Do liberal ideas suffer in the region because they are imported?
, an influential recent book, Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political thinker, and Stephen Holmes, an American law professor, argue that the rise of populist nationalisms in central and eastern Europe is in large part due to frustration with the way that liberalism was foisted on these countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Liberalism came into its own in the region from the mid-19th century until the 1930s. Civilian governments, albeit often elected fraudulently, became the norm. They suppressed church privileges and opened economies to the world. Yet then Latin American liberalism lost its way. It partly morphed into positivism, which exalted science but denigrated freedom, while industrialisation posed new challenges.
Despairing scholars began to argue that Latin America’s Catholic, corporatist heritage made it impervious to liberalism. Yet the failure of dictatorships, nationalists and Castroism brought liberals back in, with democratisation and pro-market economic reforms from the 1980s. The liberal achievement has been mixed, and politically fragile. Electoral democracy and constitutional rule have generally held up. But the separation of powers is often more notional than real.
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