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East
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The
TRANSREGIONAL CENTER FOR DEMOCRATIC STUDIES (TCDS) of the Graduate Faculty,
New School University, was officially established in the spring of 1997
to accommodate the expanding activities of the Graduate Faculty's East
and Central Europe Program (ECEP).
Launched in the spring of 1990, ECEP's original goal was to assist regional
efforts to revitalize scholarly life in the social sciences. In
the course of its first seven years, through a variety of joint projects
in which scholars from the region collaborated with their American counterparts,
ECEP became a vital, multifaceted forum for on-going discussion, study,
and research on the critical issues of democracy and democratization.
And along with our colleagues from the region, we became increasingly
convinced that many of the challenges we were addressing in the democratizing
societies of post-Communist Europe are not fundamentally different from
those still faced by the older democracies.
We
also realized that the end of communism, the Cold War, and apartheid,
as well as the changes taking place in Latin America, have not only
made possible an unprecedented and massive experiment in the building
of a democratic order, but have opened up an extraordinary intellectual
opportunity to grasp and to compare what had previously been neither
graspable nor comparable. For the processes of democratic institutional
design at the local, national, and regional level that are now occurring
in so many different geographic locations throughout the world give
rise to issues which, though colored by the seemingly local concerns
of each native realm, are no longer so hard to communicate to outsiders
as they once were.
And
so this is one of the objectives of TCDS: to illuminate the relationships
among regional processes of democratization by providing channels of
communication between the internal discussions and practices that are
taking place within different countries or within the broader regions.
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