SOMEWHERE AND SOMETIME between 1989 and 2009 Europe lost its East. It ceased to be a monolithic political actor and broke into individual national elements with diversified situations and relations within the European Union. With its disappearance as a distinct political actor, its legacy has been subjected to reworking, which has rendered it meaningless at best, and at worst made it appear harmful to Europe's present and future.

To some this was the result of a long-desired revolutionary transformation that returned Eastern Europe to the main course of European history. In this view, the forty-five years of Eastern European history appear as a history gone astray. To those on the other side of the ideological divide, which is getting more visible in European politics after the political vertigo of the so-called post-ideological age, the loss was a counter-revolutionary motion, a conscious and intentional erasure of the legacy of social revolutions, and it created a debt that may well be paid off by contracting our present's visions of the future.

More specifically, the historical process of regime change has been complemented by a conscious political erasure of the legacy of socialist politics. The transition obscured the political experience of democratic practices of socialism, as well as the revolutionary experience of anti-fascist struggle and later uprisings and resistance to the regimes, which finally culminated in 1989. It is argued here that a political debt has thus been incurred, which is made visible and felt in present-day Europe through its political crisis of the so-called democratic deficit. The narrative of the triumph of the Western model in the Cold War has nowadays come to appear more and more as something of a pyrrhic victory because, as Susan Buck-Morss suggests, ‘the historical experiment of socialism was so deeply rooted in the Western modernising tradition that its defeat cannot but place the whole Western narrative into question’. It is my intention to show that post-1989 motions against the legacy of the socialist East, particularly Yugoslavia as a politically and culturally hybrid society, seriously shrank the horizons of our political future as seen from this present.