European Journal of Political Research 37: 517–539, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 517 What has Eastern Europe taught us about the democratisation literature (and vice versa)? PETR KOPECKÝ 1 & CAS MUDDE 2 1 Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK; 2 Department of Politics, University of Edinburgh, UK Abstract. The relationship between Eastern Europe and democratisation studies so far has been highly asymmetric. In contrast to the vast contribution, both in data and theory, of Eastern Europe to the democratisation literature, the latter has been of only modest use to the understanding of the democratisation processes in post-communist Europe. Despite the growing number of empirically grounded assessments, most notably of degrees of democratic consolidation within East-Central Europe, there is still very little agreement on what exactly is democratic transition and consolidation or on what explains the seemingly widening gap between East-Central Europe on the one hand and the Balkans and post-Soviet republics on the other hand. We believe that at least part of the answer lies in two underdeveloped topics of the democratisation literature: state and nation-building (the ‘third’ transition) and the inter- national dimension. Moreover, to uncover the answers democratisation studies would greatly profit from expanding its disciplinary and geographical constraints, i.e., by integrating research from, most notably, nationalism studies, international relations as well as democratisation studies of the ‘first wave’. Introduction The fall of the Berlin Wall has had a major impact on world politics as well as on its study. It liberated Eastern Europe from the hands of the sectarian ‘So- vietologists’ and enabled it to integrate into the wider study of comparative politics (Ekiert 1999; Von Beyme 1999). Moreover, and as a consequence, the field of comparative politics became (once again) dominated by democratisa- tion studies. This said, ten years later the integration of East-Central Europe into comparative politics seems to have been rather successful, while studies of the post-Soviet space seem to retreat to a ‘post-Sovietology’ (in part a reflection of the diverging paths of democratisation in the two sub-regions, which we discuss below). 1 The initial assumptions about the political changes taking place in post- communist Eastern Europe differed. For many, ‘post-communism’ has been a variation on a familiar theme of recent transitions in Southern Europe and Latin America. While acknowledging the simultaneity and asynchrony of