This post is part of the Kluge Center’s 25 for 25, in honor of the Kluge Center’s 25th anniversary, celebrating 25 books that were written thanks to the Kluge Center’s support. Read the introductory post to the series here.
At the end of the Cold War, there was strong hope for the global spread of liberal democracy and market economies. The fall of the Berlin Wall seemingly promised an open society and a brighter, more democratic future. However, those who celebrated the integration of Eastern and Western countries soon realized that this transition would not be easy. In The Light that Failed: Why the West is Losing the Fight for Democracy (Pegasus Books, 2019), Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the belief that the end of the Cold War began an Age of Liberalism and Democracy was an “illusion.” They contend that, paradoxically, liberalism became the “victim of this heralded success in the Cold War.”
Instead of an age of liberalism and democracy, there was, in Krastev and Holmes’s terms, a thirty-year “Age of Imitation.” In the wake of the Cold War, there was no rival to Western liberalism. In this unipolar system, the authors argue, former communist countries believed that imitating the West would be the most effective way to democratize. Eastern and Central Europeans wanted to have a “normal” life, they explain, which involved not only imitating government institutions, but also adopting Western norms and lifestyles.
Over time, imitation bred resentment. Krastev and Holmes explain that imitation is inherently an asymmetrical relationship, requiring the acknowledgment of the imitator’s moral inferiority. The democratization process was often perceived as rigid, rather than flexible to unique local conditions and accepting of national traditions. As countries turned away from their traditional aspects to adopt “superior” or “normal” Western values, customs, and institutions, it was natural for feelings of humiliation, irritation, and imposter syndrome to arise. The rhetoric of antiliberals and populists in countries like Hungary and Poland capitalized on these sentiments.
For example, Mária Schmidt, one of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s key intellectual advisers, voiced this type of counter-push when she claimed: “We don’t want to copy what the Germans are doing or what the French are doing, …we want to continue with our way of life.”
The dynamic that took shape also included the idea that the West was entitled to monitor the “progress” of the post-communist states. In many cases, policymakers from Western Europe and the United States frustrated local leaders by pressuring them to enact policies they were not partial to. Even worse, some Westerners disparaged them as “going through the motions of democracy,” even though that’s precisely what they were being pushed to do.
Freedom of movement also created new strains. Millions of young, educated Eastern and Central Europeans left their home countries after the Cold War, draining human capital and weakening liberal political forces. Populist leaders seized on this demographic loss, pointing to open borders as a primary culprit.
Several events, including the global financial crisis in 2008 and the 2015 migration crisis in Europe, made Eastern and Central European leaders question whether Western liberalism was really worth emulating. Perceptions of hypocrisy exposed the fragility of the newly established liberal order. So too did Russia’s strategy of “mirroring,” as Krastev and Holmes define it. In this parody of the more straightforward kinds of imitation encouraged by the West, Russia developed a strategy of selecting some of the most problematic behavioral patterns of US foreign policy with the intent of holding a mirror up to the West, to reveal some of the West’s defects and to undermine the idea of any Western moral superiority. For example, when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin justified its actions by pointing to human rights ideals, even directly quoting a paragraph from a NATO statement. In reality, argue Krastev and Holmes, Russia, rather than caring about human rights, was cynically suggesting that the US, too, uses the pretext of values and norms as a veil for advancing its geopolitical interests.
In this landscape, liberalism began to lose its ability to self-correct. Without a competing ideology, it ceased to question itself. It also no longer had the strength of comparison.
The end of the Age of Imitation, claim Krastev and Holmes, is marked by China’s rise in global power. But this doesn’t mean there is a new type of Cold War in which China and the United States are competing with proselytizing ideologies. Rather, they explain, international competition is becoming less ideological and more about becoming dominant and powerful without creating converts.
The book’s title is a nod to Rudyard Kipling’s first novel, The Light That Failed, which was published in two versions: one short and optimistic, the other long and tragic. Similarly, Krastev and Holmes suggest that the “Age of Imitation” can end either in despair or renewal. They argue that the end of liberalism’s dominant global world order should not be mourned but celebrated. In a world of diverse political models, they suggest, liberalism has the opportunity to thrive and flourish once again.
Ivan Krastev was the Kissinger Chair at the Kluge Center in 2018-2019, a position which he said was “critical for finishing the book.” The Light that Failed has been translated into 20 languages. It won the 30th Annual Lionel Gelber Prize for the best English-language book on International Affairs.
You can read more about Ivan Krastev’s work in this blog or listen to him directly here.
This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.