[Salon] The Light that Failed with Ivan Krastev

Ivan Krastev’s latest work is one of brilliant political psychology. In investigating the reasons why the West, after winning the Cold War, lost its political balance, he comes to the conclusion that this purported end of history turned out to be the beginning of a twisted ‘Age of Imitation’.

Surveying the history of the last thirty years, he shows that the most powerful force behind the wave of populist xenophobia that began in Eastern Europe stems from resentment at the post-1989 imperative to become Westernised.

His original analysis looks at the Trump revolution as an ironic fulfilment of the (over-optimistic) promise that the nations exiting communist rule would come to ressemble the US. Yet in a strange twist, Trump has elevated Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary into models for the United States.

Don’t miss this fresh perspective on the complex dialectic of liberalism and illiberalism, alongside an original explanation of the self-destruction of the liberal West as a universal utopia.   

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ABOUT

Ivan Krastev is a political scientist and one of Europe’s leading public intellectuals. He is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, permanent fellow at the IWM (Institute of Human Sciences) in Vienna, and 2013-14-17 Richard von Weizsäcker fellow at the Robert Bosch Stiftung in Berlin. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the board of trustees of the International Crisis Group and is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.  

GOOD READS 

2019 The Light that Failed (co-authored with Stephen Holmes)

2017 After Europe

2014 Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics on Protest

2013 In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders?