Behind the Illiberal Turn: Values in Central Europe

“We have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society. The new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state”, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban famously said in 2014, exemplifying a broader trend taking place in Central Europe. Why would the countries that were praised as democratization and Europeanization success stories take an illiberal turn? This volume explores changing values and attitudes to explain events that took place in the aftermath of the financial and migration crisis in six Central European countries: Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.