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Andrew Janos

Emeritus and
Professor of the Graduate School
of Political Science

Professor Janos' teaching and research fields are comparative and East European politics. His most recent writings have been on the politics of agriculture in modern Europe, East and West. He is currently working on "Rebellions Against World Order: Communism, Fascism and Radical Political Islam."

East Central Europe in the Modern World

Combining engaging narrative with analytic power, this book presents the past and present of East Central Europe in the larger context of the political and economic history of the Continent.

The central theme of the book is best summarized by the famiiliar French proverb that the more things change the more they are the same. For while the historical experience of East Central Europe in the modern world may be described as one of endemic political change - from Western liberalism to corrupted parliamentarism, from fascism to state socialism imposed by the Soviet Union, and now to a fledgling new liberalism under Western auspices - all these political systems faced the same stubborn facts of life: the region's economic backwardness vis-a-vis the West, the debilities of small nationhood, and the cultural divide between the lands of eastern and western Christianity.

In dealing with this volatile mix of continuity and change, this book provides a new interpretation of the politics of the region in the modern period. At the same time, it also contributees to the ongoing dialogue among disciplines by attempting to strike a better balance between structural and institutional approaches to politics, and above all, between intra- and extra- societal forces that shape power and politics in national states.

For the purposes of this book, East Central Europe is defined as the territory of the historical precursors, and contemporary successors, of the eight lesser member states of the former Soviet Bloc.