 Perhaps the most lasting legacy of 1989 will turn out to be not democracy’s spread but a revolution in our expectations of democracy. In his lecture „Democracy and Dissatisfaction. How 1989 Changed Our View on Democracy“ on January 26 Ivan Krastev, political scientist and IWM Visiting Fellow, argued that, paradoxically, the post-1989 consensus on democracy undercut the very basic advantage of democratic regimes, while at the same time making democracy triumphant. What democracies suffer from today is the lack of critical debate about merits and disadvantages of democratic regimes. Democracies are not and cannot be “satisfaction machines.” But what democracies do offer dissatisfied citizens is the satisfaction of having the right to do something about their dissatisfaction. Not least, that’s what 1989 has proven.
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