Ivan Krastev | The 2023 Joseph J. Kruzel Lecture

Demography, Democracy and the Politics of the Last Man
In a democracy, numbers matter. When numbers change, power changes hands. The democratic narrative insists that power changes hands primarily because voters change their minds. But it could also be because a sizeable group of new voters joins the polity and reshapes it. My lecture considers how fears of demographic decline and of immigrants and their possible electoral choices can turn European societies against democracy.
A leading thinker on liberal democracy and European politics, Ivan Krastev is chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, for whom he co-authored an influential report on the divisions in world public opinion over Russia's war on Ukraine. His opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs. Among his books in English are After Europe (2017); Is it Tomorrow Yet? Paradoxes of the Pandemic (2020); and, co-authored with Stephen Holmes, The Light That Failed: Why the West is Losing the Fight for Democracy (2020).
The Joseph J. Kruzel Lecture
Each year the Mershon Center for International Security Studies hosts a lecture to honor the memory of Joseph J. Kruzel Jr. (1945-1995.) Kruzel taught political science at the Ohio State University between episodes of public service that included briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War, serving in the State Department delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks in Helsinki, and joining the Clinton Administration in 1993 to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO policy.
In this role, Kruzel created Partnership for Peace, a program instituted in 1994 to build trust and cooperation between NATO and non-member states in Eastern Europe. He was sent to Bosnia as the Defense Department special envoy and chief negotiator on the US team working to end the Yugoslav Wars. In 1995, in the course of that mission, he was killed with two other US diplomats when their armored personnel carrier crashed into a ravine. President Clinton awarded him, posthumously, the Presidential Citizens Medal.