ABSTRACT
In 1989 most of Eastern Europe embarked on an arduous ‘triple transition’: from communist dictatorship to pluralistic democracy; from centrally administered to market economies; and from Soviet imperial hegemony to fully independent nation-statehood. It was the third time that Eastern Europe had embarked on a transition of such magnitude. After the First World War much of the region underwent an analogous triple transition: from semi-absolutist monarchies to ostensibly democratic regimes; from a supranational imperial order to an order based on fully independent nation-states; and from a social order dominated by imperial bureaucracies and armies and large landed estates to societies with a preponderance of peasant farmers, dominated by national bureaucracies, national armies and ascendant national bourgeoisies. After the Second World War, Eastern Europe attempted yet another triple transition: from fascist imperial domination to independent national statehood; from fascist dictatorship to pluralistic democracy; and from fascist (autarkic) administered economies to more open, semi-planned market economies. The post-1918 transition came to grief on the rocks of illiberal ‘ethnic’ or ‘integral’ nationalism, irredentism, revanchism, beggar-my-neighbour protectionism and increasing ‘asymmetrical’ commercial dependence on a resurgent German Reich and, to a lesser extent, Fascist Italy. The post-1945 transition succumbed to an extension of Soviet imperial hegemony over the East European states and the imposition of neo-Stalinist regimes and programmes of coercive, centrally planned industrialization and rural collectivization, whose limited positive appeal rested in part on their alleged capacity to transcend the ethnic, irredentist and economic problems that had plagued Eastern Europe from 1918 to 1947.
