ABSTRACT
While the collapse of communist dictatorship in Eastern Europe was rapid (or at least had the appearance of being so), democratization, economic m odernization and the restoration of market relations, and the emergence of parliamentary systems were clearly going to be more protracted processes. In the pre-1939 period only Czechoslovakia had anything like a functioning democratic system, and even in that country there was dissatisfaction about the absence of self-government for the Slovak population. While the democratic traditions of Eastern Europe were not particularly weak in comparison with democratizing countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or even Southern Europe, the historical background was certainly different from that of Western Europe during earlier phases of democratic development. The divergent experiences of authoritarian rule, Nazi tyranny and communist dictatorship m eant that the post-communist countries of Central Europe were not generally able to hark back to previously established patterns of representative government and political participation. While extensive and fundamental in their implications, moreover, the events of 1989 differed from the classic revolutions of 1789 in France or 1917 in Russia in that they did not sweep the ground clear of the institutions and personalities of the old order but left much of the former system to be coped with and only eventually, it was hoped, to be built over and transformed into something quite different.1
