Words matter. These are the best Ivan Krastev Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
America is a nation of immigrants, but it is also a nation of people who never emigrate. Notably, Americans living outside the United States are not called emigrants, but ‘expats.’
America is militarily overstretched, politically polarized and financially indebted.
Russians clearly perceive America’s global influence as being in irreversible decline and American society shattered by major political, economic and ideological crises.
What makes me worry today is the alarming decline in the trust in democratic institutions – political parties, Parliaments, political leaders. Less and less people are going to the polls in most advanced democracies.
As a rule, governments monitor people.
It is people’s willingness to take personal risks and confront the powerful by daring to speak the truth, not the truth itself, that ultimately leads to change.
Germany, because of the fact and the perception of a special relationship with Russia, is the only one who can influence Russian debate. Russians also believe that Germans understand them best because they’ve been through a big war and know what humiliation means.
Before, revolutions used to have ideological names. They could be communist, they could be liberal, they could be fascist or Islamic. Now, the revolutions are called under the medium which is most used. You have Facebook revolutions, Twitter revolutions. The content doesn’t matter anymore – the problem is the media.
For the Kremlin, it is more feasible to preserve its great-power status in cooperation with the United States than in confrontation.
As China is about adaptation, not transformation, it is unlikely to change the world dramatically should it ever assume the global driver’s seat. But this does not mean that China won’t exploit that world for its own purposes.
Any unveiling is also veiling. No matter how transparent our governments want to be, governments will be selectively transparent.
Regimes like the one in Russia are stabilized by the fact that they have no ideology. There is really no ideological means to attack them.
A more stable relationship between Poland and Russia based on reconciliation might revive the reunification of Europe.
In 2008, Putin’s message was, ‘We aren’t like a Central Asian republic, we aren’t going to build a personalistic regime, we will have institutions.’ This is all abolished now. The very idea of a governing party and party career, as you have in China, that didn’t work.
The E.U. cannot act as guardian of the post-Cold War status quo without risking a collapse of Europe’s current institutional infrastructure.
Living in truth cannot be reduced to having access to full information.
Bulgaria has been deindustrialized by interest groups who extracted state assets like oil states extract the oil in their ground.
For the European Union, Russia is as important politically and economically as China is to the U.S.
Transparency is not about restoring trust in institutions. Transparency is the politics of managing mistrust.
Democracy has always been in crisis: democracy is all about practicing the art of bearable dissatisfaction. In democratic societies, people often complain about their leaders and their institutions. The gap between the ideal democracy and the existing one cannot be bridged.
