ABSTRACT
The loss of the communists’ monopoly of political power in the former Soviet bloc between 1989 and 1991 was a series of events of incalculable import and extraordinary implications. Two countries, Poland and Hungary, spearheaded this process as their authoritarian regimes sought desperately to find new means of legitimating their power and rejuvenating a bankrupt political and economic system.1 Even the most ardent of communist reformers in these two countries were astonished to find that they had launched a tidal wave of upheaval washing across the eastern half of Europe and beyond. The images were potent and the language was millennial: a new dawn, a new era, a new order. The watchwords were ‘democracy’ and ‘the market’. The new rulers of the former communist countries turned to march to a different tune, if not always melodically or harmoniously. They would no longer seek to create a new international order but to integrate themselves into the existing one. Coca-Cola was ‘no longer the drug of imperialist domination but the nectar of universal prosperity’.2
