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

2. Context, ideology, adaptation

2. Context, Ideology, Adaptation Socialist theory was born in the Western context both as a result of and a reaction to the exigencies of the Industrial Revolution and the maturation of the capitalistic process. It reflected and wished to address changes in the social, economic and political structure of the Western part of the old continent, envisioning their radical transformation. Socialism , an offspring of the Enlightenment legacy, followed up on the inadequacies of liberal politics and questioned anew a whole set of issues like the relationship between man and society, the creation and distribution of wealth, the configuration of relations between capital and labor, and the extension of political and social rights. As a most incisive answer to the challenges of the modern age, socialist theory was soon transported to other parts of the world, to societies on the verge of modernity, characterized by very dissimilar traditions and social structures to the initial Western matrix. In these sui generis societies , and due to the structural discrepancies characteristic of the cleavage between center and periphery, socialism was not, and could not be, introduced as a critique of industrial society, which remained rather the desideratum than a fait accompli. Instead, and as we will witness in some of the cases elaborated in this work, socialism did not represent an answer to the exigencies of modernity but in a reversed correlation received its validity foremost as a recipe for modernization. Socialism entered the geographical space of the Balkans in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the first place as part of a discursive modernity informing the imaginary of change9 —“progress” according to the vocabulary of the nineteenth century—long before major changes in the social and economic structure would bring about the creation, either objective or subjective, of socialism’s actual subject of liberation, the working class. Socialism functioned foremost as a vehicle for social criticism10 and as an alternative to unfulfilled aspirations of political emancipation, before becoming an ideology associated with the labor movement. It should be mentioned, at this point, that the “discrepancy ” or “displacement” in the function of transported ideologies is 11 2. Context, Ideology, Adaptation not an experience unique to socialism but could be viewed as a broader predicament of the process of “transportation.” Whereas liberalism in Europe was the outcome of a lengthy process of economic and social change, liberalism in the Balkans was to function as a lever in order to effect socio-economic change. Nor was liberalism in the Balkans the expression of articulate bourgeoisies but rather a model for political state building. If liberalism in the Western context signified the emancipation of bourgeois society from the state, in Balkan societies, on the contrary, the state was to function as the more developed institution11 and became de facto the privileged domain for the creation of elites.12 While nationalism in territorially consolidated dynastic states, such as France and Spain, was to function as a state-cementing ideology, nationalism transported to the multi-national empires of Central and Eastern Europe signified the discovery of “the people” both in social and ethnic terms and functioned as a state-creating ideology. In the case of Southeastern Europe, the establishment of state administrations , the geographic consolidation of the state and the engineering of the nation were parallel-run processes and were initiated literally exnihilo . It should be emphasized, at this point, that ideologies are not transported to the periphery with a great discrepancy in time. Rather, it is the different context to which theories or ideologies are transplanted that provides for disparities in their function or for idiosyncratic adaptations .13 Noteworthy in this respect are the reflections of the Romanian socialist Dobrogeanu-Gherea, who emphasized the reverse correlation between structure and superstructure in the countries of the periphery. In his “Socialism in Backward Countries,” Gherea argued that “the fact that the evolution of backward societies is influenced and even determined to a large extent by advanced societies gives rise to two fundamental peculiarities in the way in which backward countries evolve. The first concerns the time span of the evolution, which is shorter than in advanced countries. The second is that in backward societies political, social, juridical and other forms [the superstructure] are transformed before the socio-economic basis is developed, a basis which in advanced countries gave birth to this superstructure.”14 Whereas in industrial capitalist countries social forms followed from the economic base, in peripheral societies the process was reversed. In contrast to the Western experience...