Europeanization and Democratization in ECE: Towards Multi-Level and Multi-Actor Governance

The main message of this paper is that in the EU, the deficit is bigger in the effectiveness or performance than the often-mentioned democratic deficit. Therefore, it is more important and urgent in the EU to reform the "performance" than "democracy", although it may be even more important to emphasize that in the participatory democracy, it is in fact impossible to separate them, since the active democratic "participation" itself is the most important factor of "performance". This paper addresses first of all the challenges to the new member states against the background of the current institutional reform in the EU (Lisbon Treaty), which has demanded enhanced structural adjustments, such as public-administration reforms in the new member states. In addition, it also deals with extending European governance to two regions, the West Balkan states and the Eastern neighbours, i.e. altogether with the relationships of deepening and widening from the special aspect of public administration reforms. Basically, to a great extent, the West Balkan states and the new neighbours have similar problems as the new members: in both cases, there is an institutional "Bermuda Triangle" at the level of meso-politics, where the top-down efforts of Europeanization and Democratization "disappear". In short, the next step of democratic institution-building in the East-Central European new member states as well as in both the Balkan and the Eastern new neighbour states is creating or further developing the multi-level and multi-actor democracy that can be an institutional channel for their bottom-up Europeanization and Democratization.