Socio-Economic and Political Facts on Post-Communist Transition

Abstract

The experience of more than twenty years of post-communist development in East Central and Eastern Europe shows that transitional reforms have been introduced and implemented in all countries in the region as a similarly structured and simultaneous process of integral political, economic and, in some cases, territorial or state transformation. While in virtually all of these countries the communist political monopoly was replaced by the introduction of institutions of multi-party democracy within a period of less than three years, from February 1989 to October 1991 (see Chapter 4), the consolidation of the work of these institutions and especially the introduction and implementation of market reforms needed much more time and resources.¹ The other important similarity shared among the ex-communist countries at the beginning of their post-communist history related to a serious lack of local knowledge and more importantly a lack of resources for modelling and financing the construction of the necessary institutional frameworks for the introduction and operation of a multi-party democracy and market economy. The 40-year-long period of intensive communist institutional, educational and ideological “re-building” as well as the use of extremely inefficient non-market mechanisms of economic coordination in the “development of socialist economies” affected very similarly the individual (in)capacity of all East European countries to undergo the process of post-communist democratisation and economic marketisation.