Introduction: Regional Diversity and Local Development in the New Member States

The conventional view that holds that the post-1989 economic transformations in Central and Eastern Europe are in grosso modo about the convergence of these societies towards a western or Western European economic standard can in many ways be seen as still informing many studies on the issue (see, inter alia, Cernat, 2006; Lane, 2007; cf. Hay, 2004). One corollary of such a vision of convergence is the idea that the successful transformation from a communist economic system to a capitalist market economy is about the adoption of western models and institutions by the former communist countries — in other words, about ‘innovation through imitation’ (Keune et al., 2004: 586). In the period of capitalist restructuring in the wake of mass production in the West (‘post-Fordism’), the emphasis has often been on turning away from centralized approaches towards more flexible, decentralized ones, including in this a renaissance of cities and regions.2 A similar focus on models of decentralized and regional economic development and small and medium-sized enterprise development is endorsed for the countries of the East. Such a focus positively relates to those reforms — mostly economic in nature — that were implemented in various countries and on different occasions before 1989 (cf. Bateman, 2000; Dallago and McIntyre, 2003; Hardy and Smith, 2004).