Local government reforms in Russia and Germany: territorial and functional aspects. Strelnikova Evgeniya
The theme of this essay is Local government reforms in Russia and Germany: territorial and functional aspects. Russia and Germany are two countries which have rich history full of hard and complicated processes of changing in governmental structures. Today we have many resources with the help of which we can not only know more about some of these processes but we can also try to compare these two systems and find out some similarities and differences in experience of building local government as we can see it today.
So the main aim of this research is to determine main principals and aspects of local governments’ formation in these two countries according to the historical experience, national peculiarities and update changes in structure of local governance. To understand why these two countries of federative government structures have such different local government structures. Why in Germany self-government reforms were held according to the inland historical experience which supported identity of each new local government with minimum changes under the influence of other outland circumstances; and in Russia historical experience lead to the loss of distinctive character of self-government reform and resulted in uniformity of all local governments.
Reform process is a very complex procedure which touches upon many aspects of life. The current stage of local self-government reforms are executed in the context of large-scale changes in the whole system of public authority and German experience in this field cannot be analyzed apart from Russia’s federalism reforms, administrative reforms and the reform of the budget and tax system of the Russian Federation. This integrated approach has been outlined back in the Conception of the Distribution of Powers[1].
This research must be started with description of the main concepts of local government structure. As it is written in German Constitution there are two levels of government: the Federation and the Länder. Local government also has two-tier structure which is made up of the counties (Kreise) and the municipalities (Gemeinden) is, constitutionally speaking, part of each individual Land. The municipalities and counties possess a significant political and functional status in the intergovernmental setting on sundry scores.
Traditionally on the first place among all local government authorities stays the right to deal with all matters of relevance for the local community in their own responsibility (within the frame of the law). Second the municipalities can be put in charge, by legislation, of public tasks ‘delegated’ to them by the state. Third the federal government is not allowed to establish regional or local field offices of its own, hence, about 70 to 80 per cent of all the (federal and Länder) legislation (as well as legal provisions of the European Union) is carried out by the local authorities.
Talking about personnel and services in Germany only 6.5 per cent of the total number of public sector personnel are employed at the federal level, while some 50 per cent fall to the Länder (mostly teachers and the police force) and some 40 per cent are local government personnel and most of social services have been rendered by nonpublic non-for-profit organisations (Wohlfahrtsverbände) under the traditional ‘principle of subsidiarity’.
European experts place Germanyin the group of the politically and functionally strongest local government systems in Europe. However the allocation of revenuesto German local government is markedlymore centralized, in that, while on average 30 per cent of the revenues of municipalities come from their own taxes, most of these ‘local taxes’ are generated through a revenue sharing system which is determined by federal legislation.
Then in the history of Germany from the early 1990 took place reform “waves” which affected mostly the political rights of citizens. The traditional profile of politically strong local government has been reinforced by the introduction of direct democratic citizen rights (binding local referendums, direct election of the mayor) and of the direct election of the (executive) mayor in his/her position as the directly accountable political as well as administrative leader in local decision-making and administration[2].
The history of local government in Russia and Soviet Union can be characterized as a story of grand plans and the inability to fully implement these plans. According to the Constitution, the institutions of the national government and the regional governments (oblasts, republics, etc.) comprise the organs of state power, while the institutions of cities and districts are not part of the state, but are organs of local self-government. Thus the Constitution accepted the distinction between state authority and local self-government that had been established in a law adopted in the Russian republic of the USSR in 1991, the reform that is now in progress will virtually eliminate that distinction for practical purposes.
Local politics in Russia shows that the key reforms of local government, and the struggle to built viable democracies have been inextricably linked to the wider struggle for power between the regions and center, and to the specific nature of Russia's highly politicized and negotiated form of asymmetrical federalism.
During the early 1990s all attempts to create a universal and uniform system of local-self-government in the federation were a failure. Under the protection of their constitutions and charters, and the extra-constitutional rights and powers granted to them in special bilateral treaties, regional leaders were able to instigate strict regimes and to prevent from the implementation key local government reforms. Thus, by the end of that era the number of municipalities, their type, status and powers, varied tremendously from region to region[3]. Putin's local government reforms also need to be viewed as an integral component of his wider centralizing political agenda, and his assault on the principles and practices of federalism. Putin has overseen the creation of local electoral regimes. Putin's new system of local self-government marks a victory for the proponents of the 'statist concept' of local self-government over those who championed the 'societal concept', codified in Article 12 of the Russian Constitution[4].
Written above confirm that Local Government reforms in Russia and Germany is a very interesting and complicated research. Full work will contain more detailed analyze and comparison of these two countries in the aspect of territorial and functional local self-government reforms.
[1]Elena Gritsenko/A new stage of local self-government reform in Russia and the German experience/Number 8 of the journal «Kazan Federalist»
[2]HELLMUT WOLLMANN /Local Government Reforms in Great Britain,Sweden, Germany and France: BetweenMulti-Function and Single-PurposeOrganisations.
[3]Cameron Ross/ Local Politics and Democratization in Russia
[4]Rafael Khakimov/Political-legal resources of federalism in Russia/Number 8 of the journal «Kazan Federalist»