What the early pessimists on Eastern Europe got right

After 1989, a few scholars warned Eastern Europe’s new democracies would rapidly fail. They were wrong — but 30 years on, their “breakdown prophecies” look prescient.

I recently co-authored a couple of survey chapters (one here, one forthcoming) looking at the erosion of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe—one focusing on autocratisation as a process, the other on the region more broadly. Academia being what it is, the thrust of both has been less about changing politics than about changing scholarly debates over the last 30 years.

The received wisdom—especially in semi-academic commentaries—is that scholarship on democracy in the region was too optimistic and too liberal. Too liberal in the sense of assuming that institutions structuring and regulating political and economic competition—from political parties to stock markets to the whole grand architecture of the EU—would deliver. Much comparative politics literature of the 2000s told a story in which the right political and institutional choices could overcome and contain the negative legacies of culture and history. There would, of course, be uncertainties and challenges along the way, and the quality of Central and East European democracies—too corrupt, too top-down, too fissiparous—needed work. But the basic work of democracy building—the one-time buzzword was ‘democratic consolidation’—was considered done.

The arrival in government of illiberal populists in Hungary and later Poland in the mid/late 2000s changed all that. The scholarly agenda switched almost overnight to explaining ‘democratic backsliding’ towards new forms of authoritarianism—with liberal assumptions now under scrutiny. A mountain of academic literature has since described the processes, playbooks, and possible causes of this “illiberal turn,” ranging from the failure of promised economic catch-up with the West, to cultural disempowerment among the ‘left behind’, to the opportunism of power-hungry elites and the availability of rebooted illiberal-populist ideologies, all against a backdrop of growing global illiberalism.

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Early warnings of democratic breakdown

Looking back over the literature, one thing strikes me: in the 1990s, right after the fall of communism, there was a burst of scholarly and semi-scholarly writing about Central and Eastern Europe’s future that was far from universally optimistic. Indeed, some of it was much darker, more sceptical, and outright pessimistic. Area specialists warned that things might not go so well—that democracy might not consolidate, that liberalism might not take root. As Ken Jowitt put it in 1992:

“… it will be demagogues, priests, and colonels more than democrats and capitalists who will shape Eastern Europe’s general institutional identity. Most of the Eastern Europe of the future is likely to resemble the Latin America of the recent past more than the Western Europe of the present. Irony of ironies, it may be earlier writings by American academics on the ‘breakdown of democracy’ in Latin America rather than the recent literature on ‘transition to democracy’ that speak most directly to the situation in Eastern Europe.”

I remember reading some of these texts as a Masters student in the mid-1990s. At the time, they seemed bracing but ultimately too bleak—and soon, simply wrong.

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Failed ‘breakdown prophecies’

By the time I was completing my PhD in the early 2000s, the field had moved on. Most scholars were confident that liberal democracy had, if not fully triumphed, then at least taken hold. Sure, there were imperfections—fragile parties, murky corruption, post-communist legacies bending institutions in odd directions—but the direction of travel and permanence of liberal democracy in some form seemed clear.

In hindsight, pessimistic forecasts underestimated the speed and scale of European and international integration; the capacity of communist welfare states’ strategic social policy to buy off, divide, and pacify the immediate losers of economic transformation; the coherence and mobilising power of radical right traditions; and the pragmatism of communist nomenklatura elites, who were more than willing to fold themselves into market economies and ‘social democratise’. Analogies with Latin America, the Global South, or interwar Europe proved misleading. Béla Greskovits’s 1998 book The Political Economy of Protest and Patience brilliantly skewered the flawed logic of these failed ‘breakdown prophecies’.

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Re-read and recycle?

Yet the more I revisited this literature, the more I wondered whether it merited more than a dismissive paragraph in a handbook as just another example of social scientists being blindsided by regime developments in Eastern Europe. What once looked like success now seems, in hindsight, more brittle than we admitted, and the pessimism of Jowitt and others looks prescient.

Should we, I wondered, re-read the early pessimists? And if so, how? What might we learn from them?

Writers like Jowitt and George Schöpflin stressed the cultural and institutional legacies of communism: fragmented societies, weak institutions, and political cultures either cynically self-seeking or—on the dissident side—moralistic and ill-suited to the give-and-take of democratic politics.

Legacies were once the go-to explanation for almost everything in CEE, but three decades on they seem less compelling and less easily traceable, often diluting into a bland truism that the past shapes the present.

More interesting in both authors’ work is the idea of communism as a strange hybrid of the brutally modern and the deeply traditional—more complex than a simple story of crash modernisation. Some of these insights still seem applicable, in a different form, to the capitalist and democratic modernisation project. Tellingly, contemporary researchers on populism and democracy in CEE have rediscovered the term ‘neo-traditionalism’, coined by Jowitt in the 1970s.

Vladimir Tismăneanu, writing in the same period, worried about ideological instability, the fusion of left and right authoritarian reflexes, and the thin liberal consensus among elites and publics alike. Characteristically for the time, he made a Latin American analogy, wondering if an East European Perón was waiting in the wings. It seemed overblown, and too focused on the ideological and cultural grip of the past, but his emphasis on the power of illiberal narratives and their syncretic mash-up of discourses highlighted a blind spot in later, more optimistic literatures on comparative politics and Europeanisation.

Daniel Chirot’s sharp commentary on Tismăneanu’s 1996 essay—identifying, among other things, the role of ideological entrepreneurs—suggests that the gap between these dark expectations and the outward appearance of stable, if low-quality, democratic consolidation was perhaps thinner than we thought.

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Poor capitalism

Adam Przeworski in Democracy and the Market warned that simultaneous transitions to democracy and capitalism would be socially and politically explosive – one of many authors to want about the ‘dilemmas of simultaneity’ and the paradox of democracy having to create capitalism, rather than vice versa. He suggested that Eastern Europe could become a second Latin America—economically unstable, socially unequal, and democratically fragile. In the poetic final lines of the book, he warned that Eastern Europe was not culturally or historically distinct, nor immune to the populist protest politics of Latin America: “the East will become the South.”

In hindsight, he misjudged the dramatis personae and political processes, but he correctly identified the region’s politics and economics as those of a periphery, plagued by failed catch-up attempts. Viktor Orbán’s (in)famous 2014 speech about the ‘illiberal state’ was less about nationalism and Christian values than about economic growth and illiberal modernisation.

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Beyond failed foresight

A deeper, underlying question that crops in re-reading this older literature is how we should use failed predictions and outdated paradigms. Often, they are simply forgotten or, as in our work, relegated to the outer reaches of a literature review.

We still read Aristotle or Tocqueville—not for predictive accuracy, but for their conceptual tools, their ways of framing problems, and their insights into human behaviour under political stress. Perhaps we should treat early post-communist pessimists the same way—not as failed prophets, but as diagnosticians of risk and forgers of concepts we can repurpose.

Most of the literature I’m revisiting wasn’t based on empirical data. It was written during a time of radical uncertainty, at a moment of rupture, not consolidation. That kind of speculative, essayistic writing is rare today, and more likely to appear online—in blogs, social media, or podcasts—than in academic journals.

‘Breakdown prophecies’ were often advocacy in disguise: policy prescriptions framed as warnings, whether neoliberal or social democratic. Václav Havel’s famous warning of a ‘post-communist nightmare’ was as much a call to action as a prediction.

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The power of nightmare

As David Runciman and Phil Tinline note, crisis narratives and worst-case scenarios are staples of political debate. They are not necessarily predictions; and if the nightmare futures don’t materialise, it may be precisely because the warnings were heeded.

Dark political imagination of this kind was sorely missed as democratic backsliding, emergency politics, and Putin-inspired redrawing of the international order took shape. Academic discourse—even in venues like the Journal of Democracy—was cautious and often disbelieving about the onset of backsliding in Eastern Europe. Few in America foresaw Trump’s victory, and fewer still anticipated his authoritarian potential, though once in office it was quickly noted.

Harnessing the power of nightmare may deserve a place in research impact and engagement. And while today’s political science aims to reduce uncertainty, perhaps we need to reclaim it—not as a failing, but as an honest response to a genuinely open future.

Jowitt’s 1991 assessment in New World Order: The Leninist Extinction feels apt for our current moment, in which liberal political forms are evolving and dying off:

“We now inhabit a world which, while not ‘without form and void’ like the primordial chaos in Genesis, is nonetheless a great deal more fluid than it was just a very short while ago. The major imperatives of this world, moreover, will be the same as those facing Yahweh in Genesis: ‘naming and bounding.”

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Re-read with a dose of humility

In key respects, the early pessimists in Eastern Europe weren’t wrong—just early.

It is worth re-reading older literatures with a new eye, and with humility. They may have erred in their mechanisms, but they were right about the brittleness and vulnerability of the post-1989 democratic project. They were wrong about timing and scale—just as more recent forecasts about an aggressively authoritarian first Trump term were wrong.

Political projects, whether illiberal or—as scholars of democratic resilience should note—liberal, take time to gain momentum. They can stall, reboot, and evolve. We need to allow for multiple intellectual styles—quantitative, conceptual, diagnostic—to coexist.

Pessimism doesn’t have to mean despair. It can be a form of political seriousness: a way of keeping our eyes open to risks and truths we might prefer to ignore. Worst-case scenarios and failed breakdown prophecies – thoroughly understanding, yet wrong - have a usefulness we ignore at our peril.