Towards regional government in central Europe : territorial restructuring of postcommunist regimes

Abstract

Territorial systems in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia are surveyed together with factors that have determined their present shape. The most important among these are: a relatively late start in the building of the modern state, the legacy of communist regimes, and the exigencies of postcommunist transition. In the second part of the paper territorial cleavages occurring in the region are examined, in particular: the centre-periphery contrasts; the urban-rural cleavage; the West-East gradient of modernisation and economic development; and sociocultural cleavages as reflected in local self-organisation. In the third part of the paper the strategies of territorial reorganisation are discussed, as they are debated and implemented in the countries under study.