Thirty-five years ago, the Iron Curtain collapsed. So ended a brief-but-tragic period in the European story first defined by Winston Churchill in a 1946 speech – “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

As communist regimes fell from Budapest to Berlin to Prague and beyond, the autumn of 1989 represented the climax of a dark chapter in the biography of Central Europe. Communism’s denouement, manifest by cathartic outpourings of pent-up emotions in the historic capitals of the geopolitical interstices between Russia and the West, was pregnant with dreams of dignity, freedom and material prosperity by the previously oppressed masses. 

In the 15 years following the retreat of the red scourge from the heart of Europe, many of the hopes and aspirations of the 1989 demonstrations in Prague’s Wenceslas Square and elsewhere came to fruition as former Warsaw Pact members Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia (amicably divorced in 1992 to form two separate countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) returned to their historic Western roots with membership in both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. These first four were soon joined by their brethren in the Baltics and the Balkans to reseed Western values across a continent that had been artificially and painfully divided for over 40 years.

Under the rubric of “all good things must come to an end,” the luster of the liberal political renaissance of Central Europe has dulled considerably in the past decade. First, the reality of resurgent Russian revanchism on the region’s eastern flank injected new life into a heretofore relatively passive, traditionalist old guard pining for a return to a romanticized, simpler past.  The European immigration crisis of 2015 supercharged anti-EU, populist movements across the continent, as hundreds of thousands of refugees from the failed Arab uprisings of 2010 to 2012, as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, overran Europe’s southern soft underbelly. While then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel confidently proclaimed at the time that “we can handle this” (“wir schaffen das”), the political shockwaves to EU member states, particularly in the geographic east of the union, still reverberate today. 

In Budapest, Viktor Orban, in power since 2010, has turned Hungary into an “illiberal democracy” (Orban’s own characterization). Orban has maintained Hungary’s reliance on Moscow for energy and refused to provide military assistance to Kyiv, in the process becoming a thorn in the side of NATO and degrading European unity in the face of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Parroting inflammatory threats of immigrants taking over his country, the Hungarian leader has tightened his party’s (Fidesz) control of the judiciary, the media and academia, acting as an example for other populist leaders to emulate. 

That is exactly what has happened just to the north of Hungary in Slovakia, where Robert Fico, running on a virulently anti-Ukraine war, anti-immigrant platform, emerged victorious from general elections in the fall of 2023. The new Slovak prime minister wasted little time in implementing a series of laws aimed at restricting civil society in the country, specifically with respect to the arts, the media and the judiciary. Apparently borrowing freely from a Slovak-language version of Orban’s autocracy 101 playbook (or Putin’s), Fico has steered the small Central European NATO and EU member state squarely into Hungary’s illiberal camp. 

Meanwhile, 200 miles to the northwest of Bratislava, the current center-right government in Prague is facing mandatory elections no later than next fall. If current polling is to be believed, the upcoming plebiscite will sweep a populist regime back to power in the Czech Republic led by former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, completing a trifecta for the anti-EU, soft-on-Russia crowd in the geographical center of Europe. 

Thus, in the historically short span of 35 years, the heart of the European landmass has gone from spasmodic eruptions of mass euphoria over the collapse of the Soviet Union to the reawakening of pernicious, xenophobic, political movements more aligned with Russian autocracy than European liberal democracy. Here’s to the halcyon days of 1989!

Robert Beck of Peterborough served for 30 years overseas with the United States government in embassies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He now teaches foreign policy classes at Keene State College’s Cheshire Academy for Lifelong Learning.