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

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V. Modernity Without Socialism It is not enough to be a revolutionary and an adherent of socialism or a Communist in general. You must be able at each particular moment to find the particular link in the chain which you must grasp with all your might in order to hold the whole chain and to prepare firmly for the transition to the next link. V. I. Lenin There are few aspects of my administration that make me so proud as my labor legislation. I am rather a leftist. Eleftherios Venizelos Admittedly, it is not wise to start a chapter with a pompous title. It does summarize, however, most concisely the principal argument of the Greek case study with respect to the two preceding ones on Serbia and Bulgaria. Nor is it wiser to start by juxtaposing the quotations of two contemporaries who had little to do with each other, not to mention their adherence to entirely opposite ideological camps. The first belongs to the most favorite repertoire of the Greek Communists from 1926 to 1927, used abundantly in their debates on their desperate attempts to find that missing link that would connect them to the masses. Ironically, as history can often be, it was not the Greek Communists, but Eleftherios Venizelos, the leader of the Greek Liberal Party, who seemed to grasp and appreciate best Lenin’s practical advice. He not only proved his skills in tactical maneuvering, but retained also—with limited interruptions—the prerogative of action on the entangled chessboard of inter-war politics. Two modernizing projects thus encountered each other, aiming at diametrically opposite goals and guided by thoroughly different social visions, but with comparable hegemonic pretensions : Venizelos’ Bismarckian vision of etatist modernization and the 302 V. Modernity Without Socialism Communists’ Bolshevik vision of a future society. As power projects, or as ideal types, both endeavored to capture and instrumentalize the state as the prime motor of modernization, and both desired to mold and engineer society from above. In the quest for hegemony, it was undeniably Venizelos, who—to put it in Gramsci’s terms—won “the war of position.” Whereas the Communist Party of Greece (Kommounistiko Komma Elladas, KKE) reckoned politics to be a battle of principles, Venizelos deemed politics an exercise in political agility. This section deals with the fortunes of socialism and its successor ideology, communism, in Greece. The Greek case is distinctive in a variety of ways. In the first place, socialism was politically institutionalized with a great temporal discrepancy, not only in comparison to the country’s northern neighbors, but also with reference to the more generic international experience. The Greek social-democratic party was founded only in 1918, while equivalent parties had been formed in Bulgaria in 1891, in Romania in 1893 and 1910 and in Serbia in 1903. Socialism remained a marginal ideological option in the Greek political landscape not only in the nineteenth, but well into the twentieth century , acquiring political weight only towards the end of the 1930s. This circumstance is even more intriguing in the light of the fact that Greek scholars of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries had pioneered in the dissemination of the legacy of the Enlightenment—the ideological matrix of socialism—in the Balkans. The Greek Enlightenment had had a significant impact in the Bulgarian lands, the urban centers of the Asia Minor littoral and Romania as well. Despite the fact that socialist ideas started penetrating Old Greece, as most areas of the Balkan Peninsula by the 1870s, socialism did not become an organized political force there until the second decade of the twentieth century. Characteristically, in the countries examined above, the founding of socialist parties was the result of the concerted efforts of intellectuals and preceded the systematic organization of the working class. More pointedly, social-democratic discourses had, de facto, constructed the social subject before the subject had “properly” come into being, as we have witnessed in the Bulgarian case. Quite the opposite was the case in Greece, where a rudimentary labor movement was well on its way before a social-democratic party even emerged. An additional contrast lies in the fact that in both preceding cases, socialism received its entry ticket to the public sphere with an emphasis 303 V. Modernity Without Socialism on the political, rather than on the social factor. To the degree that it touched upon the social, it was destined to have an...