ABSTRACT
Europe-wide administrative systems have had a strong track record of innovation. The Frankish Empire, above all under Charlemagne, is generally considered the cradle of feudalism – a system that directly grew out of the dominant arrangements for paying imperial officials. Napoleon’s integration of Europe left a legacy of national and local institutions that appears to remain today. The administrative system of the EU is an exception to this tradition. Certainly Monnet’s conception of a European administration consisting of just a few hundred European civil servants who would, in turn, set thousands of national experts to work, and make firms and governments serve the aims of the Schuman Plan (Monnet 1976) was in many ways revolutionary. Yet the methods used to establish the independence of the EU civil service from national interests involved the elaboration of a system of rewards for officials that reflects more closely the philosophy of the nineteenth-century national Rechtsstaat than the pay schemes of many member states.
