Eastern Europe in transition, the case of Hungary

Abstract

The result of circumspect and considerate preliminary work, by 1990, the system of public administration characteristic of bourgeois, democratic and constitutional states was established in Hungary. The transformation of public administration is still far from complete, since fundamental reforms encompassing both structural and functional measures, and also the unified regulation of public sector human resources, urgently need to be effectuated. The continuous and rapid transformation exhausted public administration after a period and the reform programs with low efficiency discredited the ideas promoting the necessity of reforms themselves. Public administration weary of the reforms itself became gradually not supportive of, but passively resistant to the cause of the reforms, which merely reinforced the philosophy of NPM based on a neoliberal conception of the state implying that public administration cannot be reformed from within. In certain cases Hungary was under an excessive illusion concerning bot...