Central Europe’s Transition-Related Democracy Deficit

The ascent of “illiberal democracies” and populism in Central-Eastern Europe since 2010, merely two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, surprised the world and challenged Europe’s liberal values. Yet illiberalism has a long tradition in the CEE region, and the related path dependency is likely to be a main reason. The talk argues that it has also been amplified by some unintended consequences of the region’s post-communist transition itself and EU entry, which created an additional “democracy deficit” and pushed the region’s political transformation more towards illiberalism.

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society (OWNER), European Union Program at Princeton