Written by: Albatros Rexhaj
Last week, El País — one of the most widely read newspapers in Europe — asked Lea Ypi to name the two great problems of the 21st century. Ypi is a professor of Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics, an Albanian who grew up under Hoxha’s dictatorship, with a grandfather who spent fifteen years in a labor camp, with a documented family history that underlies two books translated into dozens of languages. She answered: capitalism and the nation-state.
I live in Tirana. I cover Albanian politics. I read this and looked out the window.
The gap between what the world thinks Albania is and what Albania really is has always existed. What has changed is that now this gap has a name, a chair at a London university and thirty-five translations. Albania has been many things. A philosophical device is one of the new ones.
Lea Ypi did not invent the process that produced it. She is its most successful expression — talented, serious in thought, and in exact accordance with what a certain group of institutions seeks: a voice from the particular that now comes readable as universal. A testimony that functions as theory. A place, made exportable.
This process has a familiar form. It begins with real, documented suffering. Ypi’s grandfather spent fifteen years in Hoxha’s camps. Her family’s trajectory — the connection to the fascist regime, the communist punishment, the decades of survival — is not constructed. The archives confirm it.
Then it requires distance. Ypi left Albania at the age of eighteen, studied in Rome, received his doctorate in Florence, pursued a fellowship at Oxford, and ended up at the London School of Economics, where he now holds the Ralph Miliband Chair. This chair is not built for ambiguity. It selects a certain kind of seriousness — one that translates experience into structural critique.
In the end, it produces an argument. In Ypi’s case: moral socialism — a synthesis of Kant with Marx that locates the source of the lack of freedom in capitalism and the nation-state as its political form. As an academic work, it is coherent and rigorous. As a public formulation, it becomes something else — so broad that it can absorb almost anything, including Albania.
From Tirana, the compression is clearly visible.
The Albanian state is not an abstraction. It was proclaimed in Vlora in 1912, after centuries in which Albanians existed without political form — subjects of an empire, objects of territorial claims, speakers of a language without official status. The national project was not the source of the violence against Albanians. It was the only response to it. In Kosovo, where identity was systematically suppressed and where some ten thousand people were killed in 1998–1999, the nation-state was not the problem. It was what people were dying to have.
To say that the nation-state is one of the defining problems of our time may make sense in some contexts. Here, it is a misreading of the terrain. It is a conclusion reached elsewhere and brought intact to a place that does not produce it. The framework does not fit the particular. The particular fits the framework.
And this adaptation is not neutral. It is a process of selection and distortion: what can travel is selected, what resists is removed, and the remainder is presented as whole.
Inside her books, Ypi is more careful. She resists simplification, maintains moral complexity, allows contradictions to stand. Outside of them — in interviews, festivals, television — the argument is compressed into what circulates. Capitalism and the nation-state. Two problems. One formula. The system does not punish this. It rewards it.
Its Albanian critics saw the flaw first. When Free was published in Albanian, some accused it of trivializing the communist period, of factual inaccuracies, of translating their history for an audience that would not verify it. The international press, unable to judge the specifics, dismissed them as reactionaries. Some were. Some were not. Some were asking a harder question: what happens when a country’s history is processed into philosophy and exported with a single voice — who authorizes this export, and what is lost along the way?
What is lost is the difficulty.
Albania is a difficult country — politically, historically, morally. Its communist past does not admit of pure moral geometry. Its relationship with the nation-state is not a theoretical problem, but a survival structure built at extreme cost. These do not travel easily. They do not compress. Therefore they are removed.
Ypi lives in London. Her brother has never been granted a visa to visit her. The boundaries she criticizes as artifacts of an unjust political form are the same boundaries that decide whether her family can be in the same room. This is not a contradiction. It is the system that works as it is built: you are accepted because you speak its language; you stay because you don’t break it.
Named chairs do not command concern. They command coherence — conclusions that align with institutional self-understanding, delivered with the authority of experience from places that read as suffering. Albania qualifies. The conclusions that Albania produces on its own terms are not always. They are edited along the way.
None of this makes Ypi's work invalid, or her critique of capitalism irrelevant. The economic shock of post-communism in Albania was real and severe. The role of international financial institutions in this process deserves serious consideration. These are valid arguments.
But a place is not a credential. Suffering is not a syllogism. And the distance between Tirana and London is not just geographical. It is interpretive — and the interpretation that travels is not always the true one.
When a single, institutionally legitimized voice becomes the primary lens through which a place is understood, what is lost is not just accuracy. It is authority — the authority to define the meaning of one's own history.
Albania has been processed before — by empires, by great powers, by ideological systems, by financial institutions. Each time, the processing served someone else's needs and left its mark here.
The machinery today is more refined. The language is more elegant. The intentions are better.
The function has not changed: not to understand a place as it is, but to make it readable for systems that decide what is considered knowledge — and what is not.
What is lost is not only the truth.
It is ownership of reality itself.
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