Conclusion: Seven Excursions into the Ideological Landscape of Eastern Europe

The concluding chapter discusses five nodes of postsocialist ideological struggles that the book’s authors addressed: anticommunism, Westernism, nationalism, irrationalism and antipolitics (through its three aspects of anti-corruption, civil society and technocratism). Slačálek characterizes these as discourses that are applied to obscure real social conflicts, but which at the same time rely on elements of real experience which can be critically reconstructed, and which can contribute to left-wing analyses and programs. He addresses anticommunism’s paralyzing effect on the local left together with the traps Ostalgia presents for new left politics; speaks of nationalist ideology as a means of autocratic and xenophobic politics, yet also a prism through which essential global power relationships become visible in popular politics; and investigates irrationalism as a powerful tool of neoliberal and neonationalist politics, yet also a ground of conflict that makes visible the political usages of reason and the need for the Left to develop a dialectical and self-critical rationality as a basis for its politics.