CEU Press

Acknowledgements
The legacy of division: East and West after 1989
Ferenc Laczó and Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič
Staring through the mocking glass: Three misperceptions of the East-West divide since 1989
Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits
Back to Cold War and beyond
Richard Sakwa
The cost of unity: The transformation of Germany and East Central Europe after 1989
Philipp Ther
Thirty years on: Germany's unfinished unity
Claus Leggewie
This mess of troubled times
Karl Schlögel
The mythology of the East-West divide
Jan Zielonka
Anxious Europe
Florian Bieber
'But this is the world we live in': Corruption, everyday managing, and civic mobilization in post-socialist Romania
Jill Massino
The end of the liberal world as we know it? Two walls in 1989
James Wang
Wests, East-Wests, and divides
Niall Chithelen
The Great Substitution
Holly Case
The struggle over 1989: The rise and contestation of eastern European populism
Bogdan Iacob, James Mark and Tobias Rupprecht
Beyond anti-democratic temptation
Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu
Dissidence – doubt – creativity: Revisiting 1983
Joachim von Puttkamer
Gendering dissent: Human rights, gender history and the road to 1989
Robert Brier
Creating feminism in the shadow of male heroes: That other story of 1989
Zsófia Lóránd
Legacies of 1989 for dissent today
Barbara J. Falk
Of hopes and ends: Czech transformations after 1989
Ondřej Slačálek
Just because the map says so, doesn't mean it's true: Thirty years after 1989, from an island perspective
Owen Hatherley
The East in you never leaves
Julia Sonnevend
Freedom of movement: A European dialectic
Jannis Panagiotidis
'The Romanians are coming': Emerging divisions and enduring misperceptions in contemporary Europe
Diana Georgescu
The two faces of European disillusionment: An end to myths about the West and the East
Jarosław Kuisz
Go East!
Aleida Assmann
'The future was next to you.': An interview with Ivan Krastev on '89 and the end of liberal hegemony
‘The distorting mirror’: A conversation between Igor Pomerantsev and Peter Pomerantsev
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
This volume examines the legacy of the East–West divide since the implosion of the communist regimes in Europe. The ideals of 1989 have largely been frustrated by the crises and turmoil of the past decade. The liberal consensus was first challenged as early as the mid-2000s. In Eastern Europe, grievances were directed against the prevailing narratives of transition and ever sharper ethnic-racial antipathies surfaced in opposition to a supposedly postnational and multicultural West. In Western Europe, voices regretting the European Union's supposedly careless and premature expansion eastward began to appear on both sides of the left–right and liberal–conservative divides. The possibility of convergence between Europe's two halves has been reconceived as a threat to the European project.
In a series of original essays and conversations, thirty-three contributors from the fields of European and global history, politics and culture address questions fundamental to our understanding of Europe today: How have perceptions and misperceptions between the two halves of the continent changed over the last three decades? Can one speak of a new East–West split? If so, what characterizes it and why has it reemerged? The contributions demonstrate a great variety of approaches, perspectives, emphases, and arguments in addressing the daunting dilemma of Europe's assumed East–West divide.
Ferenc Laczó is an assistant professor in European History at Maastricht University.
Luka Lisjak Gabrijelcic is a Slovene historian, political analyst and translator.