Společný visegrádský příběh očima historika
The common Visegrád story through the eyes of the historian

Summary/Abstract: The reviewer introduces the book written by the recently deceased historian Jan Křen (1930–2020) and titled "A quarter of a century in Central Europe: The Visegrád countries in a global story of the 1992–2017 period" (Prague: Univerzita Karlova – Karolinum, 2019) as a chronological continuation of his impressive work "Two Centuries of Central Europe" (Dvě století střední Evropy. Prague: Argo, 2005). In his opinion, the work should be read not only as a historical account of Central European system transformations and consolidations after the fall of Communist regimes, but also, to some extent, as the author’s subjectively coloured ego-histoire. The author methodologically draws from institutional economy which works with a principle of path dependence, and neoliberalism as the key ideology of the Central European transformation, towards which, however, he is very critical. The work represents the first compact historical synthesis of Central European developments in the last few decades and provides an excellent overview of the formation of new democratic societies and their journey to international structures, in particular the European Union, thanks to its comparative focus on political, social, and economic developments.

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