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Balkan Liberalisms: Historical Routes of a Modern Ideology

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Balkan Liberalisms: Historical Routes of a Modern Ideology BALKAN LIBERALISMS: HISTORICAL ROUTES OF A MODERN IDEOLOGY Diana Mishkova Introduction In the Balkans, as in other places in Europe, liberalism is inextricably linked with the construction of modernity. Liberal ideas and movements triggered the emergence of the first concepts of modern rule and the first modern institutions in the region. Under their banner the struggles for national unification and independence were waged and a concept of legitimate government different from the traditional one was introduced: a representative government, as opposed to an autocratic or a bureau- cratic one, enacted by the liberals themselves on behalf of the sovereign nation. Liberalism presents a case of ideational and institutional transfer that changed the nature of politics: its premises and institutionalization meant not just new technical rules or organizational forms but a new form of politics. The liberal parties constituted the first modern political parties in the Balkans with a distinct conception about the arrangement of society based not simply on experience but on knowledge and visions of the future as well. And yet liberalism’s historical role with respect to Balkan political modernity, its local theoretical and institutional incarna- tions and its legacy continue to raise a number of basic yet under-studied questions. Why were the ‘rational’ modern legitimacy and the advent of political modernity in the newly emerging Balkan states predicated on the adoption of the liberal ideology? Which messages and institutional forms attracted the reformist Balkan elites to it so powerfully despite its apparent ‘incompatibility’ with the local social reality? How did the liber- als deem it possible to make society first accept, and then sustain, such alien institutions and make them work? And what ‘traces’ did the socially and culturally diverse milieus and political traditions engrave into the principles, the institutions, and the values of liberal—that is, modern— government in the region? Both as an ideology and a political format, liberalism encapsulates the transforming (revolutionizing) function assigned to ‘imported’ political and legal institutions in this part of Europe. Liberal constitutions, legal 100 diana mishkova codes and institutional arrangements were not intended to make into law what had already become a fact. Quite consciously, they were introduced as an instrument for producing ‘facts’—as forms creating their substance. This implied a radical reversal of the logic of political legitimization: the causes that had led to the institutionalization of modern ‘forms’ in the West turned into the expected effects from the operation of those forms. This is why nineteenth-century Balkan liberalism became synonymous with the (import of ) political and economic modernity, creating a world that was perceived as structurally different from the existing one but indispensable for the survival of the community. It is for this reason that Balkan liberalism brilliantly exemplifies the pro- cess of adaptation, re-imagination and in-translation—or what might be called ‘reconfiguration of tradition’ as part and parcel of political innova- tion. Key notions of the modern political vocabulary such as ‘democracy,’ ‘popular sovereignty,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘nation’ and ‘rule of law’ were semanti- cally and functionally re-conceptualized in the process. The emergence and maturation of liberalism in the Balkans coincides with its zenith in Europe between the 1770s and the 1870s, sometimes dubbed the “age of liberalism,” when its principles dominated European political theory and practice. But despite some attempts at defining a certain common core to liberalism’s ‘classical’ principles, its regional and national variations are significant enough to warrant recognizing that, as John Gray has put it, “there is not one liberalism, but rather many, linked together only by a loose family resemblance.”1 Hence there are major benefits to reap from a comparativist approach to the study of liberalism for its common ele- ments can become visible only through a comparative interdisciplinary study of its regional and national manifestations.2 Connectivity and interaction between, and thus awareness of the mutual constitution of, discrete liberalisms are bound to inform this comparative perspective, since liberalism was, more often than not, disseminated by 1 Alan S. Kahan identifies the “common liberal minimum program” in the nineteenth century as including private property, free trade, equality before the law, freedom of press, and representative government (Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burkhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville [New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2001], 141); John Gray identifies individualism, egalitarianism, uni- versalism and meliorism as the common features of classical liberal thought (John Gray, Liberalism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, 2nd edition], xii). 2 Jürgen Kocka, in the introduction to Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, ed. Dieter Langewiesche (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1988), 10..
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