Stefano Bottoni - Unaltered dilemmas and novel challenges
At the end of its long post-socialist journey towards the West, eastern Europe has found itself once again on the fringes of the Western productive and cultural core, just as it did in the interwar period. Hybrid political cultures and peculiar power structures that are neither fully ‘Western’ nor ‘eastern’ have taken root in the semi-peripheries. This is the case not only in the post-communist space, but also in the seemingly more consolidated democracies of southern Europe
After the global financial crisis, new eastern European democracies started to question the Western political, economic, and cultural models they had been copying since 1989. The resulting neoliberal legitimation crisis tends to benefit coalitions of right-wing populists; their promise of stability aims to deal with the psychological impact of the crisis on younger voters, citizens who never experienced a shortage economy and still aspire to a Western quality of life.
Since 1989, eastern European countries have made enormous efforts to adopt political, economic, and cultural models from Western free-market liberal democracies. They mostly pursued this by imitating patterns alien to their historical legacies and dominant social mindset. The most important challenge after 1989 was how to build (or rebuild) nation states in a rapidly evolving globalized world. Post-communist eastern Europe thus emerged as a dynamic region in which the (re)construction and delayed nationalization of the social body soon became closely entwined with the process of European integration.
After the global financial crisis, new eastern European democracies started to question the Western political, economic, and cultural models they had been copying since 1989. The resulting neoliberal legitimation crisis tends to benefit coalitions of right-wing populists; their promise of stability aims to deal with the psychological impact of the crisis on younger voters, citizens who never experienced a shortage economy and still aspire to a Western quality of life.
Since 1989, eastern European countries have made enormous efforts to adopt political, economic, and cultural models from Western free-market liberal democracies. They mostly pursued this by imitating patterns alien to their historical legacies and dominant social mindset. The most important challenge after 1989 was how to build (or rebuild) nation states in a rapidly evolving globalized world. Post-communist eastern Europe thus emerged as a dynamic region in which the (re)construction and delayed nationalization of the social body soon became closely entwined with the process of European integration.
As Timothy Snyder has
claimed, the European Union can be best understood as a post-imperial economic
project led by a democratic, multicultural Germany; a country that, after
dramatically losing its own empire in 1945, was more prepared than any other
European power to undertake a paradigm shift. This deeply emotional factor
destined the EU to become an ‘empire by invitation’, reluctant to grow but
continuously forced to by external events..... https://www.eurozine.com/unaltered-dilemmas-and-novel-challenges/
