Exaggerated progress in Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall?

December 2014
EUROPP
By: Bojan Bugaric, CES Visiting Scholar 2014-2015

This year marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the division of Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The anniversary generated a wave of studies and articles examining the results Central and Eastern European countries achieved during this ‘short’ period of transition from communism to democracy. Some of them, such as Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman’s recent analysis, portray the transition as hugely successful, declaring that Central and Eastern Europe are, in addition to having close ties to the West, considered to be­­­ “normal” or even “better than normal”.