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5. Legacies Legacies form part of the longue durée in history. They provide for continuity of traditions in time and space. Concluding the presentation on intellectuals and paradigms, it is worthwhile emphasizing that there was not really a cross-Balkan fertilization in the adaptation of the various socialist paradigms in the nineteenth century. Generally speaking, none of the Balkan countries adopted its socialism from its surrounding neighbors , no matter how advanced theoretically they might have been. (For example, at the turn of the century the Bulgarians were in much better command of foreign literature and socialist theory. The Romanians, particularly Dobrogeanu-Gherea, advanced interesting theoretical positions , etc.) No doubt, influences on a petty scale did exist but did not go beyond singular cases and individuals, while even this kind of limited influence was of a bounded nature. It never involved the proper adaptation of paradigms. Generally speaking, the more we move from the space of empire to the restricted space of the nation state, interBalkan communication channels are progressively weakened and lost. Linguistic barriers could provide also for an additional explanation. It seems, however, to be more a predicament of small countries on the periphery, and perhaps further testimony to the psychological disposition of dependency, that the principal and primary connection is always sought and found in the authoritative theoretical center outside of the Balkans, while inter-Balkan communication remained essentially limited .11 This predicament holds true not only for the adaptation of socialist paradigms, but has a more generic value with respect to the issue of inter-Balkan communication altogether. Intellectual fertilization across the various Balkan boundaries remains low even today. (With respect to the legacy of the left, the above picture should be corrected partially for the inter-war period, when the Balkan Communist Federation provided for centralized coordination of strategies and know-how, however under the hegemonic auspices of the Bulgarian Communist Party. It should also be remembered that the Yugoslav Communists were instrumental in the setting up of the Communist Party of Albania. And 422 VI. Epilogue finally, that the Yugoslav Communists achieved emancipation from the big authoritative center with the Tito–Stalin break of 1948). The transportation of diverse ideologies into the European periphery as a constituent part of our conceptualization and canonization of modernity raises the issue of the diverse and asymmetrical temporalities of modernity, both as a “real” object of inquiry and as a mode of “subjective” perception. As discussed in the introductory section, we may observe in the first place a “dislocation” or a “discrepancy” in the function of ideologies in the process of their transposition into a different context (socialism not as a reaction to the exigencies of modernity , but as a recipe for modernization, or socialism as a fulfillment of the failed project of political liberalism). Moreover, there is a rearrangement , a quasi-overlapping of temporal sequences, quite different from the temporal sequences that generated these ideologies in the first place and in the initial matrix (e.g., the quasi-synchronous introduction of liberalism and socialism). To phrase it in the words of Reinhart Koselleck, we can observe the concurrent presence of different time structures (die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen).12 Socialism and by extension the communist experiments implemented in the region after the First World War belong to the long and troublesome saga of attempting to introduce modernity and apply modernization in the Southeastern European periphery. This meant, in the first place, transforming predominantly rural areas into units of modernized industrial production and transferring the labor potential of rural populations into the world of the city. Perhaps now we can even agree with Marx on the impossibility of skipping phases in the path of evolution. If this stands true, our responsibility towards less privileged areas of the world is even greater today. If the Balkan Social Democrats of the nineteenth century based their faith on the certainty of the corrosive effects of a dynamic capitalism and a speedy industrialization that never materialized, the communist states of the post-war era and the experiment of real socialism generally tried to compensate for the time lag by implementing an accelerated modernization program from above. Evaluating the experiment of real socialism remains a task for historians. What can be ascertained for sure is that the communist regimes of the mid-twentieth century had goals, which they partially achieved—at what cost is another story—that were a desideratum of the “previous” modernity drive of the nineteenth century. These goals [18.222.115...

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