Decline of Democracy in East-Central Europe: The Last Decade as the Lost Decade in Democratization

The last decade of the EU membership has been a lost decade in East-Central Europe in many ways, first of all for the young generation, which has become a lost generation to a great extent, but also for the new twin paradigm of EU as the performance democracy and the sustainable social progress. The Ten Years' Anniversary of the EU membership gives a good occasion to analyse and evaluate the performance of ECE in the EU. However, it does not give too much reason for the celebration, since it has been very controversial in the terms of economic, social and political developments. This period has to be discussed in the larger framework of systemic change (the Quarter-Century perspective), but with special regard to the EU membership period (the Ten Years perspective). This paper conceptually follows my recent paper (Agh 2014), dealing with the general framework on NMS developments both in the Quarter-Century and Ten Years perspectives. This new paper concentrates, however, on the socio-political aspect of the Europeanization and Democratization in East-Central Europe (V4+ as Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia). The contributors to the Bertelsmann country reports (BTI, Bertelsmann Transformation Index and SGI, Sustainable Governance Indicators) have discussed the topic of ECE democratization with its general-regional and nation-specific features within the CEPSA (Central European Political Science Association) several times. Moreover, the big international ranking institutions like the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Freedom House (and many others) have also evaluated and documented these democratic developments. They have also concluded that the ECE democracy has been in decline, especially in the last years. Thus, this analysis of Europeanization and Democratization in ECE can be based on the large documentation of these databases, and also on the cooperation of the ECE experts within the CEPSA and elsewhere.Key words: East-Central Europe; triple crisis; decline of democracy; good governance; global competitiveness.i Successes and failures of the ece countries in the eu1.1 The European landscape and the "forgotten crisis in the East"The EU in 2004, at the accession of the ECE countries, was rather different from the EU in 2014, when they commemorate their Ten Years' membership. Therefore a short overview as an introduction is needed about both the new European landscape in general and the "forgotten crisis" in the East in particular, to be completed in the last part of this paper with the larger overview of the present situation in ECE. The EU has gone through several development stages that have necessitated its permanent redefinition. Under the pressure of global crisis, it has become common sense that the EU is in "crisis" or even in some extreme views, in its "final crisis". Thus, the word "crisis" has been so inflated that there is now a fashionable saying: "crisis is just a period between two other crises". In fact, the EU has always been in "crisis", it comes from its "sui generis" nature of being always "in the making", therefore the EU needs the analytical-descriptive and the normative-strategic approaches at the same time. There have recently been obviously three markedly different periods of crisis: (1) the "immobility crisis" in the nineties and early 2000s, (2) the global crisis in the late 2000s and early 2010s and (3) the "transformation crisis" in the mid-2010s. In this respect, the "crises" are the natural ways of development for the EU, especially the present transformation crisis, which demands new solutions for both institutions and policies. Therefore, the EU needs visions for further development and these visions have to be formulated in the concrete terms and programs of Strategies like the EU2020 Strategy.2In the transformation crisis period the EU28 has become more than a "MultiSpeed" Europe, it is already a "Multi-Floor" Europe, since the different member states' positions have become institutionalized, i. …