ABSTRACT
In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet-type system of really existing socialism, all Europe – ‘their’ part as well as ‘our’ part – struggled to live by the ideals of much the same stories, much the same institutional arrangements, and much the same interpretations and practices of sovereignty. In practical terms, this tended to involve two things. On the one hand, the social marginality of the divided double strangers, and the frequent incommensurality of the interpretations of freedom which they upheld, was domesticated through formal commitments to broadly liberal-democratic political practices. On the other hand, the disrepute and failure of the collective definitions of freedom more or less schematically resulted in a positive evaluation of individual sovereignty and, more specifically, its market-oriented, consumer, decisionist variant.
