Albania Democracy Development
The Western democracies are characterized the opposition between the left and right. The two camps each have a logical set of principles and orientations, but what does this mean in Albania this dualism? The analysis of Fatos Lubonja
A cost simplify the scheme, the basic feature of Western democracy is the opposition between the left and right. This opposition is defined, broadly, as a comparison between progressives and conservatives, between those that promote individual freedom and competition and those that promote equality. Among those who are most sensitive to the rich and employers and those who are most sensitive to the economically vulnerable groups among those that are geared mainly towards the production of wealth and those who are concerned about rather that these are distributed as evenly as possible. Among the nationalists and cosmopolitan among those that give preference to peaceful forms of conflict resolution and those who believe instead of military force and war. The list of distinctions could be long and generate some debate ethical and moral.
This simplified scheme also includes, between these two poles antagonists, a band more or less – the more prepared to become the “social band mobile – which is the prerogative of the centre. These moderate conservatives or partisans of novelty as moderate moderately sensitive to free competition and equality. They serve in some way, to preserve the balance of the ‘boat’, so not neither inclined nor too left or too right.
Behind this simplified scheme is about to embark on a reality far more complex, built on the socio-economic developments of Western countries and on a historical tradition and cultural dynamics that opposes the mentality of the left than right. This dynamic has followed, the various situations that have succeeded after the French Revolution, when the Conservatives are opposed to progressive. The latter held a revolutionary vision of the world and society and, since their first appearance, have had to face the hostility of conservatives to carry out their projects. During different periods of history this antagonism, always alive, focused on critical issues on which cyclical differ with the principles of left and right, and it has contributed to the development of democracy.
Since the fall of communism in 90 years, which marked the triumph of liberalism and did pass the global system from a configuration of two opposing blocs in the process of globalization, the European left has experienced an obvious crisis, which has deeply shaken the pillars of his identity. It may, however, think at the end of between left and right? No, because basically these two forces express the contradictions that we are condemned to live, not to solve: the one between our individual existence and our social existence, which correspond to the private and public spaces. That between the need to adapt to reality and the desire to change it, that between competitiveness and solidarity, that between equality as a condition of freedom and the need for competition as an expression of freedom.
The Albania in front of the European scheme
Compared to this scheme, democracy post-communist Albania comes in the same ratio differences between a world in crisis and a total chaos. It is difficult to find pieces of the puzzle post-communist Albania, which correspond to European template described above. The Albania of 2008 mixes the principles of left and right, conservative and progressive forces, nationalists and cosmopolitan, rich and the poor. All these elements are present in bulk, both between individuals in all Albanian political parties, forming a mixture informed and heterogeneous. The reasons for this situation are numerous and linked both to the country’s recent history as the events occurred after the fall of communism and the development of globalization.
We try to explain this chaos developing some of these main factors.
The political and economic transformations occurring in Albania post-Communist may very well be included using the categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’, which defines Norberto in his work “The left and right.” He refers to two philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche, developing two different approaches anthropological. According to Rousseau says, men are born equal and developments further historical and social conditions have introduced one another inequality, even if they try, at the same time and at least in theory, make us equal. Wonders: then we are equal or unequal? “We are mainly equal, but also uneven, answered, rightly finding in this duality the distinction between the left and right.
The mentality of the left is more sensitive to equality, the right stresses instead inequalities. The political spectrum is formed into the sensitivity of these two with freedom. The extreme left is the combination of equality with authoritarian methods, ie by the absence of freedom. His polar opposite, the extreme right, inequality combines with the lack of freedom. Within these two extremes freedom is absent. It is located in the middle. At the “center left”, considering that freedom emerges from policies that are more sensitive to equality, which guarantees freedom, the ‘centre-right, freedom is embodied in policies based on competitiveness, given that inequality is the engine of society while ensuring freedom.
This process was parallel to the birth of multiparty in Albania. Under this system of coexistence and competition of values of interest were born many different parties, from individual or collective initiatives. Soon appeared the problems, because many parties appeared but very few values and interests to defend. Ambitions of their founders of access to power, therefore, did not correspond with the values and real cultural and social interests, which appeared only after a long process of differentiation socio-economic and cultural fields. The Albania was just out of a total poverty, a consequence of an economy totally an ideology that for fifty years had bombed the brains of people with dogmatic values of national-communism.
In 1990, Sali Berisha reigned in the country a massive anticommunist sentiment, accompanied by the need to have a reformer, Western approach to the rules, incarnated by the Democratic Party (PD). This was the first opposition party to take power in 1992, but was based on a general feeling very confused and without a specific program. This vague reform programmed was also taken by all parties emerging, even by former Workers’ Party – renamed Socialist Party (PS) – which survived thanks to its facilities, very powerful, organized and disseminated throughout Country. It took advantage of the big mistakes made by the anticommunist party in power.
During the first years of his stay in opposition after 45 years of power continued, the Communist Party, alias Socialist Party, from the beginning did not abandon the rhetoric of the left. It nevertheless tried to adopt some principles belonging to Western social democracy. Former Communists criticized so in the name of ‘equality of opportunity’, reforms of privatization and market liberalization undertaken by the anticommunist party in power, which sought to exploit the situation to create a new class of rich who would could support it. The Socialist Party leader Fatos Nano declared in 1994: “… The Socialists defend the principle of equality of human beings… Equality is achieved when everyone has the same opportunities to participate in social riches social… When all, without discrimination, are involved to the deep economic, technical, intellectual and ways of life of contemporary society… We are for compliance with the legal borders of private interests, collective and national public within a society based on social market….
Fatos Nano Meanwhile, reigned in the country a reformist spirit, characterized by privatization accompanied by initiatives beyond to any control by the state. Individuals were released tax for 45 years. People who had always worked in cooperatives and public companies and that did not have any personal effects, back itself to survive, became the natural candidate mass of the Albanians to the West in the early 90′s. The rural exodus towards the main big cities and especially to the capital, Tirana, was also important. One of the most dramatic of these initiatives are not controlled by the State, in the name of so-called free market was the emergence of companies whose financial pyramid bankruptcy in 1997, led to the collapse of the state.
The reaction of the Socialists, who in 1994 had made the ‘equal opportunity’ one of their main arguments was due, rather than a commitment convinced in favor of a system of social market economy, the fact that this process favored privatization of the groups that were not part of their electoral clientele. Thus, the Socialist Party does not oppose never seriously, even to underline their failure, the reforms suggested by the West, nor to shock therapy, regarded as the best guarantee of access to a free market or the growth of finance companies fraudulent . After all, the PS defended the same reforms and promoted the same Western values brought forward by the Democratic Party to conduct its policy. These were called “reforms standard.
This phenomenon, a plurality of parties proposing the same political program, and that showed the inability of the Socialists to develop a critical attitude, you learn even with the triumph of liberalism in the world, who sent in crisis all parties socialists Europeans. Another reason is the complex of guilt of the Socialists for 45 years of dictatorship and communist culture rooted throughout this period. Those who began to call ‘Western values’, introduced in Albania in 1990, were simplified and the method totalitarian communist ideology, without being able to be subjected to any critical analysis. For this could not be assigning more to the left and the right.
Enver Hoxha With this method, totalitarian in its essence, and wanting to preserve at any cost power, the political class, while expressing the left or right, has not helped to create clear political identity, nor to the left or right. On the contrary, it has put forward the pretext that Albania needed time to conduct these reforms within the parameters, neutral in the left-right distinction, as the separation of powers, privatization or free elections. It is not difficult to recognize this phenomenon the legacy of the old culture of retaining power at all costs, applied by dictator Enver Hoxha since the time when he ideas left a paranoid and xenophobic nationalism, and self – source of isolation, these usual characteristics of the extreme right. This phenomenon also explains the paradoxical fact that although these two parties defend programs largely similar, a conflict extremely sharp contrasts them, bringing the country at the edge of destabilization.
45 years of Stalinist isolation
The left Albania has undoubtedly found even more confused before the manner in which the triumph of liberalism has left the crisis in western to serious challenges for reform. The processes of privatization and liberalization, which were undertaken in Western countries like Britain in the name of the third way, has left the Albanian left lacks a true reference in the West, and even total inability to be able to distinguish from the right. This darkness was all the more black, as the left Albania had lost contact with the European left since the end of the Second World War. Despite the crisis that has continued in the’80s – when we still Albanians lived under a regime of extreme left – the left has developed Western values that have helped to preserve its identity and remain consistent with some fundamental principles.
This “consistency” – understood to mean that Montaigne attaches at the end: ability to adapt to changes over time retaining its own convictions – can not be attributed to the left instead Albanian: for the latter, in fact, even the opposite is true. It has lost all conviction, because it was rediscovered culturally incapable of understanding the news, not only incapable of developing new ideas, but also assimilate the ideas left in force in the area west of the time. The Albanian communist regime has crossed out the doors for 45 years to European culture left, even during the years that proceeded the fall of communism. For his totalitarian methods it has, identifying everything that came from abroad with the ideology of the enemy external or internal. It can therefore be said, regarding the legacy of the left Albania that when, after the Second World War, the European left through a long process of evolution, whose greatest wealth was its efforts to adapt all ‘ modern times, has left the Albanian side Stalinist.
While the European left has learned to respect constitutionalism and political pluralism, left Albania remained the culture of revolution as a means for the conquest of power. Unlike the European left, left Albania has not thought the collapse of Stalinism or events such as the Prague Spring unless concepts nationalists and Stalinists. It has not been subject to the culture of peace, which has indeed denigrated linking the theories “revisionist” of peaceful cohabitation. ” It has not been subject to criticism of the left towards western capitalism, nor efforts to moderate this capitalism or to find alternatives. In this context, it has totally ignored the relationship between the State and the liberal welfare state. The left Albania has also ignored and even denounced, May’68, which represented a powerful contribution of the left in Western culture. In short, when it lost in 1990 his only identity, that Stalinist, to the left Albanian was not anything more, given that the values built by the European left while Albania lived isolated from all were not his.
The Albanian society has been able to know some of the phenomena mentioned, as the condemnation of Stalinism, the collapse of the system of real socialism from an economic and political, but considering them from a right-wing, the same as the European left has rejected in several aspects. The basic elements of consistency of the left, or knowledge of the culture left, were thus completely unknown nell’Albania post-communist.
The Socialists in power: Towards a State
In 1997, his arrival in power after the crisis of financial companies pyramid, the Socialist Party has “forgotten” the whole leftist rhetoric used at the time was the opposition. It was committed, under the guidance of the IMF and the World Bank, to deepen the reforms initiated by the Liberal Democratic Party. Once in power, the Socialists have repeated formulas as: “the further liberalization of the country” and use them with equal emphasis of the terms of a time. Their goal was to become the class of rich country and to him to attract the support of the rich who were close to PD when the latter was in power. Consequently, they insisted on the new dogma that he wants the flourishing market will satisfy, as if by magic, the interests of all. The State directed by the Socialists was presented by ministers as the ‘lawyer’ or ‘partner’ of world affairs, thus overcoming the concept of liberal-democratic state regarded as arbitrator between the parties.
Indeed, Albania of the neo-socialist (1997-2005) was put on the road of consolidating a rule of oligarchs, enriched by speculation and privatizations carried out thanks to support political, sometimes by criminal trafficking, making the border between oligarchs and policymakers very nuanced. In the space of a few years the majority of socialist leaders and members of the SP to Parliament, as well as members of their families, had become the richest people in the country.
Tirana – urban housing This kind of state, controlled by oligarchs who privatized virtually any publicly owned, self-governed by the left, began to undertake some initiatives grotesque as to denounce its own contradictions. The oligarchs are free engaged in public works. They claimed hundreds of thousands of dollars and officially denounced minimum tax or non-existent. One of these initiatives was called “the human face of business: a group of oligarchs’ partner ‘government led by Socialist Prime Minister Fatos Nano took the initiative to restore nicely a number of schools in the north of Albania. Some oligarchs have obtained a building permit to build in the heart of the capital, ruled by a Socialist mayor, Edi Rama, large buildings very profitable, in return for treatment and cleaning ‘free’ of green spaces degraded the city centre.
Very quickly, therefore, under the direction of senior officials left the country no longer has heard about equality as a social opportunity to participate in the social wealth ‘, or’ compliance with the legal borders of private interests. ” On the contrary, it was now coming to compromises with the “gifts” that the rule of oligarchs offered to cities that had lost their knowledge of the state and the distinction between the public space and private space.
This process of seizure of state and the economy by the oligarchs was also accompanied by a phenomenon that made him even more dramatic, and that has increased the chaos: the informal economy. The people came from rural areas and small towns began to occupy land to build houses without having received authorization. Likewise, the coast was invaded by various constructions without the slightest regard for the urbanization and the environment The post-communist Albania was submerged by a veritable flood of initiatives uncontrollable, and knew at the same time a massive emigration, a development of the informal economy and a heavy privatization of public assets by the oligarchs.
The state, very little worried the public did not embankment from this follows that, far from countering the interests of oligarchs, favored them. This situation in Albania reminds theory of economist Peruvian De Soto. According to this theory, the country is prey to an ultra-liberal experimentation, in which the ‘borders illegality, and where the state loses its role as arbiter and guarantor of respect for law and the right competitiveness, which leads to an economy that escapes almost every state control, towards an anarchic capitalism. De Soto is advancing the idea that ‘informality’ presupposes a release of energy which can often normal in the sense that those who evolve to the borders of legality become legitimate owners of fulfilling the fees and taxes that weigh on them . Thus their properties become illegal capital and fall in the network ‘normal’ movement of capital. Nevertheless capitalism anarchist Albanian applies to the conditions of a country that until the first day was still living in a total collectivism, has aggravated the existing chaos more than it has helped their development. Still it generates destruction and degradation of the quality of life.
This kind of capitalism has dramatically exposed by an absurd situation. When forgiven private investment, disproportionate in relation to the size of the population, (remember the infinite number of buildings in the capital and coastal cities), the country into a deep crisis of supply of electricity and drinking water. He was also struck by the lack of infrastructure and pollution worthy of the poorest countries on the planet. In the configuration of capitalism anarchist Albanian is difficult to draw the boundary between the informal economy and the economy criminal, between the economy of tax evasion and money laundering from drug trafficking and other, with all the social consequences and cultural rights that flow from it.
Now, the main problem raised by this capitalism is that it produces its pillars humans, affecting not only the policy and the way of it, but also the dominant system of values, making it difficult if not impossible any return to the past. The informal economy determines the political situation, determines political power, financial and media. In a country of only three million inhabitants, there are 80 private television networks. These powers are nourished by this economy, to defend and develop it for enlarging the limits. Under the pressure of anarchic capitalism, politics also deviates from its task of creating prospects and projects for the future; it is left as of right. In capitalism anarchist politics, like everything else, submit to the game spontaneous forces of the powerful and the State, depending on the circumstances, is treated by stakeholders in the informal trade now as a partner, now as an opponent, but never like ‘Arbitrator or the defender of the interests of the whole society.
We should analyze from a point of view socio-economic electorate of their right-wing anti-party, the Democratic Party, which won the elections in 2005, and the Socialist Party in order to understand the votes from different social groups and to define their respective locations on the left or right. In fact, sociology seems to contradict the definitions. They are the poorest fringes of the population and those who voted for the party right. This was mainly a protest vote against and corrupt system built by the Socialists in eight years of power.
It would be the most normal thing that this change of names to happen and that Albania begins to enter into a perspective of opposition between the right and left, conceived on European parameters. The problem is that Albania was in this same situation as early as 1997, at the previous change of power. Until then, the forces of so-called “right” represented primarily the interests of new trade, which then moved the first steps. The PD also sought to create a band that would have been wealthy its natural support, while the DP wanted to represent those who were forgotten by this process of transition. With the arrival of the SP in power, these two parties, as we have already explained, have exchanged roles.
After two years of exercise of power, the PD is once again giving proof that they have openly renounced to keep election promises made to strip less privileged, and also fell under the yoke of oligarchs, further strengthening the same system.
Indeed, behind this war illusory between left and right hides a different political reality and another dynamic. In reality, the country has two right-wing parties, and the so-called political pluralism hides above all a war of power between political and economic groupings-media, which have created a range of rich always represented and defense policy, which it is to power or the opposition. This facade of political pluralism is not therefore nothing, and disadvantaged groups are in fact excluded from the political game.
Ultimately, the truth and that the growing crowd of the poor run by one party to another. The poor argue that the party is the opposition, hoping to finally find a representative credible, but from the moment this party comes to power, this hope remains disappointed. At the parliamentary elections of 2005, an anecdote about a candidate of the Democratic Party, which meets the leaders of his constituency.
In conclusion: the left Albania needs a renewal of the European Left
How we explain beginning referring to, we can consider the extreme left as the combination of equality and authoritarian methods, and his polar opposite – the extreme right – as the combination of inequality and authoritarian methods. We can therefore say that if Albania has experienced a regime of extreme left, now, after 17 years of post-communist transition, the trend has turned towards the extreme right. A group of oligarchs controls simultaneously political power, concentrated in two main parties, the financial strength and media power. These oligarchs control even organized crime, threatening not only the economic survival of citizens, but their very freedom. The extremes touch.
We are dealing with a specific condition of Eastern Europe in general, who need the creativity of the political classes of Europe countries to create a new left. So the existence of a weak band of the population – the socio-economic – not enough. This can not recognize one another as socio-economic bracket without awareness left without a vision of the world left, without any particularly by young people that aspiration and belief that they then need to feel like transformation programmed and political action .