Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras, eds., New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 743 pp., ISBN 0–521–57101–4

Bruno Coppieters, Alexei Zverev and Dmitri Trenin, eds., Commonwealth and Independence in Post-Soviet Eurasia (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 232 pp., ISBN 0–714–64480–3

Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: an Introduction (Oxford: Polity Press, 1997), 260 pp., ISBN 0–745–61311–x

Michael Mandelbaum, ed., Post-Communism: Four Perspectives (US Council of Foreign Relations, 1996), 208 pp., ISBN 0–876–09186–9

Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 443 pp., ISBN 0–521–57157–x

Richard Rose, William Mishler and Christian Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-Communist Societies (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998), 270 pp., ISBN 0–745–61926–6

Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder, Post-Soviet Political Order (London/New York: Routledge, 1998), 201 pp., ISBN 0–415–17068–0

Graham Smith, Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Annette Bohr and Edward Allworth, Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 304 pp., ISBN 0–521–59045–0

Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 217 pp., ISBN 0–691–04826–6

Gordon Wightman, ed., Party Formation in East-Central Europe: Post-Communist Politics in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria (Vermont: Edward Elgar, 1995), 270 pp., ISBN 1–858–898132–8

It is now about 10 years since the communist bloc ceased to exist (1989 is the year when communism was defeated in central-eastern Europe, and in 1991 its bastion –the Soviet Union – fell). What it left behind are a couple of die-hard communistsurvivor-states, an urge to ‘rethink’ or ‘re-define’ many fundamental concepts ofpolitical science, and a large swathe of land that is still to be properly categorised in registers of comparative political science. ‘Post-communism’ is the most popularterm to cover this territory. But does it refer to something real today, or does it justexpress some kind of intellectual inertia? How much do the ‘post-communistcountries’ still have in common with each other and to what extent are theydifferent from any others?