Studies on Common European Administration [antikvár]

Edward Moxon-Browne Administrative capacity became an increasingly important criterion for EU membership during the 1990s. Under its Treaty obligations, any member state is required to take the necessary measures to fulfil the obligations of membership. This is no mean task. National administrations must be able to participate effectively in the EU policy-making processes; they must be able to transpose effectively EU legislation; and their íinancial systems must be capable of discharging a wide rangé of budgetary responsibilities in relation to many EU policies e.g. agriculture, the structural funds, social policy and fiscal harmonisation. Suffícient administrative capacity is not a luxury for governments:its deficiencies can have serious economic and legal implications for the state concerned. It can be argued too that habits of administrative cooperation between the fifteen member states and, indeed, between them and the EU Commission in Brussels, have had the effect of harmonising their administrative systems not simply in terms of developing analogous policy-making institutions and processes, but at the deeper level of values, assumptions and experience. While it is true that each enlargement brings with it an infusion of new ideas and procedures - the Scandinavian enlargement in 1995 being noteworthy in this regard - it is probably more true that as the EU expands, the sedimentation of its accumulated administrative acquis becomes increasingly diffícult to disturb. What this means in practice is that current applicants for membership will be expected, by and large, to accept, absorb, and adapt to, administrative structures and processes that are wellestablished. This will be particularly the case with the forthcoming enlargement because administrative capacities in central and eastern Europe are under constant scrutiny and are being consciously moulded by the EU in its own image. However, if we are witnessing the development of an embryonic "European administrative space", it is a space with considerable diversity. Southern and northern Europe exhibit contrasting styles in the ways in which their public servants