[Marxism] LRB on Kosovo: Jeremy Harding reports from Kosovo

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Jeremy Harding reports from Kosovo

LRB

"Agani has misgivings about what's happened in Kosovo since 1999.
'We've lost the feeling of responsibility for each other. In the 1990s
we discovered something really important. We didn't know what to call
it, but I think it was democracy. Rugova's parallel structures served
everybody, rich and poor. Since then we've sacrificed democracy to
liberty . . . Tocqueville saw this in America and you can see it
here.' He is uncertain, too, about the 'ruthless liberalisation' he
identifies: a result, no doubt, of the campaign in Kosovo having been
spearheaded by the great exponents of liberal market ideology, the US
and Britain, but in any case a process affecting all post-Communist
'transition' economies, among which Kosovo is just a latecomer. Partly
because of the Milosevic years, but partly, as Agani believes, because
of longstanding attitudes in Albanian society, there is only a dim
sense of the purpose served by the state or public institutions. 'We
lived outside the state for years,' he asserts, 'and became very good
at subsistence. Statehood is not a skill we've had.' Dissent and
resistance among Albanians were always framed in terms of the national
question. There were few anxieties about wealth discrepancies; that
some did better than others was a fact of life, 'in the nature of
things', as Agani put it.

The word 'nature' seems to matter here: it was, after all, part of the
Serbs' view of Albanians that they were naturally backward and
ill-prepared for life in a modern polity. ('Backwardness was on our
side,' Agani told me, alluding to the Albanian birth rate, so much
higher than that of the Serbs.) Now this nature is reimagined as a
brake on majority-Albanian public institutions. At the same time,
conveniently enough, it suggests a predisposition to the neoliberal
ideal of an unregulated economy. Despite the deadweight of the UN,
perhaps as a result of it, Kosovo expresses something of that ideal,
but it is, in the words of one Albanian critic, 'a market without an
economy', a case of unevenness without development, jolting between
extremes of poverty and wealth."

Full: <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/hard01_.html>

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