Summary and Analysis of Country Studies

This chapter summarizes and analyzes the results of the various country studies. Rather than merely combining the data for all 17 countries included in the country studies, it was thought that subdividing them into various groups on the basis of recent history might be more meaningful. However, there is a certain amount of arbitrariness involved in doing so.

The most obvious subdivision would be to list and analyze the former Soviet republics separately, since they have a common recent history. Countries in this group include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine.

However, once one gets beyond the former Soviet republics, the decision of how to classify the remaining countries requires some subjective judgment. One possibility would be to split the remaining countries into a Balkan group and a Central and East European group. Such a categorization makes some sense, since the Central and East European group were in the Soviet bloc until 1989, whereas the Balkan countries followed a different path. Or at least that is the case superficially.