Out of the Red: Building Capitalism and Democracy in Postcommunist Europe. By Mitchell A. Orenstein. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 184p. $54.50 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Extract

Nowadays, it is easy to forget just how pessimistic observers were in 1990 about the possibility of simultaneously introducing capitalism and competitive politics to the ex-socialist states of Eastern Europe. Often, debates seemed to hinge simply on which would subvert which, that is, whether the economic shocks of reform would destabilize democratic governments or whether populist appeals to the losers of economic adjustment would derail economic reform. That popularly elected government and systemic economic change could mutually reinforce each other seemed, at the time, to describe a fool's paradise. Yet now that the dust has begun to settle, this appears to have been exactly what happened.