Meeting of Visegrad-4 plus Balkan-4 plus in Sounion Greece, May 11,2018. Marios Lolos/ Press Association. All rights reserved.
In the Guardian on July 11 Ivan Krastev argued that Central Europe’s liberals had made the error of taking an anti-nationalist stance from some point in the late 1990s. This, argued Krastev, occurred when the region’s liberals drew the lesson from the wars in the former Yugoslavia that all nationalism leads inevitably to bloodshed and violence.
By following the German example of avoiding public displays of flag-waving and treating nationalism as a creed that ‘dare not speak its name’, he claims, these liberals unwittingly forced moderate nationalists into the ‘illiberal camp’, opening the door for the illiberal backsliding that blights the region today.
