Carlos Bravo Regidor interviews Ivan Krastev in The Ideas Letter:
Carlos Bravo Regidor: The year 2024 is coming to an end and it might be fitting to kick off this conversation by asking you about its significance—not necessarily in terms of what is to follow, but rather in terms of what has happened and what it means retrospectively. How would you assess 2024 in light of where we were coming from and where it leaves us?
Ivan Krastev: 2024 is certainly going to be remembered as a turning point. When the year started, everybody was pointing at its unusual combination of wars and elections. And there was this sense of change, of something ending and something else starting, and that was felt everywhere. But the strongest sign of the fact that we’re living in a moment of radical change is not what we’re discussing about the future; it’s what we’re discussing about the past. If you look at 2024 and you go back to the debates about what happened in, for example,1989, you’ll see how different that conversation is today. Because, in a certain way, it’s not simply about this cliché that the post–Cold War world was ending: It’s more about how we’ve realized there was always something about it, something more, that we weren’t ready to see. And now we are.
Today we see 1989 as something more than the fall of the Berlin Wall; it was about the massacre at Tiananmen Square, too. So, it meant not only the end of communism in Europe, but also the resilience of communism in China, which has turned out to be quite important, perhaps even more important, historically. And 1989 was significant for radical Islam: It was that year that for the first time an Islamist country defeated a superpower. In fact, a 2019 survey conducted by the Levada Center, an independent pollster, asked Russians what was for them the most important thing that happened in 1989, and most answered not elections in Poland, not Tiananmen, not the Berlin Wall, but the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. That wasn’t about the end of communism; it was about Moscow losing its superpower mystique.
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