Introduction

Abstract

The new wave of democratization in Southern Europe in the 1970s and in Latin America in the 1980s made democratic transition a highly fashionable subject for academic research. The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 further increased scholars’ interest in democratization. Compared with the vast body of literature on the topic this book differs by its focus on Europe and its truly historical approach. It begins by discussing successful democratizations in Britain and the Netherlands in the nineteenth century and concludes with the analysis of post-Communist transitions in East Europe and Russia. Although discussing the earlier periods to some extent, most recent works concentrate on the latest wave of democratization. Their historical background is very limited. This is because transitions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are usually compared only with processes in Latin-American countries.¹ But ‘the design’ of a future polity and economic system has been imported by post-Communist countries from Western Europe and the United States of America, not from Latin America.