Transitions to democracy occurred in Southern Europe – in Greece, Portugal, and Spain – in the mid 1970s. They were launched in the Southern Cone of Latin America, except for Chile – in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay – in the early 1980s. And they were inaugurated in Eastern Europe during the “Autumn of the People” of 1989. Can we draw on the earlier experiences to understand the later ones? Are there lessons to be learned from history?

In spite of the waves of democratization in Southern Europe and Latin America, the fall of communism took everyone by surprise. No one had expected that the communist system, styled by some as totalitarian precisely because it was supposed to be immutable, would collapse suddenly and peacefully. What made the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe possible? What made it happen so quickly and so smoothly?

Since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe is the prologue to the analyses that follow, let me reconstruct the story as I see it. Yet first we need a warning against facile analyses. The “Autumn of the People” was a dismal failure of political science. Any retrospective explanation of the fall of communism must not only account for the historical developments but also identify the theoretical assumptions that prevented us from anticipating these developments. For if we are wise now, why were we not equally sage before?