ABSTRACT
It was not before the late 1990s that the diversity of post-socialist political economies became a major issue for scholars studying Eastern Europe. Before that time discussions had been dominated by the essential problems the East European countries had to master in order to transition from a planned to a market economy. Implicitly or explicitly, the literature assumed that there were best practices for this endeavour. As a consequence, Eastern Europe’s new market economies were considered to differ in degree rather than in kind. Countries were ranked according to how close they came to the ideal of a market economy without further qualification, characterised by private property rights, and liberalized financial, capital, and labour markets, as well as free foreign trade.
