ABSTRACT
In many respects, formal acceptance into Europe has been regarded as the ultimate destination of the extended, and extremely painful, road toward liberal democracy and free market economy on which East Central Europe embarked in 1989. Transition was a veritable “valley of sorrows” that consumed significant reserves of energy and the best youthful years of an entire generation – my very own – whose members were born and educated during communist times in compliance, submission, lack of critical thinking and absence of initiative, only to be forced to have a family, a career, and a public life in ever-changing post-communist polities predicated on democratic and market principles that had to be internalized “on the go” chiefly by experimenting and learning from one's own mistakes. In those countries at the beginning of the 1990s, the lure of Europe was perhaps the single most important deterrent that blocked any serious effort to forge a path toward what the first Romanian post-communist president Ion Iliescu named the “third way,” a blended and novel form of government that was neither communist, nor democratic, which protected people from the pitfalls of both regimes while permitting them to enjoy the benefits of both.
