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ESTONIA |
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ESTONIA |
HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK
1. The Estonian Civil Service
One cannot discuss the deep historical traditions of the state and the gradual emergence of modern forms of government in Estonia. For centuries, the historical development of the Estonian civil service has meant the dominance of the civil services of occupying states. The exceptions are the two periods of independence, from 1918 to 1940 and 1991 to the present.
>From the beginning of the thirteenth century, political power in Estonia belonged to the German crusaders and the King of Denmark. In the wars of the sixteenth century, Estonia was divided between Denmark, Sweden, Russia and Poland. In the seventeenth century, the King of Sweden ruled Estonia and, in 1710, Estonia was incorporated into the Russian Empire. Civil servants of that time were appointed according to their loyalty to the ruling power. However, the privileged position that the German nobles had occupied since the thirteenth century was also recognised by the Russian state and, thus, further solidified. Until 1918, the German nobility exercised power at the administrative, juridical and local levels in Estonia. Despite a “period of national awakening,” from 1860 to 1885, the official language of government offices was German until the 1880s, and Russian from the 1880s until the rise of the Republic of Estonia in 1918. Consequently, there was no justification for identifying Estonian public servants as a professional group.
The Estonian Representative Assembly established the independent Republic of Estonia in 1918. According to the constitution adopted in 1920, Estonia was a democratic parliamentary republic. All German or Russian legal acts that were not changed by new laws remained in force. The development of the civil service during the first Republic was dominated by a highly legalistic approach; understandable since the civil service had to be established for a new state. Civil servants enjoyed public support that expected lawfulness, social guarantees, competitive salaries and promotional opportunities. The system was open, and it was possible for anyone over twenty years old with a primary education to enter the civil service, even in the top ranks.
Estonia was occupied by and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1940. New institutions compatible with communist ideology and Soviet bureaucracy replaced the state institutions that had been established by the first Republic. During the Soviet period, the civil service was not “professional” in that it did not depend on specialised training and did not operate in accordance with high ethical standards. The professional ethics of bureaucrats was equated with commitment to communist ideology, and the main form of in-service training was party-political training. The civil service under the communist regime was composed of people who entered at an early age at relatively low levels in the hierarchy and spent their working lives in the public administration, typically in the same institution. Open competitions and competitive examinations were completely unknown. Formal education of basically any field of a university, technical or pedagogical institute enabled graduates to enter the civil service at higher ranks, which was a crucially important advantage because promotion opportunities were limited and depended largely on seniority. However, a number of officials with only elementary or secondary education also managed to work their way up through the civil service ranks.
In general, job security was very high under the Soviet system. Communist ideology also did not encourage professional mobility; it was typical for people to have lifetime employment with just one employer. It was almost impossible to fire an official because of poor performance. Performance appraisals were merely symbolic and were based mainly on the assessment of ideological matters. There were no incentives for in-service training and self-education, as professional qualifications did not often matter in promotions, salary allocations, etc. The civil service system offered a clear example of a patronage system with no regard for merit until the beginning of the 1990s. The legacy of Soviet bureaucracy and administrative culture caused many of the problems facing the Estonian public administration at present.
On 20 August 1991, Estonia declared her independence from the Soviet Union, marking the end of fifty years of Soviet occupation. It was necessary to re-build the state – its legal, political and economic structures – virtually from scratch. There was (and still is) a need to restructure and downse the old structures on the one hand, and to create the new structures required by an independent state. In this respect, the development was different from that in Central and Eastern European countries, which already possessed the attributes of independent statehood. In addition to the fundamental reshaping of political and economic institutions, the new government had to reform the administrative apparatus itself. While facilitating reforms in other sectors, however, the Estonian civil service itself has remained systemically unreformed. By the end of the 1990s, it was evident that the development of public administration was far behind economic reforms, and it may act as a brake on continuing economic reforms, further stabilisation and joining the European Union in the future.
Tremendous changes have occurred not only in the laws and structures governing the Estonian civil service but also in its personnel. Estonia had twenty-four thousand civil servants in 1997, and the number has steadily increased despite the government’s intentions to downsize. Officials have left the service, and new staff has been recruited during the reorganisation of ministries. Labour turnover in the civil service was especially high in 1992 and 1993. According to the state chancellery, labour turnover has been ten-twenty percent a year from 1997 to 1999. At the same time, the number of young officials has grown rapidly. Titma (1998, 126) claims that less than half of those employed by the government in 1992 remained in the same occupation in 1997. However, neither the civil servants remaining from the Soviet period, nor the newer officials have been able to develop the qualifications and skills required from a contemporary public administration. The Soviet civil service experience turned out to be of no use whatsoever and conflicted with the needs of a contemporary civil service. Tallo (1995, 127) argues that, for incoming top civil servants, trust was more important than competence, and most appointments to senior posts were made on the basis of party loyalty rather than competence.
When the Public Service Act came into force on 1 January 1996, employees of central and local government agencies automatically received the status of civil servants, without passing any examinations or assessment. Consequently, the Public Service Act has had more of an impact on newcomers to the civil service than existing civil servants. Despite its shortcomings, the Public Service Act is a significant landmark. It calls for the abolition of the patronage system, the introduction of hiring and promotion policies based on merit, competitive examinations, salary scales, regular appraisals and common grading throughout the civil service. The Public Service Act leaves recruitment open for all positions in the civil service, including senior posts. Serving officials are not given an advantage in competition for vacancies, but they are welcome to apply. Open competitions for senior positions are mandatorily announced in Riigi Teataja (a collection of legal acts that are openly available) and often in daily newspapers.
Personnel management in the civil service is, to a large degree, decentralised in Estonia. However, senior civil servants are appointed, evaluated and promoted centrally through the Competition and Evaluation Committee of Higher Public Servants at the State Chancellery. Other than these senior posts, each ministry and executive agency is responsible for the recruitment, promotion, training and performance appraisals of their officials. Civil servants are recruited on a permanent basis as a rule; fixed-term contracts are used for temporary staff only. Job security is high; dismissal is very unusual, and this puts enormous financial pressure on ministries. However, the civil service commands low prestige and remuneration is not competitive with salaries in the private sector. Therefore, it is difficult to fill vacancies with highly qualified staff.
2. Education in Public Administration
The history of education in public administration (PA) is related to broader developmental issues in Estonian universities. Throughout this report, the following institutions of higher education are discussed:
- University of Tartu;
- Tallinn Technical University;
- Tallinn University of Educational Sciences;
- Estonian Business School.
The previous list includes all institutions that provide PA education at least on the bachelor’s level. In addition, public administration is taught at a diploma level in the Tallinn Baccalaureate School and at the Academy of Internal Defence, and there are more than two hundred training institutes that provide in-service training courses in PA.
The history of PA education is based on the history of the University of Tartu, the only classical universitas in Estonia. The University of Tartu was founded by the decree of the Swedish King Gustav Adolf in 1632, then under the name of Dorpat. It was his wish to create a university “where students would be prepared seriously and solidly so that they could be useful for God and Man.” This included educating professional civil servants until 1710 when, due to the impact of the Great Northern War, the university was closed down. It was reopened in 1802 by order of the Russian emperor, Alexander I. The Czar expressed his intention to create a university where civil servants would be educated to meet the needs of all regions of Russia. Dorpat’s pinnacle was the middle of the nineteenth century, when well known public administration scholars such as Wilhelm Stieda, Karl Bücher, Wilhelm Lexis and Adolph Wagner taught in the institution.
The establishment of the Estonian Republic in 1918 marked a new beginning. From 1918 to 1940, almost all Estonian civil servants graduated from the University of Tartu. In the late 1930s, the Institute of State Officials was founded by A. T. Kliimann, a professor of administrative law, but this institution was closed in 1940 due to the Russian occupation. During this period, all social sciences were severely underdeveloped, and PA programmes were not offered in Estonia. Civil servants, by and large, had higher education in various fields from veterinary sciences to physics.
The question of educating civil servants came up again in 1992, when academics realised that a effectively functioning state needed competent civil servants. Thus a special programme for educating civil servants was established step by step at the University of Tartu, first within an interdisciplinary School of Social Sciences, which was mostly composed of Western and qualified Estonian academics from abroad. The Chair of Public Administration was refounded in 1995, and the first group of BA students graduated in 1996.
Although the predecessor of Tallinn Technical University (then called the Technical Special Unit) was founded in 1918, and the Tallinn University of Educational Sciences (then called the Tallinn Training College) in 1919, these institutions did not demonstrate interest in educating civil servants until 1994. Influenced by the change of rule in Estonia, the Faculty of Humanities was opened in 1991 at Tallinn Technical University. A few years later, the Faculty of Social Sciences was founded at the Tallinn University of Educational Sciences. A joint PA programme of Tallinn Technical University and the Tallinn University of Educational Sciences was established in 1994. This was the first time in the history of Estonian higher education that two universities launched a joint programme with extensive student and faculty exchange and fully transferable credits and grades.
It must be noted that the Estonian Ministry of Education did not initiate any PA programmes as the field was unknown to the public and even to education officials. PA as an academic field was only added to the ministry’s list in 1995, after programmes in three public universities had been established and the first students admitted. This is unusual as the logical procedure usually involved the government allocating student places within particular programmes before students were enrolled. From 1995 to 1999, the Ministry of Education was passive towards, but relatively supportive of, the universities’ initiative in the development of PA programmes, and the three universities admitted as many students as they were able to teach considering the limited human resources available.
The aforementioned universities are all large public institutions with considerable traditions in teaching and research, dating from before Estonia regained independence. The first Estonian private higher educational institution, the Estonian Business School, was founded in 1988 by Estonian and North American professors as a centre for management education. The school has largely focused on the development of business studies to date. In 1996, the school received its license from the Ministry of Education as a university-level institution. In 1998, the Estonian Business School expanded its activities by introducing a PA program, thus becoming the only private institution teaching public administration at the bachelor’s level. As the PA programme in the Estonian Business School is only one year old, it was difficult to obtain data on their activities, which is why analysis of the school is incomplete in this report.
The main rationale for establishing public administration programmes in Estonia is clear – the re-establishment of the Estonian Republic and the end of the Russian occupation of Estonia. There had not been a single civil servant professionally trained in public administration in Estonia for fifty years. All PA programmes have been established with the goal of improving the organisation and functioning of the state on all levels. As mentioned previously, labour turnover in the Estonian civil service was very high in the 1990s. The demand for highly educated young professionals has been enormous in order to staff public offices with qualified people. Even at the end of the 1990s, the four universities were unable to meet the demands of central and local governments, and there is still a remarkable shortage of qualified civil servants. In addition, the establishment of PA programmes was also influenced by the development of PA education and research in Western countries. The Western-educated faculty in Tartu, for example, contributed greatly to the development of the new, independent field at a time when the term “public administration” had not yet been translated into Estonian.
In general, PA programs have evolved from a social science and economics base with strong emphasis on interdisciplinarity. The programmes are new, but there have already been modifications to all curricula, whereas the broader objectives have remained almost unchanged. The reason could be that there has not been enough feedback from graduates yet as the first have just entered the civil service. A few changes, however, have been made according to proposals from practising officials (e.g., introducing a course on office management in Tartu). The number of EU courses has increased over the years, as Estonia was selected into the first wave of EU enlargement. The number of students has substantially increased in all universities, and graduate and postgraduate programmes have been introduced gradually. In the beginning of the 1990s, the main emphasis was on the development of undergraduate courses, but currently more attention is paid to improving graduate curricula. Changes have also occurred in faculties, with many young well-educated people joining academia. There are still, however, a limited number of faculty members in all universities, and the preparation of new scholars is a high priority for all institutions. Faculties have been increasingly asked to consult on Estonian PA reform and to provide in-service training for civil servants.
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