Living in Revolutionary Times

With 2027 being a crucial – and possibly a ‘long and cruel’ – year for Europe, as elections are coming up in France, Italy, Poland and Spain, we speak with political scholar Ivan Krastev about how Europe should respond to the geopolitical storms raging around.

‘It feels like we are living in revolutionary times – but if this is a revolution, it is a revolution without a project.’ Few commentators have as sharp an eye for contemporary geopolitics as political scientist Ivan Krastev. Born, raised and educated behind the Iron Curtain in Bulgaria, and later working in Oxford and Vienna, Krastev has a unique understanding of both Western and Eastern European perspectives, giving him a keen insight into one of the most pressing questions in today’s geopolitics: how to deal with Russia.

The world is adrift, just as it was in the last century. But whereas the great ideologies of the twentieth century promised a utopian future, speaking of it in terms of what could be gained, Krastev observes how today we only imagine the future in terms of what can be lost. He sees a revolution without a project.

With 2027 being a crucial – and possibly a ‘long and cruel’ (dixit Krastev) – year for Europe, as elections are coming up in France, Italy, Poland and Spain, we speak with Krastev about how Europe should respond to the geopolitical storms raging around. How does he explain the enduring popularity of the radical right, as we saw again recently in Germany? What does the (potential) win of Le Pen in France and AfD in Germany mean for the EU’s position in the world? And is there already an endgame in sight in Ukraine?

Ivan Krastev is the holder of the Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellowship at the IWM. Furthermore, he is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group, the European Investment Bank Global Advisory Council, and the Board of Directors of GLOBSEC.

He is a Financial Times contributing editor and the author of Is it Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2020); The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2019), co-authored with Stephen Holmes, which won the 30th Annual Lionel Gelber Prize; After Europe (UPenn Press, 2017); Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest (UPenn Press, 2014), and In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders? (TED Books, 2013).