Post-Communism is over, at least outside the countries that comprised the former Soviet Union. That is the somewhat startling premise of Padraic Kenney's new history of Eastern Europe from 1989–2004. In this slim volume, Kenney offers a synthetic account of how Communist dictatorships were transformed into the free-market democracies of the “New Europe.” The book is organized thematically, with chapters on the economy, nationalism, dealing with the Communist past, political developments, and international relations. Rather than attempting to address individually each of the fifteen countries the book covers, Kenney fuses them all into a single narrative, using illustrative examples from whichever country seems most apropos to the topic at hand. This approach yields a book that is both amazingly comprehensive and strikingly readable. Sophisticated and accessible, this analysis of Eastern Europe's post-Communist “transition” will be of considerable interest to specialist and nonspecialist alike.

Although some might quibble with the idea that post-Communism now forms a discrete and finished era, it is this assumption that allows Kenney to cut through the morass of the voluminous previous literature on post-Communism and deal definitively with its once-fervent debates. In the chapter on Eastern Europe's economic transformation, for example, Kenney bypasses old discussions about the benefits of shock therapy versus gradualism. Seeing the subject from the vantage point of a finished process, he instead argues that there was no one right path toward the free market. The key factors, Kenney declares, had nothing to do with economic policy per se. The states of the Northern tier succeeded in building strong economies because of their “record of civic activism” and “strong urban infrastructure” from before 1989 (26).

Kenney chooses to place his chapter on democratization in the region toward the end of the book, rather than at the beginning, arguing that this somewhat bumpy process can be more easily understood only after the reader has a familiarity with the economic and social changes covered in the earlier chapters. The story in this chapter, as in the book as a whole, is one of hope. The democratic governments of Eastern Europe, led for much of the post-Communist era by reformed Communists, may not have been what anyone expected in 1989, but they do largely function. Even those countries that slipped into what Kenney calls “soft dictatorships” in the 1990s (Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, and Serbia-Montenegro) have turned the corner. In this case, the recent capture of Radovan Karadžić only adds to Kenney's argument that this piece of the post-Communist transition is definitely over.

The last chapter, which examines Eastern Europe's move into NATO and the EU, is the one that perhaps shows the potential pitfalls, but also the possibilities, of writing such contemporary history. Kenney argues that East Europeans looked to the EU as the means to complete the revolutions of 1989 (153). But at the same time, their Communist past led them to break with their European compatriots in their support of the Iraq war and U.S. proposals for a potential missile shield in Eastern Europe. They wound up not just joining the EU, Kenney says, but also changing it. Since Kenney wrote the book, the EU has been confronted with a newly belligerent Russia looking to take back its place on the world stage; and the Eastern European relationship with the United States has been further soured by the course of the Iraq war and revelations about activities like rendition. It will be interesting to see whether the “New Europe” moniker continues to be apt, or what will take its place.

In any synthesis of this nature, an author must make choices about what to include and what to leave out. In Kenney's case, this means the book focuses more on high politics and state-level policies than on the experiences of individuals who experience those policies. In particular, there is very little on women's issues, an area in which some would argue there has certainly not been enough transition. But this does not take away from the book's truly significant achievement. Future scholars and students looking for a short but incisive history of Eastern Europe during the era of transition will need to look no farther. Although the book may be a bit too complicated for some undergraduates, it will certainly have a place in many courses on Eastern Europe as a resource for both students and instructors.