 Since its inception the prize was open to scholars and artists from seven central and southeast, mostly communist, European countries (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia).After the fall of communism in Europe in the late 1980s and the subsequent turmoil which led to the breakup of Yugoslavia, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, scholars from all the succeeding countries remained eligible for the prize.In the early 1990s several ex-Soviet European countries (the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; Belarus, and Ukraine) as well as Albania were also made eligible.