Editorial on the Special Issue “Demographic Developments in Eastern and Western Europe Before and After the Transformation of Socialist Countries”

Institute, the Estonian Demographic Association, the Czech Society for Demography, and the Committee on Demographic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.The conference was to be hosted in 2020 by the Center for Demography and Diversity at TU Dresden, with the theme of "Demography in Central and Eastern Europe -Demographic Behaviour since 1990."The aim was to revisit demographic changes and developments thirty years after the beginning of the social and political transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe.A call for papers was issued, drawing many submissions from participating countries.The German Research Association (DFG) funded the conference with twelve sessions and additional keynote lectures.Unfortunately, the event had to be cancelled just two days before it was due to take place because of the spread of SARSCoV2 and the first wave of COVID-19 infections in Germany.Our work appeared to have been in vain until Zsolt Spéder came up with the idea of proposing a special issue to Comparative Population Studies (CPoS) on the topic of demographic developments in Eastern and Western Europe after the transformation of socialist countries in 1989/90.The aim of this proposal was to (re-) evaluate the transformation from a theoretical and comparative perspective by providing a balanced view of the post-1989/90 transformation across all three demographic processes: family and fertility, mortality and health, and migration.This was achieved by incorporating the perspectives of Eastern, Central, and Western European researchers, including research articles from both young and established scholars.After three years of intensive work, the special issue now comprises ten articles (see Table 1) covering various topics in the research areas of family dynamics, life expectancy and health development, and international migration.It is a genuine testament to European cooperation and convergence in demographic research, even if convergence has not always occurred in the demographic processes we study.