The chapter inquires into the historically changing link between capitalism and liberal democracy in the context of the contemporary crisis of democratic capitalism. In East-Central Europe, this pathological crisis demonstrates itself through a tendential shift to authoritarian-oligarchic state projects.
Although the nature of these projects varies throughout the region, they bear a common semi-peripheral feature. Shifting to an oligarchic and authoritarian direction in political terms, these state projects sustain the region's neoliberal trajectories of economic dependence on foreign capital.