In our subconscious, still like a barely muffled roar from the turmoil of almost the last four decades, echoes a now muffled call that shook the Albanians of the 90s: "Let's make Albania like the rest of Europe!".
Fortunately, Albania is on its path to European Integration and in recent months has done for our democracy what it would not do with the opening of all Integration chapters.
In the modern path of Albania, this is very encouraging and foreigners who deal with Albanian issues often try to avoid excessive optimism. However, in the face of this, our impatience is placed but above all disappointment in its concept that is now known as ultramodernism, to borrow the term that Francis Balle assigns to this period in his book: “The Clash of the Fanatics” (translated into Albanian and published by 'Papirus').
In his argument, the professor of political science shows that in the challenges of globalization, the latter has not only not made people happier, but we are faced with a kind of barbarity that was already thought to be impossible. In our case, the democracy of the '90s could not avoid the terrible '97-'98 and the Pyramid Schemes that Berisha blessed (!); it could not avoid the great shortages of water and infrastructure; the chaos of structural theft in the country; the unbridled waste of many individuals; this postmodernism has not democratized politics and the tendency to move towards autocracy that today you can really see in the leader of the Socialist Party; It has not been able to emancipate the opposition, where Berisha uses the remaining part of the Democratic Party only for narrow agendas, nor has it individualized and raised the voice of the people through the elected, because the deputies who are today in this legislature are also elected by the people, but as soon as they are sworn into parliament they implement the Rama-Berisha verdicts like a mannequin; it has not restrained local government from its cowardice and lack of professionalism...
The political lecturers who speak to us today according to narrow interests, as apostles of this time, think only about their short-term and maximum profits. The defense of the “Balluku” issue in recent days by the Socialist Party and the unclear publication of our Constitution often helps this chaos that has turned us into identifying this ironic paradox in our country as well. What we dreamed of is now turning into an extraordinary burden, where we not only feel unrepresented but are also always part of the surprises of this pseudo modernity, served by our officials. The latter, unclear about EU directives and the country's development path, have caused the reforms to remain and turn into a tiring burden.
Justice itself is becoming an unimaginable burden with the multitude of files carried and increased enormously; healthcare with its incompetence (but apparently modernized with new buildings); education has been destroyed, a fact that affects above all the preparation of the country's elites. The consequence of this is the inability to see an elaborate debate at high levels regarding Justice, scientific research or the way it can be economically channeled.
If you were to prepare a material with the promises and words of Rama and Berisha, anyone who knows the limits of Albanian economic-social-human possibilities would be scandalized. It is this behavior of the amorphous structures that our politicians have built in three decades that Albanians still suffer for their property and some bureaucrats with no identity are wandering around, simply because they have a tesla in their pockets that they only want to fill or with shameful conformism to become a bridge for anyone who asks them in favor of their interest.
This kind of "perverse irony" of modernity has often been discussed in philosophical criticism, especially for countries with high development receptors, where among them a great thinker like Michel Foucault, naturally anticipating the crisis of modernity, would give it a definition and this had to do with the main driving forces of the modern era: reason, liberation, science and progress, which unfortunately resulted in their exact opposites: new forms of domination, technical alienation and unforeseen destructive consequences in many fields, we quote Balle.
This is also our greatest paradox today, that avoiding dogmatic Socialism would make us think that we would have greater freedom, but that has already resulted in a nightmare. What was seen as a great revolution of our administration with "Diella" has long been forgotten due to failures, because the various systems related to cyber processes are routinely blocked. If before we had a Bloc that was held on values that were calcified, now we have a caste that manages to enter the laws in parliament and above all dictate without batting an eyelid about the country's policies.
And, today almost… “40.5% of the population remains at risk of poverty or social exclusion – almost twice the European Union average. Moreover, the lack of an official minimum standard of living makes it difficult to truly measure the effect of economic assistance and financial transfer policies” (Monitor, 2026), is stated in a recent UNDP report. “Social protection spending in Albania remains around 9.5–9.6% of Gross Domestic Product, a level considered among the lowest in Europe. The EU average reaches around 27% of GDP” (Monitor, 2026), is also mentioned there.
…French anthropologist Marc Auge established the concept of “Perverse Irony” of supermodernity, in a book titled “Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity” (1995), where the paradox extends to contemporary spaces – such as airports, highways, hotel chains and shopping malls, which are designed for transient and anonymous human connections, but which in fact only produce isolating and uniform experiences. We really already have many of these (here too there is room for discussion), but with them we thought we would walk and make Albania like the rest of Europe, while unfortunately we are always in a disappointment that does not divide and leaves us alone and this is perhaps the distinguishing part of our anthropology in the last four decades. But is it a disease of modernity or our normality that we remain last?! (Homo Albanicus)
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