Continuity And Change In Soviet East European Relations

This book is originated from the 1985 Rome conference on "Soviet-East European Relations: Implications for the West," which explored the elements of continuity and change, especially the trends in intra-Warsaw Pact relations. It contains revised versions of the papers presented at the conference.

This book is originated from the 1985 Rome conference on "Soviet-East European Relations: Implications for the West," which explored the elements of continuity and change, especially the trends in intra-Warsaw Pact relations. It contains revised versions of the papers presented at the conference.

Focusing on Western and Eastern Europe, this text places recent events in a wider historical context. It tries to bring the story right up to date covering both East-West relations and European intergration. The authors examine national and regional experience as well as the broader institutional and international context. Post-1989 Europe is, they argue, in some ways more problematic than the proceding period.

This is a guide to post-communist reality, written by social scientists, and offers a detailed analysis of the transformation taking place in the former Soviet Union in terms of social, political and economic structures.

The establishment of electoral systems in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan presents both a complex set of empirical puzzles and a theoretical challenge. Why did three states with similar cultural, historical, and structural legacies establish such different electoral systems? How did these distinct outcomes result from strikingly similar institutional design processes? Explaining these puzzles requires understanding not only the outcome of institutional design but also the intricacies of the process that led to this outcome. Moreover, the transitional context in which these three states designed new electoral rules necessitates an approach that explicitly links process and outcome in a dynamic setting. This book provides such an approach. Finally, it both builds on the key insights of the dominant approaches to explaining institutional origin and change and transcends these approaches by moving beyond the structure versus agency debate.