Central and Eastern Europe Buttressed by the European Union
Résumé
The changes currently underway in Eastern European territories are the product of both the profound transformations made by the imposition of the Soviet model between 1945 and 1989 and the new economic dynamics set in motion since 1989. If the first decade of post-communism was marked by the collapse of the traditional industrial and agricultural milieus, the arrival of foreign direct investment (FDI) in certain sectors and the blossoming of pri- vate initiative, the second decade is characterized by the emergence of poles of development hinging on European aid, particularly structural funds. The radical reconfiguration of the production environments inherited from the former regime led to a major reorientation of trade towards the West in the 1990s. The territorial disparities once contained by the communist egalitarian policy widened after 1990 as a result of the polarization of development. The notions of metropolization, cluster and cross-border cooperation that structure economic development in the West have now taken hold in the East as the basic categories for development, sustaining growth rates considerably greater than the EU-of-15 average.