Why would politicians so recently freed from Soviet constraints and with memories of the earlier imposition of foreign practices under the Habsburg Empire now be willing to order from Western Europe's menu of institutions and rules? In part, as the epigraph indicates, they were advised to do so. But this answer is obviously incomplete, and a fuller answer depends upon additional factors that include communism's collapse and the subsequent opportunity to embrace Western practices, the political benefits that accrued to CEE politicians through modernizing rapidly, and these elites' desires to demonstrate to outsiders and to voters that they embrace needed reforms. That is, once external constraints were lifted by the Soviet Union, a new set of incentives for institutional change generally overpowered the remaining constraints of historical structures and conservative actors. More prosaically, the motors of change became stronger than the brakes of constraint.

CEE elites acted rationally in the face of two kinds of broadly material incentives: from their voters and from the IOs themselves. But their rationality was embedded — as the chapter's title indicates — in two ways.