Critique internationale - Content
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[Constructing Weberian Bureaucracies in the Age of New Public Management?]
Starting with a broad review of the literature devoted to administrative reforms in a process of democratization, the article identifies the various political uses these reforms involve: appropriation of the apparatus for exercising power, organizational streamlining to produce collective goods, control of administrative resources according to a clientelistic rational, concern for legitimation with respect to international funding and development organizations. As it analyzes the conditions in which the three competing repertoires of reform (“Weberian” bureaucratic model, decentralized state, new public management), the article examines the ambiguities of these recipes and examines the issues, the limits and the effects of manipulating them. It especially points up the institutional entrenchment of the reforms and their dependence on administrations inherited from authoritarian regimes that shape and constrain attempts to transform administrative systems in a democratic context.
[Tradition and Transformation in the Thai Bureaucracy]
Thailand's recent administrative reforms are analyzed in a context of the legacies of its bureaucratic institutions. Traditional Thai bureaucratic culture is characterized by patrimonialism, departmentalism and legal proceduralism, with bureaucratic power and status legitimized by myths and symbols of service to the monarchy. But the realities of bureaucratic performance (including corruption) have provided a strong stimulus for reform. Since the 1990s, reforms have been strongly influenced by New Public Management (NPM), albeit in a bureaucratic environment hostile to their imposition. International institutions such as the IMF were instrumental in introducing some of the new ideas. Under the governments of Thaksin Shinawatra, such reforms (selectively applied) gained pace due to the imposition of a clear political purpose: centralization of decision-making power (including patronage) in the hands of Thaksin and his immediate circle. The impact of these waves of reform was softened by a combination of the power of bureaucratic conservatives and by their association at first with 'foreign' forces and later with the 'political excesses' of Thaksin. The recent military coup and its aftermath represent a revival of some aspects of Thailand's bureaucratic traditions and hence an interruption to the globalizing, modernizing trajectory of the reforms.
[Legacies, Party Competition and Civil Service Governance in Post-Communist Hungary]
This paper examines the impact of the legacy of the past on administrative reform trajectories in post-communist East Central Europe. It argues that East Central Europe has numerous different legacies that have the potential to matter for post-communist reforms, that any legacy explanation of administrative reform in East Central Europe is required to spell out the causal mechanisms that link the legacy of the past and the outcomes of the post-communist present, and that the interaction effects between the legacy of the past and other important drivers of administrative reforms need to be considered, for instance, European integration and the structure of party political competition. The investigation of the politicisation of the civil service in Hungary shows that the main influence of the legacy is exercised through the impact of the late communist legacy on the structure of party competition. The legacy of the past has contributed to the polarisation between an ex-communist and an anti-communist political camp in Hungary. The legacy also continues to shape the identities and interaction orientations of key political and administrative actors vis-à-vis civil service governance. The legacy of the past does therefore exercise an important, if indirect, influence on present day civil service governance.
[The Combination of Legacy and Borrowing in the Conversion of the Russian Administration]
The desire to “reform” the administration was one of the main leitmotifs of Soviet, and now Russian politics since Perestroika, but implementation did not begin until 2000. This article first offers an analysis of the context in which the administrative reform picked up speed, underlining the convergence of expectations voiced by Russian political leaders, international organizations, entrepreneurial circles and “public opinion.” It then shows how implementation of the measures decided in the 2000s led to shaping a particular administrative system that blends borrowed elements and legacies. An analysis of this hybridization process shows that, contrary to popular belief, “modern” international guidelines and local legacies, presented as cumbersome archaisms, are not necessarily at odds but complement and even reinforce one another. Our argument draws on both official documents and research conducted in Russia in this field as well as data collected during interviews with civil servants of various ranks in several regions of the Ural.
[Resizing the Civil Service in Malawi: International Organization Guidelines and Administrative Realities]
The reduction in the number of government employees is the direct consequence of programs devised by IFI (international financial institution) experts aiming to reorganize the public sector according to World Bank and IMF guidelines. However, far from altering the underlying dynamics and structures of the civil service, the reforms undertaken have reinforced cleavages inherited from the colonial period and heightened tensions. The process of reorganizing the civil service in Malawi is a case the prompts one to question the relevance of the instrumental view of good governance touted by the IFI, a vision based on a decontextualized and ahistoric concept of a “dysfunctional” state that can be “repaired” using the “tools” proposed by experts. For it indeed seems that even when IFI objectives have been met, public sector reform, which primarily aims to orient transformations in Malawi in a direction favored by the “donor community,” has not at all helped to make the bureaucracy more efficient. It is on the contrary more fragmented than ever. “Enclaves” enjoy IFI financial and logistic support and supervising ministries fight for the meager resources, while “juniors,” the many subordinate civil servants in the country’s administration, are increasingly taking their distance from their “bosses.”
[Take or Make Power? The Legacies of Military Regimes on Decentralization in Argentina and Brazil]
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, both Argentina and Brazil decentralized their governments. Both countries also started this process with similar institutions of intergovernmental relations and in the context of military regimes. However, whereas the military in Argentina took an administrative decentralization measure first (i.e. the transfer of primary-level education from the central government to the provinces), the Brazilian military began the process of decentralization with a political measure (the reinstallation of the direct popular election of governors). The article shows that different types of militarism, in particular the different ways in which the military occupied the state apparatus and controlled the political system, explain the occurrence of opposite initial steps in the decentralization process. Such different beginnings led ultimately to varying degrees of autonomy for governors and mayors. Thus, by the end of the century, Brazilian governors and mayors had gained significantly more autonomy than their counterparts in Argentina.
[The Distinctiveness of Indian Secularism]
Contemporary discussions of secularism in India have been constrained by the tradition-modern(western) dichotomy. For some, secularism is originally a Christian doctrine adapted to modern western conditions, and means the strict separation of church and state. It is also predominantly a single-value doctrine, motivated either by liberty (as in the United states) or equality of citizenship (as in France) more suited to single-religion societies than to the socio-cultural context of India where it is more appropriate to rely on resources of multiple and indigenous religious traditions for the sake of quite different values of peace and toleration. Others argue that India has the civilizational resource from which to retrieve its own conception of secularism captured best by the phrase 'sarva dharma sambhava' (equal respect for all religions). I argue instead that India has worked out a distinctive conception of the secular that was at once Indian and modern. This remains a practical conception rather than a coherent doctrine or theory, and can thus be called Indian secularism only by extension. This conception builds on traditional resources as well as on the legacy of the British colonial state but innovatively transforms them. Many distinctive features characterize it. First, it deals simultaneously with inter-religious and intra-religious domination. Second, it has an explicit multi-value character. Third, it rejects strict separation. Separation does not mean exclusion or strict neutrality but what I call principled distance. Fourth, it implies neither respectful indifference nor active hostility but respectful transformation of religion. In short, secularism inherits the tradition of religious reform that began in India both prior to the advent of colonial modernity and because of a critical engagement with it. Finally, Indian secularism is an ethically-sensitive practical settlement and less a scientific, rationalist doctrine worked out by ideologues and implemented by political agents.
[Grammar of Civil Society and Social Reform in Germany]
The article seeks to understand the contemporary uses of the concept of civil society in labour market reforms in Germany. By first studying the three dominant readings of the constitution of collectives during the 19th century (civil, civic and social), the article aims to specify the semantics and categories available to describe and order a political society. In the second part, the article examines the expansion of “organized modernity” and the demise of civil society semantics under the Kaiserreich as a path to understanding the contemporary erosion of these century-old institutions. This historical excursion sheds new light on the reasons for the ability of civil society to subvert existing collective categories but questions the ability of new institutions and arrangements based on civil society grammar to provide stable and viable alternatives to the institutions of organized modernity.
[The Rockefeller Foundation and the Birth of American Universalism]
This article examines the history of the development of American universalism starting from the premise that the major philanthropic foundations, having emerged early on the international scene, are a locus where it crystallizes. Starting in the 1890s, the United States possessed the means to achieve their international ambition. This is also when universalism was forged among the new elites, of which the large philanthropic societies are an emanation, which is based on the certainty that the United States held the key to the future of humanity. It matured between the 1890s and the interwar period, to demonstrate its full force after 1945,due to the superpower status the U.S. had then acquired. The action of foundations should be resituated in this perspective: with the early 20th century, they devised a world policy that closely combined the certainty of embodying the general interest and a desire to spread the American model. The Rockefeller Foundation demonstrates this in emblematic fashion.
Alexis Spire, Étrangers à la carte : l’administration de l’immigration en France (1945-1975), Paris, Grasset, 2005, 402 pages.
Kitty Calavita, Immigrants at the Margins : Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, 258 pages.
Alain Chatriot, Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, Matthew Hilton (dir.), Au nom du consommateur : consommation et politique en Europe et aux États-Unis au XXe siècle, Paris, La Découverte, 2004, 424 pages.
