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The book consists of articles from East European Politics and Societies, a journal published in the United States that first appeared in 1987. This selection is composed of papers written by the journal's founders and early authors, among them Zygmunt Bauman, Tony Judt, Katherine Verdery, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Elemer Hankiss, Vesna Pusic, Maria Todorova. The first section Before the Change consists of texts written in the late 1980s; its authors tried to identify the cracks that would undermine or reform the existing system. In the second part of the book Alternative Futures contributors sketched the directions of the changes as they were just getting underway. The authors hoped that politics, economics, and societies were now free to reinvent themselves. The texts in the third section, Legacies of the Past, written before, during, and after the time of most drastic changes, show how the shadows cast by the histories of individual nations and the region as a whole continued to burden political strategies as well as daily lives.

Eastern Europe: Continuity and Change (1987-1995)

Contents: Zygmunt Bauman: Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change - Tony Judt: The Dilemmas of Dissidence: The Politics of Opposition in East-Central - Ferenc Fehér: On Making Central Europe - Ernest Gellner: The Dramatis Personae of History - Ivan Szelenyi: Alternative Futures for Eastern Europe: The Case of Hungary - Václav Klaus/Tomás Jezek: Social Criticism, False Liberalism, and Recent Changes in Czechoslovakia - Vesna Pusic: A Country by Any Other Name. Transition and Stability in Croatia and Yugoslavia - Elemer Hankiss: Our Recent Pasts: Recent Developments in East Central Europe in the Light of Various Social Philosophies - Katherine Verdery: Homage to a Transylvanian Peasant - Jan T. Gross: Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of Imposition of Communist Regimes in East Central Europe - Maria Todorova: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Communist Legacy in Eastern Europe - Vladimir Tismaneanu/Dan Pavel:Romania's Mystical Revolutionaries: The Generation of Angst and Adventure Revisied - István Deák: A Fatal Compromise? The Debate Over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary.