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Michael Bernhard, The Pennsylvania State University, mhb5@psu.edu

With the collapse of communist systems in Europe over fifteen years ago, and the accelerating integration of East Asian communist-led states into the global capitalist system, including the assumption of a prominent place in that system by China, does it make sense to think of the complex of problems facing these countries as function of communist rule or as legacies of a communist past? In the past the study of communist states has been its own separate cottage industry, justified by an exceptional developmental trajectory in which the state monopolized the political sphere and administered the economy. Not only were special linguistic skills and local knowledge necessary to understand the politics of these areas, but a special substantive knowledge about the operation of a radically different kind of polity, economy, and social system was also a prerequisite to making sense of political outcomes.

The changes of the last two decades have made it possible to collect new kinds of data, as well as apply theories and tools developed in the study of different kinds of polities to Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and East Asia. What have the deployment of these new tools added to the understanding of late-communist or post-communist politics? To what extent do these tools justify a break with practices of the past? How important is it to understand the impact of radically different path of these countries to modernity to understand their politics in contemporary age? If such legacies are important, how should they be integrated into the study of this set of countries today? Are the special legacies of this development pattern important enough to justify the study of this group of countries as a separate entity or should the comparative politics of communist and post-communist countries be fully integrated into a "normal" comparative politics?

Finally, do the different paths out of late-communism of East European, Eurasian, and East Asian states mean that the study of communist and post-communist politics has lost coherence? We have one group of countries that are rapidly integrating into the European Union, another which wavers between attempts to create liberal-democratic capitalist modernity and neo-authoritarian non-communist statism, and a set of states that have used authoritarian party-rule as the engine of rapid capitalist development. Should this variety of states be studied as a coherent whole or as a set of states with varying trajectories out of a similar systemic starting point? At what would point would such legacies cease to matter?