• Believe in History? The right side of History
  • Graphic.The Berlin Wall, in detail
  • Berlin Wall: Three decades that have changed our world forever

The celebration of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall seems like the right time to take stock of the liberal revolutions that in 1989 put an end to the Soviet orb guided with an iron hand from Moscow. A time that inaugurated an era of liberal optimism whose philosophical banner was the "end of History" theory, capitalized as Francis Fukuyama requested. A theory that paved the way to interpret the crisis and fall of communism in Europe as the empirical test that turned liberalism into "the end point of the ideological evolution of humanity."

Three decades later, however, it no longer seems so clear that the world is moving steadily toward "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government . " Liberalism seems to lose its luster and exhausted its momentum as an information force in the world. The emergence of populism in Europe and the Americas, the rise and consolidation of the so-called "illiberal democracies" in Eastern Europe or the appeal of the Chinese authoritarian model seem to prove it. Where, then, did the promise of universal expansion of liberalism fail?

According to Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes in The light that goes out. How the West won the Cold War but lost the peace , if we want to understand why liberal democracy is in retreat in Eastern Europe we must assume that "end of History" was, in fact, a process of forced Westernization and no alternative for countries that until 1989 operated in the orbit of the USSR. The thesis of the book, formulated in terms of political psychology, argues that the spirit of rejection of the idea of ​​the West that dominates the post-communist countries, is explained according to the experience of historical humiliation that supposed to associate concepts such as «Europeanization», «democratization» and, in short, "normalization" with the incorporation of other people's values ​​and customs. And that matters more, we are told, than the permanence of political and institutional behaviors rooted in an illiberal past .

So much so that Krastev and Holmes bet to rename the post-Cold War period as the Age of Imitation . A historical time that turned the once communists and democrats into imitators and imitated. But always, here is the interpretative key of the book, without altering the "moral hierarchy that proved to be deeply destabilizing." With this thesis, the authors intend to explain the success of "iliberal democracy" in Eastern Europe. Noting, precisely, its ability to mobilize values ​​contrary to post-nationalism , individualism, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism that associate Western liberalism. And pointing, in the background, a paradox that throws a jug of cold water on the liberal optimism end of siècle: "The unipolar order has shaped a much less welcoming world for liberalism than anyone had predicted."

Certainly, Krastev and Holmes capture very well that since 1989 some apostles of liberalism turned a doctrine based on the defense of individual liberties and pluralism into a kind of secular religion called to emancipate all peoples. In fact, the authors stress, this version of liberalism as an abstract and universal doctrine legitimizes leaders such as Putin, Orban or Kaczynski to identify their movements as "counter-revolutions" in a positive sense. Namely, as reactions that seek to avoid the dissolution of ethnic, cultural and linguistic differences of small European nations before the liberal homogenizing force.

In short, according to the light that goes out , the success of populism in Eastern Europe resides, first, in its ability to build a discursive framework where liberals are those who “dissociate citizenship from their ethnic ancestry and replace the ideals of substantive justice and public good with insulous and abstract notions of procedural justice, rule of law or individual utility ».

And second, as Putin does, in his power to introduce a message that identifies what the threat is : the international liberal order as an instrument of American domination that acts by weakening, disintegrating and denaturing national communities.

The thesis of the Age of Imitation of Holmes and Krastev is persuasive. However, taken to the extreme, its explanatory efficacy is more than doubtful. By prioritizing the idea of ​​the "policy of imitation" over " the gravitational force of an authoritarian past or a hostility with historical roots towards liberalism," the end result is a conclusion too manic: the fault of everything is of the West . And taking the thesis of imitation to the end, as if 1989 was a zero point in history , allows the authors disturbing statements: «Of course Stalin and other Soviet leaders were consummate liars, but rarely worried about directing their Mendacity to electoral politics. Therefore, it can be said that, before importing it from Russia, the United States had exported there a sophisticated form of post-truth democracy.

There is no doubt that the Western world incurred what Samuel P. Huntington called a "liberal mirage" in 1989. After the battle of the Cold War against Marxism and the race with it to give the world its own shape, for some Liberalism became a secular religion that should convert all countries, regardless of their status and political culture, if the catechism was well internalized. But if liberalism is not taken as a cartoon, but as the fruit of a slow historical learning aimed at seeking a modus vivendi , it is risky to propose, as Krastev and Holmes do, that the weight of the past of the countries submitted to the USSR does not It has a relevant role in explaining the difficulties of transitions to liberal democracy.

Before putting ourselves in the hands of sophisticated theories that recycle exhausted ideas, it is worth remembering that the 1989 anti-communist revolutions associated the struggle for independence with the recovery of religion, traditions and national identity , giving them a positive sense that endures today . And don't forget, as Anne Applebaum masterfully tells in The Iron Curtain (Debate), that communism had destroyed the institutions and societies of Eastern Europe. Deleting, thus, any institutional and democratic culture.

And this historical-ideological picture , full of national nuances, cannot be brimmed lightly if one wants to give a full explanation of the success of politicians like Orban or Kaczynski when they wave the flag of "iliberal democracy."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • history
  • Europe
  • culture
  • Poland
  • Hungary
  • Russia

The Paper Sphere To understand the Holocaust

The Sphere of PaperTake a match: on the right or wrong side of History

HistoriaPaul Preston: "Franco died, but Franco has survived, we are seeing these days"