ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the multi-layered and multi-scalar nature of post-communist development across Eastern Europe, and the implications this has had for the continuation or change of existing borders and boundaries. The collapse of the communist regimes across Eastern Europe, generated a plethora of publications on forms, processes, variations and mechanisms of 'transitions' and whether there was an inherent tendency to 'catch up' with the West. The term 'transition' per se points to a transformational process towards an envisaged 'ultimate' stage of development. The legacy of the Soviet Union was a tightly interdependent economic space, with clearly allocated economic specialisms in a spatial division of production across the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), directed and controlled from Moscow. The border between the former Soviet Union and the rest of Eastern Europe, that is Central Europe, has been transformed into a defensive wall' of the, internally, nearly borderless European Union under the Schengen Agreement.
