Five years have passed since 10 countries from Central & Eastern Europe joined the European Union and 20 years since the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989 - but ignorance about what is popularly still called Eastern Europe is as widespread as ever. Leon Marc gives the reader the big picture of Eastern Europe - its political, economic, social and cultural history, the nature of changes there and the issues at stake in the political and economic transition - while putting the fall of the Berlin Wall and the EU enlargement into a broader perspective of general European history.