Published a decade after the collapse of communist rule across Central and Eastern Europe, Between Past and Future asks what, exactly, happened in 1989—and what kind of political world emerged from it.

Its contributors resist the clean triumphal story in which totalitarianism simply vanished and liberal democracy arrived to occupy the empty space. Instead, they examine a region caught between discredited systems and uncertain replacements, where freedom arrived alongside privatisation, nationalism, social fracture and new forms of political exclusion. 

The essays move across Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia, addressing democratic transition, public intellectuals, ethnicity, religion, economic reform, European integration and the uneven social costs of postcommunism. Contributors include Ágnes Heller, Jacques Rupnik, Adam Michnik and Timothy Garton Ash, among others. The collection is especially useful because it captures the argument while the supposed “end of history” was already beginning to crack: the future remained open, but not necessarily benign.

Central European University Press, 2000 paperback first edition. Minor shelf wear; clean and firmly bound.