In 1989, the “Autumn of the People” ushered in high hopes concerning the possibilities for democratic transformation in the countries of the soon-to-be-post-communist world. Suddenly the Soviet bloc was no more – and within two years the Soviet Union itself would be gone too. While the revolution took different forms in different countries, in many ways 1989 was the hour of those who had labored in oppositional civil society, often underground, sometimes in prison. Suddenly they were joined on the streets by many others. This fine democratic hour seemed to hold lessons even for the more established liberal democracies in the West, which featured at that time a much less heroic kind of democratic politics, beholden to routine, ambition, material interest, and money. For a moment, democracy in its most inspirational form seemed to be found in the East rather than in the West.

Many of these high hopes have now withered. It is one thing to overthrow an exhausted system (or even just to walk into the vacuum left by its collapse), quite another to deal on a day-to-day basis with ethnic tensions, the legacy of economic stagnation, a global capitalist political economy that soon turns out to be ungenerous and unforgiving, severe environmental pollution, and inherited creaking state bureaucracies. Simultaneous negotiation of institutional, economic, and attitudinal transition has often proven extraordinarily difficult, especially in the presence of ethnic conflicts and controversies over borders and boundaries. Moreover, each of these three dimensions of transition has several aspects.