ABSTRACT
Historically, the emergence or the political right in Western Europe and in North and South America can be associated with distinct property-owning classes, the defence of social institutions such as the Catholic Church and the rise of a bourgeois civil society linked to the development of capitalism. Anti-communism is one of the few ideological tenets shared almost without exception across the diverse Eastern and Central European centre-right. Calls for radical de-communization - often linked to vaguer aspirations of speeding up reform through decisive action - were among the most characteristic demands of emergent right-wing forces in Eastern and Central Europe in the early 1990s. Many centre-right parties in Western Europe emerged on the basis of cleavages associated with classical socio-economic modernization and nation state formation. The comparative study of centre-right parties in post-communist Eastern and Central Europe represents a significantly under-researched field, but one that poses considerable challenges to scholars.
