ABSTRACT
Descriptive accounts of the fall of the communist power monopoly in the East European countries are now becoming legion. In this chapter the main lines of that story will be taken as given. Its aim is rather to suggest a framework for analysis that might enable the process of change in Eastern Europe to be put into perspective. It will be argued that, whilst the revolutionary events of 1989 did indeed represent a rupture of epochal significance, they were the culmination, in many cases, of a long series of political developments which were to influence both the process of system change, and the initial political forms that emerged from it.
