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The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) of the New School for Social Research (NSSR) was officially established in the spring of 1997 to accommodate the expanding activities of NSSR'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.