About the author
Ivan Krastev (b. 1965) is a Bulgarian political scientist and chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia; Stephen Holmes (b. 1948) is an American legal scholar at NYU. Their collaboration produced one of the most acclaimed analyses of the global crisis of liberalism, winning the Lionel Gelber Prize.
Synopsis
The authors argue that the collapse of communism left liberal democracy as the only model, turning politics in the post-communist world into an exercise in imitating the West — a process experienced as humiliating loss of identity and sovereignty. They trace how this resentment produced the illiberalism of Central Europe, the revanchism of Putin's Russia, and, in a final twist, the imitation of authoritarian methods by the West itself, especially Trump's America.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted workKrastev and Holmes argue that the demand to imitate the liberal West after 1989 — with its implied inferiority and loss of identity — bred the resentment now driving the nationalist and authoritarian revolt against liberalism.
By explaining the illiberal backlash through the psychology of imitation and humiliation rather than economics alone, the authors offer a distinctive account of why liberalism's post–Cold War triumph produced its own enemies. It reframes the global democratic recession as a revolt against being made to copy.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with accounts that locate the backlash in economics (inequality, the 2008 crisis) or in social media and elite failure rather than in the psychology of imitation, and with defenders of liberal universalism who resist the book's sympathy for the imitators' grievances.
Reading note
Read it as a subtle complement to the democratic-backsliding literature (Levitsky and Ziblatt, Mounk), focused on the post-communist world and the politics of imitation.
Best paired with
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man; Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?