Abstract
Full democratization does not necessarily follow regime change. Hybrid or ‘grey democracies' have also emerged after 1989. Choose two countries from the former Soviet bloc, one from the countries recently admitted to the European Union and one such as Ukraine, Belarus, or Moldova and evaluate the factors that have most affected the process of transition in both cases. Seventeen years after the fall of Berlin's wall, the countries that used to be under the rule of Soviet Union are trying to achieve their democratic transitions. This transition is not only a simple democratic transition but rather a multidimensional and complicated process characterized by the term ‘triple transition' . In fact, these countries must implement changes in different levels of politics: not only do they have to build a consensus on the national identity but they also had to make important constitutional choices and to revolution their economy from a collectivized system towards market economies. Some countries, mainly in the Eastern Europe, managed to begin the transition and entered the European Union in 2004 whereas other did not really succeed in achieving the step of a substantive democracy. It can be interesting to focus on two countries that are at a different stage of the democratic transition and to analyse what shaped these various paths.
