Events / Ivan Krastev

	Title	Date	Type	Speakers
	Europe After the Pandemic	Wed, 22.04.2020	Panels and Discussions	Ivan KrastevJordi Vaquer	Europe After the Pandemic Wed, 22.04.2020 Speakers: Ivan KrastevJordi Vaquer Series: Panels and Discussions The political scientist Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre of Liberal Strategies in Sofia and Permanent Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), and the political analyst and co-director of the Open Society Initiative for Europe, Jordi Vaquer, discussed the future of Europe after the COVID-19 crisis. Read more
Europe After the Pandemic Wed, 22.04.2020 Speakers: Ivan KrastevJordi Vaquer Series: Panels and Discussions The political scientist Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre of Liberal Strategies in Sofia and Permanent Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), and the political analyst and co-director of the Open Society Initiative for Europe, Jordi Vaquer, discussed the future of Europe after the COVID-19 crisis. Read more
	Liberalism in Crisis: Between Totalitarian Responses and Progressive Dreams	Tue, 25.02.2020	Panels and Discussions	Adam Ramsay Ivan Krastev Ivan Vejvoda Shalini Randeria Venelin GanevJacques Rupnik, Ana Blazeva, Katerina Kolozova	Liberalism in Crisis: Between Totalitarian Responses and Progressive Dreams Tue, 25.02.2020 Speakers: Adam Ramsay Ivan Krastev Ivan Vejvoda Shalini Randeria Venelin GanevJacques Rupnik, Ana Blazeva, Katerina Kolozova Series: Panels and Discussions In the past decade, many have spoken of the “crisis of democracy” due to the rise of populism in Europe, both in the East and the West, in the Union’s member states and in the aspiring member countries. But is democracy really what is at stake and in crisis nowadays, or is it a whole set of political-ideological values that are termed “liberal”? Can we argue that democracy is not a value system but an empty form of a political organization, a syntax that can be furnished with different semantics, including that of the illiberal world view as Viktor Orban has proposed years ago? Read more
Liberalism in Crisis: Between Totalitarian Responses and Progressive Dreams Tue, 25.02.2020 Speakers: Adam Ramsay Ivan Krastev Ivan Vejvoda Shalini Randeria Venelin GanevJacques Rupnik, Ana Blazeva, Katerina Kolozova Series: Panels and Discussions In the past decade, many have spoken of the “crisis of democracy” due to the rise of populism in Europe, both in the East and the West, in the Union’s member states and in the aspiring member countries. But is democracy really what is at stake and in crisis nowadays, or is it a whole set of political-ideological values that are termed “liberal”? Can we argue that democracy is not a value system but an empty form of a political organization, a syntax that can be furnished with different semantics, including that of the illiberal world view as Viktor Orban has proposed years ago? Read more
	Manufactured Alienation	Mon, 24.02.2020	Seminars and Colloquia	Adam Ramsay Ivan Krastev Ivan Vejvoda	Manufactured Alienation Mon, 24.02.2020 Speakers: Adam Ramsay Ivan Krastev Ivan Vejvoda Series: Seminars and Colloquia Boris Johnson turned the recent UK election into a referendum on the character of politics, and won by making democracy miserable. Based on years of investigating the dark money funded institutions which drove Brexit in the UK, undercover reporting across Europe, and street interviews with voters from Hungary to Spain and Scotland to Italy, openDemocracy’s Adam Ramsay detailed how elite networks of the super-rich and ultra-conservatives are sewing discontent with (neo)liberal democracy, and argued that progressives must embrace radical democracy. Read more
Manufactured Alienation Mon, 24.02.2020 Speakers: Adam Ramsay Ivan Krastev Ivan Vejvoda Series: Seminars and Colloquia Boris Johnson turned the recent UK election into a referendum on the character of politics, and won by making democracy miserable. Based on years of investigating the dark money funded institutions which drove Brexit in the UK, undercover reporting across Europe, and street interviews with voters from Hungary to Spain and Scotland to Italy, openDemocracy’s Adam Ramsay detailed how elite networks of the super-rich and ultra-conservatives are sewing discontent with (neo)liberal democracy, and argued that progressives must embrace radical democracy. Read more
	Rebuild Trust in Politics	Tue, 14.01.2020	Panels and Discussions	David F Goodhart Ivan KrastevWalter Hämmerle	Rebuild Trust in Politics Tue, 14.01.2020 Speakers: David F Goodhart Ivan KrastevWalter Hämmerle Series: Panels and Discussions If you are searching for the answers to such questions as why people make unexpected political choices or if the “illiberal democracies” are on the rise in Europe, you can find them in Ivan Krastev’s essay “After Europe”. This renowned political scientist from Bulgaria describes the current state of European society as a metaphorical U-turn in thoughts on globalization and geopolitics, refugee crisis and populism, whereas the latter threatens Europe’s established commitment to human rights and social solidarity. At the same time, David Goodhart, British journalist, divides people into two groups in his book “The Road to Somewhere”. There are the “Somewheres”, who crave for stability, perceive any change as a loss and are social-conservative and often less-educated, on the one hand; and urban, social-liberal “Anywheres”, who prefer self-realisation over stability and tradition, on the other. Even though “Somewheres” comprise ca. 50 % of the population and “Anywheres” just around 25 % - it’s the “Anywheres” who constitute the majority of the lawmakers among us. Read more
Rebuild Trust in Politics Tue, 14.01.2020 Speakers: David F Goodhart Ivan KrastevWalter Hämmerle Series: Panels and Discussions If you are searching for the answers to such questions as why people make unexpected political choices or if the “illiberal democracies” are on the rise in Europe, you can find them in Ivan Krastev’s essay “After Europe”. This renowned political scientist from Bulgaria describes the current state of European society as a metaphorical U-turn in thoughts on globalization and geopolitics, refugee crisis and populism, whereas the latter threatens Europe’s established commitment to human rights and social solidarity. At the same time, David Goodhart, British journalist, divides people into two groups in his book “The Road to Somewhere”. There are the “Somewheres”, who crave for stability, perceive any change as a loss and are social-conservative and often less-educated, on the one hand; and urban, social-liberal “Anywheres”, who prefer self-realisation over stability and tradition, on the other. Even though “Somewheres” comprise ca. 50 % of the population and “Anywheres” just around 25 % - it’s the “Anywheres” who constitute the majority of the lawmakers among us. Read more
	The Anthropologists’ Problem with Barter	Mon, 13.01.2020	Seminars and Colloquia	Georgy Ganev Ivan Krastev	The Anthropologists’ Problem with Barter Mon, 13.01.2020 Speakers: Georgy Ganev Ivan Krastev Series: Seminars and Colloquia The standard story of economists about the origins of money is that it came from barter. For most modern anthropologists this story is about as reasonable as the story that babies are brought by the storks. It has become such a big problem that many prominent anthropologists have recently turned against economics as a discipline in general. However, as so often in social science discourse, the anthropologists’ problem with barter has at least two sides. On the one hand, the extremely well-founded and empirically well-defended position that real life is so much more complex and nuanced than the formal lifeless economic models of the neoclassical synthesis makes the story of economists utterly untenable from both an empirical and historical perspective. On the other hand, defending this position has led almost all anthropologists to the opposite extreme, claiming that barter cannot possibly have been the origin of money, but that it has never existed in history. Thus, barter creates a problem for the apparently dominant anthropological discourse about money, because despite their claims to the contrary, it appears again and again both in historical records and in modern ethnographic descriptions of various societies. Read more
The Anthropologists’ Problem with Barter Mon, 13.01.2020 Speakers: Georgy Ganev Ivan Krastev Series: Seminars and Colloquia The standard story of economists about the origins of money is that it came from barter. For most modern anthropologists this story is about as reasonable as the story that babies are brought by the storks. It has become such a big problem that many prominent anthropologists have recently turned against economics as a discipline in general. However, as so often in social science discourse, the anthropologists’ problem with barter has at least two sides. On the one hand, the extremely well-founded and empirically well-defended position that real life is so much more complex and nuanced than the formal lifeless economic models of the neoclassical synthesis makes the story of economists utterly untenable from both an empirical and historical perspective. On the other hand, defending this position has led almost all anthropologists to the opposite extreme, claiming that barter cannot possibly have been the origin of money, but that it has never existed in history. Thus, barter creates a problem for the apparently dominant anthropological discourse about money, because despite their claims to the contrary, it appears again and again both in historical records and in modern ethnographic descriptions of various societies. Read more
	Democracy Is (No!) Fiction	Mon, 13.01.2020	Lecture	Ivan Krastev	Democracy Is (No!) Fiction Mon, 13.01.2020 Speakers: Ivan Krastev Series: Lecture Kick-off Event of the Jean Monnet Project “From Fictional to Functioning Democracy Developing Concepts and Strategies for an Inclusive and Participatory Europe” (FIFUDEM) Read more

	The Light That Failed. A Reckoning	Wed, 08.01.2020 - Wed, 08.01.2020	Panels and Discussions	Ivan Krastev Stephen HolmesMichael Ignatieff	The Light That Failed. A Reckoning Wed, 08.01.2020 - Wed, 08.01.2020 Speakers: Ivan Krastev Stephen HolmesMichael Ignatieff Series: Panels and Discussions Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only in the East but also back in the heartland of the West. Krastev and Holmes argue that the supposed end of history turned out to be only the beginning of an Age of Imitation. Reckoning with the history of the last thirty years, they show that the most powerful force behind the wave of populist xenophobia that began in Eastern Europe stems from resentment at the post-1989 imperative to become Westernized. Read more
The Light That Failed. A Reckoning Wed, 08.01.2020 - Wed, 08.01.2020 Speakers: Ivan Krastev Stephen HolmesMichael Ignatieff Series: Panels and Discussions Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only in the East but also back in the heartland of the West. Krastev and Holmes argue that the supposed end of history turned out to be only the beginning of an Age of Imitation. Reckoning with the history of the last thirty years, they show that the most powerful force behind the wave of populist xenophobia that began in Eastern Europe stems from resentment at the post-1989 imperative to become Westernized. Read more
	Europäische Nation vs. Europa der Nationen?	Sun, 10.11.2019	Panels and Discussions	Ivan Krastev Ivan Vejvoda Ruth WodakJacques Rupnik, Constanze Itzel	Europäische Nation vs. Europa der Nationen? Sun, 10.11.2019 Speakers: Ivan Krastev Ivan Vejvoda Ruth WodakJacques Rupnik, Constanze Itzel Series: Panels and Discussions Was hat die Nation zu einem Erfolgsmodell gemacht? Wie umgehen mit dem Wiedererstarken von Nationalismus und Isolationsbestrebungen? Und welche imperialen Vermächtnisse spielen in der aktuellen Identitätssuche Ost- und West-Europas eine Rolle? Read more
Europäische Nation vs. Europa der Nationen? Sun, 10.11.2019 Speakers: Ivan Krastev Ivan Vejvoda Ruth WodakJacques Rupnik, Constanze Itzel Series: Panels and Discussions Was hat die Nation zu einem Erfolgsmodell gemacht? Wie umgehen mit dem Wiedererstarken von Nationalismus und Isolationsbestrebungen? Und welche imperialen Vermächtnisse spielen in der aktuellen Identitätssuche Ost- und West-Europas eine Rolle? Read more
	American Diplomacy in a Disordered World	Thu, 19.09.2019	Panels and Discussions	Ivan KrastevWilliam Burns	American Diplomacy in a Disordered World Thu, 19.09.2019 Speakers: Ivan KrastevWilliam Burns Series: Panels and Discussions In the fifth event of the series “Geopolitical Talks” IWM Permanent Fellow Ivan Krastev talked with Ambassador William J. Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, about America’s changing role in the world and the purpose of American diplomacy. Read more
American Diplomacy in a Disordered World Thu, 19.09.2019 Speakers: Ivan KrastevWilliam Burns Series: Panels and Discussions In the fifth event of the series “Geopolitical Talks” IWM Permanent Fellow Ivan Krastev talked with Ambassador William J. Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, about America’s changing role in the world and the purpose of American diplomacy. Read more
	What the EU can learn from the Habsburg Empire	Thu, 06.06.2019	Panels and Discussions	Ivan KrastevA. Wess Mitchell	What the EU can learn from the Habsburg Empire Thu, 06.06.2019 Speakers: Ivan KrastevA. Wess Mitchell Series: Panels and Discussions In the fourth event of the Geopolitical Talks Series, IWM Permanent Fellow Ivan Krastev talked with A. Wess Mitchell, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (2017-2019), about current geopolitical challenges and lessons from the past. Read more
What the EU can learn from the Habsburg Empire Thu, 06.06.2019 Speakers: Ivan KrastevA. Wess Mitchell Series: Panels and Discussions In the fourth event of the Geopolitical Talks Series, IWM Permanent Fellow Ivan Krastev talked with A. Wess Mitchell, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (2017-2019), about current geopolitical challenges and lessons from the past. Read more