Balkan Ghosts author Robert D. Kaplan has described Romania, with some 23 million inhabitants, as "the fulcrum state of Europe." Romanians practice Eastern Orthodox Christianity, derive their linguistic roots from the West and have utilized both the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets in the past two centuries.
The end of the horrendous Ceaucescu dictatorship on Christmas Eve 1989 presented the outside world with painful images of sorrow and anguish: orphans with HIV tethered to their beds, decaying chemical facilities posing risks to human health and a bleak, often degraded urban landscape. The need for action by Western institutions was immediate if Romania was to successfully manage the dual transition to free markets and a pluralistic democracy. To confront the social and political challenges in the post-communist era the EastWest Institute devised the Legislative Issues Service (LIS).
The Legislative Issues Service operated out of the EWI Prague Centre, and helped to transform the performance of the Romanian parliament by developing the first professional staff. The EWI-sponsored LIS also provided significant contributions to parliaments in Bulgaria and Ukraine. EWI also worked to promote concerted associations between citizens and their elected representatives. Through public discussions on policy issues and the promotion of objective, non-partisan research and analysis, LIS aimed to legitimize democratic institutions and educate legislators on constitutional and legal concerns. In 1998, the project advised the Romanian government on its approach to pension reform adjustments, in addition to arranging public hearings in the Romanian parliament on pending legislation, a first in that country.
A foremost achievement of the Legislative Issues Service came in 1996, when LIS assisted the Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhova Rada) in the adoption of Ukraine's first post-communist constitution. In professional development seminars organized by EWI in France and Spain, delegations of Ukrainian parliamentary leaders who served on the constitutional committee consulted Western legal experts on establishing proper balances of power between the various branches of government. Special efforts were made to include key legislators who were unsure of which direction to move. Within three months of these visits, the newly independent nation of Ukraine adopted its first free democratic constitution.