Civil Servants and Whistle-Blowing: Loyal Neutrality and/or Democratic Ideal?
This chapter, by a political philosopher, opens a preliminary investigation of the indirect and complex relationship between the politicisation of the civil service and the incidence of whistle-blowing civil servants. The principal question is whether politicisation generates stresses on the idea and self-image of a neutral and professional civil servant and whether this may be the cause of the paradoxical stance of affirming the traditional democratic role of the civil service by speaking up, while thereby breaking the role-boundaries of that same tradition. This is a complex and novel idea, and I attempt to lay bare some important aspects of this complexity. My hypothesis, which needs empirical research from social scientists, is that any trend to whistle-blowing civil servants may itself be symptomatic of politicisation.
Committee to Protect Journalists
Assignment asking students to go to the Committee to Protect Journalists' website, read several stories and write a reaction to the web site, incorporating examples from the stories read.
Analysis: The Agenda 2007 Proposals: Evolution or Revolution?
On 10 February 2004 the Commission published its proposal for the financial perspective 2007-2013. A week later it adopted the third report on economic and social cohesion. These two documents form the basis of the so-called ‘Agenda 2007 reforms’. They will be the greatest challenge for the enlarged EU after the intergovernmental conference, since they will determine the financial basis for EU policy-making until the middle of the next decade. The Agenda 2007 proposals certainly hint at courageous reforms, because they place a previously unheard-of emphasis on performance and quality. Under the proposals, structural operations should generate value for money, and the funds should focus on projects which generate added value at a European level. Overall the Commission’s proposals point in the right direction, because they balance, on the one hand, solidarity for the new Member States and weak regions in the old Member States with, on the other hand, investments in future tasks. Moreover, they constitute a paradigm shift. For the first time, the Common Agricultural Policy will not be the dominant expenditure category. Now it is up to the Member States to examine the proposals politically and find a compromise between sometimes very divergent interests. It is to be hoped that, during the debate over expenditure limits and division of funds, national interests do not outweigh European interests.