For the first time in decades, Europeans are looking fondly to the past, rather than to the future.
That was a key point made by Ivan Krastev at a May 9 public event at the Library of Congress focusing on European politics and culture, and upcoming elections to the European Parliament.
Krastev, the Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress, was interviewed by John W. Kluge Center Director John Haskell. The event was co-hosted by the Bulgarian Embassy as part of the European Union’s Month of Culture. Krastev is an expert on Balkan and European affairs. His most recent book is Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest. A new book that he worked on while in residence at the Library, The Light that Failed, co-authored with Stephen Holmes, will be published in October.
Krastev, who is from Bulgaria, said that much of what has happened since the collapse of the Soviet Union came as a shock, in contrast to the great initial hope for the future soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The key word then, he said, was “normality.”
“We don’t need new ideas anymore,” Krastev said of the thinking at the time. “’We want to have a normal life.’ And normal life was life in the west.”
The Importance of Demography
We are seeing the importance of dynamics like changing demography and its psychological effects on Europeans, according to Krastev, in addition to more concrete factors like economic performance. Poland, for instance, has been an economic success story of the last 15 years, even remaining mostly unharmed by the global recession that began in 2009. “On the illiberal turn in Poland, theoretically speaking this should not have happened,” Krastev said. But demographic trends in Eastern Europe provide a clearer picture of what is happening.
One surprise that came quickly was the emigration of liberals from former Soviet states. After a revolution, typically the opponents of the revolution will leave, he noted, as happened after the French and Russian revolutions. But across Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s, liberal revolution resulted in liberals leaving for the west.