Category: Communist regimes

Can new social compact resolve tension between democratic recession and resilience?

     

The collapse of communism in Europe 30 years ago ended a broader social-democratic compact. Does the failure to refashion that compact explain varying degrees of democratic recession and resilience? NATO… Read more »

Europe’s East and West again divided – by values, not walls

     

Thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, ending the Cold War in Europe, new political divisions are rising between East and West. Despite the economic success of German reunification and… Read more »

Reversing CEE democratic backsliding a Sisyphean task

     

Countries in Central and Eastern Europe that made significant gains in building their new democracies following the Cold War are now experiencing a crisis of illiberalism that is weakening the… Read more »

Where every day is Kristallnacht

     

  Eighty-one years ago this week, in what is also known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” hundreds of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Nazi Germany were damaged or destroyed,… Read more »

1989: ‘Ideological lie’ exposed in democracy’s paradoxical moment

     

No empire in history has disintegrated as quickly or as bloodlessly as the Soviet one, in the remarkable year that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989…. Read more »

When foreign meddling backfires, can democrats advance?

     

The authoritarian resurgence threatens to bring back the great power competition that caused so much destruction during the first half of the 20th century, argues Mathew J. Burrows, director of… Read more »

Liberal democracy’s 1989 promise ‘a squandered opportunity’

     

Two great earthquakes shaped the present global order. The first, in 1989, seemed to promise an irresistible march towards liberal democracy and open markets. The opportunity was squandered by those… Read more »

Democracy under threat in post-Wall Europe: Spirit of 1989 fighting back

     

The west’s mistake after 1989 was not that we celebrated what happened in central Europe – and subsequently in the Baltic republics and the former Soviet Union – as a… Read more »

Why ceding ground to dictators doesn’t work

     

The world quickly becomes unsafe in the absence of U.S. power and will. Ceding ground to dictators is destined to work about as well today as it did when it… Read more »

The Soviet Collapse and the Charm of Hindsight: Misplaced optimism for Russian democracy?

     

On leaving Moscow in May 1992, I wrote: “I do not think it is an act of mindless optimism to look forward to a future in which Russia has developed… Read more »