11 November 2020
How to Self-Castrate
Donald Trump’s defeat at the US presidential election has wrong-footed some of his staunchest loyalists in Central and Eastern Europe. In Estonia, the former master pupil in the CEE ‘class of democracy’, the Trumpist part of the government has suffered a kind of public nervous breakdown with a set of unrestrained remarks aired on a radio talk show on 8 November about the allegedly ‘rigged elections’ in the US and the ‘corrupt character’ of the US President-Elect Joe Biden. This crassly undiplomatic spell of verbal incontinence by the prominent representatives of the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE), including two members of the government, culminated in the resignation of the Minister of the Interior Mart Helme. Continue reading >>
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09 January 2018
Decommunization in Times of War: Ukraine’s Militant Democracy Problem
The Ukrainian parliament Verkhovna Rada adopted four ‘memory laws’ shortly after the Maidan revolution in the spring of 2015: One contains a legislation criminalizing both Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes, prohibiting the propaganda of their symbols; two laws commemorating, respectively, Ukraine’s fighters for twentieth-century independence movement and the victory over Nazism during the Second World War, and a law guaranteeing access to archives of repressive Soviet-era organs. These laws raise fundamental questions about the legitimate defense of democracy in times of political transformation and war. Continue reading >>
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