Whither Eastern Europe?

The study of Eastern Europe as a region in political science faces a tripartite crisis. First, the very concept of Eastern Europe has lost coherence, and many in academia and outside see this field as obsolete—a mere residuum of the Cold War. Second, the support for research on Eastern Europe and the training of specialists, which was more substantial though never abundant in past decades, is drying up. Third, political science, and in particular the subfield of comparative politics, has moved away from an area-centered approach and is driven by both theoretical and methodological concerns in which the specificities of area are less important. These three developments are, obviously, related. Yet for a political scientist the polities of Eastern Europe, be they democracies, autocracies, or in flux, may and should remain objects of serious study regardless of the ontological status of the region, as they constitute a set of cases well suited to testing old theories and methods and developing new ones. The purpose of this special issue of EEPS is to provide a self-assessment of the field and to reflect on the past, present, and future place of empirical evidence gathered in Eastern Europe within the discipline. All essays collected here were first presented as papers at the “Whither Eastern Europe?” workshop, co-sponsored by the University of Florida, EEPS, and the American Council of Learned Societies. The workshop took place on 9–11 January 2014 in Gainesville, Florida, and was hosted by Michael Bernhard, Miriam and Raymond Ehrlich Chair in Political Science at the University of Florida.

For several decades, Eastern Europe occupied a peculiar place in political science and related disciplines (political sociology, political anthropology). The region, as an object of scholarly interest (as opposed to a mere geographical area) crystallized in the wake of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany and resulting Cold War division of Europe. As far as “Sovietologists” and “Kremlinologists” were concerned, Eastern Europe, the region that fell under communist rule without becoming a part of the Soviet Union, was a backwater and merited only secondary attention throughout almost the entire period of the Cold War. There were only a few exceptions to this rule.

First, interest in particular countries grew rapidly during crises (Yugoslavia: 1948; Hungary: 1956; Czechoslovakia: 1968; Poland: 1956, 1970, and 1976; and Romania in the 1970s), without, however, contributing much to generalizable social-scientific knowledge. One notable exception was the crisis in 1980–1981 in Poland and the emergence of democratic opposition there, as well as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It stimulated a reconsideration of the role of civil society in democratization among Western scholars. This remains the most spectacular case of how empirical evidence from Eastern Europe had a major impact in the social sciences.

Second, Cold War–era political scientists interested in the internal working of Soviet-type systems would sometimes use Eastern Europe as a proxy for the study of the Soviet Union itself, because of the difficulty of doing empirical work there for long periods of time. Scores of scholars spent considerable time gathering empirical evidence in Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, or Romania, and their efforts resulted in a great deal of work of substantial value. And for a short period of time, “comparative communism” was recognized as a legitimate subject of study in political science. But again, the primary interest here was in the peculiarities of communist regimes, and the results often did not have impact in the discipline beyond a narrow stratum of scholars interested in the region.

In the United States, the unsettled nature of the region and its strategic importance brought a new commitment of resources to its study through the Title VIII Grant Program established in 1983. It was a unique effort, administered by the Department of State, to finance research and language training on Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In the 1980s and 1990s, facilitated by organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), or the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), this was a very effective way to conduct research and train a new generation of scholars. EEPS, launched by ACLS in 1987, has played a key role in building and maintaining an interdisciplinary community of East Europeanists. To reflect its commitment to interdisciplinarity, the journal since 2012 has been published with a tagline “and Cultures”: East European Politics & Societies and Cultures. Yet it was the rumination on politics that has flourished on the pages of the journal ever since its first issue.

The revolutions of 1989–1991 and the subsequent extrications from communism led to a surge of interest in Eastern Europe among social scientists, including those for whom the region was, up to this point in history, terra incognita. Indeed, empirical evidence from Eastern Europe has been used to inform developments in theories addressing key substantive areas in political science, political sociology, and related disciplines. The list of such topics is endless: from revolution, social movements, and civil society; to minorities and the politics of identity; to political regimes, institutional design and choice; to parties and party systems, elections and voting (or general political) behavior; to political economy; transformation of social and elite structures; etc. At this time, the region has acquired a new identity–not as an appendix to its large neighbor to the East anymore but a compact geographical area undergoing rapid multidimensional political, social, and economic changes. In addition, the spatial boundaries of the region expanded, to include some of the former western republics of the Soviet Union. Yet at the same time, others have argued that the regional identity has lost coherence and that we should think in terms of smaller regional units, for example, the Baltics, the Balkans, and Central Europe.

Eastern Europe remained a hot topic in political science for a limited time. After the turn of the century, the interest in the region among “generalists” or “comparativists” subsided. As Ivo Banac and Irena Grudzińska Gross, who edited EEPS from 2009 to 2013, stated in their editorial manifesto when they assumed responsibility for the journal (v 23 n 1, February 2009, p. 6): “Eastern Europe has not become scholarship’s most promising laboratory, not even a promising one. If anything, the area is now more ignored, both by the diplomats and the academic community, than it was in the 1980s, when the American Council of Learned Societies started EEPS.”

Banac and Grudzińska Gross were being diplomatic when they singled out “diplomats”; there are other culprits as well, notably politicians and policy makers. Title VIII funding was first dramatically curtailed, and then effectively suspended “until further notice,” as the Web pages of NCEEER or ACLS proclaim. (More recent developments seem more optimistic: apparently, Title VIII Program received appropriations of $1.5 million for 2015.)

To be sure, there are legitimate reasons for this declining concern with Eastern Europe as an object of foreign policy. First and foremost, twelve of the countries in the region (from the GDR in 1990 to Croatia in 2013) have joined the European Union; the same group plus Albania belong to NATO. From potential adversaries, they have become allies or outright members of the “club.” Several states—the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia—have even been admitted to the most exclusive international club of all, the OECD. Second, the diverse trajectories that the countries took following the fall of communism necessitated a much more differentiated policy approach. Last but not least, American foreign policy has understandably shifted toward other priorities, such as militant Islam or China. And even if Russia has recently reclaimed its place on the list of top priorities and is likely to remain there for years to come, Eastern Europe as a research field has far less in common with Russia as an object of study compared to the Cold War.

Consequently, scholars of East European politics face both a deteriorating infrastructure of logistical support (financing) and an identity crisis. The aim of the above-mentioned workshop and of the papers published in this volume is to address those issues in the search for solutions.

In recent years, ACLS and EEPS sponsored two similar, discipline-specific workshops, on history (Stanford, 2010) and literary studies (Princeton, 2013). Senior and junior scholars who have devoted their professional careers to the study of Eastern Europe (or, more often, its particular constitutive parts) participated in both. While field experts in Eastern Europe exist in political science too, there is also a vast number of scholars whose chief research interests are substantive and disciplinary (party systems, social movements, elections, civil society, political regimes, etc.), but who readily incorporate data from Eastern Europe into their analyses and theories without becoming experts on the region itself. The need to study such data, to broaden one’s field of observations and prevent “false universals,” seems self-evident. The task of East Europeanists may be then to generate and disseminate relevant empirical evidence, as well as specify how Eastern Europe’s scope conditions require careful attention to how such data are best utilized. To discuss approaches to this process, the workshop organizers gathered together a select group of scholars representing three generations of East Europeanists: (1) those who were trained as social scientists, either in the United States or in their native countries, during the Cold War; (2) those who entered the field right before or right after the collapse of the communist system; (3) young scholars who have completed their training only recently, when many countries of the region had already become consolidated democracies. Their charge was to reflect on the ways in which their own research projects, current or past, utilized data from Eastern Europe to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge in political science. In their deliberations, the workshop participants devoted particular attention to the following questions:

Whither Eastern Europe? Is the region, defined as the lands between the Gulf of Finland in the North and Greece in the South, and between Germany in the West and Russia in the East, a coherent object of study in political science and related disciplines? What matters more: the common denominator of the communist past, other common historical legacies, or the region’s historical diversity, encompassing both the pre-communist and post-communist experience?

Whither East European studies? What is today the best approach to training a new generation of scholars? Should we, as in the past, train experts on Eastern Europe (or even particular countries), or should we draft to the field, even if only temporarily, young scholars trained in particular substantive questions? Should the expertise in a given polity in the region be at all associated with the label “Eastern Europe,” or rather with other entities (EU)? How critical is it for political scientists who use evidence from Eastern Europe to be conversant or even expert in the study of post-communism as a political, social, and cultural phenomenon?

Whither EEPS? What should be the future role of the journal? How can it best facilitate the process of integrating the East European experience into mainstream political science? But also how can it help to preserve the interdisciplinary community of scholars, who share a passion for things Eastern European?

Even with the themes of discussion defined so broadly, the substantive focus of the workshop became instantly apparent. Speaking of East European politics and its elements, be it voting behavior, party system development, civil society, social movements, etc., the subject of historical legacies emerged with remarkable consistency. The end of communism did not lead to a tabula rasa on which new institutions were easily built. Today, the suffix post- proudly stands in the front of the name designating one of the two totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century that wrought havoc in the region. While European politics may be a common denominator for all nations of the region, it is obvious that legacies of what preceded the return to Europe could not be ignored. By no means are post-communist legacies consistent across all nations, nor are they the only way in which the past is relevant to current outcomes. As William Faulkner once famously quipped, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Without sorting out the past, one cannot understand and interpret the present, let alone make predictions about the future. Virtually each author in this volume tackles this issue in his or her own way.

Grzegorz Ekiert in his reflections on East European studies in the post-communist era demarcates “three generations of researchers” by tying their efforts to specific exploratory paradigms. The initial, intuitive response of scholars to the fall of communism was to focus their attention on residual factors that might undermine or even prevent a successful transition away from it, or as Ekiert calls it, the “communist legacy/liability paradigm.” Then followed the “transition to democracy” paradigm, seeking common denominators for developments in post-communist and post-authoritarian polities. Its emergence was prompted by the relative success of a subset of countries in the region, but failed to explain not-so-isolated laggards and transition failures. In response, the “new historicism” emerged as a novel paradigm, indicating “the return to a disciplined exploration of historical and cultural contexts and their role in shaping the outcomes of transformations” ¹ .

Anna Grzymała-Busse in her analysis of the influence of religious groups on public policy in post-communist polities relies precisely on such an interplay between communist and precommunist legacies. She compares Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Croatia, motivated both by their similarity (Roman Catholicism as the dominant denomination) and differences (the monopolistic position in the Catholic Church in Poland, Lithuania, and Croatia, as opposed to the more diverse patterns of religiosity among the Czechs and Slovaks). The author shows that the country-specific forms of what she calls “religious nationalism” present today emerged from a complex interplay of pre-communist historical legacies and communist-era policies. She finds that this religious nationalism—the fusion of national and religious identities—can give the Church lasting influence over public policy. But her analysis gives us also a stern warning against an uncritical application of  “historical legacies” in analyses of present-day politics, as apparently similar legacies may generate divergent policy outcomes, while identical policies may stem from quite different legacies. ²

The centrality of historical and cultural context is further developed by Jan Kubik in his essay. ³ Kubik focuses here on the tension between the “mainstream” social sciences and area studies (not only of the East European ilk). The mainstream scholars strive to formulate generalizations, typically based on large-N analyses, and ideally approaching propositions, statements, or theories of universal character. Area studies specialists tend to emphasize what is specific and often idiosyncratic, and contextualize (if not, one may add, falsify) universals. Kubik tries to convince us that this tension can be successfully resolved through the rigorous application of a methodological approach he calls contextual holism. This approach embraces five principles: relationism, historicizing, constructivism, a focus on informality, and localism. Kubik argues that East European studies have a vast potential to contribute, through the application of contextual holism, to the generalized body of knowledge in areas such as research on intra-regional divergences, inter-regional comparisons, globalization, as well as European integration and post-socialist and postcolonial studies. His ideas are echoed by several authors in this volume (see, for instance, Ellie Knott’s call for a constructivist approach in the study of ethnic identities ⁴ ).

Jason Wittenberg offers a more general set of methodological reflections, focused on the very concept of a historical legacy. He exposes the complexity of the concept by identifying the logical structure of legacy arguments. In the case of Eastern Europe, specific features of the region might have originated and/or be present in any or each of the three epochs: pre-communist, communist, and post-communist. Consequently, Wittenberg distinguishes seven distinct “paths to post-communism,” or ways in which contemporary economic, social, and political patterns could have developed. He also introduces the concept of “non-legacy,” a past phenomenon that does not persist into a period under study. ⁵

The interplay of pre-communist and communist-era patterns is the subject of the essay by Jeffrey Kopstein and Michael Bernhard. The authors point out that the most significant legacies East European polities face in the process of democratization were, by and large, generated by the clash between the communist utopian project and the pre-modern social, political, and economic conditions prevailing across the region. Leninist violence brought to the region unprecedented suffering, but, in a most cruel paradox, also “cleared” the playing field of social structures and economic relations that were by no means conducive to liberal democracy. The communist modernization effort, while ultimately unsuccessful as it failed to establish competitive advantage over capitalism, nonetheless paved the way for the belated advent and consolidation of modern structures and value systems. This development was reinforced by what the authors, inspired by Norbert Elias, call “the communist version of the civilizing process,” ⁶ that is the adoption of the bourgeois virtues of self-restraint, manners, and delayed gratification. Such virtues, even if not universally practiced, are instrumental in the transformation to a market economy and pluralist democracy, and in the development of civil society. As Kopstein and Bernhard note, once in power, communists abandoned any attempts to revolutionize the mores of society and instead promoted traditional bourgeois values (usually in their petit bourgeois version). Here we encounter another paradox: Bourdieuan symbolic violence, mastered by the bourgeoisie, proved, not only in a long run, much more effective than the direct, physical violence of Lenin, Stalin, and their followers.

The extent to which communist regimes succeeded in erasing pre-communist socioeconomic patterns has been hotly debated for decades, well before the communist system ground to a halt. One school of thought, associated with Ken Jowitt (one of the founding fathers of EEPS) more than anyone else, recognizes the power of communist uravnilovka: the imposition, from the top (or rather from the Soviet east) of the same Leninist reality across the whole region. The other school, inspired by the writings of Andrew Janos, Jowitt’s colleague at Berkeley, emphasizes the role of pre-communist developments in shaping the diversity of the region observable during communism’s heyday as much as today. Grigore Pop-Eleches attempts to assess the relative weight of both types of legacies. ⁷ He examines the patterns of socioeconomic developments in both inter-regional and intra-regional perspectives, and their transformation into political outcomes, and finds that the relative explanatory power of pre-communist and communist legacies varies significantly across issue areas: whereas political attitudes across the region still reflect strong common communist legacies, regime trajectories have diverged and largely followed pre-communist developmental differences. In addition, in some areas post-communist polities and economies greatly diverged from one another since the 1989–1991 revolutions in ways that differ from pre-communist legacies. Thus, post-communism faces also its “own” legacies (Wittenberg’s “uniquely post-communist path” ⁸ ), or rather the intended and unintended outcomes of transition paths chosen in communism’s wake.

Jelena Subotić reminds us that this divergence of post-communist developments has its troubling, even tragic, side. She examines the contribution of East European studies to our understanding of the matters of human rights and transitional justice. Indeed, the atrocities of the wars of Yugoslav succession and the international community’s failure to prevent these wars and then its very limited effectiveness in dealing with their aftermath have contributed to the emergence of new legacies casting their long shadow on the future of Western Balkans (a concept that came to wider circulation only recently and itself may be viewed as such a legacy). Not surprisingly, Subotić takes strong issue with Ekiert’s optimistic assessment of the past twenty years as the best in the history of Eastern Europe. ⁹

The next two essays, by Joshua Tucker and Aida Hozić, offer very personal accounts of the authors’ relationship to and with East European studies. They testify to the variety of trajectories leading scholars have taken in this direction, and to the often murky waters they had to navigate along the way. Once the region emerged as a real-life laboratory for students of politics, the obvious challenge was to absorb the evidence gathered there into the discipline’s “stock of knowledge at hand.” This was no easy challenge. On the one hand, Western researchers were often discouraged by the alleged instability of the emergent institutional patterns and the apparent incompatibility of established theories with the East European experience. The language barrier played its role as well. And in contrast, researchers fluent in the area’s languages and local social circumstances, and hence capable of contextualization, were often too eager to emphasize the idiosyncratic over the universal, nor predisposed to connecting the findings of their research to the disciplinary debates. For instance, a decade ago a major academic press published a study of the political economy of voting behavior in Poland, methodologically quite sophisticated, but virtually free of any references to the classics on the subject (Downs was nowhere to be found . . . ) and to the mainstream political science scholarship in general.

Joshua Tucker, along with a “huge cohort” of his peers, ¹⁰ was drawn to the study of East European politics (or rather politics of the region’s particular constitutive elements, as he points out) by the unique opportunity to observe democratic politics in statu nascendi. He tells the story of his own research odyssey, from studies focused on a few countries in the region, to comparative studies of post-communist and established democracies, to inquiries focused on specific substantive matters (in his case the legacy of communism on post-communist political attitudes and behavior) based on large cross-national data sets, including a diverse set of political regimes. He, along with others in this cohort, not only demonstrated the utility of data gathered in Eastern Europe, but its indispensability in developing new theories and exposing false universals. As East European data was incorporated into mainstream political science research, Tucker notes, the very concept of East Europe has the potential to become anachronistic as it is supplanted by studies of substantively defined areas, such as new democracies, competitive authoritarian regimes, and new forms of regime change (e.g., color revolutions), regardless of their geographical location.

Aida Hozić, unlike Tucker a native of the region, admits that at the early stages of her academic career she consciously avoided any professional interest in post-communist politics. But she could not resist the spell of East European affairs for too long, as they kept providing abundant material for reflection on subjects that are central for her field of international relations. Yet she sees the key stimuli for the further development of East European studies not in academia itself but in the world-out-there, and in particular in the minds of policymakers. In a piece written before the Ukrainian crisis erupted, and revised as it was unfolding, Hozić warns us that Eastern Europe, stubbornly, is likely to attract the attention of world powers for the years to come, regardless of the number and intensity of conflicts emerging elsewhere in the world. ¹¹

Fertile as it is, the soil of East European politics may also generate misconceptions and confusion. Venelin I. Ganev tries to dispel one such misunderstanding, namely, the notion that analyses of post-communist transformations should be reduced to a Marxist critique of neoliberal capitalism. He takes aim at scholars who insist that the traumatic experiences of the 1990s should be explained with reference to neo-liberalism’s inherent vices, and argues that the simple, very popular story about how in the former Soviet world “capitalism” was created through the voluntaristic actions of reformers committed to laissez-faire dogmas (e.g., Jeffrey Sachs, Leszek Balcerowicz) cannot be sustained both on theoretical grounds and also in the light of diverging socio-economic and political outcomes. This story implies that in 1989 Eastern Europe was a tabula rasa that could be filled by reformers determined to impose on society their devious designs—and also that the complex amalgam of interrelated phenomena known as capitalism can be introduced by decree. Ganev demonstrates that these assumptions cannot survive critical scrutiny. His main message is that the dragon-slayers of neo-liberalism (the Slavoj Žižeks of this world) have failed to articulate theoretically informed interpretations of post-communism, and that the quest for such interpretations should move beyond the stale effort to apply Marx’s critique of nineteenth-century capitalism to the transformative dynamics of the 1990s. ¹²

In several essays that follow, their authors provide accounts of how the East European experience enriches various substantive fields of political science. The fourth power of democratic polities, the free media, is the subject of Petia Kostadinova’s reflections. ¹³ Her analysis casts serious doubt on the applicability of the adjective “free” to today’s media in Eastern Europe as a whole. Rather, we observe diversity: from Estonia, ranked “free” (and ahead of any other country of the region) in major rankings (Freedom House, Reporters without Borders), to Romania, Croatia, or Bulgaria ranked as only partially free and not just lagging, but also falling further behind on almost all indicators. Kostadinova examines three aspects of media freedom—legal protections, ownership, and content—to conclude that regardless of differences noted there, the East European media present a rather sad picture of inept and biased journalism. She also notes that the media in general, and the ways they have been shaped by historical legacies, still await more vigorous research efforts.

Following Kubik’s lead on the virtues of interpretive constructivism, Eleanor Knott takes a strong stance in favor of “ethnographic sensibility,” or what she calls a “people-centered approach” in political science. ¹⁴ She articulates her arguments not only in favor of a bottom–up strategy of data gathering and analysis but also against a top–down approach characteristic of neo-positivists and institutionalists. While Knott’s concern is with “objective” categories of ethnic identity that do not fit the constantly negotiated identities grounded in everyday human interactions, the same is often true in other areas of post-communist political reality. Suffice it to mention the left–right political continuum, which, when applied to post-communist party systems, usually fails to capture the nature of cleavages that really drive party competition and voter identification. Knott’s research, conducted in Moldova and in Crimea before the Russian takeover, offers interesting insights for anyone who wants to confront conventional wisdom on the Ukrainian crisis with the reality on the ground.

The final four articles in the collection shift the focus of discussion away from particular nations of the region (and comparisons among them) and toward analyses of intra- and inter-regional relations, although the first two still do it by taking a single-nation case as the point of departure. Tsveta Petrova looks at Slovakia as a crucial as well as typical case of a country contributing to the diffusion of democratization patterns across the region. ¹⁵ This diffusion—through orchestrated export as well as more or less conscious emulation—has been a widespread phenomenon across the region, in some cases (Poland and the Baltic states) even pre-dating the 1989 breakthroughs in these countries. Slovakia, in the 1990s considered a laggard in the transition to democracy, joined the ranks of Eastern European democracies at the turn of the century, mostly through the efforts of numerous NGOs. Building on extensive interviews with their leaders and activists, the article discusses how they supported not only the development of democracy at home but also the diffusion of their own democratization model abroad. Petrova demonstrates how such efforts, which tend to draw on perceptions of similar historical legacies, contribute to the reproduction of Eastern Europe as a distinct region.

The point of departure for Magda Giurcanu’s analysis of voting patterns across the EU is the 2009 election to the European Parliament in Romania. ¹⁶ This was a new experience for Romanian citizens, taking place just two years after joining the Union. The author demonstrates that positive attitudes toward European integration strongly motivated participation in the election. Based on analyses of the 2004 and 2009 European Election Study data for all states, she sees this phenomenon as representative of attitudes prevalent among all East European EU members. A similar pattern is observed in Western Europe, yet it seems to emerge from the opposite type of public sentiment, that is, increasing levels of Euro-skepticism. In contrast to the East and West, in the South pro- or anti-EU attitudes play no role in voters’ mobilization. These patterns, however, might have been altered in the 2014 election (data on which have been collected, but are not yet available for analysis), due mostly to the effects of the financial crisis. In this observation, the author echoes analyses presented by Stephen Whitefield and Robert Rohrschneider in their contribution to the special section on parties published in EEPS v 29 n 1. ¹⁷ The legacies of communism may fade away over time, replaced by the new ones, generated during the post-communist era (see Wittenbergin this issue ¹⁸ ).

Milada Anna Vachudova argues that political change in Eastern Europe has revolutionized existing theories of democratization by revealing the potentially formidable role of external factors. Those factors come to the forefront in the three main strands of democratization theory: privileging the role of social structures (ethnicity, religion, class), the agency of elites, or the capacity of the state. While not the only external actor, the EU has been by far the most important one in shaping political change in those post-communist states eligible for membership. Vachudova examines both the power and the limits of EU leverage for candidates as well as for states that are already EU members. ¹⁹

Vachudova and all other participants in the symposium forcefully demonstrate the relevance of the East European experience for mainstream political science, international relations, and related disciplines. As Hozić ²⁰ and others argued, this experience should not be lost on the policymakers of the major world powers. Mitchell Orenstein in the essay that closes this collection ²¹ shows that events unfolding in Eastern Europe, today as much as in the past, are of paramount importance for Europe, North America, and the world. The region has once again become a field of confrontation between contending visions of the social, economic, political, and international order. What is happening in Ukraine today, and what may happen in Estonia, or Hungary, or Albania tomorrow, should be a matter of our ongoing concern.

Whither Eastern Europe? Winston Churchill’s observation that “the Balkans produce more history than they can consume” could have been easily extended to the region as a whole. We can only hope that the growing diversity within the region heralds a healthy pluralism and not produce the kinds of legacies that consign parts of its population to a surfeit of history. Time will tell whether new forms of interdependence both within the region itself and within Atlantic and European structures will provide the kind of stability that it did for postwar Western Europe, another region that had suffered from an excess of history in the first half the twentieth century.

Whither East European studies? While far from engaging in a mood of self-congratulation, the articles presented in this volume—and the workshop from which they originated—are a testimony to the important, valuable contributions made by scholars engaged in research on Eastern Europe to the discipline of political science and its subfields. The recent history of the region has inspired a range of important research questions that have inspired diverse and important research agendas. Recent events show no sign of being any less “inspirational” for ongoing scholarship.

Whither EEPS? It is incumbent on us as the producers and consumers of research on the region to demonstrate the relevance of research that originates in its specificities to the social sciences and the humanities. The dilemmas that we study are by no means unique and the particular scope conditions posed by our region provide a means to test existing theories and develop new ones that are relevant to our peers working on critical issues in the study of politics generally.

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Besides the essays collected in this volume, two additional papers presented at the workshop have already been published as articles in EEPS (v 29 n 1, February 2015) in a special section on “Political Parties in Eastern Europe” guest-edited by Kevin Deegan-Krause. They are: “Party Competition Structure in Eastern Europe: Aggregate Uniformity versus Idiosyncratic Diversity?” by Jan Rovny and “Hurricane Season: Systems of Instability in Central and East European Party Politics” by Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause. In addition to those mentioned above, Paul D’Anieri, Conor O’Dwyer, Monika Nalepa, Royce Carroll, Christoph Schnellbach, Amie Kreppel, Norman Goda, Badredine Arfi, Andrzej Tymowski, and Wendy Bracewell also made valuable contributions to the workshop. In the process of workshop conceptualization and development, the editors of this volume enjoyed the benefit of counsel from Andrzej Tymowski of ACLS, Wendy Bracewell of EEPS, Grzegorz Ekiert, and Jan Kubik. Additional support for the conference was provided by the Office of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Department of Political Science, and the Center for European Studies at the University of Florida.

We want to express our deepest gratitude to all of them.