ABSTRACT
When the communist regimes that had ruled Central and Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989 and 1990, one of their successors’ first commitments was to re-establish genuine elected local government. Local government was understood to be as close to the citizen as possible and with as many powers and resources as possible, independent of the central state, but delivering a substantial proportion of the public services that affect citizens’ daily lives. Although these aims may have been mutually incompatible, there was a strong belief in local (self-)government as an antidote to the centralised state, and an institution through which people could gain control over their own lives, and regenerate and revitalise their communities. For Central and Eastern Europeans, local democracy in the early 1990s
meant more than either service delivery or local identity, however, but an expression of European identity, a route into the European club, most closely expressed through the Council of Europe’s European Charter of
Local Self-Government of 1985. The revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe were thus not only about national liberation but about the assertion of a consciously European aspiration to (local) self-governance (indeed it was the lack of a capacity for self-governance in the previous regimes that was a key factor in their downfall – Kooiman, 2003: 79). This aspiration survives accession to the European Union to the extent that the latter may be understood as a system of multi-level governance, in which sub-national units are relatively empowered (Marks, 1992; see also Jordan, 2001). Does this integration into a wider Europe mean that the local authorities
in Central and Eastern Europe have undergone the same shift from local government to local governance that is widely regarded as having occurred in Western Europe (John, 2001: 9; Denters & Rose, 2005)? Western thinking on the shift from government to governance reflects a wider institutional shift towards networks (social, economic, organisational) as a hybrid form of co-ordination beyond the mutual opposition of markets and hierarchies (see Thompson, 2003). In the East this idea was understood in terms of the need to move from traditional vertical co-ordination (from which flowed many of the failings of the communist system) to a horizontal approach, which meant organising through networks. The romantic localism espoused by many Central and East European dissidents in the 1980s also implied a self-governing network form of organisation – a ‘community of selfgoverning local communities’ and if this idea proved short-lived in practice (Illner, 2003: 23) it testified to the high expectations then associated with local democracy. There are, however, certain key differences withWestern Europe regarding
the governance agenda. CEE countries have had to introduce the Rule of Law (in the Weberian sense) and the New Public Management in parallel, whereas in the West the one preceded the other by many decades, so that in the East the tension between legalism and managerialism may threaten to fragment the local authority as an institution (Jenei & Gulacsi, 2004: 114). This should not be taken as implying that modernisation has come later
to Central and Eastern Europe and that it will ‘catch up’ with a path already followed in the West. Rather, it would be correct to say that the CEE countries experienced the centralising form of modernisation in the post-war period to a much greater extent than occurred in Western Europe, and therefore have a stronger sense of the value of local authorities as democratic political institutions. There may, at least in the early years after 1989, have been more appreciation of the institution of electoral politics (regardless of voter turnout) in the East than in the West. Szakolczai (1992: 11-18), for example, argued that genuine politics in the then new democracies was in danger of being marginalised by apolitical notions of ‘policy-making’ imported from the West, which in his view had more than a passing similarity with the style of the previous regime. Even within the communist regimes, the failings of centralisation were
recognised and (as noted by Sharpe, 1965: 4) some attempts were made to
Local Democracy in
increase local autonomy in the early 1960s. Just as Sharpe, in justifying local democracy, cited their experience as proof of the limitations of the centralisation then fashionable in the UK, so the CEE countries by virtue of their history are less likely to question the need for, or legitimacy of, elected local authorities or their role in either the political system or the delivery of services. Until recently civil society was much less in Central and Eastern Europe
than in the West. With the important exception of institutions which developed under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church, in which category we should include the trade union Solidarnosc in Poland, almost all formal social activity was controlled, one way or another, by the state, via the ruling parties. Even the organisation of tenants in housing estates or large blocks of flats was either very informal, or, if more organised, very ineffective, lacking links to political parties or wider advisory structures (Podemski, 1995). The local private sector is still weak in many areas, unable to fill the gap (in terms of influence) left by the large enterprises of the former era. So, in contrast to Western Europe, a ‘hollowing out’ of the state, whereby
activities previously carried out by state agencies are taken over by the voluntary sector, private companies, or specialised intermediaries such as housing associations, has hardly been possible. Even in the large cities, the conception of a ‘local regime’ which started life as a description of power and leadership in large American cities, and was then transferred to Western Europe (Stone, 1989; Stoker, 1995; Sellers, 2002), has less meaning in Central European cities, where politics and power is largely focused on the mayor, rather than a group of powerful individuals from the private sector (although the regime analogy can be applied to the constellations of power and business around the mayors of the larger Russian and other Commonwealth Independent States (CIS) cities). According to Swianiewicz (2005: 118-199), whilst the broader community
governance agenda appeals to local leaders, there is a lack of skills and confidence in moving outside the local government in the sense of administration of services, although this is expected to alter with greater European integration. However, Dowley in this collection argues that the problem may lie elsewhere – in the lack of engagement of civil society organisations with the political system (itself a reflection of the weakness of intermediary institutions such as political parties). In some respects the creation of local government, in many cases ab initio,
has parallels in the developing world, where local government is a means of giving voice and influence to the inhabitants of both large cities and dispersed rural areas (neither of which can be effectively governed from the centre), and of dealing with ethnic differences and economic disparities – as explored by Devas and Delay in this collection. A further difference is that although CEE countries have established
regional structures as part of the EU accession process (see Illner, 2003: 16-19) there is less enthusiasm for regionalism than in Western Europe,
in Central and Eastern
perhaps because the nation state and local democracy are both seen as more legitimate and (having been lost and found in the recent past) requiring consolidation rather than fragmentation. Hungary, for example, had no tradition of regionalism, whilst in countries such as Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine there has been some reticence about regional autonomy, due to concerns about the cohesion of the nation state. The ideal of a ‘Europe of the Regions’ would be unlikely to have emerged from the experience of Central and Eastern Europe. The adherence of CEE countries to the principle of local democracy is not
a sign of delayed modernisation but a wake-up call for those in the West, both scholars and policy-makers, who need to be reminded (along the lines of the European Charter of Local Self-Government) that local government is primarily a political activity, involving agencies created to represent those living in local areas and to run services for their benefit, and hence much more than an arm of central government.
