GIANT MISTAKE! Eastern European countries' failure after 1989

“On the Barricades” s06e14
This week we have two releases of “On the Barricades” where hosts Maria Cernat and Boyan Stanislavski discuss with Arto Artinian, our returning guest and friend who is a Bulgarian-Armenian professor of sociology working at a college in New York.

The first installment is a discussion of where Eastern Europe currently stands, institutionally, politically, ideologically, and emotionally even– in relation to the entity known as the Collective West and its neoliberal model that these countries gave themselves over to from 1989 on. The balance sheet of deindustrialization, demographic decline, and colonization glaringly shows that the transition was a massive mistake, looking at Bulgaria for instance. Arto shares his insights on Bulgaria’s, in particular, relation to the EU politically and economically, and how this has shaped its institutions. Why did this tragic mistake occur? Maria shares her analysis of how this massive upheaval of systems has played out in Romania and the role of the academic institutions in failing to prevent or even diagnose such a trajectory.