25
Introduction: the Dutch Iraq report
At the beginning of 2009, after six years of quarrelling in Dutch politics,
an independent committee was established to investigate the
decision-making process in the Netherlands concerning the invasion
in Iraq in 2003. On 12 January 2010, the Chairman of the Committee,
the former President of the Dutch Supreme Court Davids, presented
the Committee’s report to the then Dutch Christian Democratic prime
minister Balkenende (CDA). What happened immediately afterwards
was astonishing: the Dutch prime minister gave a press conference the
same day during which he rejected almost all the critical conclusions of
the Committee. He considered that what his government had decided
at the time, which amounted to political support for the invasion, was
still right and that the Committee’s position merely illustrated that one
could take a different view of the matter.
That this was not the most sensible thing to do under these circumstances
became immediately clear. The Social Democratic party (PvdA),
who had always been against the invasion, demanded a rectification
by the government. They were currently coalition partners with the
Christian Democratic party (CDA), but were in the opposition when
the invasion took place. Their demand almost led to a political crisis.
At the end of the day the government came up with a statement, reluctantly
supported by the prime minister, that in view of the knowledge
they now had available, a more adequate legal mandate of the
invasion would have been necessary. A few weeks later, after lengthy
internal debates, the government came up with a more elaborate reaction
which seemed to support the headlines of the report but in which
at the same time many things were brilliantly omitted.1
However, this
3
Civil Servants and Politicians:
Problems and Future Prospects
Luc Verhey
26 Luc Verhey
all appeared to have come too late to save the government. Two weeks
later the government stepped down because it could not come to an
agreement on the eventual renewal of the Dutch military mission to
Afghanistan.
As mentioned above, the report of the ‘Davids Committee’ is very critical
of the way the Netherlands decided to support the invasion. What
from the perspective of this volume is particularly relevant is that the
report gives an interesting view on the way politicians and civil servants
dealt with the matter. As the report suggests, there was a fundamental
difference of opinion within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding
the legitimacy of using force against Iraq. According to the committee,
legal arguments were systematically overruled by political considerations.
Lawyers of the Legal Division of the ministry were hardly have
been involved in the decision-making process. Further, they did not
have had direct access to the minister. The legal arguments sustaining
the conclusion of the Dutch government at the time – that there was
a sound mandate under international law – the committee found to
be biased, as if such a mandate, although controversial, could still be
construed (Davids Committee 2009, 268–273).
More or less the same happened with the information of the Dutch
Intelligence and Security Services. Although these services were more
critical about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than
their colleagues abroad, these signals were, again according to the
committee, not reflected by the relevant ministers and departments.
On the contrary, ministers and departments extracted those statements
from the intelligence service reports that were consistent with
the political stance already adopted. Even the competent parliamentary
committee, coming together in secret, had not been informed by the
government about the more nuanced views of the intelligent services.
However, the critical analysis of the committee was not the final word.
After the publication of the report, feelings of dissatisfaction and anger
about some of the committee’s conclusions leaked out of the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs.2
Some civil servants, whose conduct has been heavily
criticised were very disappointed about the report because, they held,
it described the facts incorrectly. The suggestion, for example, that the
decision to support the invasion was taken in a meeting which lasted
only 45 minutes was in view of some of the civil servants involved absolutely
false. A civil servant, who like his colleagues wanted to remain
anonymous, concluded: ‘If our ministers are not prepared to correct
this, let us then have a parliamentary inquiry so that we can defend
ourselves’. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the
Civil Servants and Politicians 27
time and former secretary general of NATO, did defend the civil service
before the final parliamentary debate took place. He argued that the
committee was wrong on several points and claimed that his civil servants
did no wrong.
The end of the story is that a parliamentary inquiry had not been
initiated because the government finally accepted the committee’s
presentation of the facts. Moreover the government announced some
measures to ensure that what occurred in 2002 and 2003, would never
happen again. One measure is that a special adviser on international
law issues is to get a separate and strong position within the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs.3
The government also found it necessary to ‘re-establish’
the rule that different opinions on major political issues within the
civil service must have access to the minister. Apparently this was not
self-evident at the time.
What the Iraq report has meant for the relationship between civil
servants and politicians is not entirely clear. Nevertheless, what the
report does illustrate is that this relationship is increasingly a delicate
one. Over the years, tensions between civil servants and politicians have
grown; this does not apply solely to the Netherlands. In many countries
civil servants seem to have come under growing political pressure. The
question is: how come? Is this indicative of some trend of politicisation
of the civil service and if so, how should this be viewed? Further, if we
do conclude that there are serious problems in the relationship between
civil servants and politicians, how can they be solved? I will now go
into these questions and try to formulate at least a beginning of an
answer. My answers will be based both on academic literature and on
my personal experiences as a Dutch civil servant over the last almost 20
years. Although it concerns experiences from one specific country my
observations are meant to be relevant to the relationship between civil
servants and politicians at large.
In this chapter, I will first go into the issue of politicisation as the
analytical framework of this volume. After setting the framework I
will shortly analyse the growing tensions between civil servants and
politicians and its possible causes. This analysis will be followed up by
taking stock of possible ways of solving the present problems. In short,
my conclusion is that more than changing the constitutional rules and
conventions of ministerial responsibility, a clearer identification of the
fundamentally different roles of politicians and civil servants can bring
us nearer to workable relationships. If civil servants and politicians are
strongly aware of their roles in the democratic process, I will finally
take the view that politicisation of the civil service, if proportional and
28 Luc Verhey
well embedded in the daily business of the civil servant, as such, is not
a bad thing.
Politicisation: the broader context
In parliamentary democracies the traditional view is that politics and
the civil service should be strongly separated. The roles and responsibilities
of politicians and civil servants are in this view fundamentally
different. Civil servants are permanent functionaries that have to serve
ministers of different political parties and backgrounds. To be successful
and trustworthy in their role, civil servants have to be politically neutral.
Obviously politicians are not. They have an electoral mandate to try to
achieve their political goals. When politicians are in power and become
part of the government, civil servants are expected to support them, but
this does not mean that are doing the same job. They cooperate with
each other from different historical and professional perspectives. Civil
servants are supposed to be policy experts who advise politicians on the
basis of their expertise and their long-standing experience. Politicians
often are (at least initially) amateurs in the policy area they are responsible
for but have the political contacts and political skills to effectively
achieve things.
Despite the fact that the separation of politics and the civil service still
seems to be generally accepted, academic literature draws attention to
a general trend toward greater politicisation of the civil service (Bekker
2009). As Peters describes (Chapter 2 in this volume) this tendency has
been apparent in any number of industrialised democracies over the
past several decades. In an earlier publication he and Pierre (Peters and
Pierre 2004) have defined politicisation as:
...the substitution of political criteria for merit-based criteria in the
selection, retention, promotion and disciplining of members of the
public service
Although many factors contribute to greater politicisation, the driving
force behind this trend seems to be the growing political will to
reduce the power of the permanent civil service who is considered to
be entrenched and unresponsive. Strengthening political control over
public policy is to be achieved by selection and by disciplining civil
servants on the basis of political criteria. Peters has analysed in more
detail which forms of politicisation can be observed in practice. At the
same time however, the phenomenon of politicisation should not be
Civil Servants and Politicians 29
overestimated. With perhaps the exception of relatively few systems
(like the United States and Australia), direct politicisation by replacing
career officials by political appointees is still extremely rare. In so far
as political intervention does take place, it generally concerns only very
few functionaries at the top of the departmental hierarchy. Expertise
and long-standing experience are, although perhaps less evident than
in the past, still indispensable and highly esteemed features of what a
normal civil servant is supposed to offer.
To fully understand how the relationship between politics and the
civil service has developed over the last decades and which problems
have arisen, it is necessary to put the issue in a broader context. Hereafter
I will discuss three developments in the public sphere which possibly
enhance tensions between politicians and civil servants:
1. The internationalisation of policymaking;
2. The increasing public attention for incidents in the executive sphere,
and
3. The blurring of constitutional rules and conventions.
The analysis is not meant to be an exhaustive explanation of what has
taken place within the civil service over the last years. Of course these
tensions cannot be detached from the issue of politicisation. On the
contrary, politicisation plays a role in the broader context of the development
of the public sector at large as touched upon below. I will come
back to this issue later.
Tensions: possible causes
Internationalisation of policymaking
The first relevant phenomenon is also the most external one. National
civil servants are doing their work increasingly in an international arena
far from public scrutiny by parliament or the media. Often only a few
insiders know what civil servants are discussing in international and
European networks not to mention ordinary people. This also results
from the fact that supranational organisations are a fundamentally
different environment to work in if one compares them with national
bureaucracies in the traditional nation state. Decisions are not taken in
a top-down fashion under political supervision but through a process
of informal consultation and negotiation among politicians, civil servants,
the private sector and civil society which often takes place outside
the scope of parliamentary control (Vanhoonacker 2009). One could
30 Luc Verhey
easily assume that civil servants like this rather unclear situation in
which they can often take up a position on their own, and perhaps
some of them do. However, many civil servants do not like ‘swimming
around’ without political guidance nor realising that politicians are
hardly interested in their work.
An example from my own experience as a civil servant may illustrate
this. In 1998 I was representing the Dutch government in the so-called
Article 31 Committee: the Committee which assists the European
Commission in implementing Directive 95/46/EC on data protection.4
In this committee, we were discussing the conditions under which
personal data could be transferred to the United States where in many
areas no proper data protection legislation was in place. During the
debates in the Committee, I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable:
how could I reasonably choose a position without knowing how my
minister was thinking about this highly sensitive issue?
When I arrived back home from Brussels I went to see my minister
and I told him what this data protection debate was all about and I
remember well the way he looked at me with glassy eyes, apparently not
having the slightest idea what I was talking about and, even worse, not
at all interested in what I was saying. After a while he asked me: ‘What is
Germany’s position?’ I told him and got the impression that my answer
did not at all influence his final conclusion by which he ended our
conversation: ‘Well, follow Germany’. One of the things I learned from
this and other experiences is that national politicians are often not very
interested in what civil servants are doing abroad. The main reason for
this seems to be that politicians cannot easily score with the public on
international policy issues. However, if it goes wrong afterwards civil
servants can easily get the blame.
Incidents in the executive sphere
The second reason for growing tensions between civil servants and
politicians is the public attention for incidents in the executive sphere.
What we have seen over the years is a shift from holding ministers
to account for their policy to searching for what went wrong in the
farthest corners of the state bureaucracy. In this respect journalists and
parliamentarians are often focused on who must get the blame rather
than on what lessons can be learned (Verhey 2001). This can easily lead
to difficulties in the internal relationships within governmental departments.
Ministers and civil servants could be tempted into blaming each
other for mistakes that have been made. What makes civil servants even
Civil Servants and Politicians 31
more nervous is that it can hardly be foreseen in advance which part of
the executive bureaucracy will be in the spotlight. This often seems to
happen by sheer accident.
A well-known example of the problems that can occur is the political
clash in the United Kingdom around the safety in prisons in the nineties
of the last century (Tomkins 2008). After a series of spectacular
prison escapes Michael Howard, the Home Secretary at the time, started
an independent inquiry into prison security. The inquiry’s report that
followed was highly critical of the Prison Service and of the entire
system of prison management. When the report was published, a political
storm broke out and the opposition called for Howard’s resignation.
Yet he refused to resign, instead calling for the resignation of the chief
executive of the Prison Service. When the latter for his part refused to
step down, Howard carried his decision through and dismissed him.
What was important in this case was the reasoning by which Howard
evaded responsibility. He claimed that as a minister he was only responsible
for policy matters, not for operational concerns. Because the problems
which had been identified in the inquiry’s report were caused by
operational failures, Howard took the view that the chief executive
of the Prison Service was responsible and therefore had to step down.
Although Howard got away with it in this individual case, a few years
later the House of Commons rejected Howard’s distinction between
policy and operational matters.5
Nevertheless, vast experience in the
United Kingdom and elsewhere shows that when political tensions are
rising, ministers sometimes publicly criticise their civil servants for
executive failures.
As we speak about the growing public attention for incidents in the
executive sphere the media plays a crucial role. To survive in politics
nowadays a politician has to have a good relationship with the media.
Protecting his reputation in public opinion is a top priority of every
contemporary politician. This vital aspect of the daily life of a politician
can easily cause tensions at ministerial departments. Where politicians
feel the pressure of the media and often want straight answers and
quick results, civil servants are inclined to exercise due caution on the
basis of their expertise and experience.
Blurring of constitutional rules and conventions
Michael Howard’s reasoning concerning the scope of ministerial responsibility
closely relates to a third development which influences the
functioning of the civil service. Constitutional rules and conventions
32 Luc Verhey
which affect the relationship between politicians and civil servants
have increasingly been called into question. This especially seems to
apply to the concept of political accountability. Critics are claiming that
the concept is not suitable for holding large executive bureaucracies to
account and that it should be replaced or at least be counterbalanced
by other accountability mechanisms (Scheltema 2000). This could be
achieved by involving other accountability forums like courts, chambers
of audits, ombudsmen and civil society panels.
The debate on accountability does not in itself disturb the relationship
between civil servants and politicians. The problem is much more
that the perceptions of the key players in the political arena about what
political accountability actually means or should mean have become
blurred. One is not very familiar anymore with the rules of the game,
and insofar as one is, one has become more and more divided about
how these rules should be interpreted. Civil servants are increasingly
confused about to whom they are accountable. Is it the minister, parliament,
civil interest groups or society at large?
I can illustrate this again by my experiences when I was a civil servant
during a course I took in the Dutch School for Public Administration.
During the discussions we had and the role-plays we had to do, there
appeared to be a widespread view with my colleagues that a civil
servant is primarily a public manager whose task is to facilitate the
decision-making process and by wheeling and dealing achieve a result
that is supported by the most important interest groups involved. Then
a fool suddenly asked: ‘What about the minister?’. Most of those present
looked at him in annoyance, apparently thinking: ‘Probably a lawyer’. It
was abundantly clear that the minister was an obstacle in the management
game civil servants are playing and that for that reason ministerial
responsibility should be reduced or even be abolished. Surprisingly
this picture was by no means corrected by the course instructor.
Potentially the confusion about the role of the civil servant is even
bigger at the level of the European Union. Within the fragmented and
complicated institutional structure of the European Union a clear-cut
concept of political accountability does not exist (De Witte 2009; Craig
2010). I could imagine that in the minds of European civil servants
questions like ‘To whom am I accountable?’ and ‘What does accountability
in the EU context mean precisely?’ could easily arise. This is not
the place to go into this matter any further but suffice to say these are
questions that are far from easy to answer (Bovens et al. 2010). At the
very least the questions seem much more difficult in the international
context than in most national democratic systems.
Civil Servants and Politicians 33
Executive accountability: changing the rules?
The relationship between politics and the civil service cannot be
dissociated from the rich and in-depth academic debate on executive
accountability. Traditionally in parliamentary systems executive power
is located in the government who is accountable to parliament. In
these systems, ministerial accountability is a vital constitutional principle
without which effective parliamentary control of executive power
would not be possible. However this picture does not fully correspond
with political reality. Nowadays executive power is exercised not only
by ministers who form the government, but also by many agencies and
networks that function at arm’s length of daily politics. As a result,
many civil servants do not work at the traditional ministerial departments
but at organisations where ministerial accountability does not or
does not fully apply (‘t Hart and Wille 2002).
In some states, agencies have become increasingly controversial. The
most important reason for criticising agencies is their lack of accountability.
Ministerial accountability for the actions of independent agencies
is limited. Other, more ‘horizontal’ accountability mechanisms
are controversial because they have not proven to be a full-grown
alternative. Some people call for a restoration of traditional political
accountability. In 2004, for example, a commission in the Netherlands
recommended to bring almost all the agencies back to the ministerial
departments (Werkgroep Kohnstamm 2004). However this advice was
not followed up. On the contrary, the significance of agencies seems to
be still growing.
The agencies debate shows that there is no consensus which model of
the executive should be preferred. There are arguments for and against
shared executive power (Craig 2010). However, experience shows that
fragmentation of the executive is a serious concern. There is a considerable
risk of getting into an obscure system of committees, agencies
and policy networks which are almost inaccessible to the outside world
and who are in fact accountable to no one. Here the ‘problem of many
hands’ arises: because many different administrative groups and entities
contribute to the decision-making process, it is hard to identify
who is, at the end of the day, accountable for the outcome (Bovens
2007). For civil servants this is highly confusing. Because there is no
single locus of executive power and because the traditional concept
of political accountability has increasingly come under pressure it
has become much more difficult for civil servants to meet everyone’s
expectations.
34 Luc Verhey
This is not the place to go much deeper into the pros and cons of
different types of executive accountability. It is a complex debate which
closely relates to the view one has on the role of politics in society. In
any event it is an illusion to think that we could get rid of political
accountability. Apart from very exceptional cases, civil services cannot
function democratically without politics. There is no real alternative
for obtaining democratic legitimacy than by politicians initiating political
accountability for what the executive is trying to achieve or has
achieved. Other accountability mechanisms can be worthwhile and
are even indispensable sometimes, but they cannot substitute political
accountability. So perhaps we should resist the first reflex to fundamentally
change the constitutional rules. Or, as a prominent Dutch
civil servant once said: ‘do not take refuge in constitutional structures’
(Niessen 2001).
Given the probability that political accountability will remain a core
constitutional principle in parliamentary systems at least in the foreseeable
future, it can be deemed essential to think about solutions within
the current constitutional framework. In order to achieve a more effective
implementation of political accountability mechanisms one should
try to clarify the specific roles of the politician and the civil servant (‘t
Hart and Wille 2006). Political scientist ‘t Hart (2000) has argued that
in this relationship there are three general principles that should be
recognised:
that civil servants and politicians always treat each other with due
respect;
that they give each other enough room that they can effectively
fulfil their responsibilities, and
that their relationship is based on reciprocity.
In the next two paragraphs it will be explained precisely what this
means for the minister and the civil servant respectively.
The minister: ‘role responsibility’
First the minister – what exactly should he do and not do? In 2002 the
British constitutional lawyer Diana Woodhouse advocated a different
way of implementing ministerial responsibility (Woodhouse 2002). She
criticised a construction of ministerial responsibility which focuses on
what she called ‘causal’ responsibility, that is, on the direct involvement
of ministers in any errors or misjudgements. This is exactly what,
Civil Servants and Politicians 35
in Woodhouse’s view, has resulted in ministers seeking to distance
themselves from the cause of any departmental failings by employing
constructions like Michael Howard’s distinction between policy and
operational matters. To avoid the scape-goating seen in Howard’s
case Woodhouse proposed moving away from direct personal culpability
towards what she called ‘role responsibility’, that is, defining the
requirements of the ministerial job.
Indeed the most harmful thing for a minister to do is to seek distance
from departmental failures by publicly saying that they are not responsible.
What actually happens then is that the minister gives the impression
that he openly wants to shift the blame to his civil servants while
these are not able to defend themselves. By doing that they are not
only presenting themselves as a weak and insecure minister but are
also undermining the very essence of the relationship with their civil
servants. It seems self-evident that this should be avoided but practice
shows it is not.
What should be done instead is defining the role of the minister more
precisely. What he should do towards his civil servants are in fact three
things:
giving guidelines;
explaining;
supervising and amending if necessary.
The first thing he must do is give guidelines. A minister must make clear
what he wants and what he expects from his civil servants to achieve
this. When a government first takes office this is often not yet very clear.
The most exciting time at the ministry is when the new minister comes
in. The civil servant must be keen to find out as soon as possible what
the minister wishes to achieve and how. Sometimes nothing happens.
What makes a civil servant feel highly uncomfortable is a minister who
has no opinions, who does not want to achieve anything or is simply
not interested in the policy issues the civil servant has to deal with.
The second thing a minister must do is not only to say what he wants
but also explain why. If a minister is only giving orders without giving
the reasons the civil servants run the risk of not having understood how
they should achieve effective results. Giving reasons also implies that
the minister is fully prepared to listen to the arguments given by his
civil servants and to explicitly weigh the pros and cons before coming
to a decision. A good minister is a minister who initiates discussion
and gives room to his civil servants to come up with all the relevant
36 Luc Verhey
arguments even when some of the arguments could limit the minister
in what he wants to achieve.
From my personal experience this is not at all self-evident. As a civil
servant I once sent my minister a memorandum in preparation of a
meeting in which I thought I would hear his opinion on the issues
involved. Shortly before the meeting I was called by the minister’s
secretary who read out loud what the minister had wrote down on my
memorandum with his feared red pencil. He wrote:
Meeting can be cancelled. The advice of the civil servant is sufficiently
well formulated.
I was puzzled by this note, sent the minister an e-mail and asked him:
What do you mean? Do I understand you correctly that you follow
our advice and that we can go on with what we had planned to do?
I had got it all wrong because the minister’s simple answer was:
No, I do not want to follow your advice although I understand what
you are saying.
Well, I answered, of course I am ready to follow any of your instructions
but we could help you much better if you would explain to us exactly
what you want to do and why. My reaction could not prevent the
meeting from being cancelled, and we waited quite some time before
we exactly knew where the minister was going policy wise.
The third and last thing a minister should do pertains to what should
happen after the policy decisions are made and the implementation has
started. In that phase, the minister’s task is supervising and correcting
where necessary. Of course a minister cannot and should not know
everything what civil servants do in order to realise governmental
policy. That would not only be unrealistic but also undesirable. But that
does not alter the rules of the game. These rules imply that he can and
will be held accountable for what his civil servants have done. In this
respect the question is: What should be expected from a minister to
make his responsibility work effectively? In other words, what precisely
is the supervisory and amendatory role he has to fulfil?
Generally speaking a minister should focus on creating and maintaining
the conditions under which policy implementation can be
successful in the first place. In this respect his responsibility is that
Civil Servants and Politicians 37
the necessary legislation that legitimises what the government wants
to achieve does apply, that sufficient resources are available for effective
implementation of policies, that there are capable employees who
occupy the key positions in the department and in executive agencies
and that there are appropriate mechanisms in place to monitor whether
the governmental policies are realised in practice.
Subsequently a minister must take amendatory action if the implementation
does not prove to be successful. If necessary, a minister has
to set up an inquiry to find out what went wrong, inform parliament
and society at large about the results of the inquiry and explain which
measures he wants to take to put things right. Which measures are
adequate should be determined case by case. However, it is clear that
the minister is politically responsible, which means that it cannot be
excluded that he himself must face the political consequences. In the
last instance this can mean resigning from office.
Of course the minister cannot fulfil the supervisory role I just have
tried to identify completely on his own. On the contrary he needs
competent staff to support him. However, a minister personally can play
an important role. Ministers who have a good sense of what is politically
needed and know how to translate this into operational action are
often the most successful. And of course a good memory helps. I once
worked for a minister who immediately wrote down what he discussed
with his civil servants in a booklet so that everyone knew that he could
come back to it anytime in the future. I can assure you that it helps.
The civil servant: professionalism, political feeling and
loyalty
Although the minister and his civil servants should try to achieve
common goals, the civil servant has a role that is fundamentally
different from that of the minister. In exercising his role three things
are important:
professionalism,
sensibility for political issues, and
loyalty.
Firstly a civil servant must be a highly professional. This simply means
that he knows what he is talking about; this sounds self-evident but it is
not. One of the biggest failures in present-day thinking about the civil
service is the overestimation of managerial capacities and the parallel
38 Luc Verhey
underestimation of professional expertise. The consequences of this are
disastrous. Many civil servants nowadays do not have enough professional
knowledge to achieve the quality that is needed. Undoubtedly this
has a negative impact on the public confidence in public authorities.
On the other hand there are fortunately still many good examples of
civil servants who put up a good performance. If you look for example
at my profession, there are many good and dedicated lawyers in the
Dutch civil service who are doing an excellent job. Contrary to what one
might think, the quality of the legal debate within the civil service is
sometimes even higher than what one can find in academic literature.
The second thing civil servants urgently need is a high sensibility for
political issues. A civil servant, even if he is a top-of-the-bill expert, will
not be very effective if he cannot cope with the political circumstances
in which he has to do his job. A civil servant has to understand that
the decision which should be taken from a purely professional point
of view is sometimes unfeasible for political reasons. Consequently he
may have to come up with alternative options and next best solutions.
Moreover, a civil servant must always think about what is the best way
to present governmental views and proposals in the political context at
present. As practice shows, not all civil servants are equally capable of
taking the relevant political aspects into account.
Political advisers and public relations officials are nowadays playing
such an important role just because of these political aspects (‘t Hart
and Wille 2002). In my view that, as such, is not a bad thing. On the
contrary, in modern times, with the mass media operating everywhere
and with a political arena in which it has become more and more difficult
to survive these advisers are indispensable in the departmental
decision-making process. The other side of the coin is of course the
risk of spin-doctoring – of disguising or straining the truth and thereby
overruling the traditional civil service. However, this risk should not
be exaggerated. Political advisers and public relations officials, which
Peters probably would indicate as ‘redundant politicisation’ (Peters,
Chapter 2 in this volume), in my experience often do an excellent job
in close cooperation with departmental experts.
Sensibility for political issues does not mean that civil servants
should get involved in party politics. In my view there is a clear distinction
between the domain of the politician and that of the civil servant.
In the exercise of his duties the civil servant has to distance himself
from party politics. In this sense civil servants have to be politically
neutral (Overeem 2005). As a civil servant I once crossed the border
of what I thought was acceptable. Just a few days before the plenary
Civil Servants and Politicians 39
debate in parliament of a Bill which intended to change the politically
controversial relationship between the minister of Justice and the
public prosecution service6
my minister at the time asked me to call
members of parliament to negotiate the amendments they were planning
to submit. I felt highly uncomfortable trying to behave as a politician
and remember that some MP’s were quite annoyed that a simple
civil servant was calling them and not the minister.
The third and last quality civil servants ought to have has to do with
loyalty. But what is loyalty? If I put it simply: civil servants are not
paid to hamper ministers because they think that what he wants is not
right. If they do not want to do things they would not do if they were
a minister themselves, they should not have become a civil servant. So
the basic attitude is actively supporting the minister in achieving his
political goals even if they are not personally liked by the civil servant.
A good civil servant even considers supporting a political view he does
not share as an attractive and challenging sport.
Loyalty should not by any means be confused with always saying yes
to the views or measures the minister wants to take. A good civil servant
sometimes strongly advises against ministerial proposals or opinions if
he thinks this is necessary. A civil servant must clearly warn if in his
view the minister runs a considerable legal, economic, political or other
risk in the case he would stick to his original intentions. In this sense
the relationship between a minister and a civil servant is not one-sided
but what ‘t Hart has called reciprocal (‘t Hart 2000).
In my experience this is not at all an easy thing to do. Some ministers
get annoyed, thinking civil servants are only obstructing the wise and
noble policies he wants to achieve. For this reason it is highly important
that – let me take an arbitrary example – a lawyer does not confine
himself to just saying ‘no’ but also does the utmost to find alternative
solutions which are legally acceptable or at least less questionable
than the original proposal. It would for example be interesting to have
a closer look at the Iraq case and try to determine whether all legal
options of supporting the Iraq war were seriously considered.
Politicisation: finding a balance
In the preceding paragraphs I have tried to analyse the normative roles
of the minister and the civil servant. These roles are fundamentally
different. One might think that this analysis reflects the old tradition of
separating politics and the administration, a system in which civil servants
are politically neutral. This is only partly true. Civil servants should
40 Luc Verhey
indeed be politically neutral in the sense that they should keep distance
from party politics. However this is not the whole story. Politicisation is
to a certain extent not only desirable but also necessary to give public
policy the democratic legitimacy that is needed.
As Peters rightly points out, politicisation is not ‘a simple phenomenon
but rather a number of different patterns of behaviour to be seen
as increasing the influence of political leaders on the bureaucracy and
on public policy’. Because it concerns different patterns of behaviour,
they also ‘may have substantially different effects on governing’ (Peters,
Chapter 2 in this volume). For this reason one cannot simply conclude
that politicisation is good or bad. Its effect depends on many factors like
the constitutional context in which politicians and civil servants have
to operate, the specific form of politicisation and the proportionality by
which it is carried out in practice.
Strong politicisation of the civil service is highly undesirable.
Replacement of experts by political appointees on a large scale would
be extremely harmful for the quality of any public policy. However, this
is not the whole story. One has to place politicisation as a phenomenon
in a broader context. In this respect the widely used definition of politicisation
as ‘...the substitution of political criteria for merit-based criteria
in the selection, retention, promotion and disciplining of members of
the public service’ (emphasis added) is somewhat misleading because it
does not cover the whole variety of patterns which could be indicated
as ‘politicisation’. The definition particularly reflects what Peters calls
‘direct politicisation’: appointing political loyalists at positions that might
otherwise be career positions. As said before this form of politicisation is,
at least in Western parliamentary democracies, still very rare. This could
change. It is not at all unthinkable that as a result of a changing political
climate more political loyalists will be appointed in the future.
However, in most systems other forms of politicisation are still more
relevant. Especially important is what Peters indicates as ‘professional
politicisation’ (Peters, Chapter 2 in this volume). It is a mixed pattern
in which the upper echelons of the civil service are filled by political
loyalists who at the same time are the product of a career system that
is highly professionalised. So the appointed officials at the top of the
departmental pyramid are both political and experts in the policy
areas. The clearest example would be Germany (see Chapter 9, by Battis
in this volume). However this pattern does not seem to cover the whole
reality. ‘Softer’ types of professional politicisation seem to occur more
often. Professional politicisation to a certain extent should apply to all
civil servants. As I explained in the preceding paragraph, civil servants
Civil Servants and Politicians 41
cannot do their job successfully without a good sense of the political
field in which they have to use their professional expertise. So there
almost always has to be a proportional mixture of professionalism and
political sensibility. What this mixture should be in any particular
case depends on the particular position of the civil servant. Obviously,
political sensibility is more important at the top of the departmental
pyramid than further below. But even at the lower levels of the civil
service a good feeling for the political aspects of public policy is highly
relevant nowadays.
Next to ‘soft’ professional politicisation, other types of politicisation
may be useful as well. Peters points out to additional structures within the
civil service, which he calls ‘redundant politicisation’. The use of ministerial
cabinets, with personal appointees of the minister monitoring civil
servants, is well known in Western democracies like Belgium and France.
However, this type of politicisation has serious drawbacks as it could
easily develop as a separate unit within the ministry severely distrusted
by the regular civil service. Perhaps easier to build into the civil service
are the special advisors which are mentioned by Peters as well. Their task
is not – or not primarily – to control departmental officials but to support
them by translating policy into politically acceptable ‘formats’. In my
experience ‘redundant politicisation’ can be very fruitful if civil servants
and political appointees work together on the basis of mutual understanding
and with mutual respect for each other’s territory.
Summarising, one could conclude that politicisation as such is not
incompatible with the traditional idea of the separation of politics
and the civil service. On the contrary, as Peters rightly points out, the
concept of politicisation helps us to realise that ‘while it is important
that the civil service be highly competent, it may also be important that
those civil servants also be interested in the success of the government’.
Therefore it is not enough that civil servants are professional experts;
they must also be capable to translate their knowledge into a politically
workable outcome. In this specific way all civil servants have to be
‘politicised’. But politicisation of the civil service should have its limits.
As is often the case, one has to search for and ultimately find the right
balance within the civil service between professionalism and political
commitment.
Concluding remarks
In this chapter I summarily dealt with the relationship between politicians
and civil servants. I started with the Iraq report of the Dutch
42 Luc Verhey
Davids Committee, which amongst many other things can be seen as
an illustration that this relationship is increasingly a delicate one. Over
the years tensions between civil servants and politicians seem to have
been grown, not only in The Netherlands but in many parliamentary
democracies (see other chapters in this volume). Changing the constitutional
rules and conventions of ministerial responsibility does not
seem to be appropriate to solve the problem. What is essentially needed
within the framework of ministerial responsibility is clearly identifying
the roles of politicians and civil servants. As I have tried to show, their
roles are fundamentally different, and it is extremely important that
both politicians and civil servants are strongly aware of that. In practice
this is not always the case. This does not mean that ‘politicisation’
by definition is a bad thing. On the contrary, politicisation of the civil
service, if proportional and well embedded in the daily business of
the civil servant, can have a positive effect on the democratic process.
On the other hand direct, politicisation in the sense of replacement
of experts by political appointees would be extremely harmful for the
quality of the public policy and the ‘democratische rechtsstaat’ at large.
Hopefully the tendency to greater politicisation as pointed out by Peters
(Chapter 2) in this volume does not go in this direction.
When we look at the relationship between politicians and civil servants
it is important to note that it cannot be seen in isolation; it must be
placed in the broader context of developments in society at large. The
key word I finally want to bring in here is ‘trust’. Do citizens still believe
in politics? Do citizens still trust the civil servants to whom citizens get
in touch when they are getting a new passport or are complaining about
their tax assessment? And what about the other way around: does the
state still trust its citizens? It seems to me that mutual trust in all kinds
of relationships in society, although essential for its proper working, has
been substantially reduced. We often do not seem to trust each other
anymore.
I think ‘trust’ is also a vital element in the relationship between politicians
and civil servants. Without trust this relationship will be highly
problematic and full of tension. This element cannot be easily influenced
without taking into account the broader picture of society as a
whole. This makes the relationship between politicians and civil servants
all the more delicate.
Notes
1. Kamerstukken II 2009–2010, 31847, nr. 18.
2. NRC Handelsblad 29 January 2010, p. 2.
Civil Servants and Politicians 43
3. Kamerstukken II 2009–2010, 31847, nr. 18, p. 4. This measure has finally
been carried out through the appointment of Prof. A. Nollkaemper in May
2011.
4. Directive 95/46/EC 23 October 1995.
5. HC Deb., Vol. 292, cols. 1046–1047 (19 March 1997).
6. Law of 19th April 1999, Stb. 1999, 194.
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