For our dear friends at ujeli dot com,

For our dear friends at ujeli dot com,

I. Overview
1. The Global Perspective

Public Administration is as old as civilization, and equally diverse. - One would think: The Mandarin administered an empire from the Sunda Strait into Siberia; Rom's decadence was bound to collapse; the Maya's and the Aztec couldn't organize themselves to wage war against the European thieves. The examples of administrations that maintained a regime for a certain period of time and space, and then failed a state are numerous.

However, we do not expect to find a myriad of different forms of administration of the state and public in the world today. Public administration lies at the heart of the neo-liberal belief that its superiority prevails over other approaches, methods and goals. As such, it is used as a justification for neo-liberal theory. Never mind the circularity of the argument.

Convergence explains satisfactory that public administrations are meant to develop according to the publics' changing needs, no matter what limited role the public plays in the state, and are induced by the homogenization of the global environment, no matter how much more complex and technical public administration has come to be.

Five-year plans, development plans, have become associated with Leninism and the Soviet Union. Conservatives have met the progressive challenge with objection to any kind of planning all together. Nevertheless, all emerging 3rd World countries in the post-WWII era embraced planning and public administration.

In those days, through progressively participatory approaches to international relations, public administration entered the global stage as a euphemism for the increasing bureaucracy.

However, the main break-through for public administration, globally, has been the dismiss of the Soviet empire, which, on the one hand, released an enormous knowledge base on public administration into the multiplying forces of the free market economy; on the other hand, it negotiated a number of principles into the unipolar political mainstream. As such, it sat at the table during Germany's reunification, and was invited by Clinton to join the G8.

International Organisations, governmental and non-governmental, are the flag-bearers of this New Bureaucratism. They are created by the state's bureaucracy to fix problems that politicians don't want to touch. In their statutory limitations they are apolitical disallowing them from working on the political level. Instead, they go to the state bureaucracy and find there beloved colleagues fighting against their political superiors - as in Malaysia of the early 80s when Mahatir degraded the civil service.

Public Administration is as old as civilization. Every leader has a faggot, and every form of social organization requires a leader, as can be observed with the chimpanzees.

But there is only one way for public administration in the world today. The neo-liberal postulate of efficiency in international affairs has done away with perceived irreconcilably competing ideas of international relations and national standard setting.

To be continued next week with: 2. A Leftist Perspective,

Ciao & rex m-ji
Michael Ickes