CBEES Advanced Seminar with Lelde Luik, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University

Speaker: Lelde Luik, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University

Discussant: Tomas Wedin, Senior Lecturer at the School of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Halmstad, and Associate Researcher at the École des hautes en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris

Abstract: Democratization studies in the post-socialist context have focused on the implementation of liberal democratic institutions and procedures. This processes has been judged as overall successful, though less than so in the terms of political culture, manifested, among other issues, by the lower civic and political participation in Eastern Europe. In a more recent scholarship, populism and illiberalism in the region have been connected with the ‘backsliding’ of post-socialist democratization. These assessments can be critiqued from the postcolonial perspective since they are based on the argument about a single Western model of democracy that Eastern Europe must emulate. Moving beyond the post-colonial critique and addressing its limitations, however, the paper situates post-socialist democratization in the constructivist scholarship of democratic theory. Drawing on the work by Claude Lefort and Pierre Rosanvallon, I argue about understanding democratization as a history of dealing with the uncertainty of the social. I illustrate this argument with the discourse analysis of Estonian and Latvian debates about democracy in the mid-1990s. The paper aims to address both the conceptualization of democracy in post-socialist studies and to engage with the notion of democratization in constructivist democratic theory, drawing on the experience of Eastern European states.