This paper deals with the new contradictions facing the social-democratic parties in ECE due to the ‘Dual Challenge’. The EU candidate countries have to perform a structural accommodation at the same time as the globalization and Europeanization when they have entered the period of early consolidation with its enhanced tensions due to the polarizing party system. Overcoming the economic deficit through drastic economic crisis management, they have created in fact a huge social deficit by the radical reduction of the public sector services in education and health care. While the West European social-democratic parties have experimented with various versions of the ‘Third Way’, their ECE counterparts have had to cope with the contradiction between the winners and the losers that has appeared very markedly in the case of HSP.

This paper discusses the Central and East European democratic transitions as parts of the global democratization process, including their both external and domestic aspects. The analysis covers six East Central European (ECE) and six Balkan states. It provides a systematic overview of these twelve states with a classification of their external and internal developments. The paper classifies these states according to the three stages of systemic change and according to their EU (association and accession) and NATO (PfP and membership) relationships. In the New World Order, the sovereignty-related conflicts appear in this systematic overview through the analysis of the bilateral and multilateral relations between and among these states as restructuring follows the requirements of the EU and NATO. These multinational organizations actually rearrange both regional structures and neighbourhood relationships. The ECE and Balkan states, based on the parallel criteria of external and internal developments, form four groupings: (1) new entrants—the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia; (2) late-comers to democratization—Slovakia, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria; (3) “semi-protectorates” of great powers and international organizations (Bosnia and Macedonia); (4) unsettled countries or conflict-seeking states—Serbia and Albania.

Parliaments have been the “central site” and parties the chief actors of the East Central European democratic transitions. The parliamentarization of political life and of its actors has taken the form of “overparliamentarization,” since the East Central European parliaments have had an overwhelmingly dominant role in politics. The parliamentarization has been both an institutional and an “educational” process for the new political elite. The institutional and cultural “deficit” of the newly emerging democratic parliaments has caused a contradiction between the opportunities and the capacities of the new parliaments, although they have made serious efforts to overcome this deficit.