Democratic backsliding and competing narratives: towards neo medieval politics?

Scholars writing on the sovereignism of east central Europe have used different labels and explanations for the region’s political transformation in the last decade. 

The concepts of democratic backsliding, illiberal democracy, hybrid regime and spin dictatorship have all been applied to make sense of this tendency. The explanations for the authoritarian turn included globalization, regional reluctance to give up freshly gained sovereignty to supranational organizations after 1989, the financial crisis of 2008, the consequent dwindling of the middle classes and old authoritarian reflexes from the interwar and the Cold War eras. A common theme is that they all focus exclusively on 20 th and 21 st century developments. 

In this lecture, prof. Kelemen aims to uncover some of the longer-term shifts underlying this transformation by using a systematic longue durée approach, relying on the theory of neomedievalism in International Relations and the mixed constitutional understanding of the European Union.