The Usual Suspect: European Union and Post Accession Reforms of Public Administration in Romania

This paper analyzes the issue of continuation of public administration reform in Romania after the EU accession in 2007. More precisely, the authors take into consideration the civil service framework legislation and assess the degree in which it changed once the deadline for accession was achieved. The main assumption of the paper is that the European Union pressured politicians in Romania towards changing the civil service up to the point where legal politicization was hardly visible. After the accession, Romanian politicians re-established the basis for creating a politicized civil service. To prove this assumption, the authors investigate the Civil Service Statute and related acts between 1990 and 2010, and consider the years 1993 and 2007 as important yardsticks in the European Union's relation with Romania. Furthermore, they make use of the Reports issued by the European Commission during the accession period as well as after it (under the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism), in order to receive a comprehensive image of the Union's assessments of reforms of de-politicization.