European Public Administration under the Principles of Legality, Proportionality and Subsidiarity

• Author: Mihaela Carausan
• Position: National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, Faculty of Public Administration
• Pages: 61-68

European public administration under the principles of legality,

proportionality and subsidiarity

Mihaela Cărăuşan 1

1National School of Political Studies and Public Administration,

Faculty of Public Administration, mihaela_carausan@yahoo.com

Abstract. Within t he European Union order, the national public administrations play a very important role.

They are responsible for the enforcement and the control of the execution of the policies of the European

Communities, in all the states of the European Union, in the interest of the respective governments. Although

the European Union has a central administration, she doesn’t have external agencies. Applying th e European

instructions and regulations depends on the national governments. Because of r ules such as mutual

recognition, each government depends on the quality of executing the Community policy, for the purpose of

achieving its own responsibilities. The role of the public administration in the European unification is a

decisive one; and this is not only because the public administration is connected to the institutional and

governmental mechanisms, but also because the real, practical, t echnical and “aesthetic” convergence of

different administrative cultures is the key element of th e European integration. Thus we are faced not only

with a new supra-national institutional order, but also with a new juridical order given by the integration

through law.

Keywords: modern administration, rule of law, good governance, discretionary power, citizens/society

Europe is characterized by unity only in and through its multiplicity. The interactions among peoples,

cultures, classes, states wove a unity which is it pluralistic and contradictory. Modern Europe

constituted itself in a chaos of genesis in which powers of order, disorder and organization were

knotted together.

Government, the backbone of the social system organized into a state, acquired new meanings.

Therefore, we didn’t aim only at describing and explaining certain principles exhibited at the level of

the juridical and administrative realities, but especially how they are implemented in the Romanian

system. Thus, we partially tackle the ways in which the present administrative activity of the

Romanian state could be improved.

Even if Kelsen argued that “the State is not the entire juridical order: neither the pre-state juridical

order of primitive societies, nor the supra-state or inter-state international juridical order, represent a

State”1, in all the countries and in all the cultures, people refer to knowledge and traditions regarding

the state: what it is, what it does and what it should be2.

Stemming from liberalism, the idea of the rule of law became a formal principle which designated the

totality of the procedures for generating law. Thus, even though for Kelsen the rule of law is a

pleonasm, any law is law of the state, and any state is a state of law, it becomes a constraining order,

an order which justified the police state.

However, the juridical literature constantly emphasized that the notion of the Rule of law has its own

universal dimension, as it was expressly attested in many international and European documents. The

existence of the rule of the law essentially depends on the national realities, those which contributed to

1 Hans Kelsen, Theorie pure du droit, Bruylant, L.G.D.J., 1999, p. 281.

2 Murray Edelman, Politica şi utilizarea simbolurilor, Polirom, Bucureşti, 1999, p. 11.

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