Europe and the Crises of Critical Thinking in Resituating Crisis: Silencing and Voicing Crisis in Everyday Life

The chapter investigates the critical potential of crisis by (re)opening a discussion of events leading to the disintegration of the communist systems in large parts of Europe in the 1980s. The chapter revisits the East European dissident movements of the 1980s and their analyses of democratic conversation and critical thinking. Based on online archive research and with the GDR-based initiative Neues Forum as example, the chapter explores the philosophies and methods of civil engagement of the dissident movements that paved the way for the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The analysis of the dissident movements and their mobilization methods serves as an “inverted telescope” (Andersen, Kramsch, and Sandberg 2015) that put past civil movement into conversation with today’s attempts to revitalize democracy through citizen assemblies and people’s parliaments. By revisiting the critical analyses of the 1970s and 1980s, the chapter also aims to cast critical light on the transition mindset, which defined the road to EU membership for the Eastern European in the 1990s and 2000s, thereby foregrounding specific understandings of democracy and civil engagement while silencing others.