Anna Seleny, Tufts University, Massachusetts

Anna Seleny is Visiting Associate Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. Previously she was Assistant Professor at Princeton University; in Princeton she also spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Studies. She has published in World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Comparative Politics, Law and Policy, East European Politics and Societies, and in edited volumes. Seleny has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the German Marshall Fund, the MacArthur Foundation, the International Research and Exchange Commission and Fulbright-Hayes.

The profound transformations that preceded the downfall of Communism originated in Poland and Hungary, but played out in strikingly different ways. Hungary led through economic reform, Poland through open political struggle. Analysis of these transformational variants yields important insights into systemic change, marketization, and democratization. This book shows how these changes were possible in authoritarian regimes as, over time, state and society became mutually vulnerable, neither fully able to dictate the terms of engagement. For Poland this meant principled confrontation; for Hungary, innovative accommodation. This book argues that different conceptual frameworks and strategies of persuasion account for these divergences in virtually identical institutional settings. Seleny traces the different political-institutional residues which, in both Hungary and Poland, now function as constraining or enabling legacies. In particular, she demonstrates that state socialist legacies account for salient differences between these two new capitalist democracies, and now condition their prospects in the European Union.