ABSTRACT
The transition of the post-communist regimes of Eastern Europe1 to democracy in the 1990s was one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century. In this book I look at an aspect of that change – the transformation of civil-military relations in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine and Russia between the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in July 1991 and the first enlargement of NATO in March 19992 – through the prism of in-depth interviews with the military, political and academic elite in each of the countries in the study. My main concern is with how these states built qualitatively new regimes of civil-military relations during a time of great upheaval; my main object is to better understand why actors in this process chose various paths of reform and to explain how and why they accomplished, or failed to accomplish, the building of democratic civil-military relations. This issue has received comparatively less scholarly attention than have other aspects of postcommunist transition such as the change from a planned to a market economy, the building of representative democratic institutions, the fostering of civil societies, and so on. Yet it is a matter of great importance. As Christopher Donnelly wrote ‘defence transformation, good civil-military relations and democratic control are problems which must be solved . . . or they will destabilise society’.3
