Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of boxes
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The economic factors in the collapse of state socialism and the new international environment, 1973–1989
- 2 Radical transformation and policy mistakes: dramatic economic decline in the early 1990s
- 3 Toward better times: the European Union and its policy of eastward enlargement
- 4 Recuperation and growth: the role of foreign direct investment
- 5 Economic restructuring: transforming main sectors, economic recovery, growth, and weaknesses
- 6 Transformation and social shock
- 7 Lasting changes in the structure of income, employment, welfare institutions, education, and settlement
- 8 Epilogue: the future of catching up in the European “melting pot”
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Toward better times: the European Union and its policy of eastward enlargement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of boxes
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The economic factors in the collapse of state socialism and the new international environment, 1973–1989
- 2 Radical transformation and policy mistakes: dramatic economic decline in the early 1990s
- 3 Toward better times: the European Union and its policy of eastward enlargement
- 4 Recuperation and growth: the role of foreign direct investment
- 5 Economic restructuring: transforming main sectors, economic recovery, growth, and weaknesses
- 6 Transformation and social shock
- 7 Lasting changes in the structure of income, employment, welfare institutions, education, and settlement
- 8 Epilogue: the future of catching up in the European “melting pot”
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
By the mid-1990s, Central and East European transformation had gradually consolidated. Institution-building had made progress, macroeconomic stabilization was succeeding, democracy and a market economy were taking root. Most of the countries had achieved economic growth and had begun recovering from the sharp decline of the first years of transformation. Progress, however, was uneven: the Central European countries advanced steadily while the Balkans remained painfully behind. At the end of the twentieth century, Ilya Prizel of Johns Hopkins University noted:
Any traveler who…cross[ed] the border between Central Europe and Eastern Europe [the successor states of the Soviet Union and the Balkans] cannot help but be struck by the enormous and ever growing contrast between these two groups of erstwhile communist states…[The collapse of communism] in Byzantine Europe did not engender a drive toward social modernization but rather pushed these societies back to the nationalist rhetoric of earlier days.
(Prizel, 1999: 1, 9)The contrast between these two regions was indeed enormous, and the pace of change erratic. Major turmoil gripped most of former Yugoslavia. In 1991, the multinational republic dissolved and a bloody civil war lasted until 1995, damaging several parts of the country, especially Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of eastern Croatia. The Kosovo crisis came to a head at the end of the 1990s. Serbia launched a destructive war, and the NATO response devastated Serbia. After Kosovo, the war escalated to Macedonia as well. International pressure and peacekeeping forces were able to stabilize the situation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From the Soviet Bloc to the European UnionThe Economic and Social Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe since 1973, pp. 79 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009