This book provides an authoritative assessment of the transitions' or transformations' currently under way in Central and Eastern Europe. In order to explore this abundant set of diverse and complex processes, it has adopted a particular perspective, which consists of examining the historical specificity of these processes - particularly the simultaneity of political and economic transitions - and, at the same time, how the social sciences have approached and interpreted them and how, in return, they have undergone the impact of these processes. The book offers, on the one hand a number of new substantial insights into these transformations, in particular on the questions of what democratic consolidations' actually consist of, as well as the political economy, in a strict sense, of these transitions, focusing on the precise characterization of the market economies which have emerged from these processes. On the other hand, it also constitutes an in-depth critical appraisal, unequalled so far, of the methodological principles, models of explanation, and fallacies, of the main approaches or paradigms competing within this research field, especially the strategic' approach of the classical transitology, and the path dependence approach, with its more avant-garde flavor. Thus, the analyses and discussions presented in this collection of essays exceed widely the empirical fields of East European transformations, and of transitology on the whole; as a result this innovating book should usefully contribute to destabilizing routine ways of thinking of social scientists and students far beyond the communities of specialists in these questions. Audience: This book will be of interest toacademics, researchers, and students in the field of political science, sociology, economics, history, political geography, international affairs, and European and Eastern European studies. In addition specialists, professionals and civil servants of international organizations and public administrators interested in aspects of the economic development, economic aid, and enlargement of the European Union may find this volume invaluable.

here ofexchange, and borrowing in debates between these disciplines, all the more so, as we shall see a little further on, as the analysis of the Central and East European transformations has also contributed to introduce into political science and sociology theoretical systematizations first formulated in economics. In addition to this opening up to the objects and theories of economics, the pseudo-"dilemma" ofsimultaneity produced, by a kind of feedback, another series of effects on transitology and the related research domains. Contrary to most expectations and predictions in the wake ofthe 1989 upheavals - affirmations that the "dilemmas," "problems" or "challenges" of the transitions in Central and Eastern Europe ought to have been dealt with and resolved one after the other in sequence, in the manner of the more or less idealized trajectories of Great Britain or Spain (trajectories significantly enough promoted, far beyond the circles of scholars, as a "model" of transition), and above all, contrary to the assumption that superposing a radical economic transformation upon a transition to democracy would make the whole edifice thoroughly unworkable, unstable or dangerous - it must be stated clearly out that the two processes, in their "simultaneity," are not necessarily incompatible. This is one of the main findings stressed upon in several chapters of this book.