July 2018, Volume 29, Issue 3
Thirty years ago in Central and Eastern Europe, belief in an open society and a sense of reasserted national and indeed European identity seemed to go hand-in-hand. But that was then.
October 2016, Volume 27, Issue 4
The crisis of liberal democracy is Europe-wide, but it has assumed an especially intense form in Central and Eastern Europe.
July 2012, Volume 23, Issue 3
How has Hungary, initially seen as a leading postcommunist success story, fallen into its current troubles?
July 2010, Volume 21, Issue 3
A tribute to Václav Havel, Czech playwright and former dissident, who became not only president but the symbol of the “velvet revolutions.”
January 2010, Volume 21, Issue 1
In the twenty years since 1989, acute excitement over democratic transition and consolidation gave way to symptoms of “democracy fatigue” and elite exhaustion; successful economic transition away from state socialism fell victim to a crisis of the free-market model; and the EU’s transformative power has reached its geopolitical limits. The nations of Central and Eastern…
October 2007, Volume 18, Issue 4
The populist backlash against corruption, the CEE transition-era elites, and the liberal consensus has led to a democratic crisis, but does not portend systemic change.
January 2004, Volume 15, Issue 1
The fall of the Berlin Wall gave East Europeans a euphoric sense that they were about to give European democacy a new direction. But as many of their countries prepare to join the EU, little has worked out as expected in those heady days.
April 2000, Volume 11, Issue 2
Nowhere else has the impact of international factors on democratization been as apparent as in Central and Eastern Europe. Integration into European and Euro-Atlantic structures is one particularly strong democratizing force.
January 1999, Volume 10, Issue 1
Read the full essay here.
Drawn from outstanding articles published in the Journal of Democracy, The Global Divergence of Democracies follows the enthusiastically received earlier volume, The Global Resurgence of Democracy.
"A useful compilation popularizing the work of an influential journal… The Journal of Democracy is an effective tribune for mainstream U.S. thinking on these issues."—Political Studies
Is the challenge of building and consolidating democracy under postcommunist conditions unique, or can one apply lessons learned from other new democracies? The essays collected in this volume explore these questions, while tracing how the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have fared in the decade following the fall of communism.
