Understanding Democracy in Eastern Europe: Radical Democratic Perspective with a View from Latvia

Abstract The rise of illiberal politics in Eastern Europe seems to have confirmed the worst expectations about the democratic stability in the region. Yet, this interpretation can be criticized as reproducing the view of perpetually “immature” Eastern Europe. The article elaborates the criticism in regard to more recent literature in the field and offers an alternative perspective for analyzing democracy in the region, which draws on the radical democratic theory by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Using the case of Latvia, I discuss Laclau’s account of ethnopopulism and critically examine the discursive relationship between “the people” and “the state” that emerges in this view. The article offers an alternative perspective to the dominant paradigm of democratization in Eastern Europe, including its interpretation of populism. It shows the value of applying radical democratic theory to a wider variety of contexts.