Fantasies of Salvation - Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Hardcover)

Eastern Europe has become an ideological battleground since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with liberals and authoritarians struggling to seize the ground lost by Marxism. In this text, Vladimir Tismaneanu traces the intellectual history of this struggle, and warns that authoritarian nationalists pose a serious threat to democratic forces. Tismaneanu shows that extreme nationalistic authoritarian thought has been influential in Eastern Europe for much of this century, while liberalism has only shallow historical roots. Despite democratic successes in places such as the Czech Republic and Poland, he argues, it would be a mistake for the West to assume that liberalism will always triumph. He backs this argument by showing how nationlist intellectuals have encouraged ethnic hatred in such countries as Russia, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia by reviving patriotic myths of heroes, scapegoats, and historical injustices. And he shows how enthusiastically these myths have been welcomed by people desperate for some form of "salvation" from political and economic uncertainty. On a theoretical level, Tismaneanu challenges the common ideas that the ideological struggle is between "right"