Albania: From Anarchy to a Balkan Identity

Citation

Abse, T. (1999), "Albania: From Anarchy to a Balkan Identity", European Business Review, Vol. 99 No. 3, pp. 190-191. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1999.99.3.190.2

Sadly, the collapse of communism seems to have brought few benefits to Albania, Europe’s poorest country. It was widely imagined that the end of the bizarre Stalinist regime established by Enver Hoxha, a regime closer in some respects to Kim Il Sung’s North Korea than to Honecker’s German Democratic Republic or Husak’s Czechoslovakia, was bound to lead to marked economic, social and political improvements for the majority of its citizens. Whilst political repression has never returned to the levels of Hoxha’s dictatorship, which in 1967 launched a Chinese‐inspired Cultural Revolution aiming at the total eradication of all religion ‐ Muslim, Orthodox or Catholic ‐ from Albania, there has been no transition to a functioning parliamentary democracy. The first genuinely free general election, that of March 1992, paved the way for an attempt to create a new authoritarianism by the victors, Sali Berisha’s Democratic Party, not for a pluralism based on alternation and genuine observance of the ground rules of the democratic game. The waves of desperate Albanian migrants seeking to enter Greece and Italy, for the most part illegally, have provided vivid testimony to the degree of Albania’s economic breakdown ‐ the general strike of May‐June 1991 wiped out much of the heavy industrial base created during the Hoxha era and the subsequent land privatisation broke up the collective farms, precipitating a mass flight from the countryside to the cities. Vickers and Pettifer are to be congratulated for providing the general reader with a detailed and absorbing account of the turbulent events in Albania between Hoxha’s death in 1985 and the general election of 1996, particularly the years after 1990, based on a judicious mixture of Albanian press sources, first hand interviews with leading participants in Albanian political life and direct personal experience of some of the events with which they are concerned. The writers are a little reluctant to admit that neo‐liberal “shock‐therapy” was the root cause of many economic problems in Albania in the 1990s, just as it was, albeit with less dramatic consequences, in other Eastern European countries. Nonetheless, they provide enough empirical evidence of the negative effects of breakneck privatisation to satisfy anybody whose interpretation differs from their own. Despite their evident personal sympathy for the Democratic Alliance, a centrist formation led by intellectuals who broke from the Democratic Party in September 1991 as Berisha’s dictatorial tendencies started to become manifest, they show a remarkable degree of balance and detachment in their discussion of Albania’s domestic politics, acknowledging that Fatos Nano was making a sincere attempt to recast the Socialist Party, the principal heir of Hoxha’s PLA, as a Western style party of the centre‐left, even if some more traditional elements within the SP sought to obstruct such a transformation. Their chapter on “The Revival of Religion” (pp. 96‐117) deserves particular attention. They examine the situation of the Sunni Muslims, the Bektashis, the Orthodox and the Catholics since the lifting of the ban on religion in 1991 and conclude that despite the efforts of various Muslim countries to increase their influence in Albania, 70 per cent of whose population had been Muslim in 1945, there is as yet no serious threat of Muslim fundamentalism.

Although Albania, despite its substantial Greek minority, is more ethnically homogeneous than most of its Balkan neighbours, much of Albanian politics can only be understood in terms of the hostility between the northern Ghegs and the southern Tosks. Hoxha and the majority of the old communist leaders were Tosks, even if Ramiz Alia who succeeded Hoxha in 1985, and very belatedly assumed the role of an Albanian Gorbachev, was a Gheg. Conversely Berisha and the majority of the leading figures in the Democratic Party, especially after its rapid degeneration into clientelism and criminality after 1992, were Ghegs. Moreover, voting patterns in the 1990s were heavily influenced by the Tosk/Gheg division even if the marked urban/rural divide sometimes overshadowed it. The Ghegs have a great deal of cultural affinity with the Kosovars across the frontier, whilst the Tosks, especially the educated elite of Tirana, do not. In their discussion of domestic politics, Vickers and Pettifer, far from ignoring this distinction, tend to underline it. Therefore, it is somewhat incongruous that in their chapters on the Albanians living in neighbouring countries, the authors take up a very polemical tone, saying of Hoxha that “he consistently betrayed the national unity question in the interests of his own regime in Tirana” (p. 143). Although aware that “the notion of a ‘Unified Albania’ has much more active support in New York than it does in Albania” (p. 151), the authors are in effect propagandists for a Greater Albania. Their position on Kosovo, which they consistently refer to by its Albanian name Kosova, goes far beyond any call for autonomy within Yugoslavia of the kind that Milosevic unilaterally abolished in 1989, and really amounts to a call for “national unification”. The political movement led by Kosovar moderate Rugova is dismissed as “a feeble human rights campaign masquerading as a political struggle” (p. 164), a rhetoric unpleasantly reminiscent of the one that Sinn Fein used to employ when discussing the constitutional nationalists of the SDLP. The chapter dealing with the Albanians of Macedonia is even more strident. Macedonia is almost always put in quotation marks or described by the cumbersome acronym FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) so dear to the Greek nationalist lobby. A consistent policy of discrimination against ethnic Albanians is ascribed to the Macedonian government since independence and Macedonia’s claims to be a non‐sectarian multi‐ethnic state are treated with contempt; whilst the Macedonian government’s record is far from perfect, less partisan observers have seen it as relatively benign by the standards of Tudjman or Milosevic and any partition of Macedonia would provoke a full‐scale Balkan war involving Greece, Bulgaria and possibly Turkey, as well as Albania, that would make the Bosnian conflict look like a minor skirmish. The economic arguments advanced by Vickers and Pettifer to the effect that the old gap in living standards between the Albanians proper and the diaspora in Kosovo and Macedonia has disappeared because of improvements under Berisha, on the one hand, and a decline in all states affected by the wars of the Yugoslav succession, on the other, are unconvincing, especially in the light of the “pyramid” scandal in Albania, which broke in 1997. In short, the Albanians of Tirana are right to be more concerned with their own economic and political troubles than with the injustice of borders decided in 1878 or 1912 which so exercise these authors.