On a cold, wet night in November 2009, world leaders assembled in the German capital to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the iconic event of the 1989 revolutions: the fall of the Berlin Wall. Over the preceding two decades so much had changed. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had instituted democracies and market economies, built new states, and integrated into international structures such as the European Union and NATO. Even a former citizen of East Germany, Angela Merkel, presided over the celebrations as chancellor of a united Germany. All appeared to conform to the oft-quoted opening line from L. P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” If there is one message that emerges from all three books under review, however, it is the importance of the past. Some institutions, practices, and mental maps from the communist and precommunist periods remain not just present but significant in shaping political behavior in contemporary Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

The revolutions of 1989 swept much away. In Czechoslovakia, the Communists were removed from power in the Velvet Revolution. Moreover, the new government introduced a lustration law designed to exclude leading Communists and those who collaborated with the communist-era security services from holding positions of power and influence in the state administration. While this may suggest a deep cleaning, helping to cleanse the countries of the stain of communism, in reality the consequences resembled more surface cleaning: 1989 was not a tabula rasa. New governments, new institutional arrangements, and new policies had to be built using the raw materials available. Not everything could be swept away. Administrative bodies and legal frameworks, for example, that were established during the communist era continued to play a role, especially in lower-level and niche sectors.

Although Martin Horak's Governing the Post-communist City has the narrowest focus of the three monographs, his detailed and insightful analysis of politics in the Czech capital between 1989 and 2000 illuminates many of the motors, brakes, and mechanisms of decision making in postcommunist CEE. Although the fall of the communist regime necessitated some changes in institutional formation and accorded previously excluded political actors the chance of input into the process, by means of a detailed study of two policy areas (transport and real estate development) Horak shows that politicians in such fluid environments may “seek simple, immediately rewarding solutions to complex problems” (p. 217). He charts how Prague city councilors chose not to hammer out a comprehensive preservation strategy for historic buildings in the Czech capital, but rather instituted arrangements that increased their chances of private pecuniary gain. Indeed, endowed with strong partisan control over real estate development, the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) formed by Václav Klaus “fostered the entrenchment of the politics of profit” and became an “umbrella” under which those after a quick buck could “find protection” (p. 175).

Horak's book makes two arguments of wider import that merit attention: that decisions made in the immediate postcommunist period had long-term consequences and that the concept of critical juncture needs to be recalibrated. In terms of the former, Horak sees the poor quality of local government in Prague in the 1990s as a direct product of the decisions made by local political leaders during the first year or two after 1989, when the environment encouraged political leaders to “seek, short-term solutions to policy problems at the very moment when their influence over the longer-term outcomes was greatest” (p. 4). Drawing on the language of historical institutionalism, he stresses the “increasing returns” of early choices that became entrenched (p. 6). Although this book is based on the first postcommunist decade, the experience of the subsequent decade does not indicate a radical improvement in the quality and functioning of decision making in the city, a situation that lends some support to Horak's assertion. Optimists, however, may point to the 2010 parliamentary election and the success of a new party TOP '09, which outpolled ODS in Prague to suggest that the tide might just be turning against the party that has ruled Prague since the early 1990s.

Horak's engagement with the historical institutionalist literature leads him to criticize the notion of a critical juncture as a single, discrete moment. Based on his observation of a series of influential decisions in shaping policy in transport, building, and development in the historic center of Prague, he argues that “[a] critical juncture can thus be usefully reconceptualized as a period of flux marked by a series of nonsimultaneous critical decision points, whose cumulative resolution results in the construction of a new political order” (p. 24). While he makes a very cogent case against a single decisive moment, the stress on a series of decision points provokes a further series of questions about the length of the period of flux and whether it makes sense to use a singular term to describe several related moments. Moreover, if there are a series of junctures, can we bundle them all up together and label them as critical?

The combination of historical institutional legacies and “considerations of partisan advantage” (p. 4) are central to John A. Scherpereel's account of administrative reform in the Czech and Slovak Republics after 1989. Indeed, in a similar vein to Horak's analysis of Prague, Scherpereel's monograph highlights how “municipal actors took advantage of inherited resources to lobby central politicians for particular reforms, effectively putting old structures to new uses” (p. 18). In addition, the author sees 1989 not as a “critical juncture or moment of historical punctuation” but rather as a shift in opportunities grasped by actors many of whom “drew from wells dug before the transition began” (pp. 18–19). Many took advantage of network resources that old institutions such as the municipal national committees provided in order to shape the transitional reform agenda. To adapt Anna Gryzmala-Busse's notion of the “portable skills” that former Communists learned in the years of late communism, which proved useful in the early 1990s (Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Successor Parties in East Central Europe, 2002), we can identify here the portable administrative structures that could be adapted to the new postcommunist environment.

Scherpereel's study of the development of self-governing regions and the creation of neutral professionalized civil services highlights one of the other motive forces for change in CEE over the past two decades: the European Union. Governing the Czech Republic and Slovakia correctly points to the use of Europe as a rhetorical tool by politicians to legitimize their preferences. Nonetheless, Scherpereel's study confirms the view of other scholars, such as Wade Jacoby, that while the EU may have helped drive the pace of change, vague criteria and guidelines left much room for maneuver when it came to the content of the reforms.

Scherpereel also rightly points to the importance of an undertheorized phenomenon: “postfederalism” (a lonely furrow this reviewer has also sought to plough; see Tim Haughton and Sharon Fisher, “From the Politics of State-building to Programmatic Politics: The Post-Federal Experience and the Development of Centre-Right Party Politics in Croatia and Slovakia,” Party Politics 14 [July 2008]: 435–54). Although much attention has been devoted to postcommunism, understanding the form and functioning of institutions and the behavior of political actors in contemporary CEE requires a recognition that large parts of the region were constituent components of federal states during communist (and in some cases precommunist) times.

Whereas Horak and Schepereel are largely concerned with the legacies of the communist period, Nadya Nedelsky's book focuses on deeply rooted ideas of nationhood and their manifestation in the postcommunist period. Central to her argument is the desire to demonstrate that Czech and Slovak postcommunist understandings of nationhood should be viewed not as “a configuration of highly malleable, and hence situational, political norms, driven to seemingly opposite corners by post-revolutionary political and economic conditions,” but rather as “orientations with strong political-cultural roots” (p 14).

Defining the Sovereign Community charts in detail different understandings of Czech and Slovak nationhood from the nineteenth century to the present. Nedelsky displays an impressive and sophisticated knowledge of Czech and Slovak history and the ideas of inter alia Ján Kollár, František Palacký, Karel Havlíček Borovský, L'udovít Štúr, Andrej Hlinka and Tomáš Masaryk.

Nedelsky is to be applauded for encouraging political scientists to be historical. We are indeed guilty sometimes of overemphasizing the importance of situational factors; nationalism's substance and appeal do tend to have deep roots. She is also right to argue that the postcommunist situational factors “did not produce contending understandings” of nationhood (emphasis in the original; p. 26). Nonetheless, there is an important distinction between the roots of understandings of nationhood and their use by contemporary politicians. As both Scherpereel and Horak remind us, politicians in fluid, complicated environments tend to use the ingredients on the shelf. When it comes to the nation, it would be odd for them not to invoke history, cloaking themselves in narratives of the past, especially when they want to emphasize strong historical roots. As Nedelsky points out, the wording of the 1992 Constitution of the Slovak Republic appears to accord the Slovak ethnic nation special political status. The two key factors that shaped the making of that constitution, however, were not the ideas of nineteenth-century thinkers but the political interests of the politicians who drew it up, who were responding to the deep underlying sense of vulnerability in Slovakia tied to what nationally inclined Slovak politicians like to refer to as the thousand years of Hungarian oppression. The base ingredients of ethnic conceptions of nationhood lie in geography and demography—spiced up with history—which simmer on the stove until a politician seeks to serve up the potent brew.

Nedelsky draws on “civic” and “ethnic” conceptions of nationhood and seeks to show how postcommunist civic Czech and ethnic Slovak understandings of nationhood are rooted in political culture and history. Nonetheless, she is aware of some of the weaknesses of the distinction. Through her excellent discussion of discrimination meted out to Roma, she argues that the Czech case “supports the argument made by critics of the traditional civic/ethnic dichotomy that ethno-cultural identity remains politically relevant in civic nations as well as ethnic nations, and may undermine civic equality under either regime type” (p. 27). Moreover, as the experience of interwar Czechoslovakia showed, Czechs were not immune from “ethnic” conceptions of the state when it came to considering the position of ethnic Germans. Given Nedelsky's criticisms, maybe Stefan Auer's notion of illiberal nationalism may have more traction than the civic/ethnic divide (Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe, 2004).

The three monographs expertly describe their particular cases and seek to draw out some of the broader lessons for both the study of the region and the wider political science audience. Nevertheless, all would benefit from a few more comparative reflections. In the case of Nedelsky's book, for instance, do modern-day views of nationhood in other countries that have experienced changes also follow similar patterns? Illuminating comparisons and contrasts could be drawn, for example, with Ukraine, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the successor states of the former Yugoslavia.

All three books under review contain detailed accounts of the intricacies of state administration, the dealings of specific municipal committees, and the views of nineteenth-century Czech intellectuals. Such details may not excite a wide readership beyond area specialists. But the books also shed light on the role played by the communist past, conceptions of the nation, and the maneuverings of political actors in the Czech and Slovak Republics. Each thus makes an important contribution to the study of politics in contemporary East-Central Europe, and merits the attention of scholars of comparative politics.