The Legal, Economic and Administrative Adaptations of Central European Countries to the European Community

The papers in this book are the outcome of a scholarly debate but presented in a way intended to inform the busy policy-maker. They are the fruit of a second East-West conference held in Brussels in September 1992. At the joint invitation of the European Commission and the European Community Studies Association (ECSA-Europe), more than fifty scholars from western and east-central Europe came together to discuss the implications of the economic and social change which challenges the intellectual and economic resources of the Central European countries. Three inter-related themes recur in all the papers – the first is the intense desire for a break with the past felt in all East-Central European countries, the second is that rupture with the past is unprecedented in scale and in quality in the second half of the twentieth century; the third is that west European arrangements cannot be simply grafted on to these societies in transition. The East-Central European countries seek closer association and eventual mebership of the European Community in order to find a way to economic well-being and to preserve their new-found political liberty. Their adaptation to the EC poses political, administrative, legal, institutional and technical problems of bewildering profusion. The process of transformation is not straightforwardly a matter of learning from the west; western scholars and experts have to learn about eastern experience and situations in order to contribute to discussions about policy for the ast: their eastern counterparts must reflect critically on western experience in order to derive anything of benefit to them. Learning is necessarily a two way process. Escaping the legacy of forty years experience of communism requires the re-estabilshment of a tissue of social and economic relations which are independent of state and political control.