The Light that Failed Quotes

“The difference between post-communist China, post-communist Central Europe and post-communist Russia closely tracks the distinction between three styles or strategies of development: namely, imitating the means (or borrowing), imitating the ends (or converting), and imitating the appearances (or simulating).”
― Stephen Holmes, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“Tribalism and fundamentalism are such effective political mobilizers because they define ‘who we are’ based on a starkly one-dimensional distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’. This distinction increases its grip on human motivation under conditions of economic stress or rapid and unpredictable social change.”
― Ivan Krastev, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“Political technologists were, and to a limited extent still are, uncompromising enemies of electoral surprises, genuine party pluralism, political transparency and the freedom of well-informed citizens to participate in the choice of their rulers.”
― Ivan Krastev, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“The principal purpose of the Kremlin’s meddling in American elections is to reveal that competitive elections in the West – shaped by the manipulative power of money, disfigured by growing political polarization and emptied of meaning by a lack of genuine political alternatives – resemble Kremlin-engineered elections more than Westerners would like to think.”
― Ivan Krastev, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“Without help from a team of American political consultants and especially without a Clinton-arranged loan from the IMF coming on the eve of the elections, it is very likely that Boris Yeltsin would have lost his bid for re-election in 1996.”
― Ivan Krastev, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“Putin does not dream of conquering Warsaw or re-occupying Riga. On the contrary, his policies, to repeat, are an expression of aggressive isolationism, an attempt to consolidate one’s own civilizational space. They embody his defensive reaction to the threat to Russia posed by global economic interdependency and digital interoperability as well as the seemingly unstoppable diffusion of Western social and cultural norms.”
― Ivan Krastev, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“With no alternative centre of power challenging its claim to the future of mankind, liberalism fell in love with itself and lost its way. The unipolar Age of Imitation was a period when liberalism lost its capacity for self-criticism.”
― Ivan Krastev, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“America’s global agenda is transformative and generally supportive of regime change. The country’s foreign-policy-makers are not just rule-makers. They are missionary proselytizers for the American model, or at least they have been so through much of the country’s history”
― Ivan Krastev, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“Illiberal politicians owe their political success to popular resentment at having spent two decades genuflecting before putatively canonical foreign models. This explains why, in the populists’ over-the-top speeches, the European Union and the Soviet Union are discussed interchangeably.”
― Stephen Holmes, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“The most memorable lesson of the unexpected end of the Soviet Union for most Russians may be that history is a series of covert operations. Not the revolutionary masses, apparently, but the cloak-and-dagger intelligence agencies, in both East and West, are the real locomotives of history.”
― Stephen Holmes, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“It turns out that people often support, or at least accept, rulers not for what they do but simply because of the offices they inhabit or titles they hold. ‘Popularity’ in Russia is a consequence not a cause of the power one wields. Instead of representing people’s interests, elections register the willingness of voters to submit to incumbents who are able to sideline any and all challengers to their power.”
― Stephen Holmes, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“What ‘managed democracy’ simulated, in other words, was not democracy but management. It took only modest administrative capacity to rig an election; it was certainly easier to engineer elections than to provide a high-quality education”
― Stephen Holmes, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning

“El alcance de la emigración posterior a 1989 en Centroeuropa y en Europa del Este, que habría despertado el temor a la desaparición nacional, ayuda a explicar la profunda reacción de hostilidad a la crisis de los refugiados de 2015-2016 que tuvo lugar en toda la región, a pesar de que muy pocos se trasladaron allí.”
― Ivan Krastev, La luz que se apaga: Cómo Occidente ganó la Guerra Fría pero perdió la paz

“El populismo centroeuropeo, con su gusto por avivar la llama del miedo, vino a interpretar la crisis de los refugiados como la prueba definitiva de que el liberalismo debilitaba la capacidad de las naciones para defenderse por sí mismas en un mundo hostil.”
― Ivan Krastev, La luz que se apaga: Cómo Occidente ganó la Guerra Fría pero perdió la paz

“La unificación de Europa se vinculó de manera explícita a la unificación de Alemania. De hecho, a principios de los años noventa, muchos habitantes de Centroeuropa y de Europa del Este se morían de envidia ante la gran suerte de los alemanes del este, que habían emigrado al unísono a Occidente, de un día para otro, despertándose como por milagro en posesión de unos pasaportes de Alemania Occidental y con unos omnipotentes marcos alemanes en el bolsillo.”
― Ivan Krastev, La luz que se apaga: Cómo Occidente ganó la Guerra Fría pero perdió la paz

“imperativo”
― Ivan Krastev, La luz que se apaga: Cómo Occidente ganó la Guerra Fría pero perdió la paz

“La negativa a arrodillarse ante el occidente liberal se ha convertido en la marca distintiva de la contrarrevolución iliberal que tiene lugar en todo el mundo poscomunista y más allá. Una reacción semejante no se puede despachar descuidadamente con la frívola observación de que «culpar a Occidente es una forma fácil para los líderes fuera de su órbita de evitar la asunción de responsabilidades en sus propias políticas fallidas». La historia es mucho más enrevesada y apremiante que eso. Se trata del relato, entre otras cosas, de cómo el liberalismo ha abandonado el pluralismo en favor de la hegemonía.”
― Ivan Krastev, La luz que se apaga: Cómo Occidente ganó la Guerra Fría pero perdió la paz

“Because Trump is anti-intellectual to the point of illiteracy as well as erratic in his policy pronouncements, liberal commentators also assume that he has no coherent project that needs to be theorized and opposed as such. But a world-view can be intuitive rather than ideological. And a strategy can be instinctive rather than clear-headed and thought through.”
― Ivan Krastev, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning