There is a certain geographic congruence between Western culture and rationally organised bureaucracies in the Weberian sense, but the organising principle must not be confounded with the political direction of the polity, nor with the concrete structural form an administration takes in a given locality.

It is therefore important to sharply distinguish between institutional performance outcomes, and the precise form institutional arrangements actually come to take in a given polity. Historical experience clearly indicates that the competitive international system exerts a powerful ‘socialising effect’ on individual states, in the sense of forcing each unit to emulate innovations introduced by others.

The considerable differences that exist in political, legal and bureaucratic culture and structure even between equally successful, geographically and linguistically proximate countries can be explained with inevitable path-dependencies following initial idiosyncratic solutions. In other words, rejectionist claims that administrative reform will inevitably lead to ‘Westernisation’ and thus amounts to ‘neo-colonialism’ or ‘cultural imperialism’ are historically inaccurate, because “in 50 years time Vietnam’s institutions for public service delivery will most likely just be better versions of what they are today, not pale imitations of those in Switzerland.”