Introduction Modernization, Europeanization, and Path Dependency

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet-type regimes in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 imposed a twofold set of constraints on the new East European states. The first of these relates to Western modernization, given the extent to which these countries had fallen behind over the preceding decades, if not centuries.¹ The need to “catch up with” the West was all the more crucial since these new states were subject, from the outset, to the globalization of trade that resulted from the opening up of national borders. This dynamic has been interpreted in the sociological literature using the Weberian concepts of legal rules, the rule of law, regulated capitalist economy, and autonomy of fields of action. The second series of constraints relates to the European Union, which most of these countries very quickly sought to join, as much on account of a sense of belonging to a common geopolitical and cultural entity as of the inherent attractiveness of the EU (European Union). The concept of “Europeanization” has become the norm for analyzing Union regulation and the adaptation pressure exerted on the new countries, particularly in the form of—mainly political— conditionally.² It so happens that this dual series of constraints, specific to globalization and Europeanization, pressed itself upon the East European states at precisely the point when they were recovering their national sovereignty. For countries that had all been deprived of it for long periods of history—and not only under Communism—this demand for sovereignty imposed itself as the fundamental variable of the post-Communist transformation.