Mastering Decentralization and Public Administration Reforms in Central and Eastern Europe

In the 1990s, all countries in Central and Eastern Europe encountered the challenge to deconstruct their previous party state structures and rebuild new democratic ones. This challenge emerged in a particular historical period when a general discontentwith the late modern welfare state became apparent. Throughout the developed world it got translated to ideals of a “lean and mean” governance creating a better balance between efficiency and democracy, bureaucracy and entrepreneurship. In top of these changes, a wholesale restructuring of the political systems in Central and Eastern Europe started to take place when established democracies grapple new problems of legitimation as states are to deliver services in a globalizing economy, and an enhanced transnational movement of people and ideas. The discontent with the classical welfare state institutions and the challenges that globalization processes triggered have altered the professional discourses on state, governance, and democracy throughout the 1990s. (Introduction, frahment)