Historicizing the Transition

<p>The purpose of this special issue is to historicize the period of the “transition” in Eurasia across the 1989/1991 divide. Just as post-socialist states and international development organizations have been forced to deal with the physical legacies of socialism, their approaches to economic development, welfare provision, and governance have been shaped by the socialist past. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, former Soviet republics and East European socialist states invited international institutions and foreign donors to help them achieve prosperity and transition to a market economy. At the time, most development institutions and national governments subscribed to the so-called “Washington Consensus” which emphasized financial discipline, minimum state regulation, and open borders. The region was, and is, heterogenous: institutions like the World Bank and USAID brought a legacy of working on the “developing world” to a region whose status seemed ambiguous - developed in terms of infrastructure and levels of education, but, in the case of Central Asia and parts of the Caucasus, predominantly rural with a large informal sector and few institutions to guide a market. </p>