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Democracy and State Bureaucracy
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Martin van Creveld |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
What has happened to the dreams of the fathers of democracy? All around the world it appears that "the state" is not so much served and admired as endured and tolerated. Taking bureaucracy as his starting-point, Martin van Creveld of Hebrew University, Jersusalem, describes what the role of the democratic state has been, and seeks to identify what it should be. |
 hereas, in 1830, Hegel praised bureaucracy as the "objective class" which put the public good above its own, and whereas, early in the present century, Otto Hintze sang "the lofty virtues" of civil servants and Max Weber saw the state administration as the embodiment of "goal-oriented rationality," today there is probably not an individual left in the world who believes that such are its attributes. In fact, the opposite is the case. In study after study produced from the 1960s on, state bureaucracies have been presented as endlessly demanding (the bureaucratic solution to any problem is more bureaucracy), self-serving, prone to lie in order to cover the blunders that they commit, arbitrary, capricious, impersonal, petty, inefficient, resistant to change, and heartless; arguing against the extension of public health services, President Bush once described his own administration as having "the compassion of the KGB." "Red tape" has come to stand for anything that is evil, and one of the worst names that any person can be called is "bureaucrat." |
Public and private
Perhaps even more striking is the fate that has overtaken the word "public" itself. In classical Greece, where the distinction between the private and the public was first invented, it was the public domain which enjoyed priority, to the point that from private, idios, comes our modern "idiot." As the late twentieth century witnessed the demise of socialism, the situation has reversed itself. In most cases "public," meaning state-owned or -provided, has become synonymous with "second-rate." Whether correctly or not, the best that can be said about a school is that it is private (though such schools are called "public" in Britain) and expensive; the worst, that it is public and cheap. Depending on the country in question, much the same applies to medical services, housing (a field where "public" is usually synonymous with "run-down"), leisure facilities (ditto), transportation (other things being equal, it is only those who cannot afford a car who make use of public transportation), and other fields too numerous to mention. |
At a time publicly owned firms can survive only by claiming that they are as efficient as private ones, the bias against anything public even seems to spread to basics such as drinking water. That which, as is still the case in many countries, is state-provided and comes out of the tap is considered undrinkable, not seldom with good reason, whereas that which is produced by privately owned bottling plants is supposedly fine. |
Though "reducing paperwork" and "cutting the bureaucracy" have become successful electioneering slogans in many places, to date there are few if any countries in which the promise has been kept. In two decades of privatization, countless government-owned corporations around the world have been either sold off or shut down, often at the expense of their workers who found themselves joining the ranks of the unemployed or who have had to resign themselves to alternative employment which promised fewer fringe benefits. In addition, since 1980 scarcely a welfare system anywhere in the developed world has not cut the benefits that it offers and threatened to cut them again; the only difference between conservatives, and socialists such as Blair and Jospin, is that the latter promise to do so with less pain. |
In France during the last month of 1995 the outcome was widespread strikes and rioting. In the United States social security was threatened with bankruptcy and, among many proposed solutions, there was even talk of privatizing it, which means that the government, while still forcing each of us to convert part of our earnings into compulsory savings, will no longer guarantee that the money will in fact be there (even to the limited extent that this is done at present) when the time for payment comes. |
To heap insult on injury, even in countries whose calls for rugged individualism, self-reliance, and privatization have been the most strident, the number of bureaucrats has not diminished: in the United States under Ronald Reagan, for example, it still managed to increase 1 percent. Nor has the share of GNP which they command declined. For example, in Britain it stood at 45.5 percent in 1993 versus 44 in 1978. For the European Economic Community as a whole the corresponding figures were 52 and 50 percent; in 1996, following a decade of fiscal retrenchment, the French government was once again taking away a record 45.7 percent of GDP in taxes. In the United States, too, the tax burden has remained more or less steady in spite of all the cuts in welfare that have taken place from the time that Republicans took power in 1981. |
State interference
Thus the evidence is that, whether overtly and brazenly, or covertly and on the sly, the majority of modern states are demanding more and more while offering less and less. At best they compensate by developing the infrastructure and providing the conditions for vigorous economic growth, as is currently happening in the United States (albeit at the cost of a constant deficit in the external balance of payments, to the tune of approximately $120 billion a year), and as was the case until recently in several East and Southeast Asian countries. At worst they drive entire sectors of the workforce into tax evasion and even barter, as in Italy (between 1980 and 1990, the share of taxes in the Italian GDP increased from 30 to 42 percent). |
Possibly by way of compensating for their growing impotence, many states have also developed a disturbing habit of meddling in the most minute details of people's lives. In the Republic of Ireland, you cannot obtain information on contraception; in the Netherlands one has to ask government permission before painting one's front door in the color of one's choice. Some governments will tell you that you cannot place a bet outside the state-run lottery system (which insists on raking the profits to itself). Others decree that as a smoker you are a pariah, others that under certain circumstances you must turn informer on your family and neighbors (a method formerly reserved for the worst totalitarian regimes), others that you are only allowed to listen to so many foreign songs on the radio (ditto), others still that you do not even control your own body to the extent of using drugs or having an abortion. |
To enforce these and other praiseworthy goals, and often driven by ecological requirements or else by the demands of minority groups, new laws and regulations fall like hail on a pane of glass. For example, by the late 1980s, the number of pages in the American Federal Register, the official journal publishing federal laws and regulations, was approaching the 100,000 mark, and they even controlled the shape of tubs in hotel rooms and the height of the jambs that could be put on their doors, nor did the agencies involved seem at all inclined to reduce their output after President Bush put a moratorium on new regulations in 1992. These and countless other forms of intrusion can only lead to alienation and anger that is sometimes literally explosive. |
In a poll taken after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, 39 percent of US citizens asked said they saw the federal government as a threat to their rights and liberties. Another poll showed that only 31 percent trusted the government "most or all of the time." In turn, that government is sufficiently disturbed by the threat to set up special teams for dealing with the possible acts of chemical and biological terrorism in US cities--none too soon, since the first alleged attempt to launch such an attack was discovered by the FBI in February 1998. |
Faces of nationalism
More evidence for the state's waning ability to attract people's loyalties comes from the field of sport. As noted earlier, the modern notion that games and competition should be organized on national lines is a product of nineteenth-century nationalism on the one hand and the railways on the other. The nationalization of sport intensified after 1918, particularly in the totalitarian states which used it to prepare their peoples for war and which, in this respect as in so many others, merely went further than the rest. It probably peaked between 1950 and 1980 or so when, in the USSR under Stalin, to attribute success in sport to any but patriotic motives was to risk punishment and when Communist Chinese competitors, once admitted, invariably ascribed their success to Mao's thought. |
Since then things have changed as money has begun to play a larger role and nationality a lesser one. From the Olympic Games down, the most important competitions have become commercialized. While many events are still organized on national lines, in others both competitors and teams are sponsored (if not owned outright) by corporations which use them for advertising purposes and deduct them from their taxes. |
The trend is most evident in expensive sports such as motor-racing and deep-water yachting where costs can easily reach into the millions of dollars. From them it spread to other sports where corporate logos have replaced national colors on the players' backs, often making them look like some particularly garish version of an overloaded Christmas tree. For example, the European Soccer Federation now allows the various competing "national" teams unlimited license in recruiting foreign (and not just European either) players into their ranks. In tennis, denationalization has reached the point where top-ranking players are often reluctant to represent their countries in the Davis Cup, which unlike the various "open" tournaments is still run on national lines, the reason being that it neither pays nor counts as part of the so-called grand slam--to say nothing of the fact that, having made their fortune, many of them prefer to live in tax havens rather than in their own countries. |
Finally, the most obvious sign of people's feelings toward the state has been their declining willingness to fight on its behalf, with the result that in one country after another conscription has been brought to an end. The first important country to undergo the change was Japan, on which it was imposed from outside and where public opinion has since become strongly pacifist. Since then the list of states which have chosen to return to the eighteenth century and put their trust in all-volunteer, professional forces includes Britain (1960), the United States (1973), and Belgium (1994). France, the country which in 1793 became the first in modern history to introduce the levée en masse and in which it had long been regarded as symbolic of national unity, joined the trend in early 1996. A few months later even Russia's Boris Yeltsin was telling voters that, if reelected, he would end conscription. |
Once governments had abolished the draft they found, often to their chagrin, that it could not be restored. In the United States during the Carter administration an attempt to register young men as a preliminary toward possible conscription in a future national emergency met with resistance and had to be abandoned, while proposals aimed at establishing some other form of national service never even got off the ground. Not only was American strategy during the 1991 Gulf War dictated almost entirely by the need to keep down casualties, but a year later the fact that Bill Clinton had evaded the draft during the Vietnam War did not prevent him from beating a World War II veteran in his quest for the presidency. Similar trends affect almost every other advanced country, including even Israel which before 1982 was perhaps the most belligerent society on earth. Since then there has been a remarkable decline in the willingness of its young people to serve the state by enlisting in the standing army, let alone by risking their lives for it. |
From state to state
Against these symptoms of declining faith it will be objected that, from the Middle East to Chechnya, many of the organizations which have done most to undermine the state are themselves trying to establish independent states. It is in fact true that doing so is often one of their goals, though by no means the only one; but even more remarkable is the fact that many of them start contemplating how to lose their sovereignty even before it has been attained. Thus, Quebec separatists hope to retain the benefits of economic union with the rest of Canada, including a common currency. No sooner had the former Soviet Union fallen apart than the CIS, or Commonwealth of Independent States, was established with the goal--only partly achieved--of saving those common institutions considered critical to the welfare of all. As a result, ethnic Russians living in the Baltic republics were allowed to participate in the Russian elections of May-June 1996. Meanwhile at least one republic (Belarus) had still not made up its mind whether it wanted to be independent or not. |
Elsewhere in Europe five other newly established states, i.e., the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the three Baltic republics, are all actively seeking to join the European Union. In the Middle East, the PLO, well aware that an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would not be economically viable, has long been thinking about some form of integration with Jordan, Israel, and possibly other countries; assuming the region is heading toward peace and not war, in some ways such a union is likely to come about whether the parties like it or not. A final case in point is represented by the former Yugoslav republics. No sooner did Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina become independent states--the latter even before it did--than they set up a federation. Like its fellow latecomers in Central and Eastern Europe, Slovenia is even now in the process of joining the European Union. As the foreign minister of one of those states told this author during a meeting at Davos, had his country not hoped to join the European Union, what would have been the point of breaking up Yugoslavia in the first place? |
The future?
While states continue to carry out some important functions, two centuries after the French Revolution first enlisted modern mass nationalism, many of them seem to have run out of people who believe in them, let alone are willing to act as cannon fodder on their behalf. Sometimes this appears to have been the result of an unsuccessful war, as in the United States (following Vietnam and "the confidence gap") and the USSR (where a similar role was played by the failure in Afghanistan). Elsewhere it happened imperceptibly as growing integration with other states caused the sovereignty of each one to be whittled down, as in much of Europe. |
Whatever the precise processes, almost everywhere they have been accompanied by a declining willingness of states to take responsibility for their economies; provide social benefits; educate the young; and even perform the elementary function of protecting their citizens against terrorism and crime, a task which at best is being shared with other organizations and at worst simply let go. At the close of the second millennium, and in a growing number of places from Western and Eastern Europe all the way to the developing World, the state is not so much served and admired as endured and tolerated. The days when, as used to be the case during the era of total war in particular, it could set itself up as a god on earth are clearly over. |
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