Trapped in a Neo-imperial Whirlpool: Albania, Globalization and the Post-Cold War World
Isa Blumi, Stockholm University
Overview
Abstract
Underlying any study of transitional Balkans after the Cold War must be a quest to identify causes and effects to the obvious disruptions, dislocations and resulting violence. This contribution will be heavily invested in such a search with the suggestion that we can also resign to telling an ultimately confusing set of narratives drawing from the perspectives of often distinctive agents of the events/processes under analysis. What the conflicting stories surfacing when exploring transitions of considerable socio-economic disruption ultimately imply is that the discourse around Islam and its place in Albania since the early 1990s functions as a critical animating factor behind the narrowing arena for political, cultural and economic action. As observed by way of appreciating how religious heritage becomes the arena for new forms of institutional capture emblematic of globalization, the objectification of Muslims and the animating role of liberal-era, global Islam becomes its own irresistible force of change.
By linking the events occurring in the larger Balkans in the 1990s (especially in respect to the destruction of Yugoslavia and the controlled demolition of much of Eurasia’s social contract with the vanishing sovereign state) has critical, if hesitatingly acknowledged, links to the events in the larger world. With a specific focus on how events in the Middle East in this transitional era intersect with those in regions inhabited by Albanians, the highly evolved mechanisms of power commandeering entire socio-cultural and political-economic infrastructures manifest in critical ways by way of an ontological Islam functional in all liberal societies. In particular, formulas to empower both bigoted rivals and a new class of Muslims emerging from the collapse of the Cold War regime provides the arena for analyzing Islamophobia as a tool of invasive structures of predatorial capitalism. The emergent neoliberal hegemon commandeering Albania and Albanians invariably links the region with the larger world in ways that may prove better understood through a specific focus on how Islam would become the new means by which global capital subordinates indigenous Muslims (and their equally impacted Christian neighbors, cousins, and fellow countrymen).
As such, this proposed chapter will seek to add to the complications of the larger contemporary story of Albania by considering some of the conflicting agendas among those fluid Balkan authoritarian regimes that emerged during the launching of neoliberal reforms and requisite subvention of democratic alternatives. With Islamophobia presenting a necessary animating rationale, the subversion of Albanians’ hard-earned, if only temporary, autonomy from global forces would rapidly take place in the context of the Balkans interjection into the larger “War on Terror” engineered to platform the narrow range of transition on offer moving into the 2000s and beyond. Ultimately, the arguments made is that neoliberalism instrumentalizes Islamophobia to justify radical market deregulation while undermining democratic contestation to the destructive process. By bringing in new and undemocratic political forums such as the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and NATO/EU agencies, as much as Gulf or Turkish NGOs that preclude democratic representation from the outset, invariably sucks large numbers of destroyed individuals, like a whirlpool, into the strategically limited confines of possible collective action. The dislocation of many Albanians from their own religious heritage, a pre-liberal ethics and their resettlement into arenas fully servicing global forces becomes the ultimate conclusion of this reflective, still exploratory, study.
Introduction to the speaker
Isa Blumi, is Professor of Balkan and Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University within the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He holds a PhD in History and Middle Eastern/Islamic Studies from New York University (NYU-2005) and a Master of Political Science and Historical Studies (1995) from The New School for Social Research, New York.
Isa Blumi researches societies in the throes of social, economic, and political transformation. In the past, he compared how Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Italian, British, Dutch, Spanish, and French imperialist projects in the Islamic world intersected with, and were thus informed by, events within the Ottoman Empire. These projects have been funded by numerous institutions and remains one of his core areas of research and collaboration, including with research groups in Denmark, Greece, Lebanon, Portugal, Austria, and Turkey. He is currently working with a team of scholars on how transformations from the 18th to 20th centuries across five empires--Portuguese, Spanish, Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg--reflected processes of adaptation and new investments in state power. The results of such research aim to help bring greater appreciation to present-day policies that may threaten to move toward authoritarianism as global or regional crisis are confronted by reformers. His latest work covers the late Ottoman period and successor regimes, arguing that events in the Balkans and Middle East are the engines of change in the larger world. In this respect, he explores in a comparative, integrated manner how (post-)Ottoman societies found in, for instance, Albania/Yugoslavia, Turkey, the Gulf, and Yemen fit into what is a global story of transition. This in turn informs the story of the Atlantic world, especially the emergence of modern European imperialism and the Americas. His research into migration as a primary lens to understand such processes has resulted in numerous articles and the book: Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Among many publications, Blumi is also the author of the book Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia tells us About the World (University of California Press, 2018).
Finally, reflecting an interest in the Cold War, Blumi is additionally working on understanding how Muslims from throughout the world contributed to the Cold War with special focus on the interactions between the Lusophone World (in the context of the anti-colonial wars in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Timor, and Cabo Verde) and communist parties in Portugal, Italy, Brazil, Turkey, Syria, Yemen, Albania, and Yugoslavia. Exploring such interactions through this global perspective helps us question how we understand modern identity and social organization, themes Blumi focuses on in the courses he teaches. In addition to his historical research, Blumi also regularly writes and lectures on contemporary Balkan and Middle Eastern politics (especially Kosovo, Turkey and Yemen) and political Islam in relation to Europe. Email: isa.blumi@su.se.