Introduction

The Centre for Social and Economic Strategies (CESES) applied the multidimensional concept of governance in an empirical analysis of the development of the Czech Republic after 1989. The research focused on strategic qualities and capacities of governance. (Potůček et al. 2007, Potůček 2008). Having been invited to participate in the First NISPAcee-EGPA Trans-European Dialogue (Tallinn, January 2008), I thought we ought to confront this concept with that of the Neo-Weberian State. Why ? Neither states nor public administration rules and agendas develop in a vacuum; we are witnessing rapid and profound societal, cultural, economic, and political changes, which create a cognitive challenge to both concepts. Even more so in the post-communist countries, with their return to democratic principles, replacement of the old cadres by new (sometimes poorly educated) administrative elites, the mass-scale and fast privatization, newly acquired national sovereignty, etc. Thus, I hoped that juxtaposing two streams of theoretical reasoning and the empirical evidence acquired by them might bring some interesting and hopefully inspiring results.

     This paper offers the result of such experimentation. It starts with the presentation of the multi-dimensional concept of governance, and, in its second part, it confronts that with the neo-Weberian concept of state (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004, Drechsler 2005, Pollitt 2008). The Central and Eastern European region’s development after 1989 serves as a source of empirical evidence for the clarification of neuralgic points and tensions between the applications of both concepts.