If we want to understand the cultural forms and conceptual repertoire behind today’s culture wars in East Central Europe, we need to dig before 1989. With the help of the concept of ‘narratives of democracy,’ this talk by Dr. Michal Kopeček will go beyond the liberal vs. populist scheme prevailing today and offer a more nuanced reading.

To be sure, today’s cultural, political, and symbolic cleavages are embedded in the pre-1989 history and their dissident genealogy gives them both mobilization potential and moral standing. Yet any essentialist reading portraying the democratic opposition as an eternal rift between what much later, at the turn of the century, became the liberal Left and the national-conservative Right, would be misleading and ahistorical. The opposition was much more plural containing many other cleavages, contradictions, controversies, and animosities, so that very different political differentiations and political outcomes were imaginable.