The Three Ages of Government by Jos C. N. Raadschelders

Author:Jos C. N. Raadschelders [Raadschelders, Jos C. N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL028000 Political Science / Public Policy / General
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

2. The Impact of Globalization on People as Citizens and as Public Officeholders

People experience and perceive the changes in their own day and age as rapid and, in fact, assume that these changes and reforms are occurring at a faster pace in their own time more quickly than ever before (see several references in Raadschelders and Bemelmans-Videc 2015, 334–335). Is this really the case? The massive changes in the political-administrative systems of Western European countries unfolded in a span of decades, roughly between the 1780s and 1820s. The emerging industrialization at that time was followed by rapid industrialization from the second half of the nineteenth century on and resulted in an unprecedented diversification of the economy and in equally rapid urbanization. In each of these two periods, the changes were experienced as extremely intense by the ruling elites as well as by the people. Remembering the Luddites in the 1810s, we can assume that workers in the weaving trade back then experienced changes in the production system of woolen cloth to be extremely swift and threatening. The phenomenal speed of industrialization on the European continent from the 1860s on alienated the workforce at large from the production process; the concurrent urbanization estranged people from Page 156 →one another when they moved from the physical, rural communities of old and into the imagined, urban communities of the present.

Large-scale social, economic, and political changes are always experienced and perceived as intense because they uproot the predictability of life. The contemporary assessment of the size and intensity of change is very much influenced by the rapidly declining “width of the social present,” and by the unbelievable capability of high-speed information exchange. Comparative scholars in public administration focus—often mainly—on diversity and change but should also consider the extent to which these changes and this diversity are accompanied by continuity. In any time and context, continuity, diversity, and change “exist” simultaneously, although in mixes that vary between countries and periods. Change and diversity are experienced and perceived much more intensely than continuity (cf. Rosling’s negativity instinct, 2018, ch. 2). However, changes are never so encompassing that they leave no trace of continuity and obliterate any evidence of diversity. In addition, diversity is never so total that it conceals similarities between peoples. And if we are to recognize and appreciate that continuity, diversity, and change always occur together in some kind of mix peculiar to environmental circumstances, we must employ a historical perspective, especially a long view of time that focuses on more than the past three, four, or five decades only.

There are three important observations regarding comparative and global public administration that can only be made when taking this type of long view. First, looking back at 10,000 years of sedentary life, it is clear that there is convergence across the globe in how humans have structured (a) the lands that they (self-)govern and, though later in time, (b) the formal institutions and organizations with which they govern. Slowly but surely, the landmasses of the

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