Lea Ypi, Switzerland and the old temptation to lecture the world from Albania

The article is easy to read. It's well written. It even affects some of the real wounds of modern - day Albania. But as you read it, you get the feeling that the author is more interested in talking about the capitalism crisis than in real Albania.

Basically, its argument is clear. Albania, according to Ypit, has nothing left to sell except nature. Luxury tourism, strategic investments and construction in protected areas are not the system's deviations, but its logic itself. And the Zrvenec protest appears as a delayed revolt against this model.

This is where the paradox begins.

Leah Yip seems very concerned about the system, but much less for those who built it. She's talking about oligarchy, but not her architects. It's about the deformities of democracy, but not about concrete political responsibilities. It's about last year's elections, but it doesn't stop at all in the way power has been exercised in Albania over a decade.

There is even more interesting.

In the article, Ypi treats corruption almost as an insufficient explanation for Albanian problems. She writes that political conflict should be seen not only through corruption, as if not individuals, but the rules of the system itself.

This is a popular thesis in Western left-left academic circles. But for Albanians it sounds kind of weird. Because in Albania the system has not been operated abstractly. He had names, faces, decisions, favors, clients and concrete responsibilities.

And that's where autocrylic is missing.

Leah Ypi writes about the political elites, but forgets that her first two books were promoted by Edi Rama and Erion Veliaj, two of the most important figures in the establiable it today presents as part of the problem. One is today in the face of a wave of protests demanding his departure. The other one's in jail. However, the article finds no reflection on this former relationship of closeness and promotion.

There is no question of how it happened that people present today as a symbol of the model to be rejected were yesterday the most important promoters of her work in Albania.

Instead, the problem is largely explained as a failure of capitalism.

And here the article gets a connotation that is not entirely unknown to Albanians.

For decades, communist Albania was represented as the illusory “fantary” of global Marxism-lenism. The world would learn from Tirana. Revision resistance would begin from Albania. Socialism would be saved from Albania.

Today, of course, nobody talks about a pro-else revolution anymore. But when you read the Ypi article, you cannot help but notice a distant similarity: even now Albania is used as an ideological laboratory to show the world where capitalism has erred.

It seems that the land once considered an enlightening fan of Communism is returning to a kind of universal example. Just this time not to save socialism, but to prove the capitalism crisis.

Maybe it's just coincidence. Maybe it's just the intellectual formation of the author. Or perhaps homesickness over major ideological battles is harder to abandon than the system itself that produced them.

The problem is that today's Albania does not have the luxury of theoretical debates.

We are not the country giving lessons to Europe for the capitalism crisis. We are the country that has not yet managed to build stable institutions. A country where immigration continues to empty cities, where confidence in politics is at minimum and even the most important institutions need continued international support to function.

So the Zvrinec protest can be a lot. It could be an environmental protest. It could be a civic revolt. It could be a response to the way of government.

But presenting it mainly as proof of capitalism's failure is a theoretical luxury that may sound convincing in London.

In Albania, the problem continues to be much more concrete: lack of state, weakness of institutions and lack of political responsibility.

And these are not products of abstract capitalism. They are products of concrete people who have governed Albania.