Marking the thirtieth anniversary of the revolutions of 1989, this original and wide-ranging study places the transformation of Eastern Europe in a global context, providing new perspectives on the relationship between globalisation and the collapse of communism in the late twentieth century, and the rise of populism in the twenty-first.

My name is James Mark. I am the author of the "Divine Mercy Chaplet - a Deep Meditations." I am 75 years old. My wife and I have 2 children and 5 grandchildren (one by adoption and one through marriage). I now live in a small rural town about 20 miles south of Joliet, Illinois. I attended high school and first year college in the Chicago Diocese's minor seminary. I left the seminary and graduated from College in Rural Southern Illinois. After graduation I spent 2 years in the Peace Corps in Malaysia on the Island of Borneo. My Peace Corps training was in Hawaii for three months. There I learned the Malay language, customs and about tuberculosis, a very common and deadly disease in Malaysia at that time. When I finally arrived in Malaysia I worked in hospitals and clinics. I worked in the lab identifying samples that may contain the tuberculosis germ or not. Later I went out into the field and helped vaccinate children against the disease. The cure for tuberculosis at that time required taking 3 medications for two years. Many times, people would not come to the clinic to get their monthly supply of meds, so I would drive on my motorcycle to the kampongs to make sure they had their meds. One time at the local school the science teacher had to leave so I filled in for about a month as well as doing my duties in the clinic when I returned to America, I attended Illinois State University where I earned a master's degree in Special Education. It was also where I met my wife, Donna. I taught in Sp.Ed. classrooms for 27 years before retiring. After retiring from teaching I started a small lawn mowing business and helped out at my local parish, Immaculate Conception. There I am a teacher of religious education, lector, Eucharistic Minister, and help with general maintenance of the parish from time to time.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 0.1 Going global; 0.2 The long transition and the making of transitional elites in global perspective; 0.3 A global history of the other '1989s'; 0.4 The end of the '1989' era?; 1. Globalisation; 1.1 From socialist internationalism to capitalist globalisation; 1.2 Debt and ideological re-orientation; 1.3 The choice of 'neoliberal' globalisation; 1.4 Authoritarian transformations?; 1.5 Transformation from within; 1.6 Conclusion; 2. Democratisation; 2.1 Reforming elites; 2.2 Opposition from the local to the global and back; 2.3 Alternatives to '1989': authoritarianism and violence; 2.4 Disciplining transition and democratic peace; 3. Europeanisation; 3.1 The early Cold War: a divided Europe; 3.2 Helsinki - re-bordering Europe?; 3.3 An anti-colonial Europe: critiquing Helsinki; 3.4 A prehistory of Fortress Europe: civilisational bordering in late socialism; 3.5 Eastern Europe, a buffer against Islam?; 3.6 After 1989: 'Fortress Europe'?; 3.7 Conclusion; 4. Self-determination; 4.1 The rise of anti-colonial self-determination; 4.2 The Soviet withdrawal; 4.3 Peace or violence; 4.4 Reverberations of Eastern European self-determination; 4.5 Conclusion; 5. Reverberations; 5.1 1989 as a new global script; 5.2 Instrumentalising 1989: the West and new forms of political conditionality; 5.3 'Taming' the left; 5.4 Interventionism and the '1989' myth; 5.5 Eastern Europeans and the export of the revolutionary idea; 5.6 From Cuba to China: rejecting '1989'; 5.7 Conclusion; 6. A world without '1989'; 6.1 Towards the West? Ambiguous convergence; 6.2 Who is the true Europe? The turn to divergence; 6.3 Beyond the EU: post-socialist global trajectories; 6.4 Conclusion.