Seminar paper from the year 2000 in the subject Politics - Region: Eastern Europe, grade: 1,0 (A), University of Leipzig (Faculty for Sociology, Philosophy, Political Science), course: Seminare 'Administration Policies and Politics/ Professionalism and Ethics', language: English, abstract: Civil service, a part of public administration. The quotation above is one of the best to illustrate the nature of this institution. But, what actually is civil service? Writing about the Polish central administration in the 20th century, one cannot omit mentioning the beginning, the birth of administration in Europe, theoretical approaches, and finally the answer to the above question. I decided to close all that in the 2nd chapter: Theory for to solve any doubts and for a better understanding of the rest. The first chapter about Poland presents the establishing of public administration and civil service in the 20`s and the 30′s, after over a century of non-existence. It introduces Polish projects of re-forming the administration, consequence of a military coup d′état and an authoritarian regime. The next chapter is about the destruction of all administrative achievements of the 2nd Polish Republic, politicisation and dissolvation of the civil service during the communist regime after the World War 1939-45 and positive changes in the 80′s that were the result of a critical situation of the Polish People′s Republic. Then the 90′s, the end of the non-democratic regime, new reality, the idea and the need to re-create the civil service, project, the creation and the role of the KSAP (National School of Public Administration) are being shown. The 6th chapter concerns the enacting of the first Civil Service Law and the next - wide, open critique of it, in addition the questions of civil service and the new constitution.. In the 8th chapter the focus is on the discussion that appeared in 1998, when already a new project of the law was being worked out, and generally regarded the existence of the civil service. Subsequently, the next part pre-sents the 1998 Civil Service Law, most important differences and innovations and again the doubts connected to it. The last, but particularly important chapter of my work in-troduces ethical aspects not only of the civil service but of the public administration as a whole. The main reason is the very "young age" of the civil service corps in Poland and the similarity of the problems bothering them, civil service is after all a part of the pub-lic administration. Being discussed are the problems of corruption, misbehaviour, inef-ficiency and at the very end the need for a Code of Ethics for the civil service.