By Ben Andoni
Our literature and culture lack a character or an individual who transcends the written word and becomes a symbol of the nation’s development. In the pursuit of independence, constrained by time, suffocated by ideology, and now seeking a place in global art, our gallery of characters shines dimly. Fortunately, good literature and culture are universal, and a few characters and individuals who have “survived” belong to everyone. Don Quixote, Hamlet, Faust, Mephistopheles, Gargantua, Zorba, Gregor Samsa, and a dozen others seem to define our journey, everywhere and for everyone. If we knew how to properly care for history, by following the right path through these characters’ journeys—without forgetting or neglecting their mistakes and challenges—perhaps we wouldn’t keep repeating the same things. Without understanding the time we live in, it seems we will never grasp just how difficult it is to preserve the hard-won freedom we so easily take for granted.
All of this comes to mind from our own lives, and today, Albanians see it firsthand in the names of politicians we have recycled, who, it seems, will continue to lead us even after May 11, 2025. The blow left by communism during nearly five decades of rule has been relativized—to the extent that some try to profit through mockery, others through extreme demonization, and many by justifying all our weaknesses through it. “We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability—the sense that history could move only in one direction, and that direction was toward liberal democracy,” historian Timothy Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny. He further emphasizes that, following the concept of the “End of History” as proposed in Francis Fukuyama’s book, countries became complacent—especially those of us who emerged from behind the Berlin Wall.
If we take Albania’s case, the new ideologues of the post-1990 era—who had been educated and shaped within the very schools of communism—led our state to dismantle nearly its entire defensive system, believing there was now someone to protect us (!!). We stifled our imagination (which, even under communism, had been reduced to a black-and-white binary) and opened the doors precisely to those types of regimes that sprouted everywhere in the East, bringing forth all sorts of democratic-cloaked monstrosities. Berisha and Rama did not disappoint—in fact, they are the grand “promise” that Albania will continue in the same way even after May. Vučić remains unshaken in Belgrade; Orbán cynically snubs the entire continent; the Kaczyński brothers (with Lech having perished in a plane crash in 2005) have held Poland under harsh rule; and so many others across the globe have disgusted their nations with democracy. These are the politicians of inevitability—who, when they speak, “convince” you with their torrent of words about the evils of the past, the present with them, and the future, again with them, in a trajectory that only they can supposedly guide.
Listen to Rama and Berisha in these final hours as they have already begun their de facto campaigns. The future they paint in their rhetoric is so vibrant that prosperity seems just one step away—especially if you listen to Rama. From Berisha, however, it is only a matter of escaping the current “catastrophe” under his leadership! Snyder calls this a teleology—a narrative leading toward an inevitable goal. With the country’s current development and the people we produce to lead our parliament, we prove that we have learned nothing from communism. “The politics of inevitability is an intellectual coma in which we have immersed ourselves,” writes Snyder. By accepting inevitability and assuming we fully understand our communist past and its familiar tendencies, we felt there was no need to examine in detail how that regime was shaped within us. And while the Socialists defended their status quo and ideological shift from the Party of Labour to the Socialist Party, the Democrats—emerging from the same Party of Labour—abolished the Communist Party and declared war on the Socialists, branding them as communists. It seemed as though the country had no alternative but these two—a sense that persists to this day. Neoliberalism, nurtured by them, has already taken major hits, even here, and has thoroughly disappointed. In his imitation of President Trump, Berisha has loudly proclaimed that gender criteria are strictly binary, continuing with other statements, yet firmly adhering to this politics of inevitability.
The other antihistorical approach to assessing the past relates to a different direction, known as the politics of eternity. Unlike the politics of inevitability, this one is deeply concerned with the past—“but in a self-absorbed way, detached from any concern for facts,” as Snyder puts it. This approach idealizes moments and periods that never truly existed, romanticizing times that were, in reality, devastating. Politicians of eternity present history as a vast, foggy courtyard filled with indistinct monuments of national victimhood—equally distant from the present and equally available for manipulation, Snyder argues. Politicians like Berisha embody this politics of eternity, speaking of a “glorious past” that must inevitably return. In truth, Berisha’s past is the early 1990s and his tenure as prime minister—a time of unimaginable corruption and chaos, but also of unexpected achievements, culminating in the liberalization of visas and NATO membership. A careful look reveals why all PD politicians frequently highlight this period: Berisha has hypnotized them into his political narrative of eternity, in which only he and his past leadership can supposedly rebuild Albania.
But in the politics of eternity, nostalgia for a mythologized past prevents us from thinking about a possible future. The habit of hiding behind victimhood stifles any impulse for self-correction, Snyder writes. It’s no coincidence that in public discourse, words like enemy, crisis, nightmare, terror, and crime are constants in Berisha’s rhetoric, while the sense of emergency—perpetuated by politics—is ever-present. So much so that what Albanians actually want for the future seems impossible, as the enemy is always lurking ante portas. “If the politics of inevitability is a kind of coma, the politics of eternity is a kind of hypnosis: we gaze into the great cauldron of a cyclical myth until we fall into a trance and then do something shocking under someone else’s command,” writes Snyder, who often relates his examples to the early Trump presidency.
Albanians are now realizing that they cannot escape historical cycles and the constraints imposed by societal stagnation. However, the times we live in, and those who govern us, have forced upon us the lesson that both inevitability and eternity are antihistory—and that only history itself, which stands between them, truly matters. This means that today’s Albanians must create history for themselves, avoiding the traps of inevitability and eternity that Berisha & Rama so tightly grip to lull us into slumber. Who knows, perhaps we need to find our new literary characters—ones who can change this era. It is difficult because it is only the beginning, but we must understand that we need to truly create our own 21st-century history. The necessary change. (Homo Albanicus)
