Entangled Paths Toward Modernity: Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism in the Balkans

1. Divergent paths towards modernity?

VI. Epilogue 1. Divergent Paths Towards Modernity? The nineteenth century witnessed the introduction of diverse ideologies of mass representation such as liberalism, nationalism and socialism in the Balkan space suggesting a menu of new identities (political, social, national) and offering, in the first place, an “imaginary” integration of the predominantly peasant masses into the novel categories of modernity. “Wrangling” with the legacy of the Ottoman past, new “imagined communities” were to emerge proposing “bonds” of allegiance and solidarity quite different from the “habitus” and the hitherto experience of the majority of the Balkan populations. With respect to the fate of liberalism in the Balkans, it could be argued that in all Balkan cases, the liberal civic project was compromised for the liberal nationalist project, reflecting as much the spirit of romanticism prevalent at the times and the unfavorable contextual conditions in which the liberal project was implemented (the absence of the effects of the Industrial Revolution, etc.) as the quest of emerging political elites for recognition, legitimacy and hegemony. In all Balkan cases, the project of modernity epitomized the quest for a strong centralized state in its maximum geographical expansion and the race to catch up with other parts of the world. It resulted in the realization of expensive and extensive state-building projects, boosting the development of the state machinery and the military and carried usually on the shoulders of populations , who, on the whole, benefited little from the new institution of the nation-state. As to why state building had to take precedence before economic modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Diana Mishkova argues convincingly that … the formidable tasks of state-building and nation-building in the Balkans had to be carried out simultaneously with economic modernization. Why these took precedence over the efforts to counter economic backwardness seems logical: it was the nation-state that had to create the preconditions of the transformation, not vice-versa. Embarking on economic modernization in a situation of a rapidly increasing gap between forerun- 408 VI. Epilogue ners and laggards was unthinkable in the pre-modern framework, before the establishment of a conducive institutional and psychological setting and even without the modern state’s direct economic activity. Hence the crucial role of the state in catching-up societies.1 To an imaginary of modernity based on the premises of national cohesion , socialism counterproposed an imaginary on the premises of social solidarity, the dignity of labor and social justice. The disparity in socio-economic development however, imposed strains on the capacity to sustain a class discourse fashioned on identities according to the taxonomies proposed by Western variants of socialism (Marxism). Slow changes in the socio-economic structure did not allow for the creation of social subjects who were able to project their own future in this new version of modernity. To the extent that socialism could assert itself on the social terrain in the nineteenth century, it did so predominantly by addressing the dissolution of previous social categories, while simultaneously witnessing the slow emergence of new, uncertain and mixed categories of social existence in the long transitional period of the nineteenth century. To the extent that socialism was to inspire intellectual cadres, this took place predominantly on the basis of unfulfilled expectations of political emancipation than on the basis of aggravated class struggle. On the contrary, and as confirmed by the present analysis, eastern variants of socialism like populism had a greater chance to articulate the pulse and the mentality of the “moral economy” of disintegrating social categories and of expressing their “resistances” to the disciplining mechanisms of the state. The Serbian case serves as a good example for the ambiguous paths of modernization. Spurred initially by the desire to control the process of modernization and the consequences it implied for the social structure of the country, the early Radicals exemplify a defensive populist socialism, where socialism was understood as a means to counter the “threatening” effects of “Westernization” and its broader socio-cultural connotations. The Radicals “moral revolt” was a reaction to the corrosive effects of the encroachment of the moneyed and increasingly market-oriented economy upon the traditional structures of their society . The low degree of social differentiation offered in the eyes of the Radicals a unique opportunity to evade the scenario of extreme social polarization, inject modern scientific and technological know-how into 409 1. Divergent Paths Towards Modernity? their egalitarian social structures, and...