Advancing U.S. interests take should precedence over defending the “liberal international order” and the U.S. should not use its “national strength to uphold a fictive international community”, according to foreign… Read more »
Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright turned president in Czechoslovakia, had a unique ability to find hope in the bleakest of situations, notes Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for… Read more »
The geopolitical retreat of the West, the authoritarian resurgence, the erosion of belief in democratic values, and the loss of faith in the efficacy of democratic institutions have halted democratic… Read more »
In both developed and developing states, challenges to the liberal order are converging on a single main competitor, populist nationalism, which is a response to the tension between two central… Read more »
The central European states were the vanguards of communism’s collapse in the late 1980s, prompting a sense of inevitability about democracy’s benign coming, reinforced by the diverse figures who stepped… Read more »
The Czech Republic’s successful transition from communism to democracy would not have been possible without the activists who provided a courageous voice in favor of political and intellectual freedom and… Read more »
Russian nineteenth-century literature famously had a string of leading characters, the best known being Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, who were called superfluous men, notes Thomas de Waal, Senior Associate at… Read more »
Democracy is moving away from mass representation and the bureaucracy of the welfare state towards something more networked, open and personalized, argues Anthony Zacharzewski, the director of the Democratic Society,… Read more »
Václav Havel’s legacy is a vital moral and intellectual resource for confronting the authoritarian resurgence and for addressing the challenge of democratic renewal, a commemorative conference at the National Endowment… Read more »
Michael Ignatieff begins his new post this fall as president and rector of the famed Central European University – about as politically charged a job there is right now in… Read more »