ABSTRACT
Starting in the early and late 1990s, respectively, the East Central European and Balkan post-communist states were in large part “driven to change” by their pursuit of integration into the EU – with the exacting and largely non-
negotiable (take-it-or-leave-it) terms and conditions of EU membership acting as particularly powerful pressures, incentives and catalysts for transformation
(Dimitrova 2004; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005, 9-10, 224-225; Grabbe 2006; Bideleux and Jeffries 2007b, 574-613). This gradually promoted
strong cross-party consensuses on macroeconomic policies, neoliberal programmes of economic liberalization and privatization, considerable restructur-
ing of institutions and industries, and extensive judicial and legal reform, including promotion and protection of human and minority rights. The rise of more “horizontal” networks and power relations gradually helped to constrain
and bring to account the strongly hierarchical, patrimonial and clientelistic “vertical” power structures bequeathed by the communist regimes. Gradual
“restructuring” and “structural transformation” gave fairly steadily increasing substance to the rule of law, equality before the law, limited government,
media independence and pluralism, more law-governed and pluralist “civil societies”, more “level playing fields”, “civil economies” (as coined by Rose
1992) and the gradual strengthening and entrenchment of civil liberties and liberal forms of representative government. The major downsides have
included greatly increased inequalities of income and wealth and a veritable “counter-revolution” with regard to gender equality (Galligan, Clavero, and Calloni 2007; Ramet 2007; Bideleux 2009a, 2009b, 2009c).
