Europe & Central Asia Archives - Page 12 of 13

Hungary: How Liberty Can Be Lost

Tyrannies always collapse, but whether Hungarians will escape with their sanity and sufficient clarity for a new start remains to be seen

July 23, 2019 • by Agnes Heller

As the Bible (Exodus) teaches and, more recently, Hannah Arendt warns, liberation is not yet liberty. The institutions of liberty must first be constituted, and people need to learn how to make them work while breathing spirit into them. The years 1989–1991 were a time of liberation for all the people ...

Democracy

The People’s Vote That Ended Communism

Lessons from Poland on the role of elections

June 8, 2019 • by Jim Bjork

On June 4th, 1989, Polish voters went to the polls to elect new members to the national legislature. The election was designed to produce a managed, incremental modification of the Communist regime’s four-decade-long rule. Only a third of seats in the lower house (the Sejm) were contested, and the newly ...

Europe & Central Asia

Forming a New Polish Political Consciousness

Part Three: Confronting Polish Responsibility for the Shoah in Paris

May 8, 2019 • by Izabela Wagner

Editor’s note: in two prior essays on the challenges Polish scholars are confronting in their efforts to bring attention to Polish-responsibility for portions of the Shoah, Prof. Wagner discussed the origins of, and the historical and contemporary resistance to, the New Polish School of the History of the Shoah. In this ...

Forming a New Polish Political Consciousness

Democracy

Who Wants to Live in a Comedy State?

A tough choice to make in the Ukrainian elections

April 19, 2019 • by Mariia Shynkarenko

It would be fair to say that notwithstanding the protracted war in Donbass and endemic corruption, Ukraine has managed to prove itself a prudent player in the region. Over the course of five years, Ukraine weaned itself off Russian gas, strengthened its army, signed an association agreement with the European ...

Europe & Central Asia

The Subtext of a Recent International Scandal

Part One: Confronting Polish Responsibility for the Shoah in Paris

April 17, 2019 • by Izabela Wagner

In Paris, on February 22nd of this year, a conference entitled “The New Polish School of the History of the Shoah” (NPSHS) began. The conference was meant to be a celebration, particularly a celebration of all the research done over the past 15 years on the role that non-Jewish Poles played ...

The Subtext of a Recent International Scandal

Europe & Central Asia

Democracy in Hungary

The Alliance of State Autocracy and Neoliberal Capitalism

April 10, 2019 • by Attila Antal

Looking at the last few years in Hungary – overflowing as it is with hate against refugees, migrants, liberals, George Soros, leftists, homeless people, NGOs, public intellectuals, and the political opposition – we can easily recognize that the political system is as far from a democracy as it was during ...

Europe & Central Asia

Democracy in Hungary?

The Orbán regime is clearly not democratic

March 5, 2019 • by Zoltán Gábor Szűcs

There is no democracy in Hungary anymore. If you have a hegemonic party that has gained a constitution-making majority in the parliament three times in a row, in increasingly rigged elections, one does not have a democracy. If the power of all major independent institutions is curtailed, or they are led ...

Democracy

Authoritarian Parasitism in Turkey and Beyond

Erdogan and the rise of strongman politics

February 6, 2019 • by Utku Balaban

What makes this phenomenon perplexing is the fact that these governments come into power in countries that are anything but similar. For instance, the United States has a long-lasting political system backed by its strong institutions and semi-holy texts such as its Constitution. Hungary reframed its entire political regime after ...

Authoritarian Parasitism in Turkey and Beyond

Europe & Central Asia

From Casting Director to Failed Coup

Unseating the Turkish military

March 6, 2018 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

The most recent period of competitive democratic politics in Turkey was bookended by two coups: those of 1980 and 2016. If the first heralded the re-organization of politics under the supervision of the military, the second instigated the transition to a civilian autocracy. The significance of the failed coup of ...

Europe & Central Asia

A Revolution in the Polling Booths?

The new constitutional order in Orbán’s “illiberal” Hungary

March 5, 2018 • by Mátyás György Endrey

In line with these ambitions, Orbán was also quick to announce that he considered the new parliament to be “a constitutional assembly,” tasked with setting the solid foundations for the new system in the form of a new constitution, The Fundamental Law, coming into force on January 1, 2012. This ...

Democracy

Political Narratives and Authoritarian Consolidation in Turkey

Telling a different story about July 15

October 16, 2017 • by Ates Altinordu

Although more than a year has passed since the event, many details about the planning and implementation of the coup remain unknown. The “confessions” released to the public seem heavily filtered by the government, and a parliamentary commission charged with investigating the coup attempt has curiously neglected to question key ...

Europe & Central Asia

The Tragedy of the 2015 Turkish Elections

Examining the AKP victory

November 10, 2015 • by Ertug Tombus

The November 2015 election brought a landslide victory to the Justice and Development Party (AKP), increasing its vote almost nine points in 5 months. This surprising comeback would be hard to explain in an ordinary situation where such drastic shifts in voting in a short time period would not be ...