UofG Centre for Public Policy

17 September 2025: Following his contribution at the European Group for Public Administration conference in August, Professor Alasdair Roberts writes about the tendency to lean towards centralisation in moments of crisis - based on his recent research and book project - warning that centralisation 'may be a formula for fragility, not resilience.'

Blog by Alasdair Roberts, Professor of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This blog is part of a series connected to the 2025 European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) Annual Conference, held in Glasgow 26 - 29 August. 

The European Union faces a crisis of security, and many doubt whether it is ready for the moment. Some think that the solution is centralisation: increasing Brussels' capacity to steer foreign and defence policy. In the midst of crisis, the temptation to centralise can be overwhelming. In the long run, though, centralisation may be a formula for fragility, not resilience. 

"We are living in the most momentous and dangerous of times," Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in March 2025. Russian aggression is twinned with American isolationism. "The real question," von der Leyen said, "is whether Europe is prepared to act as decisively as the situation dictates. And whether Europe is ready and able to act with the speed and the ambition that is needed."

This question is hardly new. The EU has been hit by a succession of crises over the last two decades: the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the sovereign debt crisis that followed; Brexit; the rule of law crisis in central and eastern Europe; and the immigration crisis of 2014-16. In most instances, the response to crisis has been to increase Brussels' authority, and specifically the authority of the European Commission. Some of the proposed responses to the current security crisis follow the same path.

This is not entirely surprising. Jean Monnet predicted that "Europe would be built through crises, and that it would be the sum of their solutions." And if we look at other large political systems, we see the same cycle of crisis-and-centralisation. The United States today is much more centralised than it was a century ago.  The Great Depression, world wars, rivalry with the Soviet Union, the crisis of civil rights - all these events resulted in a shift of authority to Washington and the presidency. 

We can see the allure of centralisation. By concentrating power at the top, decisions will be made more quickly and intelligently.  Leaders at the apex will have a better overall view of events. Policies will not be marred by senseless compromises. At the stage of execution, problems of miscoordination and confusion will be avoided.

In my current book project, I call this way of thinking the doctrine of centralism. The doctrine is amalgam of many arguments advanced by reformers over the last century, all purporting to show how centralisation will make government perform better. In reality, these reformers were conducting an experiment in regime design. They expected that centralisation would lead to better performance, but they could not be certain. 

A century of experience now shows us the pitfalls of centralisation. One has to do with the quality of decision-making at the center. In practice, leaders at the top often do not act intelligently. They may operate within informational bubbles or suffer from groupthink. Stress and lack of time often undermine their capacity to deliberate well. Some top-level leaders and advisors are simply out of their depth.

Nor does centralisation necessarily mean relief from gridlock. Even centralised systems can suffer from factionalism and stagnation, as the Soviet Union did in the 1970s. Moreover, centralisation means that entire systems suffer when the center seizes up. Alternately, extreme centralisation can actually stoke societal divisions - as American politics currently shows us.

Similarly, centralisation does not necessarily mean cleaner execution. Nikita Khrushchev once compared the Soviet bureaucracy to a "tub full of dough," impervious to central control. The same is true of any large administrative system. The bigger the system, the longer the chains of difficult principal-agent relations.

Such systems are not merely difficult to manage. They are difficult to reform too. This is partly because complex systems are hard to understand, which means that it is hard to predict what reforms are likely to do. And partly because large scale systems include so many vested interests. Think of the challenges involved in reforming the American healthcare system, or India's farm laws.

In the twentieth century, many people who thought about the design of large-scale political systems were deeply sceptical of decentralised, federal models. Even in the United States, the tendency was to see federalism as an obstacle to social and economic progress: slow, cumbersome, and ineffectual. As one writer said, federalism was a pis aller: a second-best form of government, to be tolerated only when political conditions made centralisation infeasible.

We can now see that the grass is not greener on the other side of the fence. As we look at large systems that did centralise over the last century - the United States, India, China, the Soviet Union - we can see that centralisation had very serious pathologies too. The choice between centralisation and federalization is not between first-best and second-best. It is a choice between two seriously flawed modes of governance.

One might say that this is an argument for the familiar principle of subsidiarity, which emphasizes the virtues of local decision-making. Rather than emphasizing the virtues of localism, however, I would emphasize the long-term pathologies of centralisation. These tend to be forgotten in moments of crisis.

Author

Alasdair Roberts is a professor of public policy at University of Massachusetts Amherst. His most recent book, The Adaptable Country, is a finalist for the 2025 Shaughnessy-Cohen Prize for Canadian Political Writing. His current project, Against Centralism, is under contract with Oxford University Press. His website is www.alasdairroberts.ca.

Professor Roberts was part of the plenary panel titled EU Relations in Turbulent Times at the 2025 European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) in Glasgow, chaired by the Centre for Public Policy’s Professor Nicola McEwen.

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First published: 17 September 2025