The Post-War Transformation of Western Europe

The European integration process was initiated and developed in Western Europe. It was extended to Central and Eastern Europe only after the key features of the European Union (EU) as they are today had been created and become established. Until the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989–90, countries such as Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, and Poland were either part of the Soviet Union or were located within the Soviet bloc. As such, they were quite outside the processes that, until the early 1990s, were focused exclusively on drawing Western European states increasingly close to one another in an array of cooperative and integrative relationships.