Continuity and Change in Eastern Europe: Strategies of Post-Communist Politics
Continuity and Change in Eastern Europe: Strategies of Post-Communist Politics

Summary/Abstract: A few years ago when the Communist governments of East Europe fell, the mood about the prospects of the region tended toward optimism. While a few voices of caution , or even doom , made themselves heard, studies of "transition" from authoritarianism to democracy, and from socialism to capitalism , proliferated, and at least one author gained temporary fame by predicting the advent of a liberal millennium , and a "Hegelian end of history." Such optimistic forecasts were largely the products of the understandable euphoria of the historical moment. But in good measure they also reflected on a nostalgic , perhaps propagandized but in any case overly romanticized , view of an "old Europe" that had never really existed , yet was now fondly recalled by many on both sides of the Iron Curtain. [...]

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