Authors

Discussion

The deterioration of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe  (CEE) from the mid-late 2000s – often taking the form of backsliding in the direction of a hybrid regime (Stanley 2019; Bakke & Sitter 2020) – came as an unwelcome and largely anticipated surprise to scholars and policy makers who had believed that the region had successfully consolidated into a flawed, but stable model of liberal democracy. The fact that supposed democratic trailblazers such as Hungary and Poland which were subject to the sharpest democratic regression was especially disconcerting.  Subsequent commentary saw this apparent scholarly misreading of the region’s democratic prospects was emblematic of post-Cold War liberal hubris coloured by notions such as the End of History, “transition“ and an overestimation of  top-down technocratic institutional transformation projects such EU enlargement (Carothers 2002; Krastev & Holmes 2019; Dawson & Hanley 2019).

However, an early vein of now largely overlooked area studies scholarship in the 1990s,  best exemplified by Ken Jowitt (1992), set far more pessimistic expectations about the prospects of democracy in the region, which – while  dismissed at the time  as misconceived– in hindsight seem increasingly prescient.  This paper revisits and re-evaluates such early post-1989  “breakdown prophecies” literature  - and critical responses to it which (correctly) debunked its short-term claims (Greskovits 1998) - and considers if and how certain of its insights could be re-connected with current debates  about democratic backsliding and resilience in CEE.

The paper concludes that despite often erroneous comparative and historical parallels; mis-estimating the early capacity of communist-era elites and institutions to adapt to democratic politics; and wrongly discounting speedy EU enlargement, these literatures correctly anticipated much that informs the contemporary debate about CEE and its democratic trajectory(-ies): its status as region of peripheral capitalism; the persistence and adaptability of informal institutions; the enduring appeal and flexibility of anti-liberal nationalist discourses; the potential for the (re-) of an illiberal left with a ‘red-brown’ mix of appeals; and the de-stabilising and autocratising potential of Russia.

Recognising this early literature’s  genuine, if partial,  insights, the paper argues, forces us to focus on those factors that delayed, slowed or temporarily contained  the potential for illiberal breakdown in the first 20-25 years  after 1989 (and  may continue partially  to do so).  This implies reframing post-1989 CEE democratisation as an unstable liberal interlude” rather than a phase of democratic consolidation later disrupted by external crises.