ABSTRACT
Post-communist societies have faced many challenges since the end of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. The economic challenges are well known and have been met with varying degrees of success. But the political challenges have been no less daunting as a model based on the single-party monopoly of power, the illegitimacy of independent centers of dissent, and sharp limits on freedom in “civil society” — the very concept was foreign or at any rate suspect under the communist model — was replaced by a very different one. The policy expert existed under communism, but there was no question that he or she should be independent of the state. Moreover, many experts were little more than party apparatchniks whose advice was influenced by and filtered through the ideology of the party.
