Each year, VIENNA ART WEEK dedicates an afternoon to a series of in-depth program events exploring the theme of that year’s edition, designed to encourage reflection and further thought.

In cooperation with Dorotheum, VIENNA ART WEEK has invited Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, one of the most prominent voices in the debate on the crisis of liberal democracy, to reflect on NAVIGATING ANGST in today’s world.

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KEYNOTE BY IVAN KRASTEV

When We Went to See the End of the World

In Robert Silverberg’s 1972 science fiction story “When We Went to See the End of the World,” time-tripping had become the nation’s foremost growth industry. People spent their holidays travelling to the end of days to watch the world sink under water, burn, or simply disappear.

But while the aficionados of extinction tourism were telling their stories of the world’s last hours, the news reported that an earthquake had levelled California, a monstrous amoeba was poisoning the water supply, the American president had just been assassinated, and riots were tearing the city apart.

Watching it unfold, one senses that, unlike the disasters glimpsed on distant time trips, it is political rather than natural catastrophe that brings the world to its end. If you wish to see the end of the world, you need only look out the window.

The world we live in is not very different. And the question is: could the shadow of the catastrophe be our best chance to guarantee the future of humanity?

My answer is No.

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Ivan Krastev is Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and Chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia (CLS). He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and serves on the European Investment Bank’s Global Advisory Council and the Board of Directors of GLOBSEC.

A contributing editor at the Financial Times, Krastev is the author of Is It Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe (2020), The Light That Failed: A Reckoning (2019, with Stephen Holmes), which won the Lionel Gelber Prize, After Europe (2017), Democracy Disrupted: The Global Politics of Protest (2014), and In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders? (2013).

In 2020, he was awarded the Jean Améry Prize for European Essay Writing.