Introduction

Eastern Europe^l has been passing through an unprecedented wave of political and institutional transformations since mid-1989. Many more, some very incisive, changes are on the current policy agenda. The newfangled political leadership in these countries is very ambitious as regards the speed and scope of the coveted mutations. This attitude is being fortified by self-styled policy advice being counseled - even administered - with increasing frequency by an emerging phalanx of new experts on Eastern Europe. As John K. Galbraith (1990, p. 51) recently put it rather acerbically, but no less pointedly:

In my view, some, and perhaps much, of the advice now being offered the Central and Eastern European states proceeds from a view of the so-called capitalist or free-enterprise economies that bears no relation to their reality. Nor would these economies have survived if it had. What is offered is an ideological construct that exists all but entirely in the minds and notably in the hopes of the donor. It bears no relation to reality; it is what I have elsewhere called the primitive ideology.