Ten years after European Union (EU) enlargement, democracy in the East European new member states is still a topic of discussion. This paper focuses on the initial years of democratisation in these countries, and asks what economic, political, and social processes explain its variation. Cross-sectional time series analysis (1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002) shows the impact of political orientation of ruling parties to reform, electoral institutions, size of ethnic minorities, and the extent of EU integration, but not economic development. Further, we disaggregate the effect of EU integration and find that early Europe Agreements signing has a more significant effect than the pre-accession membership negotiation stage.

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This entry reviews scholarship on race, ethnicity, and nationalism in Eastern Europe. First, it examines nationalism both during and after socialism, and, in particular, its role in the dissolution of multiethnic states. Then, it proceeds to review the empirical evidence on the ethnic versus civic nationalism debate, and contrasts it to the research grounded in the alternative, constructivist and cognitive, approaches to ethnic identity. In the last part, it discusses research on race in Eastern Europe, in particular on the underprivileged group of Roma. It concludes that future research should worry less about the demarcations of civic versus ethnic nationalism. Instead, it should explore the conditions under which ethnic/national/racial identities are made salient by either those who self‐identify or those who impose labels, and specify what consequences these identification and classification processes may have for social, political, and economic inequality in Eastern Europe.

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