title: Introduction: From democracy decline to democracy renewal
abstract: The Introduction gives a short summary of the book and considers East-Central Europe, as a historical and actual region, and its common basic features. In the 1990s the democratization cum Europeanization scenario appeared as an easy-dream narrative, but by the end of the 2010s the democratic order had collapsed in ECE. My book Emerging Democracies in East Central Europe and the Balkans (Edward Elgar Publishing, 1998) was conceived in an optimistic mood, and after two decades there is a need to 