"Looking at Eastern Europe on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall - said Emanuele Ottolenghi, a lecturer on the Middle East at Oxford - we could have predicted which countries would have an easy transition to democracy and which ones not. Countries like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, which had a history of liberal institutions and free markets that had been suppressed by communism, quickly flourished. Others farther east, which did not have such institutions in their past and were starting from scratch - Bulgaria, Romania and the former Soviet republics - have struggled since the fall of the wall".
Thomas Friedman, New Signs on the Arab Street, The New York Times (via Camillo)
