Adrian Brisku,Bittersweet Europe: Albanian and Georgian Discourses on Europe,1878–2008

Reviewed by: Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan, USA

Adrian Brisku is an Albanian married to a Georgian. He has combined his dual national allegiances in a fascinating comparative history of Albanian and Georgian discourses about Europe. The narrative displays an ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between these two distinctive countries and their notions about, hopes of, and frustrations with, Europe, which has alternatively been an inspiration and a disappointment. Europe presents an ideal of civilization, an aspiration for the peripheries of empires to join the historical mainstream. Georgia was positioned between Asia and Europe, but its intellectual elite, led by the nationalist poet Ilia Chavchavadze, was determined to be part of Europe rather than Asia, and although Russia, its imperial master, was often the door to Europe, Georgians looked for alternative routes to the world of enlightenment and progress. A key Albanian intellectual, Sami Frashëri, who considered the Albanians to be the oldest nation in Europe, firmly linked his nation to Europe, distancing them from the Turks, a ‘wild nation having arrived from the deserts of North Asia’ (66).

Nineteenth-century nationalists and socialists looked to different Europes as possible futures for their countries. Albania continued to envision a European present and future through the turbulent interwar years, and the dictatorial King Zog I presented himself as a European. Georgia, and later Albania, under the Communists turned away from capitalist and democratic Europe, but even the Marxist ideal was indebted to a sense of European progress. Brisku unfolds the discussions that took place in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist years in more detail than is available anywhere else in English, and these chapters in particular are a major contribution to what we know about the periphery of the Soviet empire. With the decline of Marxist-Leninist style socialism, Europe once again appeared as a beacon to oppositionists. But as at moments in the past the modernity presented by the West was both appealing and difficult to acquire. For Albania and Georgia Europe is both present and absent, close at hand and never quite reachable.

The parallels between the Albanian and Georgian experiences are striking, but most valuable in Brisku's narrative is the integration of the concern of the intelligentsia with Europe and the political vicissitudes through which both countries travelled in the twentieth century. Neither being embedded in alien empires nor living in precarious independence made the road to Europe any less rocky. Becoming European has meant subscribing to far more than a vague notion of culture and civilization; it comes with political requirements, economic readjustments, and international realignments, as well as subordination to new forms of international hegemony.

Brisku's review of the historical discourses on Europe has a relevance in our own time, as both Albania and Georgia negotiate their current and future relationship with the West. Will they be full members of Europe at some point soon? The desire is there on the part of Albanians and Georgians, but as tantalizing as Europe remains, not all of its various meanings are inviting to small nations that wish to preserve something of what they conceive as their essence. Europe's modernity is a solvent in which the particular might potentially be lost in another's universal.