This book, one of two volumes, is an anthology that analyses, through selected examples, the role played in the development of private law by the pursuit of goals serving modernisation or national ideologies in various countries, cultural spheres, and periods.

More than 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, European integration remains a work in progress, especially in those Eastern European nations most dramatically reshaped by democratization and economic liberalization. This volume assembles detailed, empirically grounded studies of eleven states—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and the former East Germany—that went on to join the European Union. Each chapter analyzes the political, economic, and social transformations that have taken place in these nations, using a comparative approach to identify structural similarities and assess outcomes relative to one another as well as the rest of the EU.

Explores European civilisation as a concept of twentieth-century political practice and the project of a transnational network of European elites. This title is available as Open Access.