By Ben Andoni
In our collective subconscious—still echoing like a muffled rumble from the upheavals of nearly four decades ago—there lingers a call that once shook Albanians at the turn of the 1990s: “Let’s make Albania like the rest of Europe!”
Fortunately, Albania is on its path toward European integration, and in recent months it has achieved something that not even the boldest dreams once imagined: the opening of all chapters of the integration process. In the modern trajectory of Albania, this is deeply encouraging, and foreign observers dealing with Albanian affairs often try to avoid excessive optimism. Yet this stands against our own impatience—and above all our disappointment with what is now known as hyper-modernity, borrowing the term that Francis Balle uses to describe this period in his book The Clash of Fanatics (translated into Albanian and published by Papirus).
In his argument, the professor of political science notes that in the challenges of globalization, the latter has not made people happier; rather, we are confronted with a kind of barbarism that once seemed impossible in the modern world. In our case, the democracy of the 1990s failed to prevent the horrific years of 1997–1998 and the pyramid schemes that were blessed by Sali Berisha; it has not eliminated chronic shortages of water and infrastructure; it has not curbed the structural plundering of the country or the reckless abuses of many individuals.
This postmodern condition has not democratized politics either, nor has it halted the tendency toward autocracy—something visible today in the leadership style of the head of the Socialist Party, Edi Rama. Nor has it emancipated the opposition, where Berisha uses the remaining segment of the Democratic Party largely for his own narrow agendas.
It has not individualized the voice of the people or strengthened representation through elected officials. Members of parliament are elected by the people, yet the moment they swear their oath in parliament they behave like mannequins, mechanically implementing the verdicts of Rama or Berisha. Nor has local governance been spared from disorder and lack of professionalism.
Political commentators who speak today—according to their narrow interests, like apostles of the age—think only of their short-term and maximal gains. The recent defense of the “Balluku affair” by the Socialist Party and the hesitant steps of our Constitutional Court often deepen this chaos, pushing us further into recognizing this ironic paradox even within our own country.
What we once dreamed of has now become an enormous burden. We not only feel unrepresented, but we are also constantly caught in the surprises of this pseudo-modernity served up by our officials. These same officials, often unclear about EU directives and the country’s development path, have turned reforms into an exhausting weight rather than a transformative process.
Justice itself is becoming an unimaginable burden with the accumulation of countless files; healthcare remains marked by incompetence—though cosmetically modernized with new buildings; and education has been severely damaged, a fact that deeply affects the preparation of the country’s future elites.
As a consequence, it is nearly impossible to witness a sophisticated debate at higher levels about justice, scientific research, or how economic development should be structured. If one were to compile a document of the promises and statements made by Rama and Berisha, anyone familiar with Albania’s economic, social, and human limits would be scandalized.
This behavior of amorphous political structures built over three decades has left Albanians still struggling for their property rights, often dragged through bureaucratic mazes by faceless officials—individuals who merely carry a party membership card in their pockets and seek only to fill them, or who act with shameful conformism, becoming bridges for anyone requesting favors in the name of personal interest.
This kind of “perverse irony” of modernity has often been discussed in philosophical critiques, especially in societies experiencing intense development pressures. Among those thinkers, Michel Foucault sensed the crisis of modernity early on. He suggested that the main driving forces of the modern age—reason, liberation, science, and progress—have, tragically, produced their exact opposites: new forms of domination, technical alienation, and destructive, unforeseen consequences across many fields.
This is perhaps our greatest paradox today. Escaping dogmatic socialism led us to believe that we would gain greater freedom. Yet the result often feels closer to a nightmare. What was once presented as a revolutionary reform in public administration through the digital system “Diella” is now barely mentioned due to its failures, as interconnected cyber systems frequently collapse.
If once there was a Bllok sustained by values that eventually calcified, today there exists a caste capable of penetrating even the laws passed in parliament—and of dictating the country’s policies without the slightest hesitation.
Today, nearly 40.5% of the population remains at risk of poverty or social exclusion—almost twice the European Union average. Moreover, the absence of an official minimum living standard makes it difficult to measure the real impact of social assistance and financial transfer policies (Monitor, 2026), according to a recent report by United Nations Development Programme.
“Expenditures for social protection in Albania remain around 9.5–9.6% of GDP, among the lowest levels in Europe, while the EU average is approximately 27% of GDP,” the same report notes.
The French anthropologist Marc Augé described this phenomenon as the “perverse irony” of supermodernity in his book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995). The paradox extends to contemporary spaces—airports, highways, hotel chains, and shopping malls—designed for fleeting and anonymous human connections but which ultimately produce isolating and uniform experiences.
We too now have many such spaces (though this remains open to debate). With them, we believed we would move forward and make Albania like the rest of Europe. Instead, we remain trapped in a lingering disappointment that isolates us—perhaps the most distinctive feature of our anthropology over the past four decades.
So the question remains: is this a disease of modernity, or simply our own normality—to remain among the last? (Homo Albanicus).