The Cunning of History: What Thirty-Five Years of Eastern European Politics Taught Us About Political Creativity
The transition paradigm promised a single destination. Eastern Europe delivered twenty-one different answers. A Viadrina workshop takes stock.
On February 19, 2026, four scholars — Prof. Gwendolyn Sasse, Prof. Sonja Priebus, Prof. Beichelt, and myself — convened at the European University Viadrina to ask what remains of the transition paradigm and what a genuinely post-teleological political science of Eastern Europe might look like.
This workshop — “Beyond Transition? Long-Term Political Development in Eastern Europe (1989–2025)” — was organized around the publication of the Springer volume Die politischen Systeme im östlichen Europa, edited by Sonja Priebus and Timm Beichelt, the first comprehensive survey of political systems across 21 post-socialist states since Ismayr’s 2010 edition. With Gwendolyn Sasse (ZOiS, Berlin) moderating, the three presenters — Priebus, Beichelt, and myself — approached the same empirical landscape from three distinct registers: comparative regime mapping, historical-institutionalist analysis of critical junctures, and the political philosophy of plural institutionalizations.
The workshop’s central finding is sobering for anyone who still clings to the directional certainty of 1989: the post-socialist decades produced not delayed convergence on liberal democracy but a stable diversity of institutional outcomes — from the fragile consolidations of the Baltics and Czechia, through the arrested democracies of the Balkans, to the steep autocratizations of Hungary and Serbia, and the cyclical oscillations of Ukraine and Moldova. The concept of post-transformation names the condition in which the original agenda of democratization, marketization, and Europeanization has ceased to drive political competition, replaced by contests over security, sovereignty, identity, and the extension of patron-client networks. The EU’s normative gravity, once the single strongest predictor of democratic consolidation, has been eroded from within and without — a finding that Beichelt, who built his career on that very variable, presented with admirable candor.
The discussion — conducted entirely online due to rail failures and weather, yet substantive and at times contentious — pressed into the hardest questions the framework raises: the methodological indeterminacy of critical junctures, the absence of Georgia from the volume, the asymmetric treatment of informality (always corruption, never civic mobilization), and the structural near-impossibility of re-democratization in deeply autocratized systems like Hungary. What emerged is the outline of a political science that takes seriously both the creative freedom of the transition moment and the structural constraints that channeled it toward outcomes no one predicted — a science, in short, adequate to the cunning of history itself.