Ideological borrowings from the Perestroika reform: Albanian state socialist ruling elite in the late 1980s.docx
Creators: name: Lleshi, Sokol
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Sociology
subject: FOS: Sociology
subject: 160603 Comparative Government and Politics
subject: FOS: Political science
subject: 160805 Social Change
subject: 160806 Social Theory

description: The focus of this study is to address the extent to which relevant factions of the ruling elite of the state socialist regime in the periphery of the East Central Europe, such as Albania, borrowed and used the ideological blueprint of perestroika in order to solve the legitimation crisis of the late 1980s. The objective of the study is to reconsider the common sense understanding of the communist regime in Albania, which is generally characterized as remaining Stalinist and totalitarian since its inception until the end. That is not to condone the crimes and the repressive features of the dictatorship neither to praise the assumed modernizing or so-called emancipatory goal of the communist regime itself. Yet, the empirical evidence indicates that in the late 1980s the Albanian state socialist regime considers replacing the dogmatic Marxist-Leninist ideological legitimation and the nationalist legitimation ( Tismăneanu, 2003) of Stalinist type with a more expertise-based and universalistic ideology that would temper the schematic and doctrinaire features of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. Despite the proclaimed continuity with the previous Stalinist ruling practices of the regime, and the ferocious public criticism of current revisionism (an allusion to Gorbachev) and bourgeois capitalist states, a close circle of party ideologues and key representatives of the nomenklatura led by Ramiz Alia started using a different ideological frame and terminology regarding the ‘construction of socialism’ in Albania. By studying and exploring the official public discourse of these representatives and other influential members of the regime one notices a difference between two prevailing factions within the Albanian Labor Party. One faction represented by conservative and loyalists to the Stalinist legacy of the communist regime emphasizes continuity and status-quo, being not in favor of reforms. The other faction represented primarily by the General Secretary of the PLA and his inner circle does not disavow socialism completely yet aims to restructure the command economy by providing more autonomy to the managers and to induce the professional class to deliberate on innovative or creative ways of reforming socialism. The more reformist faction had the upper hand despite the discursive ambiguity and hesitations regarding the scope of the reforms. Challenges to regime transition were not lacking either. One could refer to the societal mobilizations of dogmatic regime supporters from local communities in defense of the Stalinist legacy of the dictatorship and the attempted military uprising by cadets of the Army School in February 1991. The protracted dynamics of regime change in Albania, this paper claims, could be better explained by the conceptual framework devised by McFaul (2001) to explain regime dynamics in the Soviet Union. This framework could actually provide a plausible explanation to absence of democratic consolidation and frequency of regime cycles (Hale, 2005) in Albania.