ABSTRACT
One issue that has arisen in the scholarly attempt to understand the regime changes that occurred in this region is their comparability with those transitions to democracy that occurred in Latin America and Southern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. If these are considered to be comparable, then that growing literature on the transition to democracy, ironically called ‘transitology’,5 could be used to examine these later cases. For some, there was no question; they were part of the ‘third wave’ of democratisation sweeping the globe.6 But others were more cautious, suggesting that the communist cases differed significantly from those of Latin America and Southern Europe, with the implication that the theoretical tools used to analyse the earlier cases could not be used without change to study the communist transitions. A number of perceived areas of difference were pointed to.7 A range of differences were perceived to exist in the nature of the starting point of the transition, the nature of the communist regime and the sort of society over which it ruled. The totalist nature of the regime, in the sense that it sought both to penetrate and transform society much more deeply, and to exercise more extensive control over all aspects of life than was the case in the Latin American and Southern European dictatorships, was considered crucial. The clearest instance of this was the way in which the communist political economy effectively melded together the political and economic realms, eliminating the boundary between the two that was characteristic of these earlier cases. The communist regime was thereby seen as a much more formidable foe than the other dictatorships had been because of the brute power which the regime possessed and the way in which its functionaries were lodged in positions of responsibility throughout the entire socio-politicoeconomic system. In addition, it was argued that society under communist rule had been much more flattened, with sharp class divisions eliminated, the generation of individual interests subdued, and civil society destroyed. Economically, the communist states were seen to be at a much higher level of economic, and especially industrial, development than their putative comparators. It was also proposed that the transition from communism involved a question of identity, as new states sought to establish their identity independent of the overlordship of an imperial power (seen variously as the USSR, the Russians, the Serbs and the Czechs), and a degree of ethnic diversity much greater than in the earlier dictatorships.
