ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the energy security of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is determined to some extent by the character of governance and relations between key elite actors in the field. It argues that the questions in turn are affected by the overall character of the society and economy of each country. Initially, in the early 1990s, the debate on economic changes was dominated by a neo-liberal understanding of the process as one of 'transition' which assumed an endpoint that would be western-style capitalism 'without qualifying adjectives'. Since the late 1990s, as the extent of variation in post-socialist regimes became apparent, an equally varied literature has emerged attempting to identify the main factors explaining why different countries in the region have developed in different ways. By the 2000s Hungarian banks were almost entirely foreign-owned and around 80 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was accounted for by both imports and exports.
