CEPS Ideas Lab
Highly inspiring discussion with political scientist

Ivan Krastev (IWM Vienna and Center for Liberal Strategies, Sofia):
The Long 1989 and the end of the age of imitation based on his bestseller (co-authored with NYU Prof Stephen Holmes) „The light that failed“. Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there, but also back in the heartland of the West.

Krastev argued that the supposed end of history turned out to be only the beginning of an Age of Imitation. Looking at the history of the last thirty years, it seems that the most powerful force behind the wave of populist xenophobia that began in Eastern Europe stems from resentment at the post-1989 imperative to become Westernized.