Authors

Matej Ivančík¹;  ¹ Comenius University in Bratislava, Faculty of Arts, Slovakia

Discussion

Democratic backsliding in the ECE countries and the emergence of populist movements have been attributed to a good deal of factors. Little attention, however, has been brought to the democratic endeavours in 1989 and through the 1990s. While acknowledging the dissident legacies, I maintain we should take into serious consideration what the emergence of democracy in ECE after 1989 meant for its ethos, legitimization and imagery. Within this realm, the case of Slovakia’s Public against Violence’s (VPN) rather early and sad ending, not quite differing from other ECE democratic movements, provides an exceptional case study of entanglements of participation, ethno-nationalism, and liberal-democratic institutionalism. The main question to be posed is how and why the seemingly sole legitimate democratic protagonists lost on the very grounds of lacking in democratic revolution’s legacy. However, the focus on both the explosiveness of vocalized ethno-national ambitions and particularisms in economic interests emerging into the dissolution of Czechoslovakia happened to overshadow the enquiry into how “democracy coped with” the various meanings of its striving. Thus, in contradiction to this narrative, democracy should be examined as a political language with its ingrained polyvalence of outcomes, even that of its own failure to sustain a long-term framework of both attractive and legitimate modus vivendi.