33
The collapse of the communist regimes and communist states from 1989 to 1992
produced a number of remarkable changes in the political and economic landscape of
Europe’s eastern half. In particular, during the brief span of three years, authoritarian
regimes gave way to political orders that were, albeit to quite varying degrees, more competitive
and more respectful of civil liberties. In addition, twenty-two new states arose
from the rubble of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, while one communist
state, the German Democratic Republic, merged with its neighbor, the German
Federal Republic, to reconstitute a single Germany. As a result, a region once composed
of nine states featured by the end of the Cold War twenty-nine—if we include all of the
successor states of the former Soviet Union, together with Central and Eastern Europe
and the Balkans. At the same time, open market economies, again to varying degrees,
replaced state-owned, centrally planned, and highly protectionist economies. Finally, the
post–World War II separation of Europe into two halves ended, not just because of the
economic and political liberalization of the east, but also because of the eventual eastward
expansion of three international institutions: the Council of Europe, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), and the European Union (EU). In short, 1989–1992
constituted a revolution in Central and Eastern Europe—in state boundaries, in the organization
and practice of politics and economics at home and abroad, and, finally, in elite
and mass identities and political preferences.
This chapter assesses the political side of this revolution. In particular, I compare
patterns of regime transition in Central and Eastern Europe since the dramatic events
of 1989, draw some generalizations about what has transpired and why, and place these
changes in the larger context of the global spread of democratic governance. My discussion
is divided into two parts. In the first section, I focus on the short-term political consequences
of the collapse of communism, or the forms of governance that came into being
during the early years of the transition from 1989 to mid-1996. Of interest here are such
questions as the following: Did the end of Communist Party hegemony lead, as many
expected, to the immediate rise of democratic politics, or do we in fact see a more complicated
political story? To what extent were the early political dynamics of postcommunist
Europe typical or distinctive when compared with the collapse of dictatorships and
CHAPTER 2
The Political Transition
Valerie Bunce
34 VALERIE BUNCE
regime change in other parts of the world? Finally, what factors seem to provide the most
compelling account of the first stage of the political transition in postcommunist Europe?
In the second part of this chapter, I shift my focus to developments beginning in
the latter part of 1996 that continued through mid-2017. Here, the discussion addresses
three notable trends. The first is the remarkable ability of the new states in the region to
endure (and several more to form), and the second is the expansion of democratic polities
since the mid-1990s. This expansion represents two convergent developments: the fact
that most of the first democracies in the region stayed the political course, coupled with
the failure of the remaining and more authoritarian regimes in the area to maintain their
political momentum. In this sense, there have in fact been several waves of democratization
in postcommunist Europe, with the first occurring immediately after the fall of
state socialism and the second occurring roughly a decade later. The final trend is less
reassuring about the future of democracy in the region. Several countries long thought
to be the most durable democracies in Central and Eastern Europe—that is, Poland and
especially Hungary—are experiencing major challenges to democratic politics from rightwing
populist politicians and parties.
Postcommunist Political Diversity
By 1996, one could identify three types of political regimes in postcommunist Central
and Eastern Europe.1
The first, which included Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary,
Slovenia, Lithuania, and, less perfectly, Estonia and Latvia (because of some political
discrimination against their Russian minorities), was a democratic order, characterized
by political arrangements that combine free, fair, and competitive elections that are regularly
held; representative institutions that convert public preferences as expressed through
elections into public policy; rule of law, or rules of the political game that are accepted
by both elites and publics and applied consistently across time, space, and circumstances;
and extensive civil liberties and political rights guaranteed by law. Because of all these
features, democracy in general, and in these cases in particular, can be understood as a
way of organizing politics that rests on accountable government.2
What is striking about
Poland, the Czech Republic, and the other countries listed above at this time, therefore,
was that they managed to move quickly to full-scale democracy.
The second type of regime in the region at this time was authoritarian. In authoritarian
states, political arrangements lack the characteristics noted above, thereby producing
governments that have neither the incentives nor the capacity to be accountable to
their citizens. Authoritarian regimes, in particular, lack the institutionalized competition,
individual rights, and procedural consistency that translate individual preferences into
public policy through elections and representative government. This combination of traits
describes the politics during the period under discussion in two of the successor states of
Yugoslavia (Croatia and Serbia-Montenegro). Here, it is interesting to note that, despite
the efforts of their dictators, Franjo Tuđman in Croatia and Slobodan Milošević in SerbiaMontenegro,
some political pluralism was in evidence—most notably in the capitals of
Zagreb and Belgrade, where oppositions had a presence and where publics, even in the
face of fraudulent elections, still managed to deny their dictators decisive electoral support.
THE POLITICAL TRANSITION 35
Finally, the remaining countries in the region, Albania, Bosnia (but only after the
Dayton Peace Accords of 1995 had demilitarized the country and provided a skeletal
form of government), Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine—a group of
countries roughly equal in number to the full-scale democracies at this time—fell between
the extremes of dictatorship and democracy. They were what can be termed “hybrid
regimes,” that is, political arrangements that feature some of the formal characteristics of
democracy, such as representative institutions and political competition, but fall short of
the liberal standard as a result of unfair elections, extensive corruption, irregular recognition
of civil liberties, significant biases in the media, opposition parties that are poorly
organized in comparison with parties in power led by authoritarians, and weak ties
between political representatives and the citizenry. Also common in this category are several
other characteristics that undermine the development of accountable government—
in particular, rapid turnover in governments (a characteristic that Poland also shared), an
inability of citizens to counteract the power of the state through associational ties with
each other (or what has been termed “civil society”), and a sharp divide between urban
and rural politics, with the latter more consistently supportive of authoritarian rule.3
In short, in the first stage of the transition from state socialism, we find three
characteristics. The first is political diversity. Put simply, the deregulation of the political,
economic, and social monopoly of the Communist Party that occurred throughout
Central and Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1991 was not followed necessarily by the
rise of democratic politics. In this sense, the Central and Eastern Europe of this period
presented an important lesson. There can be a substantial lag, and even no relationship,
between two developments that are often assumed to be tightly intertwined: the decline
Photo 2.1. Remembering Václav Havel, Prague, Czech Republic. (Davidlohr Bueso)
36 VALERIE BUNCE
of authoritarian rule and the rise of democratic politics. Second, regime change in this
region was largely peaceful but sometimes violent. The Baltic states’ attempts to separate
themselves from the Soviet Union invited a short-term violent response on the part of the
Soviet leadership. The merger in Yugoslavia between two issues—the future of the regime
and the future of the state—produced very different political trajectories among the
republics that made up the state and a war from 1991 to 1995 that left 140,000 people
dead (according to the International Center for Transitional Justice) and undermined
democratization in those successor states that served as the major site of this conflict,
Croatia and Bosnia, while in the process shaping developments in their neighbors, particularly
Macedonia and Serbia-Montenegro. The fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania
in 1989 was also violent. These contrasts aside, however, it is striking that where regime
transition was accompanied by violence, the result was either a hybrid regime or a dictatorship.
Thus, democracy and a peaceful adjudication of conflicts—with the latter often
serving as one definition of democratic governance—were closely associated with one
another in the Central and East European transitions.
Finally, there were significant differences across the region in the resources, cohesion,
and political goals of both the communists and the opposition. For example, while
the communists were quick to embrace the liberal political and economic agenda of the
opposition in the Baltic countries, Poland, and particularly Hungary and Slovenia, they
were more resistant in the remaining cases. Serbian political dynamics under Milošević are
the most extreme example of this resistance. At the same time, oppositions varied greatly.
Whereas in the Baltic countries, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia, the
opposition was large, sophisticated, relatively cohesive, and committed to liberal politics,
in the remaining countries, the opposition tended to suffer from a number of problems.
For example, Bulgaria saw divisions over the best way to build capitalism and democracy
and become an effective political force, and in both Serbia and Slovakia, elite struggles
over political power and manipulation of national tensions in order to maintain authoritarian
control and stave off demands for democracy demobilized and often marginalized
the liberals.4
Elements of this pattern can also be seen, more recently, in Macedonia.
Comparative Perspectives: The Puzzles of Diversity
Was the diversity of postcommunist political dynamics and political pathways in the first
half of the transformation surprising or predictable? The answer is that for many analysts,
the political patterns of postcommunism, as summarized above, were in fact unexpected.
This was the case whether we refer to specialists on comparative democratization or
specialists on postcommunist Europe.
At the time that communism collapsed, there had already been a clear trend, in evidence
since the mid-1970s, suggesting that the decline of authoritarian rule led invariably
to the rapid and peaceful rise of democratic politics. This was precisely what had
happened, for example, in one state after another in both Latin America and southern
Europe (though the Portuguese case was an exception). In addition, the dichotomous
thinking of the Cold War, which had framed political dynamics and therefore political
assumptions in the international order for forty-five years, made it easy to presume that
THE POLITICAL TRANSITION 37
there were only two political choices in the world: democracy or dictatorship. Thus, if the
hegemony of the Communist Party was challenged and dictatorship rested on this hegemony,
and, just as importantly, if the Soviet Union failed to back up communist rule in
its client states and at home and, indeed, failed in the more profound sense of being able
to continue functioning as a regime, a state, a regional hegemon, and a superpower, then
in the wake of its collapse, it was widely thought, democratic revolutions would follow
both within the Soviet Union and throughout the Soviet bloc. As we have seen replayed
in reactions to the Arab “spring” from 2010 to 2011 and in US debates about Iraq from
2002 to the present, moreover, many assumed not just that the political world offered
only two regime options but also that if dictators and dictatorships were subtracted from
the equation, publics would necessarily rise up to embrace the democratic cause—and be
able to translate these preferences in relatively quick order into well-functioning democratic
institutions and procedures. Democracy, in short, was natural and easy, and these
characteristics would be revealed once the distorting effects of dictatorship were removed.5
From these perspectives, therefore, the assumption was that the end of dictatorship
constituted the beginning of democracy—and full-scale democracy at that. Such
an optimistic reading of the future was unusually tempting in the wake of 1989, given
the rapid and region-wide character of the collapse of Communist Party control and the
dependence of these regimes and their specific economic and political features on that
control. This position, however, was as flawed in the postcommunist world as it would
be a decade later in Iraq and Afghanistan and several decades later in Egypt.6
Oppositions
Photo  2.2. General and former president Wojciech Jaruzelski and former president
Lech Wał sa at a debate on Poland’s past. (Rzeczpospolita)
38 VALERIE BUNCE
can be fractious, dictatorships invariably have supporters, constructing democratic
institutions in weak states can be difficult, and publics can care as much about their personal
circumstances as about governmental forms. Moreover, the fall of dictatorships can
be partial, not complete.
Scholars specializing in the postcommunist region had different expectations—
though these were also inaccurate in some respects.7
For some scholars, the emphasis
had long been on the striking similarities among the communist states—similarities that
spoke not just to common ideological texts but also to the foundational role of the Soviet
Union as the “inventor” and then the “exporter” of state socialism. In all of these cases,
communist regimes were governed by a single Communist Party that enjoyed a monopoly
on power, money, and social status and was committed to rapid socioeconomic development
through control of the allocation of both labor and capital. It is puzzling, therefore,
that the structural and ideological similarities across this region—similarities far greater
than those found, for example, among dictatorships in Latin America or southern Europe
during the 1960s and 1970s—could have translated so quickly into such differences,
not just in political regimes, as already noted, but also in economic regimes. Thus, capitalism
replaced socialism very quickly in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the
Baltic states, and Slovenia, whereas socialist economics, especially with respect to state
control over the economy, remained in place to varying degrees in the other countries in
the region. Commonalities, therefore, in the most basic building blocks of politics and
economics—for example, state control over politics and the economy—gave way very
quickly to diversity.
For other specialists, there was widespread recognition that these countries entered
the transition with variable mixtures of assets and liabilities, such that postcommunism
would not produce, especially in the early stages, identical political dynamics—the
similarities in the institutional “skeletons” of these systems notwithstanding. In this
sense, diversity was expected. Not expected, however, was the range of regimes that
appeared, with the most improbable group comprising those countries that made a quick
and thoroughgoing transition to democratic politics. As some observers were quick to
note, of the many countries in Central and Eastern Europe that had experimented with
democratic politics during the interwar era, only one—Czechoslovakia—had managed to
survive until World War II with democratic institutions and procedures intact. Even in
that case, however, the inclusiveness of the polity and the extent of political and certainly
economic equality among the nations that shared that state at the time were both in some
question.8
In short, little of the political past could be recycled to support democratic
change. As a result, democracy was assumed to be, at best, an uphill struggle—in direct
contrast, for example, to the Latin American transitions to democracy that occurred in
the 1970s and 1980, where the norm was redemocratization, not building democracy
from scratch.9
Many analysts also recognized the considerable costs of the state socialist brand of
authoritarian rule due to its unusually penetrative and despotic character. These were
dictatorships that, while less and less brutal over time in most cases, were nonetheless
extraordinarily ambitious. By owning and planning the economy, monopolizing political
power, sealing borders, and atomizing publics, these dictatorships seemed committed to
the destruction of some of the most elementary building blocks of democratic life—for
THE POLITICAL TRANSITION 39
example, interpersonal trust, respect for the law, confidence in political institutions such
as political parties, and participation in associations independent of the state, such as
labor unions, clubs, professional associations, and the like. The autonomy of individuals
and groups, so important for countering the power of the state in a democratic order,
therefore, had been severely limited by the communist experience. Economic decline
during the last years of state socialism, moreover, would also seem to have constrained the
rise of democracy, especially since the political regime transition in question would be tied
to an unusually costly economic transition. Indeed, it is not just that Central and Eastern
Europe featured—and still features—a much lower level of economic development than
Western Europe, which many have read as undermining democratic governance, but also
that citizens in Central and Eastern Europe experienced a far greater decline in living
standards in the first half of the 1990s than one saw during the Great Depression, when
nearly half of Europe’s democracies, we must remember, had collapsed.10
When we compare the perspectives of specialists in the postcommunist region and
those of specialists on recent democratization in other regions, therefore, we find a clear
contrast. Whereas the former tended to underpredict democracy, assuming, in effect, that
many more regimes would fall into either the hybrid or authoritarian camp, specialists
on comparative democratization had the opposite problem: they overpredict democratic
rule. In both cases, the political diversity of the region—at least by the mid-1990s—was
puzzling. How then can we explain why some countries in Central and Eastern Europe
moved decisively in a democratic direction, while others moved less decisively and thereby
combined elements of democracy and dictatorship, and still others remained authoritarian
but in forms different from the communist model?
Explaining Early Political Pathways
A number of plausible factors would seem to be helpful in accounting for the differences
among postcommunist regimes during the early stages of the transition. One could
suggest, for example, that a key consideration would be the age of the state. As a number
of studies have suggested, in the West, states were built long before the possibility of
democratic politics either entered or could enter the political agenda. State building is
a nasty process, wherein political leaders, wanting to secure their access to people and
economic resources and to deny that access to their competitors, use their militaries, local
allies, and rudimentary bureaucracies to solidify their political and economic control over
a spatially defined group. Rather than negotiate each time they need money and troops,
they prefer to create more permanent arrangements—or what subsequently became
known as states. The essence of state building, therefore, to borrow from Charles Tilly, is
that wars make states, and states make wars.11
The demand for democracy in the West, therefore, took place after state building.
Once people have lived together for some time in a common state and operate within
an increasingly integrated and interactive political and economic context, they can learn
to define themselves as members of a common political community, or nation. In the
process, they can also embrace a common political project that redefines the relationship
between citizens and the state by arguing that states cannot just be coercive or just provide
40 VALERIE BUNCE
citizens with security. Instead, they are expected to do more—by recognizing citizens as
equal, by guaranteeing political rights, and by creating accountable government.
The necessary sequencing of these developments—or spatial consolidation of political
authority followed by growing pressures for accountable and legitimate governance—
would seem to suggest that the key difference in Central and East European political
trajectories after communism is whether the state is new—and thereby committed to the
draconian politics and economics of state building—or better established and, because
of prior integration of the economy and settlement of borders and membership in the
nation, more responsive to political demands for equality and rights. Indeed, precisely
this contrast led Dankwart Rustow to argue more than forty years ago that democracy
can only enter into the realm of political choice when issues involving membership in the
nation and the boundaries of the state have been fully resolved.12
The problem here, however, is that the variations in postcommunist political trajectories
are not predicted by the age of the state. Just as some of the long-standing states
in Central and Eastern Europe, such as Bulgaria and Romania, were hybrid regimes in
the first half of the 1990s, some of the newest states in that period—Slovenia, the Czech
Republic, and the Baltic states—were in the group of early and robust democracies. Even
more interestingly, in the cases of Slovenia and the Czech Republic, the states were in fact
completely new formations—in contrast to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had
been independent states during the interwar years as a result of the Russian Revolution
and the breakup of the Russian empire.
Might the differences be explained by ethnic and religious diversity? Again, it is
logical to assume that democracy is harder to construct when many nations share the
same state, when national differences coincide with differences in economic resources
and political power, when previous governing arrangements play diverse groups off one
another, and when national minorities spill over into neighboring states, thereby generating
tensions about the legitimacy of existing boundaries. However, this factor does not
distinguish well among the Central and East European countries either. Both Poland
and Albania, for example, have national homogeneity despite their very different political
pathways immediately after communism, and the robust democracies of Estonia and
Latvia have unusually high levels of diversity, defined here as the size of the second largest
ethnic community.
This leaves us with two remaining hypotheses. One is that variation in democratization
reflects differences in the mode of transition. Put succinctly, transitions engineered
by bargaining between opposition and incumbent elites are more likely to produce democratic
government than transitions that occur in reaction to mass protests—a contrast
that has been used to explain differences in democratizing dynamics in Latin America
and southern Europe. The problem here is that most of the transitions in Central and
Eastern Europe involved mass—indeed massive—mobilization, and all of the most
successful transitions, except in Hungary, took place in response to mass protests. The
other hypothesis targets differences in the nature of politics during communism. Here,
the argument is that the more liberalized regimes during communism would have laid
more of the groundwork for democracy after communism—for example, because their
communists were reform-minded and because opposition forces had more opportunities
to expand their support and develop sophisticated political strategies for winning power.
THE POLITICAL TRANSITION 41
However, the strong democracies within our group are in fact divided between those that
experienced more hard-line communist rule—Czechoslovakia and the Baltic countries—
and more reformist regimes—Slovenia, Poland, and Hungary.13
Explaining Diversity
How, then, can we explain the early patterns of postcommunist politics? We can begin
to answer this question by recognizing the importance of the age of the state and the
difficulties introduced by what was for many states in this region a simultaneous transition
to a new regime and a new state. For states that were already defined at the time of
the transition from communism, the key factor that shaped subsequent political pathways
seems to have been the outcome of the first competitive election. In particular, where the
opposition won handily (Poland and Hungary), we see quick and sustained democratization.
By contrast, where power was more equally divided between the communists and
the opposition (as in Romania and Bulgaria), the result was a hybrid regime.
But is this argument in fact a tautology, in that when communists win, dictatorships
follow; when the opposition wins, democracy follows; and, finally, when they are neck
and neck, a synthesis of the two options materializes? Despite the logic of this observation,
there are in fact several reasons to be more confident that the argument about initial
electoral outcomes is illuminating. One is that this line of explanation also captures
variations in economic reform, with rapid reforms following a clear victory of the opposition,
resistance to such reforms when the communists win, and a pattern of “fit-andstart”
reforms when electoral outcomes are more evenly divided. Another is that there is
no particular reason to assume that, if the opposition wins, it will necessarily embrace
democratic politics—though in every one of the established states it did. Oppositions,
after all, can want many things. Third, it is notable that this argument flies in the face of
the generalization in the literature on Latin America and southern Europe that “balanced
transitions”—or those in which the opposition and the authoritarians are evenly balanced
in their power and form political pacts with each other as a result—lead to the most
successful transitions to democracy. With this type of equality, it has been argued, both
sides feel secure enough to proceed with regime change. Thus, what seems tautological in
Central and Eastern Europe is in fact counterintuitive in other regional contexts.14
This leads us to a final point, which helps us deal with the problem of what “causes
the cause.” Initial electoral outcomes in the contest between authoritarians and opposition
forces correlate in turn with patterns of protest during the communist era. To put the
matter succinctly, one can conclude that, at least in Central and Eastern Europe, rapid
progress toward democracy seems to have depended on a dynamic wherein the development
of a strong opposition during communism translated, with the end of the party’s
monopoly, into an unusually strong political showing in the first elections, which augured
well for the future and quality of democratic governance. In this sense, the proximate
cause, or variations in electoral outcomes, alerts us to a more distant cause, or variations
in opposition development during communism.
We can now turn to the new states in the region—or the Baltic countries, the Czech
Republic, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia-Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine.
42 VALERIE BUNCE
(Because of the war and its subsequent development as an international protectorate,
Bosnia is left out of the comparison.) Here, a key issue seems to be whether the nationalist
project connected with a liberal or illiberal political project—or whether defending
the nation was understood to require, or at least be consistent with, democracy or
dictatorship. For those countries (then republics) that had nationalist demonstrations or
movements during communism (Croatia in the early 1970s, Serbia-Montenegro in the
early 1980s, and Slovakia in the late 1960s), the resulting dynamics divided the opposition
into democrats and nationalists while weakening public support for the communists
and pushing them to bear down on nationalism and to resist any political and economic
reforms that might expand opportunities for nationalism to reinvigorate itself. As a result,
when communism collapsed, either communists became nationalists in order to maintain
dictatorial power (as in Serbia-Montenegro and Slovakia), or the nationalists, facing
discredited communists, rejected liberal politics in order to take power (as in Croatia).
In either case, democracy was poorly served, whether the communists, the nationalists,
or some combination of the two emerged triumphant. By contrast, where nationalist
mobilization materialized only when communism began to unravel (as in the Baltic
countries, Macedonia, and Slovenia), the nationalist ideology was defined in a liberal way
such that nationalist and liberal forces came together to form a powerful opposition, and
communists, not as politically isolated or as compromised as in the first set of cases, had
little choice, in terms of either personal preferences or self-interest, but to defect to the
liberal cause. Ukraine is also an example of late mobilization. However, because of the
east-west divide in Ukraine with respect to identity, history, and economic interests, there
were more obstacles to democratic change in that country than the others.
In short, we find two pathways. In the older states, regime change was a product
of the balance of power between the communists and the opposition forces and, to push
the causal process further back in time, the development of a capable opposition during
the communist era, whereas in the new states, the key factor seems to have been varying
combinations of nationalism, liberalism, and communism, with the particular combination
strongly affected by when nationalist mobilization took place and the effects of this
timing on the preferences and popularity of both the communists and the nationalists.
Put more simply, one can suggest that patterns of political protest during communism,
albeit playing out in different ways in republics versus states and introducing different
political options, seemed to play a critical role, once the communists lost their political
monopoly, in either ushering in democratic politics or compromising the democratic
political agenda.
Durability of New States and New Democracies
If many observers were surprised by political outcomes in Central and Eastern Europe
in the first phase of the transition, they were even more surprised, given these early
developments after the fall of communism, by what transpired in the second phase. From
1996 to 2016 we find three political trends, with the first two both indicating and contributing
to greater stability in the region and the third one having the opposite effect.
First, while the new states that formed in the region from 1991 to 1992 have remained,
THE POLITICAL TRANSITION 43
much to the surprise of many analysts, they have been joined in recent years by several
other new states. Thus, in the late spring of 2006, Serbia-Montenegro divided into two
separate states, Kosovo (once a part of Serbia-Montenegro) became an independent state
in 2008–2009, and the Russian Federation expanded in size at the expense of its neighbor,
Ukraine, as a result of its annexation of Crimea (a peninsula in southeastern Ukraine)
in the spring of 2014.15
While the international community recognizes the new states of
Montenegro and Kosovo (though the Russian government and a few others have objected
to the latter) and, thus, Serbia’s new name and boundaries, it views the sudden boundary
changes of Russia and Ukraine as illegitimate. Several aspects of the Crimean case make
it very different from the other two. One is that the key international actor involved in
the reformulation of boundaries gained territory as a result of its engagement. Russia, in
short, was a far more “interested” observer with respect to Crimea than were the United
States or the EU in the cases of Montenegro and Kosovo. Second, in contrast to Kosovo,
the citizens of Crimea did not need to be protected from attacks launched by their own
government. Finally, the hastily held referendum that purportedly legitimated Crimea’s
secession from Ukraine was not a referendum on independence (as had been the case for
Kosovo and Montenegro) but rather a choice about whether to remain in Ukraine or
join the Russian Federation. That referendum, moreover, took place with Russian troops
already in control of the peninsula and in the absence of any international monitors.
The relative stability of borders in this region since 1992 speaks to several factors.
One is that opportunities for redefining boundaries tend to be fleeting, occurring primarily
during the unusual circumstances of a conjoined shift in domestic and international
regimes, as had happened from 1989 to 1992 when communism collapsed, the
Soviet Union was dismembered, and the Cold War ended. Another is that state dissolution
during the earlier tumultuous period succeeded to some degree in providing a closer
alignment of national and state borders and, with that, an expansion in the legitimacy
of both the regime and the state. Finally, powerful actors in the international community
tend to resist border changes because they see an opening up of the question of
borders as highly destabilizing for both domestic and international politics. To question
existing borders is to invite minority communities throughout the region—and certainly
their leaders—to demand states of their own. Such demands are tempting in many
cases, because they empower minority leaders, while allowing them to ignore other,
more pressing issues that might challenge their political influence—for example, rising
corruption, poor economic performance, and a decline in the quality of democratic life.
Recent developments in both Montenegro and Kosovo, however, remind us that the
borders in southeastern Europe remained in some flux for many years after the collapse
of communist regimes and states. Indeed, in sharp contrast to their words and deeds in
other parts of the world, including the Caucasus and Russia, major players in international
politics, such as the United States and the EU, grew increasingly unwilling and
unable to support the borders of Serbia-Montenegro as established during the wars that
accompanied the dissolution of the Yugoslav state from 1991 to 1995. Thus, beginning
in 1997, the Montenegrin political leadership began to question the value of its federal
relationship with Serbia. In 2003, the EU, eager to keep borders intact, brokered a deal
whereby Montenegro agreed to stay within the larger, but quite decentralized, state until
2006, when a referendum would be held on the question of Montenegrin independence.
44 VALERIE BUNCE
In the spring of 2006, this referendum did take place, and a majority (though not an
overwhelming one) of Montenegrins expressed their desire to establish their own state.
Quickly following the referendum, Serbia and Montenegro went their separate ways.
The situation in Kosovo has been different. Following the US-led NATO bombing
campaign in 1999 to protect Albanian inhabitants in Kosovo from the increasingly repressive
actions of the Milošević regime, the United States, with EU support, defined Kosovo
as an international protectorate. When it became increasingly clear that Kosovo could
not be reintegrated with Serbia, because of the institutional precedents set by its postwar
status, the strong support of the majority within Kosovo for independence, and continuing
tensions between the Serbian and Albanian communities coinhabiting the province,
the United States took the lead, with EU support, in providing verbal, economic,
and technical support for a gradual transition in Kosovo to sovereign statehood.16
This
culminated in a February 2008 declaration of independence. For Serbian publics and
politicians, the departure of Kosovo has been a good deal more controversial than the exit
of Montenegro. Moreover, widespread poverty, the dearth of state institutions that could
be recycled from the past, and continuing tensions between the Serbian and Albanian
communities living in Kosovo have also rendered the state-building project there a more
difficult and prolonged venture than in Montenegro. Thus, while the establishment of
the Montenegrin state took place relatively smoothly and quickly, the same has not been
the case for Kosovo.17
The second trend in the region since the mid-1990s is the growing homogenization
of the regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, given the expansion of democratic orders
(albeit of varying quality). This development reflected two trends: on the one hand, nearly
all of the first democracies stuck and indeed deepened, an outcome one cannot necessarily
have expected, especially in view of the constraints on democratization, noted earlier, as
a result of the authoritarian past and the stresses of economic reform; on the other hand,
the hybrid democracies of the first stage have, in virtually every case, shifted to the democratic
camp in the second stage, while the regimes that were initially dictatorships all
moved in a liberal direction, thereby joining the hybrid category and sometimes moving
in an even more liberal direction (see table 2.1). It is safe to conclude, therefore, that the
Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia, all
EU members, are very likely to continue as democratic regimes in the future. At the same
time, Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Montenegro have all made significant progress
since 2000 in building more democratic polities.
There are, however, three important exceptions to this “happy” pattern of democratic
progress throughout the region. One is Ukraine, which had made some strides in
building democracy in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution in 2004 but experienced
continuing problems with corruption and, following the election of Viktor Yanukovych
as president in 2010, a decline in democratic performance. Following widespread popular
protests in Ukraine against Yanukovych’s unexpected turn away from the EU in the late
fall of 2013, the government collapsed and Yanukovych fled to Russia (which had been a
close ally), Russia annexed Crimea, and Russia launched a covert campaign to destabilize
eastern Ukraine. In May 2014, a new president, Petro Poroshenko, was elected, and in
October of the same year, a new parliament was elected. Despite their commitment to
economic and political reforms, however, the new government has made limited progress,
THE POLITICAL TRANSITION 45
especially with respect to reducing corruption. The ability of the government to carry
through on reforms, of course, has been severely compromised by the continuing crisis
in eastern Ukraine.
The remaining exceptions are Hungary and Poland—two countries that, from the
early 1990s onward, were widely viewed as the front-runners in the race to democracy and
capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe. In both cases, democracy has eroded following
the sweeping victories of right-wing nationalist parties in parliamentary elections—the
Civic Alliance, or FIDESZ, in the case of Hungary in 2010, and the Law and Justice Party
in the case of Poland in 2015. The leaders of both parties have used their parliamentary
majorities to wage a war on democracy by, for example, undercutting civil liberties and
political rights, purging the judiciary and the bureaucracy, exerting more state control
over the media and civil society groups, and using extremist rhetoric and policies—for
example, in response to the refugee crisis—to carry out their culturally conservative and
nationalist agendas. Prime Minister Victor Orban’s attack on Hungarian democracy,
however, poses the greater threat, in part because he is far more corrupt than his Polish
counterpart, in part because he has been more aggressive in changing the Constitution
and taking on issues of personal and academic freedom, and in part because his assault
on democracy has been going on longer, that is, seven years.18
The recent developments in Poland and especially Hungary and backsliding under
Yanukovych in Ukraine notwithstanding, it is fair to conclude that a democratic Central
and Eastern Europe has finally come into being. In this sense, the pessimists have been
Table 2.1. Freedom House Rankings for Central and East European States,
2006–2017
Country 2006 2008 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Albania 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3
Bosnia-
Herzegovina
3.5 3.5 3.5 3.5 3 3.5 3 3.5 3.5 4
Bulgaria 1.5 1.5 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
Croatia 2 2 1.5 1.5 1.5 2 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5
Czech
Republic
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Estonia 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Hungary 1 1 1 1.5 1.5 1 1.5 2 2 2.5
Latvia 1 1.5 2 2 2 1.5 2 2 2 1.5
Lithuania 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Montenegro 3 2.5 2.5 2.5 2.5 2.5 3 3 3
Poland 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1.5
Romania 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
Serbia 2.5 2.5 2 2 2 2.5 2 2 2 2.5
Slovakia 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Slovenia 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Ukraine 2.5 2.5 3 3.5 3.5 2.5 2.5 3 3 3
Source:  Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” (http://www.freedomhouse.org/report-types/freedom-
world).
Note: The cumulative average of political rights and civil liberties scores is based on a scale of 1 to 7, with
1 considered free and 7 considered unfree.
46 VALERIE BUNCE
proven wrong, whereas the optimists seem to have been validated—with one important
qualification. As the division of this chapter suggests, democratization in Central and
Eastern Europe has come in two stages. The first wave, as already outlined, featured
an immediate and sharp break with the communist past, or a process wherein massive
demonstrations, a large and unified opposition embracing liberal politics, and communists
who were marginalized (as in the Czech Republic), ideologically sympathetic to the goals
of the opposition (as in Hungary and Slovenia) or sufficiently self-interested in the face
of a powerful opposition to recognize the logic of defecting from dictatorship (as in
the Baltic countries), combined to end the old order and lay the groundwork for competitive
elections, which the forces in support of democratic politics then won handily.
Although this scenario describes what happened with most of the “early democratizers”
in the region, some variations on these dynamics should be noted. Thus, in both Poland
and Hungary—the two countries that, in effect, jump-started the collapse of communism
in 1989—the critical political turning point was in fact a roundtable between the
communists and the opposition forces (with the roundtable following significant protests
in Poland in the fall of 1988 and the roundtable in Hungary strongly influenced by the
surprising political outcome of the Polish precedent). In both cases, the roundtable set the
stage for subsequent elections, which were semi-competitive in Poland and fully competitive
in Hungary. In both cases, noncommunist governments were formed and predictably
fueled the democratic momentum.
The second wave, or developments that took place in Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia,
Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine from 1996 to 2014, has
entailed one overarching similarity. Founding elections in all of these cases had compromised
the transition to democracy—either through the victory of the ex-communists, who were
divided in their commitments to democratic politics, or through the victory of nationalist
oppositions, who were often more illiberal than their ex-communist counterparts.
However, subsequent elections changed the political balance in ways that, in contrast to the
earlier period of transition, better served a democratic outcome. In this sense, a key issue
in all of these countries was the growth of political competition during the transition—a
pattern that we also find in the first democracies and that, because it produced turnover
in governing parties and coalitions, contributed to the deepening of democratic politics.
The dynamics of the second round of democratic transitions in Central and Eastern
Europe, however, varied in detail. In Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia, the key issue was
the eventual rise of a more effective liberal opposition that was able to win power and,
for the first time, form a durable and effective government. We find a different dynamic
in Albania, Croatia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Here, the key issue was the growing
incentives for the ex-communists, reacting to an opposition that was either liberal or
illiberal but in both instances highly competitive, to embrace the liberal cause as a means
of weakening the incumbents, differentiating themselves, and thereby accumulating
political power.
The final dynamic was in Serbia, where we see a replay, in effect, of the first
transitions to democracy in the region, albeit a decade later—a process that also took
place, three years later and informed by the Serbian precedent, in Georgia in 2003 and
in Ukraine in 2004. In Serbia, mass protests in the fall of 2000 in reaction to an attempt
by the increasingly corrupt and politically repressive ex-communists to steal the election,
THE POLITICAL TRANSITION 47
enabled the opposition—a coalition as broad as that seen, for example, in Czechoslovakia
in 1989—to win power over the long-governing ex-communists. This sharp break with
the past, however, was not so sharp, as the subsequent instability of Serbian politics
indicated—consider, for example, the continuous squabbling between the Serbian president
and the prime minister, the inability of elections to reach the constitutionally
required level of turnout, the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in the spring
of 2003, and the continued popular support for the antidemocratic Radical Party by a
substantial minority of Serbian citizens. The outcome of the presidential elections held
in June 2004 and thereafter; the acceptance of Montenegro’s declaration of independence
in 2006; the use of the International Court of Justice to challenge Kosovo’s declaration of
independence in 2008 significant progress in both economic reforms and economic performance;
the impressive Serbian record since 2000 with respect to civil liberties, political
rights, and free and fair elections; and, finally, the commitment of once antidemocratic
parties to the democratic project, however, suggest that Serbia is indeed on the road to
democracy.
These details aside, all of these “second-wave” democracies are interesting in that
the shift from either dictatorship to democracy or from hybrid to full-scale democracy
took place in response to elections that brought to power governments with the incentive
and the capacity to change the country’s political course.19
But this leaves two obvious
questions. Why did the “laggards” in stage one all move in a more democratic direction
in stage two? And how can we explain, more generally, the recent convergence in regime
types in Central and Eastern Europe?
Photo 2.3. Berlaymont building with “Welcome Bulgaria Romania to the EU.” (European
Commission)
48 VALERIE BUNCE
Explaining the Second Wave: Domestic Factors
In contrast to the explanations offered with respect to the first stage of the transition,
the explanations of the second stage are much less parsimonious. Indeed, the importance
of both domestic and international factors, both of which pushed in a similar liberalizing
direction, is striking. On the domestic side, we can point to two influences. One
is suggested by the fact that if we look at postcommunist Eurasia as a whole (or add to
our Central and East European group the remaining twelve Soviet successor states), we
find a high correlation between contemporary political arrangements and the duration
of Communist Party rule. All of the states of interest in this volume are democratic, and
they all became communist after World War II. By contrast, the record of democracy in
those Soviet successor states where communism had been in place since World War I is
far more mixed, featuring, for example, clear-cut dictatorships, such as in Belarus and
Uzbekistan, low-quality democracies, such as in Ukraine, and formerly relatively democratic
orders that have moved decisively in a dictatorial direction, such as in Armenia and
Russia. The durability, albeit continued fragility, of democracy in Moldova—the only
Soviet successor state, aside from the Baltic countries and the western part of Ukraine, to
have been added to the Soviet Union after World War II—makes this comparison even
more instructive. Just as strikingly, given the Armenian, Russian, and Belarusian cases,
there have been no cases of democratic breakdown in Central and Eastern Europe since
the end of Communist Party hegemony (though the period of Vladimír Mečiar’s rule in
Slovakia after the breakup of the Czechoslovak federation certainly compromised Slovak
democratic performance in the short term, and the same can be said about Poland since
2015 and Hungary since 2010).
Why is the length of Communist Party rule so important? Two plausible factors come
to the fore. First, a longer experience with communism means deeper penetration by communist
ideology, institutions, and practices—penetration secured in part by the number
of generations that lived under communist rule. This could make a transition to democracy
more difficult, because of the absence of democracy-supporting institutions and
values and because of the constraints on the development of a viable political opposition.
The second reason is also historical in nature but asks us to think in broader terms about
what this correlation means. The countries of concern in this volume all have a long history
of close connections with Western economies, cultures, and political ideas—a history
abruptly ended by the rise of communism during and immediately after World War II.
The geographical proximity to the West, therefore, may have been important in laying the
groundwork, once opportunities for political change presented themselves, for subsequent
democratic development. The ability of these countries to withstand the challenge of communism,
of course, was aided by the brevity of the communist experience—especially,
for example, the unusually brief duration of Stalinization, when the most antidemocratic
aspects of state socialism were imposed.20
The second domestic factor focuses particularly on those countries where illiberal
nationalists came to power after the deregulation of the Communist Party’s monopoly,
that is, Slovakia, Croatia, and Serbia. In all three cases, the liberal opposition, having
been divided and demobilized by the struggle over the national question, finally managed
to regroup and remobilize and thereby win elections. The literature on both nationalism
THE POLITICAL TRANSITION 49
and democratic transitions is in fact silent about when and why once successful illiberal
nationalists lose power and politicians with a more liberal agenda take their place,
focusing far more on the question of why some transitions to democracy feature a central
political role for illiberal nationalists. In response to the first and largely unexplored
question, we can identify two striking commonalities in our three cases: the opposition
was able to focus on the threats and costs of one leader in particular (Mečiar, Tuđman, or
Milošević), and international actors, including the EU, the United States, and transnational
networks of nongovernmental organizations, played an important role in providing
support to the opposition—for example, training them in the art of resistance, providing
electoral monitors, and helping them organize campaigns to increase voter registration
and electoral turnout. International influences, in short, were critical—a dimension that
I will now address more systematically.
International Influences
As noted above, geography played a role in the second wave of democratization. However,
its impact was also expressed in international dynamics. If the events of 1989, or the
region-wide collapse of Communist Party hegemony, indicated the power of diffusion
when neighboring states have similar domestic structures, similar historical experiences,
and similar external constraints (such as Soviet control), then diffusion, we might suggest,
can still operate after these momentous events. Here, it is important to remember that there
was in fact a great deal of interaction among the states of concern in this volume during
the communist era. For example, oppositions in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia
were in contact with each other during communism; the rise of the Solidarity movement
in Poland in 1980 influenced opposition development in the Baltic states and in Bulgaria
before the dramatic developments at the end of the decade; and protests in Central and
Eastern Europe during the communist era invariably called for adoption of some features
of the Yugoslav alternative model of communism. While this pattern did not guarantee
by any means that these countries would all follow identical pathways once the hold of
the communists weakened, it did mean that developments in one country had the potential
to influence developments elsewhere in the region—for example, demonstrating
that democracy was possible in the first stage of the transition and, later, helping weaker
opposition forces in, say, Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia to acquire the strategies needed
to move their less democratic countries in a more liberal direction. Indeed, changes in
Slovak politics in the second half of the 1990s influenced subsequent political changes in
Croatia and Serbia—and Georgia and Ukraine, for that matter. In this way, over time the
region converged in both its political and economic forms—as it had in the past, only
in an illiberal way and then with the additional nudge of a hegemon, the Soviet Union,
committed for reasons of security and ideology to dictatorship.
The importance of geography, or the spatial side of politics, also alerts us to several
other international factors. One is the global wave of democratization. By the turn of
the twentieth century, a majority of the world’s population lived in democratic orders—
an unprecedented situation and one that contributed to developments in Central and
Eastern Europe by rendering democracy perhaps the “only game in town.” That the
50 VALERIE BUNCE
countries under discussion are in Europe, of course, also mattered, especially given the
role of the Helsinki Process, beginning in the 1970s, in solidifying a European norm
of democracy and human rights and, indeed, in providing the opposition in Central
and Eastern Europe during the communist era with greater resources to question their
regimes’ legitimacy and performance.
This leads to a final international variable:  the EU. As numerous scholars have
argued, the EU has had two effects in Central and Eastern Europe.21
It has provided a
clear standard for democratic politics (and capitalist economics) by which both publics
and elites in this region can measure regime performance, and it has provided powerful
incentives for those countries to meet (and continue to meet) EU standards—for
example, by offering advice on the construction of liberal orders and by holding out the
promise of markets, financial support, and the legitimacy that comes from being coded
as European and, therefore, part of a prosperous, stable, secure, and, to use the language
of many Central and East Europeans, “normal” community. Many scholars and Central
and East European citizens, of course, debate whether the EU has been such a powerful
force for democracy. Does the EU, for example, make democracy both possible and
doable, or has it merely courted those countries that were already on the road to democratic
government? Does the EU secure sovereignty for the postcommunist countries
or undermine their newly won sovereignty by reducing domestic policy control? Do the
economic benefits of joining the EU outweigh, especially in the short term, the costs of
preparing for membership—which include not just meeting a huge number of expensive
conditions but also facing the constraints imposed by EU markets, the protectionism of
older members, and the EU’s commitment in recent years to austerity measures in the face
of the global economic crisis? Has the EU encouraged competition or merely strengthened
those already in power, thereby contributing to inequalities in power and money?
Finally, does EU membership produce equality among countries through the creation of
a single Europe, or has the eastward expansion of the EU effectively created a hierarchy,
sundering the rich western members from their poor eastern cousins and dividing the
east, in turn, into countries designated as either current or possible future members and
those countries that, because of geography, have no hope of joining and may, as a result,
be isolated and thereby locked into authoritarian rule?
While insightful in certain respects, these concerns must be placed alongside two
incontrovertible facts. First, all of the countries that have recently joined the EU (though
contemporary Hungary and Poland are exceptions, and the EU is currently considering
ways to make them pay for their declining democratic performance) or applied for
candidate status evince clear improvements over time in democratic assets. Second,
there is a clear correlation between prospects for joining the EU and the breadth of
the domestic political spectrum. Put simply, we have witnessed in Central and Eastern
Europe a sharp decline in most countries (though, again, Hungary and Poland are
recent exceptions) of extremist political voices and the convergence of political parties
around support for the EU (though public support of the EU, it must be recognized,
varies over time within countries as well as among them). For example, after returning
to power in 2003, the Croatian Democratic Union, a party that had formerly ruled
over Croatia as a dictatorship, went further than its more “moderate” predecessor in
embracing EU membership as its primary policy goal. Similarly, Tomislav Nikolić, the
president of Serbia from 2012 to May 2017, has done the same, despite a long record of
THE POLITICAL TRANSITION 51
opposition to the EU and support for illiberal Serbian nationalism. We can, of course,
debate whether political moderation, as in most of the second-wave democracies, is
a consequence of the EU’s influence or a function of purely domestic developments.
However, the fact remains that political leaders in Central and Eastern Europe, either
early in the transition or later, have come to believe that joining the EU is critical for
their own political futures and for concerns about identity, money, stability, and security
that are critical to voters.
However we construe this dynamic, improvements in democratic performance in
such areas as rule of law, state provision of civil liberties and political rights, and moderation
in the political values and attitudes of citizens and politicians alike are associated
with EU membership. In the rush to embrace the EU, other ways of meeting goals, such
as international security and economic growth, as offered by the extreme right and especially
the extreme left, have lost political support, either during the accession process or in
the years immediately following membership. With respect to the latter dynamic and the
second round of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, extremist parties have
either gone into decline or chosen to adapt. Thus, just as political competition increased
in all of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe that had lagged in democratization,
the structure of competition itself changed through the decline in political polarization.
The EU may very well have played a key role in that process.
What is critical to recognize, however, is that these generalizations about the impact
of the EU on narrowing the ideological spectrum apply less well in 2017 than they did
five and certainly ten years ago. Like Western Europe, some countries in Central and
Eastern Europe—most obviously, Poland and Hungary—have experienced a resurgence
of right-wing nationalism. The popularity of the EU has also declined.
Conclusion and Some Speculation
In this chapter, I have argued that the transition to democracy in Central and Eastern
Europe has proceeded in two stages. In the first stage, from 1989 to the first half of 1996
(with the Romanian presidential elections constituting the turning point), there were
variable regime outcomes, with half of the region moving quickly to democracy and the
other half either stuck in dictatorship or perched precariously between the two regime
extremes. In this period, the key issue was the development of oppositions during communism
and the extent to which they embraced liberal politics and were able to win in the
first competitive elections. In the second period, 1996–2014, the “laggards” in democratization
all moved in a liberal direction. In this case, the causes were multiple, including
diffusion effects within the region, the role of the EU, the declining capacity of authoritarian
leaders to maintain power through exploitation of cultural differences, and limited
constraints on democratization because of what was, from a broader regional standard, a
shorter history of Communist Party rule. As a result, the pronounced political diversity
of Central and Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism
and communist states declined. Just as state boundaries tended to endure, so too democratization
spread. Indeed, even the exceptional cases of Montenegro and Kosovo and their
secession from Serbia could be construed as an investment in a more authentic democratic
politics for all three parts of the original Serbian-Montenegrin federation.
52 VALERIE BUNCE
The patterns of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, together with their
underlying causes, present us with several important questions that are relevant to this
region and, more generally, to the study of recent transitions to democratic rule. What do
we mean by regime outcomes? Does it make sense to argue that some countries in Central
and Eastern Europe succeeded or failed to become democratic orders after communism,
or does it make more sense to argue that the countries in this region were differentially
situated to build democratic orders, with the result that democratization took longer in
some cases than in others? The analysis presented above suggests that the latter interpretation
is more compelling. This implies that there are differences in the assets and obstacles
to democratization and that these differences affect how long a transition can take, even
after the evident decline of authoritarian rule.
The time horizons we use to evaluate democratization, therefore, are critical in two
ways. First, we can draw premature conclusions about political pathways after authoritarianism
if we rush to judgment. Second, we may need different explanations for these
pathways, depending on when we choose to step back and evaluate political patterns. In
this sense, there seems to be no single road to democratic politics, especially if we allow
ourselves to recognize faster versus slower transitions.
But does this mean that, given time, democracy is inevitable? Given the nearly
region-wide victory of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe by 2016, or twentysix
years into the transition, we might be tempted to draw such a conclusion. However,
there are ample reasons to be skeptical. One is that there are still significant differences
in the quality of democratic governance in Central and Eastern Europe. For example,
Macedonia has faced repeated instability rooted in the intersection between ethnic
diversity and interparty competition, political support for conservative nationalist
parties and conservative politicians with inconsistent commitments to democracy has
increased in recent years in Bulgaria and especially Poland and Hungary, and the shift
to the democratic column in Croatia and especially Serbia is of relatively recent vintage.
In addition, other waves of democratization in the past, while admittedly not as global
in their reach as the current wave, have been followed by democratic breakdowns. Here,
the contemporary examples of Poland and especially Hungary serve as cautionary tales
of being too quick to generalize about democratic change. This is especially the case
since, in the third wave in particular, we have seen few examples of the collapse of
democracy but more examples of a subtler deterioration in democratic performance.
Moreover, the current global wave reveals a disturbing pattern: the rise of more and
more hybrid regimes, which could tip in either political direction and, at the same time,
could endure as halfway houses built on political compromises that promote stability
at the cost of corruption and checkered economic performance. Still another consideration
is that democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, as I have repeatedly
emphasized throughout this chapter, is strongly advantaged by the long connection
of this area to Western Europe and, more recently, by the influence of international
institutions such as the EU. That recognized, however, it is also the case that populism
in Western Europe has influenced politics in Central and Eastern Europe (and vice
versa), and that the EU is poorly set up to deal effectively with challenges to democracy
in its member states. To put the matter succinctly, the EU’s political and economic
leverage is much greater with states that are seeking membership than with states that
are already members.
THE POLITICAL TRANSITION 53
Finally, Central and Eastern Europe is distinctive in another way that has also
invested in democratic political outcomes. This is a region that does not force dominant
international powers, such as the United States, NATO, or the EU, to choose between
security concerns and democracy promotion—a choice that was evident throughout the
Cold War and that undermined, as a result, democratic politics. Even after the Cold War,
this choice is being made again with regard to US policy toward Russia, Central Asia, the
Caucasus, and Pakistan.
Democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, therefore, as in southern Europe
beginning in 1974, while proceeding in stages, has nonetheless been strongly aided
in ways that are largely unavailable to many other countries that have participated in
the third wave. Unlucky throughout its history, especially in comparison with Western
Europe, Central and Eastern Europe at this time—in comparison with other regions
undergoing regime change—has become, in these respects, lucky. Domestic and international
factors are largely working together to support democratic rule, whereas both sets
of factors in the past had usually pushed these countries in the opposite direction.
These advantages, however, must be judged alongside some constraints on democratization
that are likely to become even more apparent in the future. One issue is the declining
capacity of the EU to provide incentives for new members, candidate members, and countries
with association agreements to deepen the dynamics of both democratization and economic
reform. The problem here is that the EU is very divided from within; it is perceived by
many publics, whether inside or outside the EU, as too bureaucratic and too removed from
its various citizenries to represent their interests and speak for them; it is facing deep economic
problems; and it is in the midst of addressing the departure of the United Kingdom
from the EU as a result of the verdict of the British voters in June 2016. As a result, the EU
is unlikely in the near future, precisely because of all these problems, to expand to include
such new but precarious democracies as Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia,
or Ukraine. The EU, in short, is less willing and able to invest in the newest democracies
than it was in the case of the first and most robust democracies in the region. In this sense,
the north-south divide in Central and Eastern Europe is likely to continue.
In addition, there is the continuing problem in many of these countries of significant
corruption and expanding socioeconomic inequality—with the latter often correlated
with cultural cleavages. These developments can contribute to political polarization,
especially in hard economic times—as we have seen, for example, in Hungary and
Poland. Moreover, most of the regimes in the region feature weak political parties—as
institutions that structure the political preferences of mass publics, serve as the primary
linkages between citizens and their governments, and shape, especially through elections
and parliaments, the course of public policy. The “party” problem, in combination with a
severe economic crisis, helps explain political polarization and deterioration in the quality
of democracy in Hungary. Yet another issue for even the well-established democracies in
the region is the very high level of political cynicism (whether citizens focus on the performance
of democratic institutions or on specific politicians), coupled, not surprisingly,
with often low voter turnouts. Throughout the region, therefore, we find both continuing
weakness in democratic institutions and public disappointment with the democratic
experiment. Democracy, therefore, while region-wide, is flawed, and these deficiencies,
while unlikely to be fatal to democracy, will necessarily define the boundaries and the
consequences of political competition for many years to come.
54 VALERIE BUNCE
Study Questions
1. Is it accurate to say that the end of communism led to an immediate and region-wide
transition to democracy in Central and Eastern Europe?
2. What are the key differences between democracy and authoritarianism?
3. What are hybrid regimes?
4. How typical have the experiences with region transition in Central and Eastern
Europe been in comparison with such transitions in other parts of the world?
5. What have been the key differences in the political evolution of regimes in Central and
Eastern Europe since the fall of communism, and what key factors account for these
differences?
6. How important was the EU for the spread of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe?
7. What do the recent politics of Poland and Hungary tell us about the durability of
democracy?
Suggested Readings
Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik, eds. Twenty Years after Communism: The Politics of Memory and
Commemoration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Bunce, Valerie. “Global Patterns and Post-Communist Dynamics.” Orbis 50 (Autumn 2006):
601–20.
Bunce, Valerie, Michael McFaul, and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, eds. Democracy and Authoritarianism
in the Postcommunist World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Bunce, Valerie J., and Sharon L. Wolchik. Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist
Countries. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Gagnon, Charles P. Myth of Ethnic War:  Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, NY:  Cornell
University Press, 2004.
Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina, and Ivan Krastev, eds. Nationalism after Communism:  Lessons Learned.
Budapest: Central European University, 2004.
Stroschein, Sherrill. Ethnic Struggle, Coexistence and Democratization in Eastern Europe. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Vachudova, Milada Anna. Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Zielonka, Jan, ed. Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe. Oxford:  Oxford University
Press, 2001.
Websites
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: http://www.rferl.org
Freedom House, “2014 Nations in Transit Data”:  http://www.freedomhouse.org/report-types/
nations-transit#.VzAizM5Z9ac
World Bank, “Worldwide Governance Indicators”:  http://www.info.worldbank.org/governance/
wgi/index.aspx#home
THE POLITICAL TRANSITION 55
Notes
1. The tripartite political division of the region in the immediate aftermath of communist
regimes has been analyzed by several scholars. See, e.g., Valerie Bunce, “The Political
Economy of Postsocialism,” Slavic Review 58 (Winter 1999):  756–93; M.  Steven Fish, “The
Determinants of Economic Reform in the Postcommunist World,” East European Politics and
Societies 12 (Winter 1998): 31–78; and Michael McFaul, “The Fourth Wave of Democracy and
Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions in the Postcommunist World,” World Politics 54 (January
2002): 214–44.
2. There are many competing definitions of democracy. Perhaps the most helpful summary
of these debates can be found in Robert Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1998).
3. Since the early 1990s, hybrid regimes have become the most common outcome of the global
wave of democratic change that began in the mid-1970s. See Larry Diamond, “Thinking about
Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002): 3–24; Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way,
“The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002): 51–65. See
also Marina Ottaway, Democracy Challenged:  The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism (Washington,
DC: Carnegie Endowment Press, 2003).
4. On the issues of demobilization of the liberals in these two countries, see V. P. Gagnon, The
Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004);
and Kevin Deegan-Krause, “Uniting the Enemy: Politics and the Convergence of Nationalisms in
Slovakia,” East European Politics and Societies 18 (Fall 2004): 651–96.
5. See, e.g., Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth
Century (Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Guillermo A.  O’Donnell, Philippe
C.  Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, vols. 1–4
(Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and Giuseppe Di Palma, To Craft
Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
6. On the unexpected problems encountered after the fall of Saddam Hussein, see Larry
Diamond, “What Went Wrong in Iraq?” Foreign Affairs 83 (Summer/Fall 2004): 34–56; and Peter
Galbraith, “Iraq: Bush’s Islamic Republic,” New York Review of Books 52 (August 11, 2005): 6–9.
7. A useful summary of these arguments can be found in Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen
Hanson, eds., Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe:  Assessing the Legacy of
Communist Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
8. Carol Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia: The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918–
1987 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
9. See, especially, O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead, Transitions; and M.  Steven Fish,
Democracy from Scratch:  Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
10. See Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown
of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
11. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1992 (London:  Basil
Blackwell, 1992).
12. Dankwart Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative
Politics 2 (April 1970): 18–36.
13. See Terry Lynn Karl, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,” Comparative Politics
23 (Spring 1990): 28–49; and Valerie Bunce, “Rethinking Recent Democratization: Lessons from
the Postcommunist Experience,” World Politics 55, no. 2 (January 2003): 167–92.
56 VALERIE BUNCE
14. Bunce, “The Political Economy,” 756–93; McFaul, “The Fourth Wave,” 214–44; and
Valerie J.  Bunce and Sharon L.  Wolchik, “Favorable Conditions and Electoral Revolutions,”
Journal of Democracy 17, no. 4 (October 2006): 5–22.
15. Valerie Bunce and Aida Hozic, “Diffusion-Proofing and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine,”
Demokratizatsiya 24 (September 2016): 345–456.
16. International Commission on the Balkans, The Balkans in Europe’s Future (Sofia: Secretariat
Center for Liberal Strategies, 2005).
17. Elton Skendaj, Creating Kosovo: International Oversight and the Making of Ethical Institutions
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2014).
18. David Ost, “Grappling with the Hungarian and Polish New Right in Power,” Newsnet 56
(August 2016): 1–4.
19. For a comparison of these two waves, see Valerie Bunce and Sharon Wolchik, “A Regional
Tradition: The Diffusion of Democratic Change under Communism and Postcommunism,” in
Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Postcommunist World, ed. Valerie Bunce, Michael McFaul,
and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
20. The importance of geographical proximity to the West has appeared in a number of
studies that have attempted to explain variations among postcommunist political and economic
trajectories. See, e.g., Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Reilly, “Geographical Diffusion and the
Transformation of the Postcommunist World,” World Politics 53 (October 2000): 1–37.
21. See, e.g., Milada Anna Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration
after Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Wade Jacoby, The Enlargement of the
European Union and NATO: Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004); and Ronald H.  Linden, ed., Norms and Nannies:  The Impact of
International Organizations on the Central and East European States (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002).