The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s arguments and findings and discusses their implications. Whether we seek to understand the electoral viability of illiberal forces or their behavior in power, the legacies of critical junctures of market reform remain pivotal. Crucially, as institutional developments entail the interplay between historical legacy and human agency, illiberal outcomes unfold in the probabilistic shadow of prior neoliberal deepening. The chapter closes with a discussion of (1) the study’s contributions to research in the tradition of Karl Polanyi; (2) the social bases and neoliberal adaptations of illiberal incumbents; (3) the legacies of Eastern Europe’s transition to democracy and the market; and (4) the crisis of liberalism and the Left. Although intense market reforms have failed to produce democratic stability and illiberals have kept finding ways to opportunistically exploit neoliberalism to their own advantage, the book ends on an optimistic note. Far from inevitable, the illiberal challenge can be countered – and democracies strengthened – if forward-thinking political agents learn from past experiences and progressive examples, build parties around new ethical principles, and focus on delivering economic well-being to broad social coalitions.

Chapter 1 introduces the study’s core puzzle and overall logic of inquiry. It discusses main themes, locates arguments relative to relevant scholarship, and establishes the analytical framework. Early in the chapter, the puzzle of varying illiberal electoral outcomes is presented and contextualized. Captured by two distinct yet related indicators – illiberal voting and post-neoliberal populist magnitude – illiberal electoral outcomes not only varied persistently across countries but also signaled the high salience of economic issues in postcommunist Europe. The next section establishes the rationale for explaining outcomes by drawing insights from Latin America – another semi-peripheral space that experienced consequential neoliberal junctures. Having argued, based on key economic and political parallels between the two regions, that a critical juncture approach is appropriate also for making sense of developments in Eastern Europe, I spell out the work’s central propositions and highlight theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions. The final sections discuss matters of research design and evidence – namely, the mixed method approach, case studies, and quantitative and qualitative data, including 100 interviews – as well as the book’s organization.

Chapter 5 examines path dependencies in Slovakia and Poland, where postcommunist junctures produced powerful illiberal reactions in the 2000–20 period. It does so by unpacking political and societal dynamics and emphasizing how illiberal forces reaped considerable electoral benefits. In both countries, mainstream leftist parties embraced the neoliberal agenda and (eventually) failed, with many of their former supporters becoming available for subsequent populist mobilization. As the Left’s failures occurred amid the rising salience of economic concerns, adaptive illiberals gained at the ballot box. While it stresses key similarities in terms of the core mechanism linking postcommunist junctures and illiberal electoral outcomes, the chapter also identifies important distinctions between reactive sequences in Slovakia and Poland. Indeed, bait-and-switch tactics may have defined junctures in both cases, but political configurations featured more nuanced distinctions specifically in terms of agency, which, in turn, conditioned important differences between illiberals in the two countries. Overall, whereas the patterns of similarity substantiate the book’s core theory linking early market reform legacies and illiberal electoral outcomes, the differences suggest that the critical juncture framework can be further refined – to which I return in the book's final part.

Chapter 2 develops the book’s core theoretical framework. After discussing some relevant literature that focuses on the significance of historical legacy and political agency in Eastern Europe, I turn to political economy, sociological, and anthropological perspectives influenced by the work of Karl Polanyi and then elaborate on the Latin American parallel. Next, I define postcommunist junctures and locate fifteen Eastern European countries in three categories, depending on who led the charge for and against market reforms during relevant periods. The chapter then develops the book’s central argument, according to which distinct political configurations during junctures led to persistently varying odds of illiberal electoral viability via a two-step process. Concretely, postcommunist junctures shaped divergent path dependencies on the Left, which, in turn, conditioned subsequent antiestablishment parties’ programmatic choices and probabilities of electoral success. As in Latin America, illiberal outcomes in Eastern Europe were products of contingencies during neoliberal junctures. Unlike Latin America's key market reform periods, postcommunist junctures triggered a more specific mechanism, in which the status of the Left is a crucial intervening variable.

Chapter 3 offers an initial empirical assessment of the book’s main argument. It begins by identifying the partisan Left and Right in postcommunist Europe and analyzing patterns of their programmatic positions and ballot box results. The findings support the theoretical expectation that the long-term economic stances and electoral performance of the Left, but not of the Right, are two mutually related legacies of postcommunist junctures. Next, having developed a set of variables to compare long- and short-term electoral effects on the Left, I show that the former are the stronger predictor of illiberal electoral outcomes. The chapter closes with a discussion of why rival arguments prioritizing economic, political, and cultural demand, institutional and leadership supply, and international factors fail to adequately explain the variation identified in book’s opening chapter. This point is empirically reinforced in Appendix D, where I test the plausibility of the postcommunist juncture theory vis-à-vis rival hypotheses by using an original dataset and standard statistical methods for cross-sectional and time series data. The results show that the long-term regularities rooted in postcommunist junctures explain illiberal electoral outcomes in the most significant and consistent way.

The study of European capitalism since 1945 has revealed three key findings. First, Europe’s governance of capitalism has been marked by four main periods: : 1) embedded liberalism (1945–73); 2) global attempts at mixed capitalism (1973–92); 3) high neoliberalism (1992–2016); and 4) the return of community capitalism since 2016. Second, Europeans have invented an original system to reach compromise between both states and the three types of capitalist governance, thereby offering choice, far from the image of a neoliberal technocratic dictatorship. The European Union is a mix between the influence of many countries, including Germany, France, and Britain, in addition to Italy and many others. Third, the trinity points to three alternatives that were – and still are – present: the neoliberal free-trade area, the socio-environmental alternative and the challenge of the return of community capitalism, between protectionist tensions, Fortress Europe and the possible hollowing out of the European Union from the pressure of growing nationalism.

The rise of community capitalism since the mid-2010s is reflected in the return of protectionism, authoritarianism, nativism, and violent conflict. European capitalism was forced to adapt by being more assertive. Europeans have embraced solutions that were previously refused as too protectionist, such as European preference, free trade contingent on adhering to social and environmental norms, subsidies to industry for strategic reasons, and competition policy decisions based on reciprocity. Some of these ideas were long defended by France. Germany previously criticised them, but has embraced some in trade since 2016, and others in foreign policy since 2022. The management of Brexit has reaffirmed the basis of European soft power, which depends on the unity of the Single Market. The Covid-19 pandemic (2020–21) forced the Union to adopt protectionist and interventionist measures. The Russo-Ukrainian War has led to very strong sanctions packages, as well as the Union’s foray into military matters. But the Europeans still remain heavily dependent on the US for defence. Donald Trump’s return to power in 2025 has forced Europe to think harder about organising community capitalism.

Throughout history, reference to the historical constitution of Hungary was used to achieve different and sometimes conflicting goals. Since 2012, it has become a constitutional concept after decades of abandonment. It appears in the Fundamental Law of Hungary (2012) and the jurisprudence of the Hungarian Constitutional Court (HCC) – linking it to the concept of constitutional identity. This chapter claims that the narrative of the Hungarian historical constitution as a constitutional concept is conducive to illiberalism. This is because political and constitutional actors have used it to oppose liberal values. Two arguments justify this claim. First, the contemporary claims on continuity and rights expansion cannot be verified when we contrast the contemporary narratives on the two most important constitutive components of the historical constitution, that is, continuity and rights expansion with legal measures introduced in the second part of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Second, the relevant jurisprudence of the HCC suggests that the finality of introducing the historical constitution into the constitutional text and their subsequent linking to the concept of constitutional identity was to secure the traditional Westphalian understanding of ethnic-national sovereignty, mainly against the rule of law, that is, EU obligations and globalization.

The conclusion of Invisible Fatherland reviews the book’s findings with a view to the rise of Nazism and the concept of militant democracy. Juxtaposing the republic’s constitutional patriotism with Nazi ideology, the author highlights the clash between two diametrically opposed “ways of life.” While Nazism was a violent political order that dehumanized marginalized groups, Weimar democracy embraced plural and hybrid identifications. Although the republic ultimately fell to the Nazi threat, the study argues that its constitutional patriotism remains a positive legacy of Western-style democracy. By reframing the narrative, Invisible Fatherland provides a forward-looking, “glass-half-full” perspective on one of history’s most misunderstood democratic experiments

This chapter focuses on the Democrat Party’s final years in power (1958–60), which followed a debt restructuring agreement with creditors. During these years, Democrat Party leaders attempted to implement unpopular economic policies while still holding on to power. Their main tactic was to create the “Homeland Front,” a mass political organization. Though many people joined willingly, the Democrat-led government relied on high-pressure tactics and propaganda to ensure participation. It also increased pressure on its opposition through both legislation and extralegal actions such as mobilizing mobs to attack opposition leaders. These methods were, I argue, part of a more general shift toward illiberal, less democratic norms of governance among American Cold War allies in the late 1950s. By 1960, however, the Democrat Party’s authoritarian actions had alienated important domestic groups, including academics, bureaucrats, and military officers, which led to its removal from power. Rather than explaining the origins of the May 1960 coup, this chapter reveals how hollowed out the democratic political order had become by the time military officers finally launched their operation.

This chapter traces the two different movements in British imperial history that occurred post-Revolution: the geopolitical “Swing to the East” and the corresponding ideological “Swing to the Right.” Examining first India, then the Pacific, then Australia, it shows how the British empire became more assertive in each place from the 1780s, while at the same time experiencing a narrowing of imperial sentiments toward jingoism at home. It also considers colonized and Indigenous reactions to these assertions, delineating how they sometimes affected the course of empire in this period despite the overall negative effect of British incursion into their homelands. Colonized and Indigenous people certainly saw British assertions as anything but an improvement on their liberties. The chapter argues that the British empire’s survival after the American Revolution is best understood as a simultaneous refocusing on new oceanic possibilities and on a new kind of conservative imperative.

What does it mean “to tolerate” in a post-Christian and post-secular state? This chapter argues that antecedents of contemporary conflicts over diversity in Europe can be found in early modernity, specifically in early modern practices of toleration, which impacted on both the belonging and the visibility of minorities. New forms of intolerance pertain to the position of religious, ethnoreligious, and sexual minorities in public life, echoing the concerns of the public visibility of minorities inhering in historical Christendom. The political articulation of certain groups as “other” to “the nation” is increasingly mediated through constitutional repertoires, such as constitutional revision and amendments, developments in the hermeneutics of constitutional concepts, or pseudo-constitutional behaviour. This chapter introduces the main themes: tolerance and intolerance, constitutionalism, secularisation, and their significance across the liberal–illiberal divide.