The Specter Haunting Europe

The Unraveling
of the Post-1989 Order
Ivan Krastev

Ivan Krastev is chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia

and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
He is also a founding board member of the European Council on For-
eign Relations, a member of the International Crisis Group’s board of
trustees, and a New York Times contributing writer. His most recent
book is Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest (2014).

The time is out of joint. The post-1989 liberal order is unraveling be-
fore our eyes, in three distinct but interrelated ways: 1) The West is
losing power and influence in the international system, as reflected in
a rising China, a resurgent Russia, and a proliferating number of armed
conflicts in different parts of the globe. 2) The Western model of market
democracy is losing its universal appeal, as we can see from the wide-
spread backlash now taking place against globalization, understood as
the free movement of goods, capital, ideas, and people around the world.
3) The West’s own liberal-democratic regimes are facing an internal
crisis that is usually summed up as “the rise of populism.”
This unraveling is working its most devastating and far-reaching ef-
fects in Europe, where the post–Cold War order was born and shaped.
After Brexit, the prospect of a full or partial disintegration of the Eu-
ropean Union is no longer unthinkable. An increasingly authoritarian
Turkey could leave NATO, whether voluntarily or by expulsion. Bel-
gium, Spain, and the United Kingdom could break up. The establish-
ment of illiberal regimes in Hungary and Poland—complete with media
controls, hostility to NGOs, disrespect for judicial independence, and
intense polarization—has many fearing that Central and Eastern Europe
is sleepwalking its way back to the 1930s.
Poland is a particularly worrying case. It is the poster child for suc-
cessful postcommunist transition, and its economy has been Europe’s
strongest performer for at least the last decade. Thus the 2015 election
wins of the conservative-nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party came

Journal of Democracy Volume 27, Number 4 October 2016

© 2016 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Ivan Krastev 89

as a shock. In light of what has happened in Poland, it is hard to explain

away the degeneration of liberal regimes as primarily due to global eco-
nomic woes.
Unlike many of the rising stars of European populism, PiS leader
Jaros³aw Kaczyñski is not a corrupt opportunist who simply tries to
capture the mood of the masses and dances along EU red lines while
being careful not to cross them. Instead, he is a true ideologue of the
twentieth-century sort. And not unlike Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip
Erdo¢gan, he understands politics in terms of Carl Schmitt’s distinction
between friends and foes.
Why have Poles voted for the very same populists whom they threw
out less than a decade ago? Why have Polish voters, who opinion polls
tell us still form one of Europe’s most pro-European electorates, put Eu-
roskeptics in power? Why have Central and East Europeans increasingly
begun to vote for parties that openly loathe independent institutions such
as courts, central banks, and the media? These are the questions that
define the new Central and East European debate. It is no longer about
what is going wrong with postcommunist democracy; it is about what
we got wrong regarding the basic nature of the postcommunist period.

Back to 1989
A little more than a quarter-century ago, in what now seems like the
very distant year of 1989—an annus mirabilis that saw rejoicing Ger-
mans dancing on the rubble of the Berlin Wall—an intellectual and U.S.
State Department official named Francis Fukuyama captured the spirit
of the time. With the Cold War’s end, he argued in a famous essay, all
large ideological conflicts had been resolved.1 The contest was over, and
history had produced a winner: Western-style liberal democracy. Taking
a page from Hegel, Fukuyama presented the West’s victory in the Cold
War as a favorable verdict delivered by History itself, understood as a
kind of Higher Court of World Justice. In the short run, some countries
might not succeed at emulating this exemplary model. Yet they would
have to try. The Western model was the only (i)deal in town.
In this framework, the central questions were: How can the West
transform the rest of the world and how can the rest of the world imi-
tate the West? What institutions and policies need to be transferred and
copied? Coincidentally, on the heels of “the end of history” came the
dawn of the Internet as a mass phenomenon deeply affecting economies,
societies, and everyday life. The two seemed to go together, so that the
end of history entailed imitation in the sphere of politics and institutions
at the same time that it called forth innovation in the field of technolo-
gies and social life. Global competition would increase, but it would
be competition among firms and individuals rather than ideologies and
states. Its net result would be to bring countries together.
90 Journal of Democracy

The “end of history” vision had some doubters—Fukuyama himself

put a question mark on the title of his original essay—but many found
it attractive owing to its optimism and the way it put Western liberal-
ism, and not this or that antiliberal revolutionary movement, at the heart
of the idea of progress. What Fukuyama articulated so effectively was
a vision of post-utopian political normality. Western civilization was
modern civilization, was normal civilization, was the natural order of
the modern world.
It is this vision of the post–Cold War world that is collapsing as we
watch. It is only by contesting its major assumptions that we can address
the problems we face today. The question posed by the unraveling of
the liberal order is not what the West did wrong in its efforts to trans-
form the world. The pressing question is how the last three decades have
transformed the West.
Rumor has it that after the Germans tore down the Berlin Wall, the
British diplomat Robert Cooper, then the top planner at the Foreign Of-
fice, had rubber stamps made reading “OBE!” (Overtaken By Events!).
Cooper then asked his colleagues to go through the existing files, stamp-
ing as needed. It is time to bring out the OBE! stamp again. In order to
make sense of the changes now afoot, we need a radical change in our
point of departure. We need to reimagine the nature of the postcommu-
nist period.
At the same time that Fukuyama was heralding history’s end, U.S.
political scientist Ken Jowitt was writing in the Journal of Democracy
of the Cold War’s close not as an hour of triumph but as an epoch of
crisis and trauma, as the seedtime of what he called “the new world
disorder.”2 A respected Cold Warrior who had spent his life studying
communism, Jowitt disagreed with Fukuyama and rejected the view that
what was unfolding was “some sort of historical surgical strike” that
would leave the rest of the world “largely unaffected.” Instead, wrote
Jowitt, the end of communism

should be likened to a catastrophic volcanic eruption, one that initially

and immediately affects only the surrounding political ‘biota’ (i.e., other
Leninist regimes), but whose effects most likely will have a global impact
on the boundaries and identities that for half a century have politically,
economically, and military defined and ordered the world.3

For Fukuyama, the post–Cold War world was one in which borders
between states would officially endure even while losing much of their
relevance. Jowitt instead envisioned redrawn borders, reshaped identi-
ties, proliferating conflicts, and paralyzing uncertainty. He saw the post-
communist period not as an age of imitation with few dramatic events,
but as a painful and dangerous time full of regimes that could be best
described as political mutants. He agreed with Fukuyama that no new
universal ideology would appear to challenge liberal democracy, but
Ivan Krastev 91

foresaw the return of old ethnic, religious, and tribal identities. Jowitt
further predicted that “movements of rage” would spring from the ashes
of weakened nation-states. In short, Jowitt foretold in outline al-Qaeda
and ISIS.
For more than two decades, at least as regards Europe, it looked as
if Fukuyama was right and Jowitt was wrong. Yet it is Jowitt’s analysis
of the post–Cold War era as a time of global identity crisis and redrawn
state and communal boundaries that can help us to make sense of the
current state of politics in Europe generally, and in Central and Eastern
Europe in particular.
For twenty years, Europe’s new democracies scrupulously adopted
the West’s democratic institutions and the EU’s required laws and regu-
lations. Voting was free and fair, and elected governments colored inside
the democratic lines. Voters were able to change governments, but not
policies. Social inequalities were growing, some groups lost status, and
populations moved within and across national borders. But none of this
stirred the waters of electoral politics much. In many ways, Europe’s
young democracies were like diligent first-generation immigrants, try-
ing hard to fit in and going quietly home after work.
There was some noisy populism, but it seemed to be more style than
substance, a matter of reform’s “losers” blowing off steam with protest
votes. Populism, however, was always more than that. Jan-Werner Mül-
ler convincingly argues that populism “is not anything like a codified
doctrine, but it is a set of distinct claims and has what one might call an
inner logic.”4 It is more than what Cas Mudde calls “an illiberal demo-
cratic response to undemocratic liberalism.”5
Populism’s key feature is hostility not to elitism but to pluralism. As
Müller says, “Populists claim that they and they alone, represent the
people. . . . The claim to exclusive representation is not an empirical
one; it is always distinctly moral.”6 Kaczyñski is not representing all
Poles but the “true Poles.” Almost half of Turkey opposes Erdo¢gan’s
policies, but he feels sure that he is the only spokesperson for the people
because the “true Turks” vote for him. It is populism’s exclusionary
identity politics that bears out Jowitt’s grim vision.

Migration and the Rise of Identity Politics

Of the many crises that Europe faces today, it is the migration cri-
sis that most sharply defines the changing nature of European politics.
Many Europeans associate migration with the rising risk of terror at-
tacks, with the Islamization of their societies, and with the overburden-
ing of the welfare state. Worries over migration are behind the popu-
larity of right-wing populism, the victory of Brexit, and the growing
East-West divide within the EU that is casting doubt on the idea of “ir-
reversible” European integration.
92 Journal of Democracy

Migration is about more than influxes of people; it is also about in-

fluxes of images, emotions, and arguments. A major force in European
politics today comprises majorities that feel threatened. They fear that
foreigners are taking over their
countries and endangering their
While Western Europe’s way of life, and they are con-
attitudes toward the rest vinced that this is the result of a
of the world have been conspiracy between cosmopoli-
shaped by colonialism tan-minded elites and tribal-mind-
and its emotional legacy, ed immigrants. The populism of
Central and Eastern Europe’s these majorities is not a product
of romantic nationalism, as might
states were born from the have been the case a century or
disintegration of empires more ago. Instead, it is fueled by
and the outbreaks of ethnic demographic projections that fore-
cleansing that went with it. shadow both the shrinking role of
Europe in the world and the ex-
pected mass movements of people
to Europe. It is a kind of populism for which history and precedent have
poorly prepared us.
The migration crisis, whatever EU officials in Brussels might say,
is not about a “lack of solidarity.” Instead, it is about a clash of soli-
darities—of national, ethnic, and religious solidarity chafing against our
obligations as human beings. It should be seen not simply as the move-
ment of people from outside Europe to the old continent, or from poor
member states of the EU to richer ones, but also as the movement of
voters away from the center and the displacement of the border between
left and right by the border between internationalists and nativists.
The scandal of Central and East Europeans’ behavior, at least as seen
from the West, is not so much their readiness to build fences at the
very places where walls were destroyed less than three decades ago;
it is rather their claim that “we owe nothing to these people.” Publics
in the East seem unmoved by the refugees’ and migrants’ plight, and
leaders there have lambasted the EU’s decision to redistribute refugees
among member states. Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia has said
that his country will accept only Christians, citing a lack of mosques in
Slovakia. In Poland, Kaczyñski has warned that newcomers may bring
disease. Hungary’s Premier Viktor Orbán has argued that the EU’s first
duty is to protect its member states’ citizens, and has called a referen-
dum on whether Hungary should obey the Brussels requirement to ac-
cept foreigners. Such votes are no longer exceptional: There are now 34
EU-related referendums under consideration in 18 of the 27 remaining
member states.
This regional resentment of refugees may look odd. For most of the
twentieth century, Central and East Europeans often emigrated or took
Ivan Krastev 93

care of immigrants, so it might be expected that today they would easily

identify with people running from hunger or persecution. Moreover, at
least as far as Syrian refugees are concerned, hardly any are currently
to be found in the region: In 2015, only 169 entered Slovakia, and only
eight asked to stay. But what remains most striking is how much ethnic
and religious identities matter despite almost three decades of European
integration.
Central and Eastern Europe’s position on refugees is no accident.
While it represents a local version of the popular revolt against glo-
balization, it also has roots in history, demography, and the twists of
postcommunist transitions. History matters in this history-wracked re-
gion, where tragic experience so often cuts against globalization’s ros-
ier promises. More than any other places in Europe, the postcommunist
countries know not only the advantages but the dark sides of multicul-
turalism. These states and nations emerged in the late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth centuries. While Western Europe’s attitudes toward the
rest of the world have been shaped by colonialism and its emotional
legacy, Central and Eastern Europe’s states were born from the disinte-
gration of empires and the outbreaks of ethnic cleansing that went with
it. Before Hitler and Stalin invaded in 1939, Poland was a multicultural
society where more than a third of the population was German, Ukrai-
nian, or Jewish. Today, Poland is one of the most ethnically homoge-
neous societies in the world—98 percent of its people are ethnic Poles.
For many of them, a return to ethnic diversity suggests a return to the
troubled interwar period. It was the destruction or expulsion of the Jews
and Germans that led to the establishment of national middle classes in
Central and Eastern Europe.
Curiously, demographic panic is one of the least discussed factors
shaping Central and East Europeans’ behavior toward migrants and ref-
ugees. But it is a critical one. In the region’s recent history, nations and
states have been known to wither. Over the last quarter-century, about
one of every ten Bulgarians has left to live and work abroad. And the
leavers, as one would expect, have been disproportionately young. Ac-
cording to UN projections, Bulgaria’s population will shrink 27 percent
between now and 2050. Alarm over “ethnic disappearance” can be felt
in these small nations. For them, the arrival of migrants signals their
exit from history, and the popular argument that an aging Europe needs
migrants only strengthens a gathering sense of existential melancholy.
But at the end of the day, it is Central and East Europeans’ deeply
rooted mistrust of the cosmopolitan mindset that stands out most sharply.
They have no confidence in those whose hearts are in Paris or London,
whose money is in New York or Cyprus, and whose loyalty belongs to
Brussels. Being cosmopolitan and at the same time a “good” Bulgarian,
Czech, Hungarian, Pole, or Slovak is not in the cards. Was not commu-
nism, after all, a form of “internationalism”? For Germans, cosmopoli-
94 Journal of Democracy

tan attitudes may offer a way to flee the Nazi past; for Central and East
Europeans, they are reminders of something very different. In Western
Europe, 1968 was in large part about solidarity with the non-Western
world; in Central and Eastern Europe, it was about national awakening.

Two Faces of 1989

At the core of the populists’ claim to legitimacy is a revision of the
legacy of 1989. They see ’89 as “a revolution betrayed.” In reality, there
were two 1989s. One was the “1989” of cosmopolitan intellectuals such
as Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, while the other was the “1989” of
nationalists such as Kaczyñski. For a while, they coexisted peacefully
because joining the West and the EU was the best way to guarantee a
permanent escape from Russia’s zone of influence. Yet the tension be-
tween cosmopolitanism (as represented by European integration) and na-
tionalism never went away. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s muted the
nationalists for a time, but the paradox of European integration is that it
weakened class identities (the very identities on which the West Europe-
an democratic model had been built) while strengthening the ethnic and
religious markers of belonging. For these small states, integration with
Europe and “structural adjustment” meant that major economic decisions
such as the size of the budget deficit were effectively removed from the
arena of electoral competition. What remained was identity politics.
Central and Eastern Europe could import Western political institu-
tions, but could not import the social identities that support them. There
were social democrats but not strong trade unions, and classical liber-
als but not much of a real business community. The Cold War sealed
the borders between capitalism and communism, but kept the internal
class borders inside each system fairly easy to cross, at least compared
to what is the case in a traditional society. The post–Cold War world
reversed this situation. After 1989, previously impermeable territorial
borders became easy to traverse while borders between increasingly un-
equal social classes became harder to cross.
Until the 1970s, democratization was making societies less unequal.
The promise of democracy, after all, was also the promise of egalitari-
anism. In countries where millions could vote in competitive elections,
it was assumed that those at the top would need the electoral support
of the have-nots. Western Europe’s post-1945 social-democratic com-
promise reflected a calculated effort by the “haves” to make capitalism
legitimate in the eyes of mass electorates. Central and Eastern Europe’s
failure to import Western-style social identities after the Cold War also
reminds us that these identities were already on the decline in post–Cold
War Western Europe. The welfare state and liberal democracy in West-
ern Europe were not simply shaped by the Cold War; in an important
sense, they were preconditioned by it.
Ivan Krastev 95

What we are seeing now in Europe both east and west is a shift away
from class-based political identities and an erosion of the consensus
built around such identities. The Austrian presidential election and the
Brexit referendum reveal alarming gaps between the cities and the coun-
tryside, between the more and less educated, between the rich and the
poor, and also between women and men (far-right populism’s supporters
tend to be found mainly among the latter). The migration of blue-collar
workers from the moderate left to the extreme right is one of the major
trends in European politics today. Economic protectionism and cultural
protectionism have joined hands. The internationalist-minded working
class is no more, having faded along with Marxism.
It is not facts or rational arguments that shape political identities.
Democracy is supposed to be government by argument. Yet in Po-
land, Law and Justice has profited greatly at the polls from conspiracy
theories about the April 2010 Smolensk air crash. Belief in these theo-
ries—and not age, income, or education—is the strongest predictor of
whether someone backs Kaczyñski’s party.
The belief that President Lech Kaczyñski (Jaros³aw’s twin brother)
was assassinated when his plane went down in Russia has helped to
consolidate a certain “we.” This is the “we” that refuses to accept of-
ficial lies, that knows how the world really works, that is ready to stand
for Poland. The theory of the Smolensk conspiracy mined a vein of deep
distrust that Poles harbor regarding any official version of events, and it
fit with their self-image as victims of history. Law and Justice support-
ers were not ready to accept Donald Tusk’s claim that Poland is now a
normal European country, run by rules and not by shadowy puppet mas-
ters. It should come as no surprise that the new Polish government does
not believe in accidents. In its view, all its critics are connected with one
another, and they are all working together to undermine Poland’s sover-
eignty. Trust, in this mindset, must not extend beyond some inner circle
(of, say, the ruling party). “Independent” institutions such as courts, the
media, or the central bank cannot be trusted because their independence
is an illusion: Either “we” control them, or our enemies do.
For populists, the separation of powers is a piece of elite trickery, a
devious mechanism for confusing responsibility. People who refuse to
place trust still want to place blame. The paradox of the current populist
turn is that while many voters think making the executive all-powerful
is the only way to make it accountable, the likelier reality is that the un-
dermining of all independent institutions will open the road to an even
greater lack of accountability.
The Polish case poses the question why we should expect people who
have the right to elect their own government to choose shielding mi-
norities over empowering the majority. The sobering truth is that liberal
democracy is an unlikely development: Property rights have the rich
to champion them and voting rights have the support of the many, but
96 Journal of Democracy

respect for civil rights and liberties—including those of minorities who

may be unpopular—is what makes liberal democracy truly liberal, and
it is more a matter of happy accident than we might like to think. Only
in very rare cases do the powerful feel a need not just to guard their own
property but also to protect the rights of powerless minorities. Similarly,
it is rare for a majority to think of itself as a possible future minority
and thus be willing to embrace constitutional provisions that limit the
majoritarian concentration of power.
The real appeal of liberal democracy is that losers need not fear los-
ing too much: Electoral defeat means having to regroup and plan for
the next contest, not having to flee into exile or go underground while
all one’s possessions are seized. The little remarked downside of this is
that to winners, liberal democracy denies full and final victory. In pre-
democratic times—meaning the vast bulk of human history—disputes
were not settled by peaceful debates and orderly handovers of power.
Instead, force ruled: The victorious invaders or the winning parties in a
civil war had their vanquished foes at their mercy, free to do with them
as they liked. Under liberal democracy, the “conqueror” gets no such
satisfaction.
So perhaps we should be asking not why liberal democracy is in trou-
ble in Central and Eastern Europe today, but rather why it has done so
well at the task of consolidation over the last two decades. Here we must
note that this success was rooted in a certain political identity that was
doomed to disappear. This was the identity of the postcommunist voter,
haunted by the shame of having been a part (even if a small one) of the
old, unfree regime, but also inspired by the desire to find a place in the
new order of freedom and democracy. Having seen real state repres-
sion, this voter was ready to “think like a minority” even when in the
majority. Communism’s role in shaping the self-restraint of this voter
was communism’s unintentional gift to the cause of liberal-democratic
consolidation.
The defining characteristic of the populist moment in Central and
Eastern Europe is the disappearance of this ex-communist identity and
the fading of communism as the central reference point. The migration
crisis makes it clear that other identities have taken center stage.

Migration: The Twenty-First Century Revolution

A decade ago, the Hungarian philosopher and former dissident
Gáspár Miklós Tamás observed that the Enlightenment, in which the
idea of the EU is intellectually rooted, demands universal citizenship.7
But for meaningful citizenship to be available to all, one of two things
has to happen: Either poor and dysfunctional countries must become
places in which it is worthwhile to be a citizen, or Europe must open its
borders to everybody. Neither is going to happen anytime soon, if ever.
Ivan Krastev 97

In a world of vast inequalities and open borders, migration becomes the

new form of revolution.
People no longer dream of the future. Instead, they dream of other
places. In this connected world, migration—unlike the utopias sold by
twentieth-century demagogues—
genuinely offers instant and radical
In a world of vast change. It requires no ideology, no
inequalities and open leader, and no political movement.
borders, migration It requires no change of government,
only a change of geography. The ab-
becomes the new form
sence of collective dreams makes mi-
of revolution. People no
gration the natural choice of the new
longer dream of the future. radical. To change your life you do
Instead, they dream of not need a political party—you only
other places. need a boat. With social inequality
rising and social mobility stagnating
in many countries around the world, it
is easier to cross national borders than it is to cross class barriers.
In a world where migration to Europe is the new form of revolution,
European democracy easily turns counterrevolutionary. The failure or
unwillingness of governments to control migration has come to symbol-
ize the ordinary citizen’s loss of power.
Migration also dramatically changes the lives of host communities.
The media are full of stories about people who have found themselves
in a totally foreign world, not because they moved but because others
moved to them. Left-wing intellectuals in the West like to talk passion-
ately about the right to preserve one’s way of life when the subject is
some poor indigenous community in India or Latin America, but what
about middle-class communities closer to home? Have they such a right?
If not, why not? Can democracy exist if the distinction between citizens
and noncitizens is effectively abolished?
History teaches us that liberal democracy fares poorly in times of iden-
tity-building and the redrawing of borders. Democracy is a mechanism of
inclusion but also of exclusion, and counterrevolutionary democracy is
not an oxymoron.
The unraveling of the liberal order renders problematic the European
project of trying to extend democracy beyond the nation-state. Elections
can help to manage the inner tensions of an existing political commu-
nity, but can they create a new one? The process of European integra-
tion has put into question some of the political communities defined by
European nation-states, but it has failed to bring into being a European
demos.
Leaders such as Orbán and Kaczyñski offer illiberal democracy—
majoritarian regimes in which the majority has turned the state into its
own private possession—as an answer to the competitive pressure of
98 Journal of Democracy

a world where popular will is the only source of political legitimacy

and global markets are the only source of economic growth. One might
argue that the rise of such majoritarian (and hence illiberal) regimes
is an inevitable result of the backlash against globalization. And one
may question how stable these regimes will prove to be. But one thing
is clear: The European project as we know it cannot long survive in an
environment dominated by populist governments. The critical question,
then, is who has more staying power, the EU or these regimes?

NOTES

1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest, Summer 1989, 3–18.

2. Ken Jowitt, “After Leninism: The New World Disorder,” Journal of Democracy 2
(Winter 1991): 11–20. Jowitt later elaborated his ideas in a book titled The New World
Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), see
esp. chs. 7–9.

3. Jowitt, New World Disorder, 310 (emphasis in original).

4. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 2016), 10.

5. Cas Mudde, “The Problem with Populism,” Guardian, 17 February 2015, www.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/17/problem-populism-syriza-podemos-dark-
side-europe.

6. Müller, What Is Populism? 3 (emphasis in original).

7. Gáspár Míklos Tamás, “What Is Post-Fascism?” 14 September 2001, www.opende-

mocracy.net/people-newright/article_306.jsp.
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