romanian society, about to get Europeanized, cannot jump in one go to a higher stage of development. The national society’s Europeanization keeps being – in the minds of wide groups of the population – an act of support for the free circulation of capital, which is profitable only to certain groups. An important part in Europeanization is played by the multinational companies, which have come to own the industry and natural resources of Romania. Europeanization is not brought about or sustained by elites alone, but also by the groups of Romanians who work in European Union member countries.

In the new, post-accession context, the European institutions should understand that the Romanian society’s Europeanization can be beneficial to both the Romanians and all the Europeans alike only to the extent to which it answers the real needs of the Romanians and the Europeans. Europeanization is complete only at the moment when the Romanian society surmounts on its own the mentality of periphery of Europe, dominated by an oligarchic structure and with a population forced into a low living standard, unknown in the countries that founded the European Union.

It is clear that the Romanian society is subject to the influence of globalization, which has deeply altered the sense and course of the industrial civilization in the two types of societies of the modern age: capitalism and communism. These transformations directly influence the life of Romanians today, and – just like on every other occasion – our intellectual elite is out of step, being oriented towards debates on obsolete topics.

253 Romania’s problem, today, is not the fight against Communism, but the economic development gap - wider than ever – separating it from the other European Union members.

A relevant theme is that, by European Union integration, Romania has, for the first time ever in its history, the adequate means to raise to the standard of the European development model, an essential factor for the Romanians to conquer their feeling of being second-rate Europeans because of the frustrations, complexes and handicaps of the past. As early as the prime stage of modernity, the Romanians’ trend of modern European development has been assumed, we should say, unconditionally. That is why the argument that Romania is a Balkan country used in order to justify the protraction of its admission to the European Union was improper, as was the invoked Balkan exceptionalism. The Balkan exceptionalism allegedly derives from the idea that Balkan countries would be singular because of their cultural and political tradition, of their common history. The decision of the European Union to associate two countries, Romania and Bulgaria, for having them accede at the same time, has nothing to do with Romania’s belonging to the Balkan space. Romania indisputably belongs to Central Europe, and denying it accession in 2004, together with the 10 countries that joined the European Union that very same year, was a decision motivated rather more by it’s neighbouring on former Soviet states and the latter’s relationships with the European Union. In stating this we do not wish to negate the significance of Romania’s lower economic level in the European integration process. But should we draw a comparison with Cyprus, we could hardly fail to notice that this country did not meet all the accession criteria, and still it was accepted to join on May 1, 2004.

Contributors.ro Accessed 18th of May; 11:40 am

254 Appendix VI

Victor Ponta: “I don’t want us to be again ORDERED from abroad. We know better what needs to be done in Romania”

By Ovidiu Albu

The PSD-UNPR-PC presidential candidate, prime-minister Victor Ponta, declared on Tuesday, in a videoconference call with the Social-Democratic county leaders that he hoped to win the second round of voting with a lead that would legitimize the implementation of the changes he envisioned in Romania.

“I am much more optimistic and confident not only that we will win, but also that we will be able to change the country and stop the course set in the previous ten years. Still, it is up to you all, on my campaign team, to reach this goal while taking a comfortable lead that gives legitimacy to all the changes we want to work in the country in the period ahead. (…)I am fully convinced that on November 16 we can embark on a new road for Romania”, Ponta said.

“Mr. Iohannis is speaking to things, I am speaking to people. Mr. Iohannis is a thing, I am a Romanian. (…) I want to talk about the Romanians and about Romania, not about things, and I don’t want us to be ordered again from abroad, from the EPP and other individuals who derided Romania in 2012 as well, about how to live in Romania. We thank them, but we alone know what’s best for Romania and their orders and their scorn of the Romanians are something we are not going to accept anymore”, the prime-minister added.

He also indicated that every measure had been taken for the Romanians living abroad to be able to cast their vote.

“We have taken very clear measures so that in the places of the diaspora where problems have emerged, in London, in Paris, all the Romanians are able to vote. I have full respect for all these voters and it is an extraordinary thing when a Romanian in his country, or abroad, wants to vote for his president”, Ponta stated.

He stressed, at the same time, that his winning the votes of the Romanians in the Republic of Moldova was “a tremendous honour”. “All the votes and all those who have voted for me, young or old, in any region of the country or outside the country, deserve my respect. I have won, for the first time ever, with a consistent lead, the votes of the Romanians in the Republic of Moldova and for me this is both a tremendous honour and a huge responsibility, I have full respect for all the others who voted for one of my competitors or for those who did not want to take part in the voting”, the PSD chairman indicated.

Accessed at Evenimentul Zilei Online Newspaper, at http://www.evz.ro/victor-ponta-nu- vreau-sa-primim-din-nou-ordine-din-afara-tarii-noi-stim-mai-bine-ce-sa-facem-in- romania.html, on the 4th of November 2014

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