Here are some of the people who contributed to whatever kind of “success” this book ends up having out there in the real world: Bill Kaul, Joanna Sheldon, Bob Ashley, Fred Will, Anthony Pym, Daniel Simeoni, Marcella Alohalani Boido, Michael Cronin, Sean Golden, the participants in the translation colloquium at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona where I presented some of these ideas in March 1997, Don Robinson, Don Kartiganer, Dena Shunra, Jussara Simões, Chris DeSantis, Marilyn Gaddis Rose and the four other unnamed readers who read the manuscript for SUNY Press (Marilyn twice) and made useful comments. James Peltz at SUNY Press continued to believe in the project over the long haul, and for that I am grateful. Bill Kaul says he thinks Shakespeare’s spirit probably helped me some too. But then he’s been wrong before.

This book charts the demise of east European communism and analyses the failure of the communist experiment, the revolutionary events of 1989 and the post-communist aftermath as the legacy of both these processes. The author explains communism's initial ability to survive crises but then its cumulative decline in the face of dissidence, economic weakness and reform movements. By analyzing these issues in the context of the regions drive since the nineteenth-century to catch up with western Europe, this book concludes that the events of 1989 can cast light more widely still, on the fortunes of the three great ideas that the continent as a whole derived from revolutionary France: liberalism, socialism and nationalism.