Reclaiming Constitutional Government and Public Administration Space

Demetrios Argyriades and Gérard Timsit, Moving beyond the Crisis: Reclaiming and Reaffirming Our Common Administrative Space (Brussels: Bruylant, 2013). 485 pp. €100.00 (paper), ISBN: 9782802739821. This book is the fourth in a related set of a larger series of International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) studies on global challenges and renewal opportunities in public administration. Listed as references to this review, along with related sources, all books in this IIAS set reflect international concerns with the adverse impacts on governments of the rise of neoliberal economic marketization of public affairs since the early 1970s and of New Public Management (NPM) since the 1980s. Three themes are dominant in this 2013 IIAS collection: (1) reaffirmation of government and public interests, (2) administrative space and regionalization, and (3) professionalism and expertise of public service. Ten chapters draw chiefly on African, Australian, Arab, Continental European, U.K., East Asian, South Asian, Latin American, and Canadian and U.S. experiences and research. These are preceded by cogent analyses by the two book editors and by the IIAS director general, Rolet Loretan. Typical of IIAS publications, fulsome abstracts of all contents and other book elements are provided in English, French, and Spanish. is a principal theme throughout the IIAS series, but this 2013 volume also thoughtfully reflects internationally on the ongoing bond market and additional financial crises associated since 2008 with the Great Recession, along with other large political, economic, and social changes that now require revisions of global architectures. “The State is back” summed up the proceedings of the 2011 IIAS Conference in Lausanne, and that perception underpins this book. But a sustained concern, as expressed by Demetrios Argyriades in his detailed wrap-up commentary, remains, what kind of state? Is the model to remain one reflected in disparaging laissez-faire ideology, in which people generally are seen as objects of production and consumerism? And is it to be one in which those meriting public service respect are instead considered to be mere disposable instruments as government employees, absent constitutive responsibilities? In Argyriades's analysis, clearly the answer favors constitutionally democratic government, deeply grounded in authoritative foundations, not mere popular democracy and ballot-box legitimacy. As Aristotle's research revealed in the classical era, constitutional democracy is observable as one of three common forms of responsibly authoritative government, whereas democracy in the absence of constitutionally defined powers and limits is found to be one of three forms that commonly tend to authoritarianism. This wisdom of constitutional democracy remains vital (Ober 2013). Yet a near failing of portions of this collection is some language suggesting a dangerously careless preoccupation with mere legitimacy through popular democracy. Clearly, these authors do not embrace government unrestrained by disciplined enlightenment, but some others who carelessly speak only of democracy and legitimacy forget that Adolf Hitler was legitimized by popular election, and some overlook other examples of oppressively ideological political, economic, and religiously faith-based movements and regimes of today. In defense of the authors of this book, however, note that this fault presently dominates the academic literature in public administration. That carelessness is accompanied by a twin failing in the field: an almost exclusive focus on citizens, as became popular in NPM's peculiar focus on citizens as consumers of government services. That now persists in critiques of that movement to the neglect of the deeper philosophical and constitutional value of human dignity of all—including alien residents, international students and professors, foreign tourists, transient laborers, global performers, and international businesspeople. All of these are expected to share in self-governance and civic responsibilities, along with citizens, who have added special governance responsibilities as participants in democratic sovereignty. In present-day global affairs, in which the shared constitutional values of human dignity and rule of law need to span nation-state borders, wise reconciliation of today's localization and globalization paradox is fundamental in public administration. That deep paradox merits careful thought in academic language and professional practices if, in earlier terms of related IIAS books, the world is to be won for these virtues and values. Pan Suk Kim, the IIAS president when this book was published, focuses strongly, as Argyriades and Loretan do, on this vital constitutional framework, noting that “[v]alues and institutions must be nurtured with consummate care” (16). Interdisciplinarity is stressed as foundational, resulting in public administration as “a quilt of many fabrics” (12, 328). A quarter of a century earlier, Gérard Timsit, a co-editor of this book, sought with many others “to position the study of Public Administration in a context, at the crossroads of the fields to which it belongs, i.e. of law, economics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and political science” (363). In short, enlightenment—grounded in disciplined, broad-ranging knowledge in humanities, arts, and sciences—underpins the IIAS's reaffirmation of government and public interests. This reaffirmation and renewed administrative claim to professionally expert service to support and advance public interests constitutes the IIAS's sustained rejection of NPM and associated ideological devaluing of government. Two chapters by Gerald Caiden on “Ideological Differences in Administrative Reform” include a thoroughly researched and detailed nation-by-nation and general analysis of the origins, early developments, varied experiences, decline, and consequences of NPM. The documented history reported in these chapters especially warrants reflective study of this book and its retention as a detailed reference source. Additionally, Professor Caiden's forward-looking analysis of public service concerns and prospects, noted later on in the third thematic section of this book, reflects a balanced, nonpolemical inquiry into the impossibilities of reclaiming a long-gone past and the prospects for timely innovations for present and future advances. constitute the second major focus of this 2013 book. Professor Timsit's introduction, “La notion d'espace administratif,” and the first chapter by Stavroula Ktistaki, analyze the European Union (EU) experience in seeking shared policy outcomes through varied administrative-implementation means of EU nation-states. This is a singularly cogent analysis of the most fundamental constitutional developments within the EU. It is also timely for comparison with current U.S. developments in health exchanges, required for implementation in 2014 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Administrative space is characterized in this book as a European development of “remarkable originality,” with “two perfectly distinct functions—which have points in common, to be sure, but do not coincide with those underlying the traditional idea of Public Administration” (376). One is a passive function to set conditions for EU membership. The other is a dynamic function of construction “essentially aimed at building the system of regional governance” through means that will in the “future improve, perfect itself and effectively and more efficiently carry out the missions assigned and entrusted to it” (377). Using a principle of subsidiarity, administrations of EU member states, which remain de jure and de facto national, are assigned responsibility for implementation of policies common to the EU, which lacks all but a few administrative capacities of its own. Thus, “the Union imposes on its members only ‘what lawyers call an obligation of result.’ The member states remain free to organize their administration(s) as they choose” (380). In the American system of federalism, the new Affordable Care Act provision for health exchanges is being implemented with similar efforts to achieve nationally shared results through differentiated means that draw on localized conditions, including distinctive needs and capacities. In California, for example, seven different health exchange regions have been established with locally oriented variations. Regional initiatives and integration have advanced rapidly beyond the highly visible examples of the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement (first implemented in January 1994). The IIAS highlighted such regional developments in its 2005 and 2009 books. Earlier, in 1975, it established a European Group for Public Administration, and it has recently created a regional group for Latin America, as reflected in a chapter in this book, “La Gestión del Espacio Público Latinoamericano: Uno Responsabilidad Compartida” by José R. Castelazo. An Asian group has also been established, as reflected in two book chapters: “Restoring Professionalism to South Asian Public Services” by O. P. Dwivedi (recently deceased) and D. S. Mishra, and “Administrative Space in East Asia” by Pan Suk Kim, Masao Kikuchi, and Martin Painter. The IIAS is looking forward to a regional group for Africa, highlighted in a chapter by John-Mary Kauzya, “Towards Professionalism in Africa's Public Service.” It is also focusing on the Middle East, with the 2013 IIAS Conference scheduled in Bahrain and a chapter in this book by Jamil Jreisat, “Transition in the Governance of the Arab States.” are combined as the third principal theme of this book. Major challenges almost globally are deterioration of public service values and disciplines of merit where they once were strong and/or their displacement by cultures of self-interested government political officials and employees as well as external patrons seeking personal entitlements, along with strengthening of clientelism (patronage) and corruption where merit-based public service has never existed. Ideals of public service autonomy (administrative space as analyzed in this 2013 book) providing professional expertise for government remain memorialized in Confucian history and in Weberian prescriptions for responsible bureaucracy. They became models of practice during the twentieth century in many nations, reaching a pinnacle in America's idealized golden age of public administration from the Progressive Era into the 1970s. While important vestiges remain, throughout the IIAS's book series since 2005, its international scholars and practitioners have documented causes for alarm because of a lack of governmental competencies and integrity. In the current book, Gerald Caiden states these concerns: “Simplistic hollowing out of the Administrative State that undermines traditional dedicated career service ideals, values and ethics is not reform but retreat. . . . The damage to public service will prove long lasting; it may never quite recover from its fall from grace” (157). Despite this assessment, Caiden explains the changes: “Collaborative governance requires a different style of public service than the old-style bureaucracy” (157). He observes that governments are likely to continue to privatize and contract out; digital technologies such as e-mail and high-tech warfare reduce numbers of people needed by governments; configurations of work have been transformed; and volunteerism is increasing, along with expectations of increased individual and collective self responsibility. In short, realities have changed. Bureaucracies that are designed ideally to serve responsibly with trusted autonomy based on merit, as denoted by Weber, have often, instead, reflected the connotation of the term: self-serving, unresponsive, and barriers to needed changes. An example today is Greece. Argyriades explains the tragic deprofessionalization there following the “reforms” of 1981: expansion of political clientelism (patronage) and militant union activism. He notes that “from 1979 to 2010, there were as many as 5,280 general and sectoral strikes involving on an average 96% of public sector employees” (345). He concludes, “Somehow, the public service ought to recapture service—not self-service; priming end-users’ needs over those of service-givers—as a core professional value” (347). America is likewise an example. The golden era's ideal of trusted public service autonomy became lost by the mid-1970s, in part because of internal faults. Academic public administration, per Leonard White et al. (Newland 1984; White 1926) increasingly detached itself from cutting-edge thinking in law; the field embraced separation of powers and executive branch aggrandizement rather than shared legislative, executive, and judicial authority of constitutional design; and public employee unionization and militancy from the early 1960s forward increasingly altered merit standards of public service to a culture of mere government employment. Rights to collective bargaining won in the 1960s were quickly converted in many jurisdictions into partisan political bargaining and clientelism in support of self-interest and political party advancement. By the 1980s, publicly trusted autonomy of American public administration was largely gone. While recognizing the complexities of political and self-inflicted damages to public service, along with vast changes in governmental contexts, as the authors of the 2013 book do, all of the IIAS studies in the series since 2005 have focused greatest alarm and searching thought for constructive alternatives on ideological threats to responsibly trustworthy constitutional government: weakened cultures of enlightenment; personalization of “know-it-all” political, economic, and social/religious leadership; and failures of disciplined processes in support of dynamic, constitutionally democratic government to facilitate sustained searching for human dignity and reasonableness supported by a broadly shared rule of law. Yet the IIAS focus has been chiefly on constructive, varied alternatives, not simply on faults. Especially note examples in this book: administrative space for shared accomplishments through differentiated means, as in the EU; regionalization, as in the IIAS itself; collaborative, digital-era governance, increasingly dominant; and facilitative government in support of diverse public and private creativity for multiplication of constructive values and means to their accomplishment. This worthy agenda characterizes this 2013 book, and it is continuing as the IIAS is now undertaking studies of related global challenges of poverty and its alleviation

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