Europe since 1989

We are often told that one of the problems of the social sciences is that we can't do experiments. But the imposition of communism/state socialism in much of Europe after WW2 was a kind of experiment, and post-communist transition/transformation after 1989 is another, with different parts of the bloc developing in different ways. I'll trace some of the underlying constraints and contingencies which may explain the various outcomes across Europe up to the present - including the increasingly important role of the EU.