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In May 1995, European Union (EU) issued the White Paper “Preparation of the Associated Countries of the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) for the Integration into the Internal Market of the Union”, stating that the main challenge facing the associated countries lied in adapting their administrative machinery to the conditions necessary to make the legislation work (para 3.25). In December 1995 the future challenge became the “consolidated administration” accession criterion. Bridging the gap the literature on Europenisation generated by not deepening the study of EU provisions for public administration reform, I offer a possible, democratic reading of the “consolidated administration” criterion as presented by EU to Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania during 1998-2006. My assumption is that EU nurtured the democratization of the organization and functioning of CEE public administrations by means of its “consolidated administration” criterion. My argument draws from Dahl’s democratization theory and makes use of the analysis of both strategic domestic documents of the countries in question and the Progress Reports designed by the European Commission during the fifth enlargement process. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine and compare the accession negotiations with regard to the institutional changes and the new processes of policy making that have emerged in three of the smaller new EU member states: Slovenia, Hungary and Estonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]