The Age of Imitation and Its Discontents
The end of the Cold War gave birth to the age of imitation. This imitation had different names - globalization, democratization, integration, but the meaning was clear. Imitating the West, its values, institutions and practices was the imperative. Looking back at the three post-Cold War decades and reflecting on the current crisis of liberal democracy, Ivan Krastev tries to suggest: why does imitation fuel resentment and hostility? Why do many imitators of foreign institutions feel like impostors? And why not only imitators but the imitated turned against the post-1989 liberal order?
Full lecture available here.
Keynote Speaker
Ivan Krastev, Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences.
He is a founding board member of theEuropean Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of Trustees of The International Crisis Group and is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. Krasteve was appointed as the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress (2018-2019). His latest books in English are After Europe (2017), Democracy Disrupted (2014), The Global Politics on Protest (2014). He is a co-author with Stephen Holmes of a forthcoming book The Light that Failed (2019) on perils of the politics of imitation.
Respondents
Heather Grabbe, Director of the Open Society European Policy Institute
Jorg Kustermans, Assistant Professor in International Relations at the University of Antwerp