Diverse Outcomes: Liberal Societies, Captured States and Undetermined Polities

In assessing the outcomes of post-communist transformation to the present date, one should begin with the question: has the country completed the change-over from communist central planning to a liberal market economy, in a word, is transition over? The first conclusion of this book points to the wide divergence of outcomes among the 27 countries, with one group having essentially completed this journey, a middle group still short of the end-point but progressing steadily, and a third group not only farther behind but stalled at a stage of partial, frozen transformation. In the light of their new EU membership, the transition in Central Europe and the Baltics is surely over for all intents and purposes; while in South-East Europe it is clearly not over yet, though steady progress is evident. For the rest, the CIS countries’ transformation is definitely not complete in the conceptual sense of establishing a liberal economy and polity regime. But in a practical and unfortunate sense, it could be said it is ‘over’ for now because they have become trapped in an oligarchic-autocratic regime of partial capitalism and a far from matured democracy. While the people-revolutions in a handful of these countries may break open this trap, it is far too early to judge their prospects, or the possibilities of a similar development in other countries. The rest of this chapter summarizes this variation in outcome by recapping, in the next section, what happened in the course of 15 years, followed by our explanations of why transition evolved differently across the region.