The History of the Establishment of the Civil Service in the European Union
Abstract
The article presents a comprehensive historical and institutional analysis of the evolution of the supranational civil service of the European Union – from its emergence within the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) to the current stage shaped by the Russian-Ukrainian war, the energy crisis and the renewed enlargement policy (2022–2025). Eight key historical stages of the formation of the supranational civil service are identified; each stage has its own institutional logic, treaty foundation and personnel configuration. On the basis of primary documents – the founding treaties, the EU Staff Regulations, institutional decisions of the Council and the European Commission – together with archival data and statistics of the European Parliamentary Research Service, the dynamics of personnel numbers are traced: from the compact apparatus of the High Authority in Luxembourg, through rapid growth in the 2000s, to stabilisation at the level of approximately 32–33 thousand persons in the European Commission as of 2025. Particular attention is given to the principle of geographical balance, the regime of professional neutrality, and the formation of a «mixed» personnel model in which permanent officials coexist with temporary staff, contract staff and seconded national experts, providing flexibility in responding to peak workloads such as the migration crisis of 2015–2016 or the support of Ukraine after 2022. It is demonstrated that the EU civil service system has transformed from a technocratic apparatus for the management of common markets into a multi-level administration combining law-making, regulatory, supervisory and foreign-policy functions; its present-day quality is determined not so much by the number of staff positions as by the capacity to act under conditions of simultaneous crises. A set of practical recommendations is formulated for Ukraine: integration into the European Administrative Space, professionalisation of the Senior Civil Service, separation of political appointments from career positions, development of integration competencies, and establishment of mechanisms for secondment of Ukrainian civil servants to EU institutions.
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