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Explaining Eastern Europe: Imitation and Its Discontents | Journal of Democracy

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For countries emerging from communism, the post-1989 imperative to “be like the West” has generated discontent and even a “return of the repressed,” as the region feels old nationalist stirrings and new demographic pressures. The origins of the region’s current illiberalism are emotional and preideological, rooted in rebellion at the humiliations that accompany a project requiring acknowledgment of a foreign culture as superior to one’s own. Further contributing to illiberalism in the region is a largely unspoken preoccupation with demographic collapse—resulting from aging populations, low birth rates, and massive outmigration—which manifests as a fear that the arrival of unassimilable foreigners will dilute national identities and weaken national cohesion. In Mary Shelley’s 1818 horror story Frankenstein, an inventor driven by Promethean ambition creates a monster by assembling body parts drawn from “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house” and even “the unhallowed damps of the gr

Explaining Eastern Europe: Imitation and Its Discontents | Journal of Democracy Explaining Eastern Europe: Imitation and Its Discontents Ivan Krastev Stephen Holmes Issue Date July 2018 Volume 29 Issue 3 Page Numbers 117-128 Print Download from Project MUSE View Citation Select your citation format: MLA (Modern Language Association 8th edition) Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition (full note) APA (American Psychological Association 7th edition) For countries emerging from communism, the post-1989 imperative to “be like the West” has generated discontent and even a “return of

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