Powerful waves of democratisation which spread throughout Europe on the cusp of the 1990s were predominantly marked by the promotion of new social and ideological values, essentially opposite to the fundamental versions of the socialist system of the time. As concerns values and ideology, those new political orders were undoubtedly built on the models of the constitutional and state institutions created throughout the centuries in Western European democracies and the United States legal and political system. Subsequent to the appearance of the first opposition political groups, institutionally still “located” within the framework of the vanishing socialist legal system, the first political parties emerged, while the change in the general social and legal values reached its peak in the form of adoption of new constitutions. Despite their different situations, the states of Central and South Eastern Europe sooner or later all began building new legal and political systems. After a general introduction to the legal and historical characteristics of the period of the collapse of communism, the author presents the fundamental legal and historical references contained in the pertinent constitutional preambles. In the context of the declaration of full statehood and the recognition as new subjects of international law, some states wished to express their political and legal continuity and individuality in their constitutional preambles, often referring to some of their important (legal) historical events or facts. The dynamics of adoption of the new constitutions after the demise of communism varied significantly, which depended on new national elites and international circumstances. Based on these facts, the systematization and presentation of the constitutions relies on their conceptual similarities and content, and not on the classifications of constitutional doctrine.