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Polish administrative assemblages

Following my attempts to elucidate the conditions of administrative orientation in America, 1966, and Sweden 1766 - still somewhat incomplete - I began to see how a similar explanation of Poland's bureaucracy could be of great help in understanding the political context of information and FOI. Mostly, I went back to a couple interviews I did and found there the insights that will help me create the following section which will append my Polish FOI chapter serialized here. It probably belongs somewhere between the intro pages where I explain the local NGO scenes and battles and the middle section where I begin to explain the proliferation of FOI law internationally.
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The democratic revolution of 1989 transformed Poland’s political and economic systems from an authoritative socialist regime into a democratic free market, but the people and traditions of the former regime were not immediately replaced by new people and traditions. This important social and cultural dimension has created important obstacles to democratic reform, including the promotion of greater information access and information flows to the public. To understand why this is the case, we need to examine the historical conditions and tendencies of Polish bureaucracy.

Within socialist states, the bureaucracy represented what Wasilewski calls a “quasi-autonomous partner in a quasi-pluralistic political system…relatively independent of the party/state” (1990: 744). This means that the bureaucracy was neither simply the tool, or apparatus, of the party, nor was the party or state simply a tool of the bureaucracy. However, it was clearly one of the most powerful forces in Poland during the PRL era. This bureaucratic structure was vertically centralized and lacked horizontal channels of information sharing or cooperation (Rice 1992, Newland 1996). It was also quite large and unwieldy, considered “inefficient” by Western administrative standards. In a rather paradoxical manner, it was both obsessed with a command and control design, while also overly inclusive of partisan community interests in the work of countless local committees and deliberations (Newland 1996). The administration was operated from the top down and it orientated itself to citizens as a form of public power and not as public servant (Rice 1992). As a result, bureaucratic functions and rulemaking lacked public oversight or accountability. As Gintowt-Jankowicz, former director of Poland’s National School of Public Administration explains,
one has to remember that the most important tasks normally performed in democratic states by public administration [were] performed by the administration of the Communist parties, commonly referred to as the apparatus. That apparatus was not subject to the normal principles of openness, due process and accountability through judicial control of the administration by independent courts. It is self-evident that the administration did not consist of a professional public service (Gintowt-Jankowicz 1993: 2, quoted in Newland 1996: 384)
These administrative historians offer us insight into the unique power of the Polish bureaucracy as a key figure on the political scene. It should come as no surprise then that the thousands of bureaucrats constituting the apparatus refused to relinquish their powers following the 1989 revolution.

Both citizens and bureaucrats alike often had to counteract the rigid vertical command design of the bureaucracy through reciprocity (Newland 1996) or informal connections (Wedel 19XX). These individuals connected together resources or sources of information designed to remain separate and used their personal relationships or connections to facilitate positive actions. However, this established social structure constituted the same dynamic that would later be referred to as corruption, in which bureaucrats use their public service function for private interests. But during the PRL era, this “corrupt” activity was justified since the apparatus did not seem to work in and was not accountable to the public interest, but rather the interests of state power. Nonetheless, the practices were firmly established within the bureaucracy during this period.

For the most part, there was no need for the apparatus to relinquish their powers after 1989 because the focus of the newly-elected Solidarity government was not to disband the bureaucracy, but to build new institutions of capitalism and democracy. To be certain, some ministries, such as those that controlled prices or centralized economic planning, were discarded, but even those officials were then shipped to other bureaucratic positions, such as the Ministry of Finance, where they could serve as regulators of the economy. A point was made to replace top-level bureaucratic elites with democratic-minded reformers from the Solidarity party’s ranks, but most bureaucrats largely remained within the administration with the main exception of those lower-level civil servants who were laid off when the enormous bureaucracy shrank (Newland 1996).

Posted by michael at 8 lutego 2005 17:42