Introduction

It is now just over a quarter of a century since the ‘revolutionary changes’ swept the region of Eastern Europe and led to the transition from communist regimes to democracy. Twenty-five years is a considerable vantage point to consider not only the events that have occurred in the region, but also the scholarship on this region. Academic perceptions of the particularism and specificity of the post-communist, ex-Soviet states have undoubtedly changed. In the years immediately after the revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR, the prospect of a handbook on “East European Politics” being required all these years later would have seemed unimaginable to many. For many scholars in the 1990s, these countries were viewed as being on a rapid transit towards westernisation. Their new leaders had shown little enthusiasm for experimentation, preferring instead to copy practices from their established liberal democratic neighbours. If Soviet-style communism had imprinted its legacies on the politics of these countries, the impact would be short term and quickly annihilated by the forces of new-liberal capitalism and liberal democracy. Foreign direct investment was not just a high pressure hose for the economy; it would also sort out communist-era bureaucracies and state institutions that stood in the way of the free movement of people, labour, and capital. We would, it was assumed, study these countries from the perspective of comparative politics; acknowledge for sure the regional variation that came from their rapid and recent consolidation of new institutions, but this could be undertaken as part of a broader study of ‘European Politics’ that already accommodated and acknowledged ‘Southern Europe’ and post-authoritarian states. Differences between ‘new’ and ‘old’ Europe, such that they persisted, would be little more than variation in how, for example, legislatures or party systems functioned.