Post-Soviet and Liberal Transitions: Wherefore, to What Effect, and How?
In Pursuit of Liberalism: International Institutions in Postcommunist Europe. By Rachel A. Epstein. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 288 pp., $55.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 987-0-801-88977-6).

Economic Liberalism and Its Rivals: The Formation of International Institutions among the Post-Soviet States. By Keith A. Darden. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 366 pp., $90.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-86653-8).

Transnational Actors in Central and East European Transitions. By Mitchell Orenstein, Stephen Bloom, Nicole Lindstrom. Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press, 2008. 272 pp., $27.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-822-95994-6).

The fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union have arguably been the most important events in the contemporary international relations. They detonated momentous changes in the political, economic, and military landscapes of the formerly communist states thus setting off a natural experiment in broad transformations in the countries that endured decades of central planning and communism. Because of the unique and world-historic quality of these transformations and far-reaching implications of these reforms, they have attracted significant academic following, and have been a subject of growing scholarly concern. The early studies of liberal and post-Soviet transitions deliberated the optimal ways to transform the postcommunist states focusing on the sequence and pace of reforms as well as the country-specific initial conditions (Hardt and Kaufman 1995; Woo, Parker, and Sachs 1997). The recent scholarship expanded conceptual boundaries of transition and integrated the move toward a complex interdependence in Europe besides the democratic and market reform. It shifted accents from internal to transnational forces and began examining the precise role played by various international actors—non-governmental and international organizations, corporations, foundations, Church, just to name a few—in the transitional reforms. The books under review are a notable addition to this recent wave of literature on the transnational dimension of post-Soviet and liberal transitions.

Why do states liberalize despite the apparent contradiction of these reforms to their domestic preferences, political autonomy, and national tradition? This is the central puzzle of Rachel A. Epstein's monograph, In Pursuit of Liberalism . She underscores the role played by international institutions in mobilizing domestic support for reforms, and elucidates the conditions for the success of mobilization. Epstein contends that the ability of international institutions to cultivate support for reforms hinges on the degree of uncertainty in the policies in transition, the …