ABSTRACT
The region’s communist regimes broke down in the late 1980s and, with them, the generations-old Iron Curtain between West and East. While the Western, Northern, and Central European countries all had democratic, parliamentary political systems, two countries in the South remained under dictatorial, fascist rule. In the context of a massive and rapid emigration from some of the smaller East-Central European countries to the West and a “revolution from above” initiated by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, a succession of peaceful revolutions swept away the communist regimes of more than half a dozen countries, including the Soviet Union itself. For European integration to become successful in the long run, a more encompassing model of integration, one based on “generic rationality,” is indispensable. By comparing data on religious practices, social permissiveness, and civic morality from the European Value Study in 1981 and 1990, they find that the various West European countries did not converge.
