The essay gives an overview of the rise of radical neoconservative discourses in East Central Europe in the wake of the seemingly successful completion of the transition agenda, culminating in NATO and EU accession. It describes the main directions of criticism aiming at the “liberal consensus,” held to be dominating the ideological frameworks of these countries in the 1990s. Offering the metaphor of Kulturkampf as a heuristic model to interpret the interplay between political claims and the battle for hegemony in the public sphere, it revisits some of the central battlegrounds of contention: that of memory politics, the critique of political correctness, and the debate around the reception of Western institutions and intellectual paradigms. Taking a closer look especially at the Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian discussions, the essay also identifies some of the most important ideological references of the “neoconservative revolution” envisioned by these ideologues, such as decisionism, the radicalization of the majoritarian principle toward a plebiscitary understanding of democracy, the reliance on the voluntary activism of an uncivil society, and, finally, a paradoxical antielitist sort of authoritarianism. All in all, while the most spectacular manifestation of this phenomenon is no doubt in Hungary after 2010, the essay argues that it should not be considered a local anomaly but rather a more general and, to a large extent, systemic problem of the postcommunist “transition societies,” which had a very clear image of the short-term trajectory to follow in order to reach the European framework but had far fewer ideas, let alone social consensus, of the type of democratic culture they wanted to create as a result of the transition.
This article offers an overview of the scholarly debates on Romanian nation building and national ideology during the first post-communist decade. It argues that the globalization of history writing and the increasing access of local intellectual discourses to the international “market of ideas” had a powerful impact on both Eastern European history writing and on the Western scholarly literature dealing with the region. In regard to Romanian historiography, the article identifies a conflict between an emerging reformist school that has gained significant terrain in the last decade and a traditionalist canon, based on the national-communist heritage of the Ceauşescu regime, preserving a considerable influence at the institutional level. In analyzing their clash, the article proposes an analytical framework that relativizes the traditional dichotomy between “Westernizers” and “autochthonists,” accounting for a multitude of ideological combinations in the post-1989 Romanian cultural space. In view of the Western history writing on Romania, the article identifies a methodological shift from social-political narratives to historical anthropology and intellectual history. On this basis, it evaluates the complex interplay of local and external historiographic discourses in setting new research agendas, experimenting with new methodologies, and reconsidering key analytical concepts of the historical research on Eastern Europe.
A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a two-volume synthetic overview, authored by an international team of researchers. Covering twenty national cultures and 250 years, it goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural entanglement of discourses. Its principal aim is to look at these cultures within the global “market of ideas” and also help rethink some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought and modernity as such. The second volume starts with the repercussions of the collapse of multinational empires in the region (Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, and Romanov) after the First World War, followed by multiple cycles of democratization and authoritarian backlash. Analyzing the intellectual paradigms and debates of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist decades it shows that although the imposed Sovietization had similar blueprints, it also entailed a negotiation with local intellectual traditions. At the same time, the book identifies paradigms, such as revisionist Marxism, which were eminently transnational and crossed the Iron Curtain. The phenomenon of dissidence is also analyzed from this perspective, paying attention both to local traditions and global trends. Last but not least, rather than achieving the coveted “end of history,” the liberal democratic order created in East Central Europe after 1989 became increasingly contested from left and right alike. Thus, instead of a comfortable conclusion pointing to the European integration of most of these countries, the book closes with pertinent questions about the fragility of the democratic order in this part of the world and beyond.
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