The concept of Totalitarianism has been widely, and often hotly, debated, one major issue being whether this term can be equally applied to quite different authoritarian regimes such as fascism, Nazism or communism. This volume is the first attempt to analyze, on a large scale, totalitarian and authoritarian systems in Europe, both in a long-term historical perspective and immediately after their collapse. Often using new archival material, historians, legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists from fourteen different countries explore traditional concepts and typologies of totalitarianism and authoritarianism and discuss the transformation of these regimes into democratic systems over the last decade.