ABSTRACT
The analysis of political transformations in fifteen post-Communist countries for the period between 1991 and 1998 showed that we cannot and we should not speak of one post-Communist Eastern Europe, which would imply a homogeneity of the process of democratisation of the region, but of very different regions within the former ‘Soviet bloc’. The book identified four different regions, which display diverging patterns of political change. The first and most advanced region is ‘Central Europe’, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia. The second distinct region is ‘Southern Europe’, which encompasses Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The third postCommunist region, which crystallised in this book, is post-Communist ‘Northern Europe’, including Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Finally, the fourth post-Communist region is ‘Eastern Europe’, which includes Belarus, the Ukraine and the Russian Federation. The basic feature of these four regions is that we do not find a convergence of patterns of political development, but a clear divergence of paths of political change across these four main post-Communist regions.
