Prefab Prevails

This chapter focuses on the prefab model, which was proposed by the Western allies in 1990. The United States and West Germany convincingly made the case for taking the West's prefabricated institutions, both for domestic order and international economic and military cooperation, and simply extending them eastward. This institutional-transfer model had the advantage of being quick, and dealing in known and successful commodities, such as the West German Basic Law, the West German currency (or DM), and the Article 5 mutual defense guarantee of NATO, to name a few. Indeed, the fact that both the European Community (EC) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were structurally capable of expansion provided useful precedents. Ultimately, the prefab model was the one model that proposed to harmonize both domestic and international institutions in Eastern Europe to preset Western standards.