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The British Tradition of Administration
Robert Skidelsky
Moscow Conference
| Wednesday, October 17, 2007
The British tradition of public administration is aristocratic, the French is republican. This difference persists today beneath the practice of meritocratic selection common to both countries. It is reflected in the greater importance of social class in recruitment to the higher ranks of the British civil service. Educational reforms designed to increase access have run up against the persistence of the British class structure, giving a strong social bias to ‘selection by ability’. This is true in both schools and universities. The best efforts of reformers to remove parental advantage from the recruitment of top civil servants has been ...
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Education for an Effective Public Service
Robert Skidelsky
Moscow Conference
| Tuesday, July 17, 2007
1.Most countries have devoted considerable attention to the education of their rulers. These were traditionally drawn from the aristocracy, but since the 19th century, selection for the public service has generally been based on merit. Candidates for the higher civil service had to pass examinations for which they were prepared at elite institutions.
2.A country in transition, seeking to build up an administrative structure of high ability and integrity, can draw some instructive lessons from the experience of successful administrative systems elsewhere. The key question is: what structure of education, secondary and higher, best ...
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World Governance
Robert Skidelsky
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Our starting point is the breakdown of the theory and to some extent the practice of state sovereignty under the impact of globalization. The doctrine of state sovereignty has been increasingly qualified. Sovereignty, it is said, is being undermined from above by the emergence of institutions of global governance, and from below by transnational movements and NGOs. The right to intervene coercively in what had hitherto been regarded as the domestic affairs of states is now being asserted for various contingencies, the most notable being when states sponsor terrorist groups or perpetuate or allow mass murder. The doctrine of state ...
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Future of Europe
Robert Skidelsky
Moscow School of Political Studies
| Tuesday, July 27, 2004
I would like to speak about the three most discussed issue about the future of the European Union today.
The first concerns the European Constitution.
The second concerns foreign and defence policy
The third concerns the future of the Euro
I will conclude briefly about how all this may affect Russia.
The New Constitution
First, the EU has a new Constitution. This was agreed at the Brussels Conference on 18 June of this year. Agreed, but not ratified. A number of countries, including Britain and France, will hold referenda on ratification, probably next year.
Constitutions are associated with creating governments. But the ...
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Globalisation and International Relations
Robert Skidelsky
Buckingham University
| Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Ever since the end of the Cold War, people have been trying to picture what a ‘world after communism’would look like. The first attempts to discern the post-communist future revolved round the ideas of ‘globalisation’ and ‘democracy’. Underlying both was the view that the main barrier to the spread of markets and democracy had fallen away, and that a ‘new world order’ was shaping up, or could be made to shape up, according to these two precepts. A crucial corollary of this was that war and the threat of war would become residual factors in the ordering of international relations because we had found a ‘better way’. Free trade promised ...
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