Democratization and Security in Central and Eastern Europe and the Post-Soviet States

Abstract

The night of November 9, 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin wall. The collapse epitomized the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union (SU), which was officially dissolved on December 26, 1991. Moreover, it was the most symbolic manifestation in a series of events that had shook Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) beforehand. Slow but steady reform processes in Hungary and Poland coupled with peaceful mass rallies in East German had been the earliest signals of imminent change. The then fifteen former Soviet republics1 eventually became independent and the other six members of the Warsaw Pact2 were no longer dominated by the USSR. From the perspective of numerous political scientists, the events of 1989 and 1990 were at the peak of the so-called “third wave of democratization.”3 One scholar, Francis Fukuyama, even declared that the breakdown of the former communist regimes represented the “end of history.”4 He argued that the Western values of political and economic liberalism had won over competing ideas made by communist rulers of the Warsaw Pact on how to run a society. Most surprisingly, however, one of the largest political—if not the largest—transformation in history did not result in large-scale violence.5 Today, twenty years after the velvet revolutions German politi-