General Framework of Administrative Convergence Provided by the Reforms of National Public Administrations in South Eastern European States

The development of the construction and enlargement of the European Union processes introduces new concepts to the specific terminology. Within a systemic framework, these concepts describe and summon the institutional and normative mechanisms sustained by this generous investigation. European governance and administration overcome, in an accelerated manner, the obstacleroute between concept and reality; a route specific to the European and national elements –as complex in their entanglement, as to overcome the processes and phenomena which characterize the building of a Unified Europe. Making now the reference to the European administration, we should note that it can be understood as a system of institutions and structures situated at European level. Such an approach is, at present, restrictive, the European administration describing, in fact, a process that evolves towards a series of values ad standards that are unanimously accepted as European; a process with a philosophy that includes the so called Europeanization of the national administrations. As such, the European administration will be structured as a system having a mixed architecture, several subsystems – the national administrations and connections that point to the norms of the Communitarian law and to the respect for sovereignty and national traditions and experiences. The exact coordinates of this process are hard to establish, especially since in the area of public administration, there is no acquis communautaire, so there is no law to transpose in the legal systems of the EU member states (there are few exceptions in the field of the management of European funds and of public procurement). In this context, the national administrations of the states that want to join the European Union are evaluated under the criteria expressed in the “judicial and administrative capacity to implement the acquis communautaire†. This creates serious difficulties since there is more than one national administration in the EU and there is no model or guiding criteria for reforming the national public administrations of the candidate countries. The Lisbon Treaty brings out new regulations meant to promote and sustain the good governance and European administration, thus underlining the right to good administration, the necessity of the administrative cooperation, strengthening of the administrative capacity for implementing the communitarian law and the respect of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality in establishing the competencies of the European Union. In this context, the European Administration obtains a new and clearer content, to the evolution of which we will further focus on. Several concepts frequently appear in the doctrine: the European Administrative Space, the European convergence located next to the administrative dynamics, “the old†public administration and the new public management, and the Europeanization; analyzing them means comprehending the mechanisms and connections that lead to the evolution of European administration. The present paper focuses on administrative convergence as an internal process with catalyzing features for the national public administration evolution in the broader context of European integration process. Studies’ focus is on the public administrations reforms in the South-East European states as a support for the administrative convergence processes that engage other states. The general convergence framework is offered by the European Administrative Space (EAS) itself constituted in an informal acquis communautaire that helps monitoring the administrative reforms progresses in the EU member states or acceding ones.