It seemed that the sole reason the downfall of communism, as it were, took so long was the veto power of the Soviet Union. According to theories of
modernization, the higher the levels of socioeconomic achievement, the greater the pressure for open competition and, ultimately, democracy. As such, the nations in Eastern and Central Europe were seen as "anomalies in socioeconomically highly-developed countries where particularly intellectual power resources have become widespread" (Welsh 19). Due to their longtime adherence to communist policies, these nations faced great difficulty in making the transition to a pluralist system as well as a market economy. According to Preuss, these problems were threefold: The genuine economic evastations wrought by the communist regimes, the transformation of the social and economic classes of the command economy into the social and economic classes of a capitalist economy and, finally, the creation of a constitutional structure for political entities that lack the undisputed integrity of a nation state (48).

With such problems as these to contend with in re-engineering
their entire economic and political systems, the people of East
Germany seemed to be in a particularly enviable position. Economically, they were poised to unite with one of the richest
countries, having one of the strongest economies, in the entire world. In the competition for foreign investment, such an alliance gave the
late German Democratic Republic a seemingly insurmountable lead over
other nations. In regards to the political aspects of unification,
it effectively left a Germany with no national or ethnic minorities,
as well as having undisputed boundaries. As well, there was no need
to create a constitution (although many of the pitfalls of
constitution-building would have been easily-avoided due to the
advantages Germany had), because the leaders of the GDR had joined the
Federal Republic by accession and, accordingly, allowed its Basic Law
to be extended over their territory. For all the good that seemed to
be imminent as a result of unification, many problems also arose
regarding the political transformation that Germany was undergoing. Among these problems were the following: the tensions between the
Basic Law's simultaneous commitments to supranational integration and
to the German nation state, the relationship between the nation and
the constitution as two different modes of political integration and
the issue of so-called "backward justice" (Preuss 48).