Implications of the fragmentation of Lithuanian uniformed services

Abstract

The scope of impact of EU integration on national governance structures is minimal. Member states need only to comply with standards of democratic governance, whereas the exact means how to achieve results remains specific to a member state. Prior to the Eurozone crisis, there was a belief that economic convergence would lead to institutional convergence among EU member-states and thus strengthen integration. However, the crisis has showed that the causal link might be the opposite – differences in how policy is implemented may lead to divergence between the member states, and those differences may act to impede integration. Uniformed services form the core of the coercive capacity of a sovereign state. On the one hand in EU these organizations need to be overseen by democratically elected civilian leaders, and act on the basis of the rule of law; on the other – the management of these services is highly contingent on national contexts. The impact of international best practices is patchy at best and local political consideration constantly risk trumping the adoption of such practices. The Lithuanian case is of particular interest in this context, as its civil, and uniformed service regulation and structure is highly complex, and does not correspond to the organizational structure, and even the constitutional division of power between branches of governments. A small state with a about 70.000 service-members has a structure of a dozen laws that regulate different aspects of different service. This internal fragmentation means that there is a diffusion of managerial practices even at the national level. We hypothesize that this lowers the capacity to perform the tasks presented to uniformed services.