Two new books detail Albania’s roller-coaster ride toward stability, its European integration, and lights that stay lit.

The Albanian Question: Reshaping the Balkans, by James Pettifer and Miranda Vickers. I.B. Tauris, 2007. Hardback, 312 pages.

Albania and the European Union: The Tumultuous Journey towards Integration and Accession, by Mirela Bogdani and John Loughlin. I.B. Tauris, 2007. Hardback, 272 pages.

Around the turn of the millennium, it used to be said – with only a little bit of hyperbole – that the typical Albanian was entering the 21st century with a mobile phone in one hand and a candle in the other.

Several years later these contrasts are still very evident.

Greater prosperity has allowed more and more people to adopt the latest advances in communications technology. Yet the government in Tirana has been facing calls this summer to declare an “energy emergency” and to tackle the power blackouts caused by an antiquated energy generation and distribution network.

Cuts in electricity supplies have also become a major irritant in Kosovo, where even the investment of hundreds of millions of euros in the power sector under the United Nations’ auspices has failed to remedy the problem.

These contrasts that strike observers of the Albanian scene are by no means confined to the field of technology and public utilities. They also are displayed in the political projects currently being pursued by Albanian elites across the Balkans.

On the one hand, Albania is looking forward to the prospect over the next decade or so of joining the European Union. This process of integration and sharing of sovereignty is, on a pan-European scale, very much a 21st-century enterprise – even if its more limited beginnings in Western Europe and broader aspirations date back to the middle of the last century.

On the other hand, with the drawn-out negotiations over Kosovo’s future as a salutary reminder, for Albanians the issues of nation-building and state-construction, associated in much of Europe with the 19th century, remain unresolved. Kosovo’s overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian majority insists on gaining independence and acquiring all the trappings of sovereign statehood, while Serbia is adamant that it will not accept what it regards as the amputation of part of its territory.

The sources and effects of such broad cultural and political contrasts form the foundations for two new books about Albania.

MIXED STRUGGLES

The Albanian Question focuses firmly on the recent history of interaction among Albanian communities in different countries as they struggle for more extensive minority rights, democracy, or independence. In an extensively researched book that contains a wealth of detail, James Pettifer and Miranda Vickers, two of Britain’s leading experts on Albanian issues, chart a decade of developments. They start with the collapse of the fraudulent pyramid investment schemes that unleashed unrest in Albania in 1997.

In the first years of the decade, there were four armed conflicts involving Albanians in four countries or entities. The uprising against President Sali Berisha’s administration, which many Albanians blamed for allowing the pyramid schemes to operate, involved the looting of many army depots. The captured weapons were to provide the tools for ethnic Albanians to wage their armed struggles in subsequent years.

The thriving arms trade, cross-border smuggling, and chaotic conditions that persisted in Albania’s northern border regions until well after the end of the uprising created the conditions that enabled the Kosovo Liberation Army to fight against Serbian rule during the war of 1998–1999.

More indirectly, the chain reaction unleashed by the troubles in Albania also contributed to the small-scale ethnic Albanian insurgency in the Presevo valley of southern Serbia in 1999–2000 and to the much more serious conflict between ethnic Albanian guerrillas and Macedonian security forces in 2001.

In both of these cases, ethnic Albanian militants drew their inspiration more directly from Kosovo. That war had demonstrated that a resort to arms at the very least would encourage the international community to pressure state authorities to grant the ethnic Albanians more extensive minority rights.

Even without actual military intervention of the kind NATO carried out over Kosovo, ethnic Albanians expected – rightly – that diplomatic involvement by the United States and the EU would help bolster their position against their more powerful adversaries: the security forces of Serbia and Macedonia.

Pettifer and Vickers provide a first-class analysis of the always intricate, and at times convoluted, relationships between Albania’s political elites and the ethnic Albanian communities of neighboring countries. The authors demonstrate that there is little substance behind the nightmares of many Serbs, Macedonians, and Greeks – and the dreams of some Albanians – concerning the prospects for the creation of a greater Albania.

Apart from a few fringe parties, politicians in Albania have shown no interest in the redrawing of borders that would bring Albanians together in one state. It is a message that is reiterated by the authors of Albania and the European Union. Academics Mirela Bogdani and John Loughlin, both based in Great Britain, note that Albania has never played the role of “mother country” to the ethnic Albanian inhabitants of neighboring states.

This reflects the preoccupations of ordinary citizens of Albania, many of whom struggle with economic survival in a country that only recently escaped the unenviable position of being Europe’s poorest nation.

A history of separation and widely diverging forms of development have created different priorities among Albanians who live in different countries. Moreover, Tirana is anxious to reassure its Western partners that it has no interest in rocking the boat of stability that the United States and the EU are trying to steady in the once turbulent waters of the Balkans.

INTERNATIONAL CONCERNS

Both volumes dissect the role of the outside world in Albanian affairs with great attention. In their comprehensive and balanced discussion of Albania’s modernization process, Bogdani and Loughlin stress the many positive aspects of foreign involvement.

It is thanks to pressure from the EU and the United States – sometimes mediated through other bodies, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe – that Albanian politicians have turned from conflict to negotiated solutions on many occasions, most notably in 1997. (As recently as the beginning of this year, a threatened opposition boycott of local elections was avoided with the help of behind-the-scenes diplomatic mediation. No such success, however, was achieved in July in attempts to find a consensus candidate for president.)

One of the key arguments advanced in Bogdani and Loughlin’s volume is that whatever progress is being made in Albania’s reform agenda, it is due largely to the requirement to reach the standards set by the EU (and NATO) for their candidate countries’ eventual accession.

Left to its own devices, Albania’s political class, often viewed as corrupt, arrogant, and elitist, would do little to introduce much-needed reforms to increase public accountability, transparency, and an independent judiciary.

With many politicians accused of – but not prosecuted for – corruption, and with frequent allegations detailing links between senior officials and organized crime, it is hardly surprising that Albanians have much greater trust in foreign institutions than in their own. According to a 2006 opinion poll cited by the authors, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they trusted the EU and NATO more than they did the government in Tirana.

Pettifer and Vickers do no share this broadly positive view of the role played by international institutions, the EU, and the United States in Albanian politics. Instead, they describe constant interference by major powers and neighboring countries, motivated frequently by a desire to undermine Tirana’s support for Albanian communities in other countries.

As the authors write, “In contemporary Tirana foreign influence is projected through open corruption and/or the influence of foreign embassies over the media.”

Perhaps that judgment is somewhat too harsh, at least in the case of the major powers (if not with regard to some of Tirana’s neighbors). The powers’ overriding objective in Albania since the early 1990s has been to restore, consolidate, and preserve stability as a means of boosting security in the wider Balkans and of reducing both the number of migrants and the volume of crime exported from Albanian-speaking parts of the region.

Pettifer and Vickers also stress the involvement of rival foreign intelligence agencies in conspiracies to influence Albania’s regional policies – and even in assassination plots against Kosovar Albanian activists based in Albania.

But by its nature this is a murky area in which fact and fiction are often difficult to separate. Allegations abound in the Balkan media, but they are notoriously tricky to substantiate. As the authors themselves acknowledge, with reference to attempts by foreign states to control Albanian politicians, reliable information “is in short supply, but speculation and unfounded allegations are common.”

LOOKING AHEAD

So what of the future? Is Albania – are the Albanian communities in the Balkans – heading on a fast track toward a European future? Or is there going to be a lengthy diversion to resolve key aspects of the Albanian question – first and foremost, the status of Kosovo?

Bogdani and Loughlin remain pessimistic in the short term. They view Albania’s self-serving, irresponsible political class as the main obstacle to integration, not least because many among the elite may be concerned about losing the benefits that come with rampant corruption once those practices have to be cleaned up with the approach of EU accession.

Yet others might argue that Albania’s officials of all leanings need not despair: EU enlargement can provide both opportunities for and constraints on corruption. Several of the recently added countries, most notably perhaps Romania, have demonstrated that leading politicians can find ways to line their pockets with accession funds.

The longer-term prospects in Albania look much brighter, for Albania’s eventual EU membership – perhaps in about 10 or 12 years’ time – and for the resolution of the Albanian national question through the process of European integration.

“When the countries of the Western Balkans join the EU,” Bogdani and Loughlin write, “all Albanians in the region will be part of the same political unit for the first time since 1912. Instead of ‘Greater Albania’, it will be the ‘great European Albanians.’”

The chances of that happening now look increasingly likely, as the EU’s policy of step-by-step economic and legal integration for the Western Balkan countries, designed to promote their eventual accession, makes steady, if slow, progress. With its large ethnic Albanian community, Macedonia is already a candidate for EU membership. Albania itself may become the next country to be granted that status.

Pettifer and Vickers look beyond politics for answers, and they come up with several astute observations. They detect the development of a new, broader Albanian space that began with the collapse of communism and has picked up momentum with the opening of borders, particularly since the end of the war in Kosovo. The result has been a huge increase in the flow of people – among them tens of thousands of Kosovar Albanians who spend their holidays on Albania’s beaches.

Cross-border trade has also been booming, aided by a revival of regular transportation links and more broadly by the emergence of market economies in the region. Northern districts of Albania, once suffering the consequences of being on the neglected periphery, are now enjoying thriving business contacts with Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia.

The combined impact of the movement of people and goods, the revolutionary advances in communications technology that help Albanian-speaking communities keep in touch, and the various aspects of globalization are making it increasingly difficult, as Pettifer and Vickers argue, for the Albanian government or international institutions to control the nature or speed of integration among Albanians living in different countries.

Instead, Albanian economic and cultural integration in the Balkans appears to be emerging almost spontaneously in response to local or regional needs and largely without regard to how politicians in Tirana, Pristina, or places further afield might like to shape it.

As for the political side of the Albanian national question, the best hope – and most likely prospect – is that EU integration will accommodate the Albanians’ aspirations as much as it will their neighbors’ concerns. Meeting both sets of desires may turn out to be one of the toughest challenges Brussels will deal with in the Western Balkans in the coming years.

Gabriel Partos is a writer on Central and southeast European affairs and until recently was the BBC’s Southeast Europe analyst.

Book Review

By Merita B. McCormack, BSc, MBA

Long Island, New York, USA

Published at Illyria Newspaper, New York, 31 August 2007

Is it going to be 2010? 2020? Or maybe earlier then that, maybe 2014? These are the years of the future when Albania may be able to see itself as an EU member. Is it really going to happen? Probably. Why is it not happening earlier?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of Albania joining the EU, what are the obstacles for integration and accession? What favours the process?  These and many more questions are analyzed and clearly answered in "Albania and the European Union: A tumultuous Journey towards Integration and Accession", written by Mirela Bogdani and John Loughlin, and published by I.B.Tauris (London - New York).

The book opens with theoretical and contextual issues by stating the meaning of nation-state and the definition of the European Union, and by going into details describing the most influential theories of the European Integration. 

A detailed and well written history of Albania in 1990-s follows in chapter two. This explains the crossroads between Communism and Democracy and analyzes in great detail and very objectively Albania at the eve of democracy. The authors elaborate on political, historical, economic and cultural legacies of the past, beginning with the Ottoman empire and ending with the communist period.

Meeting the Copenhagen Criteria is a separate chapter that "grills" the transition period as one of most important steps of Albania toward integration into the EU. The domestic political and socio-economic current situation is analysed in depth, focusing on the elections, public administration, rule of law and judicial system. In the economic area the authors point out that they are two sides of the Albanian economy: a miracle macro-economy and a poor real micro-economy. Authors emphasise that many changes have happened in these areas, but the reforms still proceed very slowly and changes are mainly cosmetic. The incorporation of acquis communitaire and its 35 negotiation chapters are analyzed further. Ensuring approximation of EU legislation and applying it are the two emphasized challenges that Albania faces in this area. The authors conclude that Albania is still far from fulfilling the Copenhagen Criteria and a lot of work needs to be done.

A specific and important place in this long and enriching chapter takes the Albanian religious issue. The concept of EU as a "Christian Club" has raised many eyebrows for EU membership for Turkey and other Muslim countries. Authors, one of them a native Albanian, have given a true picture of what is really going on religious way in Albania and what is the real religion in Albania. What faith dominates and why? What are the real statistics and what are the trends of embracing Christian Faith? And most importantly, does religion represent an obstacle for Albania's chances of accession, as in the case of Turkey? This is a very hot topic today in both European informal and official debates and a "thorny issue" of the EU Enlargement Policy.  

Western Balkans and the SAP regional framework are analyzed later in the book, pointing out that each of the 6 WB countries are at different stages of the accession journey, but they are all "passengers of the same train", they have a clear destination, the EU membership, which will be achieved on merit-basis only when they fulfil all the Copenhagen Criteria. The other important goal, the NATO membership, is also analysed briefly. The statement "Future of Albania lies with the EU" closes that chapter.

Political system of post communism takes place in a separate chapter as to bring into light the successes and failures of the Albanian political class. Parties, coalitions, and other issues, such as internal party democracy, parties' funding, etc, are also analysed in this chapter.

Corruption, one of the main obstacles for Albania's EU integration, and other phenomenons like clientelism, nepotism and most importantly the organised crime, are subjected to an objective and open critique. They point out that corruption and bribery have affected every cell of life, but especially in public administration, judicial system and customs. The organised crime is very difficult to combat as the criminal individuals are in many cases connected with the politics and protected by politicians. The authors list facts, refer to certain events and previous works and have themselves very well observed the situation, closely monitoring Albanian society development as a whole and subsequently drawing well sounded conclusions on the issues.

The role of the elite and domestic actors is developed and analyzed in chapter eight. This is the largest by detail and one of the most important chapters of the book, as it gives a proper insight of why and how Albania is this country on the world map today. Government, Parliament, President and other structures of governing bodies in Albania are analyzed in detail. Dr. Bogdani's previous involvement in the Albanian party politics and her experience in the Albanian Public Administration have tremendously helped to  gain such a sound knowledge and to further evaluate in a very realistic and impartial way the situation in Albania in these areas. The "brain drain" is brought to the attention of the reader as an unfortunate phenomenon that has happened to Albania during the years of transition and the causes of these phenomena are analysed. The country's elite both during communism and in transition period is analysed. Unfortunately, the handful of rich and intellectual people that emerged at the end of the War World II were crushed and jailed, properties confiscated, leaving thus a huge gap between the dictator's clique and the broad masses. The authors emphasize that if any intelligentsia survived, that was mainly concentrated in Tirana, country's Capital.

The country's local government bodies are shown in its history, since communism, followed by the current days' role and future challenges that the local government structure face.      

In the book is emphasised the great role that the EU is playing for Albania in three directions: firstly through the prospect of EU membership, which provides an incentive for carrying out domestic reforms, secondly the concrete processes of  SAP and SAA and thirdly the financial assistance and programs (past, present and future ones). This and other external factors, such as the Globalisation, the influence of other CEE countries, the USA, Albanian Diaspora are called to attention in the last chapter.

The concept, the reality and the prospect of the "Greater Albania" (or "Ethnic Albania", "Pan-Albanism"), as well as the "Future of Kosovo issue", are objectively and extensively reviewed and analyzed in the book. Authors conclude that the question of "Greater Albania" should be seen under the full light of prospective future accession of Albania, Kosova, other Albanian territories in neighbouring countries, and all Balkan countries into the EU. 

As a conclusion, authors point out that many obstacles and challenges remain, but the factor they blame the most is the Albanian political class, who with its incompetence, irresponsibility and selfishness, is the main obstacle for Albania's journey towards the EU. They argue that what will make this journey shorter and less bumpy and what Albania really needs is a new political class, a new generation of leaders, equipped with real democratic principles and values of integrity, decency and honesty, committed and willing to sacrifice and make a difference for their country and its citizens, for a country and a nation which deserves more and has lost a lot of time.

A well written book. Well researched and very interesting, that has been needed long time ago. It could be of interest for a quite a wide range of audience and I think this book should be in the shelves of every foreign scholar, professional or official that is involved in Albanian issues. Every foreign government body that has engaged itself in projects with Albania should use this book as a very good source of valuable information regarding Albania and the Balkans. The greatest importance of this book is that it is (along with its previous version) the first book which analyses the relationship between the EU and Albania and its accession and integration process.

Congratulations to the authors.