Transposing fiction produces failure: The sad fate of EU-pushed civil service reforms in the New Member States

The European Commission, working with the SIGMA initiative of the OECD, has pushed postcommunist states acceding to the European Union to adopt a set of specific policy prescriptions on civil service reform - the so-called "European principles" aimed at building impartial and effective public administration. This package is now widely acknowledged to be a failure (even by SIGMA itself), but the Commission continues to push it nonetheless in Western Balkans and other applicants. In this lecture, Miroslav Beblavy discusses the policy package itself, its implementation in the new member states and reasons for its failure. He also discusses what lessons this holds for both EU policy and national governments.

Miroslav Beblavy is a Member of the Slovak Parliament (since 2010) and a Senior Research Fellow at CEPS (since 2009). He is also the Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. Between 2002 and 2006, he was the State Secretary of the Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs and Family in Slovakia. His areas of interest include employment and social policy, education policy, fiscal policy, governance and corruption.