ABSTRACT
An island nation, like Great Britain, or a former colony isolated in an aboriginal hemisphere, like America, face different state-building tasks than Continental European nations such as France and Germany, where protection of territorial integrity and enforcement of unity historically are of paramount importance (Barker 1944). The differences widen when the influence of democratic institutions and the nature of legal systems are taken into account. Unlike in Continental Europe, democracy in Great Britain and America was built on a system of common law and of legislative and judicial institutions that preceded and governed the creation of their administrative states. As Klaus König (1997, 217), puts it:
While bureaucracy in the classical administrative systems may be said to be older than democracy, the development of public bureaucracies in civic culture administration countries such as Great Britain and the United States was governed from the outset by the political régime, the historic continuity of which has been maintained up to the present day.
