Eastern Europe in Post-Transition Period: Post-Communist Challenges, European Solutions
This project investigates the political trajectories of Eastern European societies after the exhaustion of the transitological paradigm, asking what conceptual frameworks can adequately capture the plural and often divergent institutionalizations that have emerged across the post-communist space since 1989. Drawing on the author's concept of "political creativity," the study argues that Eastern European polities did not simply succeed or fail at replicating Western liberal-democratic models, but generated genuinely novel and theoretically significant political forms, including hybrid regimes, patronal democracies, and what the author terms "intelligent autocracies."
The project examines how these formations relate to deeper structural legacies of Soviet and imperial governance while also responding to specifically European normative pressures, above all the gravitational pull of EU integration. Particular attention is paid to the cases of Ukraine, Russia, and the Visegrád states as exemplifying three distinct logics of post-transitional development. The research situates these trajectories within a broader diagnosis of Western modernity's normative crisis, which has undermined the very teleological assumptions on which the transition paradigm rested. By bringing post-Soviet and East-Central European cases into a single analytical frame, the project seeks to contribute both to contemporary history and to political philosophy, proposing that Eastern Europe's experience illuminates the limits and possibilities of European political order as such.
The fellowship period at ZZF will be devoted to completing an article that synthesizes these lines of inquiry, integrating the author's qualitative fieldwork, comparative institutional analysis, and philosophical reflection on the fate of universalist political projects in a post-teleological age.
The project examines how these formations relate to deeper structural legacies of Soviet and imperial governance while also responding to specifically European normative pressures, above all the gravitational pull of EU integration. Particular attention is paid to the cases of Ukraine, Russia, and the Visegrád states as exemplifying three distinct logics of post-transitional development. The research situates these trajectories within a broader diagnosis of Western modernity's normative crisis, which has undermined the very teleological assumptions on which the transition paradigm rested. By bringing post-Soviet and East-Central European cases into a single analytical frame, the project seeks to contribute both to contemporary history and to political philosophy, proposing that Eastern Europe's experience illuminates the limits and possibilities of European political order as such.
The fellowship period at ZZF will be devoted to completing an article that synthesizes these lines of inquiry, integrating the author's qualitative fieldwork, comparative institutional analysis, and philosophical reflection on the fate of universalist political projects in a post-teleological age.
During his stay at the ZZF Potsdam, Professor Dr. Mykailo Minakov is a visiting fellow in Department I: Communism and Society. / Während seines Aufenthalts am ZZF Potsdam ist Professor Dr. Mykailo Minakov Visiting Fellow in Abteilung I: Kommunismus und Gesellschaft.