ABSTRACT
This chapter looks into ways societies of the region go about changing their economic organizations, into factors that condition depth, speed, and direction of changes. Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) collapsed within months and were replaced by efforts to (re-)construct a liberal-democratic society. The term strategy is used here in a loose sense. Strategies of institutional change in the CEE countries are still in the phase of formation. Evidently, in CEE, political change is a precondition for a daring economic change. Romania and Bulgaria still struggle to move their economies and polities away from communism, while Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland Communists have been effectively removed from power. The Communist experiment with societies is no different from the story about the Polesye swamps. Although we assume that rebuilding the civil society and this includes institutions of political democracy and of competitive markets is a task that may succeed, it is a task of enormous complexity.
