This edited volume explores the nature of authoritarian policing, its transformation and resilience, and its rule of law implications. The discussion of the evolution of policing takes place in the context of the overall development of the police, their professionalization, institutional autonomy and neutrality, legality, and their credibility within the communities they manage and serve. What makes policing “democratic” is a contested concept and the definition varies depending on the level of abstraction and the particular focus of the inquiry. While regime type, which is itself a contested concept, the close nexus between the coercive power of the police and the state, it is never dispositive. Thus, the dichotomous categorization of authoritarian policing (AP) and democratic policing (DP), while useful as a starting point for comparative analysis, misses a large amount of nuance and often overlooks the plurality of either system, neglecting the fact that a police system can be authoritarian or democratic in multiple ways and in different aspects of policing. This volume rejects this simple binary view. It aims to untie and unpack the nexus between the police and the political system and to explore the plurality of both AP and DP.

Using recent advances in historical national accounts and scholarship of the region, this chapter depicts the economic development of eastern Europe from the times of the Habsburg monarchy and the Russian Empire before World War I through the turbulent interwar years, with the onset of the communist regime and socialist experiment in Russia, the spread of the centrally planned economic system and communist rule in the post-World War II decades, its collapse in the late 1980s and then a decade of transition to market economies. The chapter assesses the region’s economic performance in each of these periods. Even though the path of eastern Europe since the late nineteenth century has been one marked by a series of significant shocks, there were also significant continuities, so that the socialist ‘experiment’ did not result in the significant break with the past that its architects had envisaged.