Romania, Thirty Years After: The Bloody Revolution of 1989 and the Refusal of the Populist Consensus
Romania, Thirty Years After: The Bloody Revolution of 1989 and the Refusal of the Populist Consensus

Summary/Abstract: This paper has presented a general model to explain the political developments in ECE over the period 1989–2019, which focuses on path dependence, agency and contingency and explores the aggregation of structural, nation-specific and conjunctural factors. Such a model helps one explain the 1989 regime changes, the democratization processes during the first post-1989 decade and the gradual authoritarian backslidings which emerged after 2010 in Central Europe and influenced to different degrees all the countries in the region. The present paper has focused on the legacies of the 1989 regime changes in ECE, with a special emphasis on the Romanian case. The argument set forth has been that Romania did not experience authoritarian backsliding on the Central European model, as one could witness in Hungary and Poland in the post-2010 period and whose main feature has been identity politics

• Details
• Contents