The European Civil Service

As a common understanding, the EU is a hybrid system, neither a simple international organisation nor a State strictly speaking. Hence, it shares some similarities and shows some differences with both the models, since it lies in-between them. In light of this, a comparison aiming at shedding light on these discrepancies is in principle possible and, moreover, arguably profitable. As seen above, whereas some works providing such a comparison with regards to international organisations already exist in literature, this is not replicated for the opposite model. Indeed, it is only possible to find some works – even quite recent – that study legal nature of the EU civil service against the broader category of international civil service systems. Conversely, comparisons between the EU and state entities are few and, above all, mostly unsatisfactory or of narrow scope. Moreover, the analysis usually focuses only on the EU civil service, so it takes into account only the supranational civil service as outlined above. By contrast, a systematic and far-reaching comparison of what differentiates the broader notion of European civil service from fully-fledged States in this specific field is still missing. It goes without saying that States can vary in their constitutive elements: according with their division of tasks among the levels of government and therefore with the more or less decentralised outlook of their legal systems, States can mirror different models. Therefore, it is crucial to decide what is the purpose of the comparison that is going to be carried out, in order to decide which State to compare. As regards the European civil service, this research aims at providing a better understanding of its legal nature, by identifying the origins of the current framework and by outlining the possible outcomes of its evolution. To this end, it would be almost pointless to simply compare the European civil service with, for example, a centralised system such as the French fonction publique, since the former is not supposed to align itself to the latter, at least in the near future. Conversely, at least since its origins and still to some extent nowadays, federalism has been one of the underlying ideals underpinning the process of EU integration. Of course, such a path is far from being concluded, despite many elements are already there. As Schütze has remarkably pointed out, legal comparison between the EU and other fully-fledged federal systems can provide meaningful insights to better understand the constitutional and administrative underpinnings of the EU. Consequently, in order to provide a fruitful comparison, this research explores the civil service systems in the Federal Republic of Germany (hereinafter simply Germany) and the United States of America (US), seeking to point out their main features. In particular, these two systems are taken into account because they provide almost antithetic forms of government and, therefore, they can expectedly offer the widest range of possibilities when it comes to civil service matters. Indeed, as better explained in the next chapters, these two systems reflect a different scheme in the relationships between the federal level and the local entities: whereas in Germany there is a «cooperative» model with many ties between the Bund and the Länder, for the US there have been coined several labels, but at the end of the day they still embrace a dualistic model, in which the Federation and the States are to be kept separate. Unsurprisingly, these differences bring about many consequences for the civil service systems.