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

1. Methodology

1. Methodology The current work makes use of the analytical advantages offered both by transfer2 and comparative studies.3 Far from agreeing on their methodological incompatibility or mutual exclusiveness, pointedly argued by some of the most articulate proponents of either fields,4 this study makes a strong case for their methodological complementarity. With no pretensions to constitute a new paradigm, transfer studies have raised a whole agenda of methodological issues that deserve attention when studying transnational processes of cultural and intellectual transmission . The current study embraces several of the sensitivities raised by transfer theorists,5 whose contribution most pertinent to this work on the transfer of socialist paradigms is the emphasis on the dynamic and creative character of the transmission and diffusion process. Cultural clusters or ideas are not mechanically “empted” from one context into another. Transfer is rather a process “in the making,” containing elements both of innovation and transformation. As a consequence, the transport of cultural and intellectual “goods” is an activity that resembles more a “translation” (both literal and metaphorical), involving multiple strategies (rhetorical, cultural, social, political engineering) of adaptation, in contrast to an assumed mechanical, static, or simply mimetic activity of transfer from one context to another. Commonly referred to as the history of reception, a variety of local components determines the form of adaptation and recontextualization of a paradigm . As will be demonstrated, reception is a creative and communicative action involving multiple levels of negotiation with a given context. Adaptation, the way an ideological system can be rendered intelligible for a society, is contingent on a variety of conditions and proceeds according to a menu of options but also of limitations. The necessity to readdress the transfer of socialist paradigms to the European periphery was motivated by some additional considerations . The historiography of the history of socialism in the Balkans has remained, to a certain extent, entrenched and predictably polarized . Whereas communist historiography has discussed the adaptation 7 1. Methodology of socialist paradigms in terms of a universalizing scheme, as orthodoxy vs. deviation, post-communist historiography often tends to emphasize only the “imposed” character of socialism in the Balkans. Both historiographical trends tend to rely on static models of adaptation and tend to underestimate the local dynamics of the Balkan societies. Neither has the international history of socialism detached itself from this static model of transmission. Although emphasizing the transnational character of the transmission process, its perspective remains usually focused on the authoritative center. Ironically, whereas, on the one hand, incorporating the world’s peripheries into a narrative of world history was one of the emancipatory intentions of international socialism, it is precisely this view, on the other hand, that has failed to inscribe into the history of international socialism the standpoint of its own peripheries. The current analysis is no less indebted to the challenges posed by comparative studies and the advantages of comparative practice. On the one hand, it makes use of the comparative method’s greatest quality : its capacity to explain by contrasting and juxtaposing case studies . On the other, it takes a “soft” comparative approach, combining elements both of the “individualizing” and the “generalizing” schools of comparison,6 without, however, adhering strictly to any of the two traditions. The three case studies under scrutiny are not linked to each other through temporal symmetry but rather through temporal asymmetry . The chosen focus was not determined by the desire to address variety through the presentation of different socialist paradigms. On the contrary, country-specific historical developments and variance in the timing of the adaptations in each country will be shown to have determined , to a certain extent, each specific choice of socialist paradigm. In addition, variance has ensured avoiding predictable results. To attempt a comparison of the social-democratic paradigm in Serbia and Bulgaria would have produced rather foreseeable results, for example the Social Democrats’ suspicious attitude towards the countryside, predictable oscillations between the left and right wings, etc. To attempt a broadening of the comparison so as to include the Greek case would have been futile, since the social-democratic paradigm there was not only established very late but was also of negligible duration. To attempt, for example, a three-country comparative discussion of populism would also have been inconclusive. While in Serbia it developed into a 8 I. Introduction mighty political movement, in Bulgaria, due to time factors, it was very quickly superseded by Marxism. Greece was left untouched...