Roads Cannot Replace Ideals

A narrow side street in Saranda, Albania. (July 18th, 2024)

Some time ago, I was reading an excerpt from “Discourses on Colonialism” by Aimé Césaire, a Martiniquais poet and politician, and one of the postcolonial movement’s most important thinkers. He wrote of the process of colonization:

“They talk to me about progress, about ‘achievements,’ diseases cured, improved standards of living. 

I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks … They dazzle me with the tonnage of cotton or cocoa that has been exported, the acreage that has been planted with olive trees or grapevines.” 

The excerpt made me think of a phenomenon in an entirely different context, yet strangely similar in a narrow sense. I was reminded of two summers past, when I visited Borsh in Southern Albania. The village, from which my father’s side of the family hails, is a natural wonder, its sweeping green hills facing a pebble-studded beach and the stark blue of the Ionian. Its natural beauty has even taken a comical facet, with the village’s natives (known far and wide as Borshiotë) having become notorious for their boasting of its unparalleled vistas.

Descending from the heights of the Riviera Highway and into the village proper, I was shocked to find that the main road running parallel to the beach remained not merely unpaved but disastrously so. Unchanged since the last time I laid eyes on it nearly a decade prior. This made me take Cesaire's statement in a direction he almost certainly did not originally intend.

Separate from the context of colonialism, I thought about how much infrastructure — the material, the immediate — is prioritized in the context of developing nations. I placed myself in the shoes of a villager who simply wants to make his way to work and back on an adequate road and to send his children to a safe and comfortable school, whose livelihood is constantly on the receiving end of political decisions far from his reach. How removed would considerations of consolidating democratic institutions be from my thinking if I were not observing his society as a well-meaning outsider but rather living his reality?

At the national scale, it is this dynamic that shapes the sacrifice of institutions and ideals – ones which seem reasonably on the other side of difficult reforms – for basic needs and material advancements.

This dynamic has left a painful mark in recent Albanian history. In any conversation with an apologist of Enver Hoxha’s regime – of which I have had more than I would like to remember – one can be as sure as they are that the sun will rise the next morning to hear mentions of the material achievements of the dictatorship: virtually eradicating illiteracy, draining the marshlands to extinguish malaria, building hydroelectric dams that introduced electricity to rural areas, establishing schools, hospitals, factories and railroads with the help of first Yugoslavia, then the Soviet Union and finally China. This, they conclude, amounts to an incredible track record that stands in stark contrast to the anarchic avarice of the last three decades of post-Communism.

When asked about the shortcomings of Hoxhaism, the more self-aware among the apologists – read, those who are not entirely in denial – will offer some pithy anecdote along the lines of: “Well, he’d lock you up and throw away the keys for uttering a word.”

In all fairness, this seems to stand in stark contradiction to the other defense often mounted: “We might have been poor, but our lives were so simple and happy.” Upon closer reflection, however, this turns out not to be the anti-materialist bit of wisdom it may first appear to be. It, too, corresponds with my framework, with its willingness to sacrifice ideals we now find sacrosanct – say, the freedom to think and dissent – for some simple and uncorrupted good, best defined as the bliss that lies in ignorance.

This mode of thinking continues into the present day, much more intensely than it is comfortable to admit. I was in equal measures concerned and amused about a year ago to watch a traditional musical troupe literally singing the praises of Prime Minister Edi Rama at the inauguration of a tunnel along a major roadway in Southern Albania. Is it not strange, I thought to myself, for a corner of Europe to write hagiographies to the head of a government for building a tunnel in the twenty-first century, as humanity elsewhere prepares for the onset of Artificial General Intelligence?

In a previous article I translated a reflection by Mit’hat Frashëri on the ideals Albanians should uphold. At first, I did so simply out of esteem for his intellectual figure and an intuitive understanding that this was a foundational document of modern Albanian history. It only gradually struck me how prescient his guidance remains in the present day; above all his reminder of the need to “have faith in one’s stars” – to embrace a common ideal and the strength that comes with it.

The awful contrast could not be clearer.

On the one hand lies the approach of ultimate compromise, of trading whatever ideal to secure what is aptly termed “bukën e gojës”: one’s daily bread. On the other is a strong faith in one’s destiny and an unwillingness to compromise it for immediate material gain. It is a dramatic theme as old as time, but by no means too abstract to affect real-life decisions.

What does the path out of this mode of thinking look like, then? In my view, it means investing in the long process of putting institutions first. This is both a day-to-day approach, shaping the mundane interactions between state and citizen, but also one which must materialize when key decisions are made, be they on the part of an official approving a major contract or the simple citizen casting his ballot.

At the end of this week, Albanian citizens will be heading to the polls – and many in the diaspora to the post office with their ballots – to vote in a rather unprecedented election. For the first time in thirty-four years of post-communism, there is a good chance that smaller parties outside of the Socialist-Democrat duopoly, and the former’s breakaway led by Ilir Meta, will enter parliament. There is a general sense that the ability of these new movements to secure seats will determine whether a new stage of political development will be ushered in or represent the final disappointment of any reformist vision.

There are no clear and sharp distinctions here. No one party that possesses all the answers in contrast to another which represents total paralysis. What can be done, particularly by voters in the diaspora and those whose socioeconomic standing grants them a fair degree of independence, is to keep this tension, and the primacy of institutions, in mind. Those not burdened by day-to-day survival, or the pressures of vote-buying and intimidation, are at much greater liberty to consider the institutional health of their societies.

This does not matter only in Albania. It is a process that can be identified virtually anywhere you go looking in the developing world. Those who have the resources and opportunity to sit back and reevaluate what they are prioritizing, then, have a clear duty to do so. This means a duty not only to vote, but to closely examine what biases and short-term pressures have shaped one's decision.

As I view it, the central question has to be: am I making a decision with only tomorrow in mind, or will I remain confident that I made the right choice thirty years down the line?