Transforming the State in Socialist Economies

In the early 1990s, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the accompanying collapse of communism in Eastern Europe captured the imagination of political observers who believed they were witnessing the final moment in a struggle of competing world orders. In the United States, the highly respected social scientist Francis Fukuyama advanced the view that the triumph of western capitalism over Soviet communism marked ‘the end of history’. Indeed, more than a decade later, experience confirms that representative democracy and market economics had earned a definitive, if flawed, victory in that region of the world. Yet a global analysis reveals that the process of economic transition remains controversial, deeply divisive, and, above all, incomplete.