Post-Communist States of Eastern Europe and Problems with Improving their Environmental Policy: The Role of the Introduction of European Union Standards

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe, facilitated by its collapse in the Soviet Union, caused fundamental societal changes that led from a rigidly directed economy to a modern approach to capitalism and a market economy. The process of transition from communism to capitalism is, in Czech literature, more precisely referred to as the “transformation.” However, it also deeply affected the sphere of environmental policy inherited from the preceding system. Identifying and characterizing these changes in connection and contradiction with the preparation for the enlargement of the European Union with Eastern European countries, which had just occurred in the year the reviewed book was released, is the main focus of the work. From the perspective of geographical delimitation of the studied region, the book’s subtitle proves to be rather imprecise. In fact, the book does not deal with all the countries of Eastern Europe (while “eastern” is understood here as a political term), but with only some of them, namely with two Central and East European states: the Czech Republic, (it has also an official geographical–i.e., short name, Czechia, which I highly recommend to use) and Hungary (politically known as the Republic of Hungary). The Central Eastern Europe (hereafter “CEE”) region, however, furthermore consists of Poland, Slovenia, and Austria. The book then deals with one country from each of the following regions: Southeast Europe: Romania; Northeastern Europe: Estonia, and, finally, post-Soviet Russia. The regionalization of Eastern Europe, I suggest, is not a merely formal geographical delineation. In (European) geography, the entire area of Central Europe as a rule also includes Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Each of the East European sub-regions mentioned here distinguishes itself with particular historical, economic, and cultural development, with specific socio-economic and physical-geographical characteristics as well as different geopolitical and geo-economic positions. All of these positions have been changing over time and space, constituting an enormously important factor in the regional development. The forty-year-long activity of the Soviet mode of communism, however, erased certain differences between the countries, or, to be more precise, left behind traces that are common to all states of the former Soviet block. With regard to studying the given topic in the context of the development of the European Union (EU), the book would be more methodically unified if it focused on those of CEE countries that joined the EU in 2004, i.e., Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia. For the purpose of comparison it would be valuable to add Estonia, and as a model of a non-EU country, Russia. The key country of Central East Europe, Poland, is not covered in the book as it has already been sufficiently addressed (p. 30). However, it would be worthwhile to add a brief chapter containing an overview of crucial knowledge and compare Poland especially with Czechia, a country whose industry was, in terms of energy production, based on coal-generated electricity and heavy