Three Ends, Two Transitions, One Crisis: The Quest for the Lost Transition in Balkan Normative Order

In the comparative politics literature, “transitology” is the study of a particular kind of regime change, namely the passage from “non-democracy” to a liberal regime. This article widens the scope of the investigation, addressing the question of how grand teleological narratives of socioeconomic transformation, including but not limited to the democratisation project, are domesticated in normative terms. It does so by retrieving Balkan constitutional texts and analysing them as “narratives of transition”. The texts selected are from characteristically “revolutionary” periods: 1945, the 1960s, and 1989, corresponding to major shifts in modernist socioeconomic narratives. It is argued that in both socialist and liberal discursive traditions, “transition” is a fully perspective and open-ended “historical stage” characterised by a series of reforms, not least constitutional, intended to conclusively transform society. However, a comparable transitory narrative from or to the “European Social Model” has never existed; yet, it is precisely this narrative that emerges as the current economic crisis unfolds. As such, the term of “Balkans” might acquire new significances, as a region of convergence of several EU peripheries (South-Eastern Europe, the South, Western Balkans).