The Reading Warehouse

The second volume starts with the repercussions of the collapse of multinational empires in the region after World War I, followed by multiple cycles of democratization and authoritarian backlash. Analyzing the intellectual paradigms and debates of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist decades it shows
that although the imposed Sovietization had similar blueprints, it also entailed a negotiation with local intellectual traditions. At the same time, the book identifies paradigms, such as revisionist Marxism, which were eminently transnational and crossed the Iron Curtain. The chronological starting
point of Volume II/2 is the defeat of the vision of socialism with a human face in 1968 and the political discourses produced by the various consolidation or normalization regimes. It continues with mapping the exile communities' and dissidents' critical engagement with the local democratic
and anti-democratic traditions as well as with global trends. Last but not least, rather than achieving the coveted end of history, the liberal democratic order created in East Central Europe after 1989 became increasingly contested from left and right alike. Thus, instead of a comfortable
conclusion pointing to the European integration of most of these countries, the book closes with pertinent questions about the fragility of the democratic order in this part of the world and beyond.