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Albania
Historical Setting
Skanderbeg, Albanian national hero of the fifteenth century
"THE ALBANIAN PEOPLE have hacked their way through history, sword
in hand," proclaims the preamble to Albania's 1976 Stalinist constitution.
These words were penned by the most dominant figure in Albania's
modern history, the Orwellian postwar despot, Enver Hoxha. The
fact that Hoxha enshrined them in Albania's supreme law is indicative
of how he--like his mentor, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin--exploited
his people's collective memory to enhance the might of the communist
system, which he manipulated for over four decades. Supported
by a group of sycophantic intellectuals, Hoxha repeateded transformed
friends into hated foes in his determination to shape events.
Similarly, he rewrote Albania's history so national heroes were
recast, sometimes overnight, as villains. Hoxha appealed to the
Albanians' xenophobia and their defensive nationalism to parry
criticism and threats to communist central control and his regime
and justify its brutal, arbitrary rule and economic and social
folly. Only Hoxha's death, the timely downfall of communism in
Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, and the collapse of the
nation's economy were enough to break his spell and propel Albania
fitfully toward change.
The Albanians are probably an ethnic outcropping of the Illyrians,
an ancient Balkan people who intermingled and made war with the
Greeks, Thracians, and Macedonians before succumbing to Roman
rule around the time of Christ. Eastern and Western powers, secular
and religious, battled for centuries after the fall of Rome to
control the lands that constitute modern-day Albania. All the
Illyrian tribes except the Albanians disappeared during the Dark
Ages under the waves of migrating barbarians. A forbidding mountain
homeland and resilient tribal society enabled the Albanians to
survive into modern times with their identity their Indo-European
language intact.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Ottoman Turks
swept into the western Balkans. After a quixotic defense mounted
by the Albanians' greatest hero, Skanderbeg, the Albanians succumbed
to the Turkish sultan's forces. During five centuries of Ottoman
rule, about two-thirds of the Albanian population, including its
most powerful feudal landowners, converted to Islam. Many Albanians
won fame and fortune as soldiers, administrators, and merchants
in far-flung parts of the empire. As the centuries passed, however,
Ottoman rulers lost the capacity to command the loyalty of local
pashas, who governed districts on the empire's fringes. Soon pressures
created by emerging national movements among the empire's farrago
of peoples threatened to shatter the empire itself. The Ottoman
rulers of the nineteenth century struggled in vain to shore up
central authority, introducing reforms aimed at harnessing unruly
pashas and checking the spread of nationalist ideas.
Albanian nationalism stirred for the first time in the late nineteenth
century when it appeared that Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and
Greece would snatch up the Ottoman Empire's Albanian-populated
lands. In 1878 Albanian leaders organized the Prizren League,
which pressed for autonomy within the empire. After decades of
unrest and the Ottoman Empire's defeat in the First Balkan War
in 1912-13, Albanian leaders declared Albania an independent state,
and Europe's Great Powers carved out an independent Albania after
the Second Balkan War of 1913.
With the complete collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian
empires after World War I, the Albanians looked to Italy for protection
against predators. After 1925, however, Mussolini sought to dominate
Albania. In 1928 Albania became a kingdom under Zog I, the conservative
Muslim clan chief and former prime minister, but Zog failed to
stave off Italian ascendancy in Albanian internal affairs. In
1939 Mussolini's troops occupied Albania, overthrew Zog, and annexed
the country. Albanian communists and nationalists fought each
other as well as the occupying Italian and German forces during
World War II, and with Yugoslav and Allied assistance the communists
triumphed.
After the war, communist strongmen Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu
eliminated their rivals inside the communist party and liquidated
anticommunist opposition. Concentrating primarily on maintaining
their grip on power, they reorganized the country's economy along
strict Stalinist lines, turning first to Yugoslavia, then to the
Soviet Union, and later to China for support. In pursuit of their
goals, the communists repressed the Albanian people, subjecting
them to isolation, propaganda, and brutal police measures. When
China opened up to the West in the 1970s, Albania's rulers turned
away from Beijing and implemented a policy of strict autarky,
or self-sufficiency, that brought their nation economic ruin.
Data as of April 1992
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