Pages from Albanian History

On 7 April 1939, Good Friday, an armada of Italian warships and troop carriers surprised the inhabitants of three Albanian ports, Durrës, Vlorë, and Sarandë. Benito Mussolini had had enough of His Majesty King Zog I of Albania and decided to rid himself of a perennial annoyance. ¹ The king was always in need of "loans" that Mussolini knew would never be repaid and was increasingly behaving as an impediment to the Duce's Balkan schemes. Money was an essential commodity in this primitive kingdom where the Ottoman rushfet (bribery) was a way of life. Zog needed it to keep his entourage happy and hopefully loyal, and the only source he could get it from was his patron across the Adriatic.

For some Albanian patriots, among them the Harvard-educated bishop Fan S. Noli, the Italian invasion seemed inevitable. Many of them had objected to the Albanian-Italian Fascist Defense Treaty (1927), which had de facto reduced Albania to an Italian protectorate. But the Zog regime faced a dilemma that has yet to be resolved by subsequent Albanian governments: whether to befriend its neighbors and maintain the de facto cultural unity of the Balkan nation or shield itself behind a powerful patron and pursue the elusive dream of a "Greater Albania." ² To this date, Albania's history affirms the premise that when the choice is between extraregional protectors or good neighborly relations, its leaders have always opted for the former. Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Bolshevik Russia, and Maoist China all figured prominently in shaping Albania's foreign policy. They have all been loved, used, and discarded when circumstances warranted it or when a better replacement became available. Apparently now is the turn of the United States to be loved, used, and saddled with the task of defending the perennial Balkan underdog.

By the mid-1920s the founding fathers of the first Albanian state had realized that their truncated creation was incrementally losing its sovereignty. But they could not complain too loudly. They had miscalculated events during the Balkan wars and sided with the collapsing Ottoman Empire instead of joining the revolt of their Christian neighbors. In fact, it was an Albanian general, Esat Bey Toptani, who commanded Sultan Hamid's II troops in Kosovo and western Macedonia. Toptani was soundly defeated by the Montenegrin general Boshko Boshkovic and in a humiliating ceremony signed the surrender instruments for both provinces.

Matters got far worse for Albanian rulers in the interwar period. Within a few years following Albania's conditional admission to the League of Nations in 1920, ³ its rancorous governments came to believe that Italy rather than Albania's traditional ally, Turkey, offered better prospects to regain what had been lost during the Balkan wars. Though new in the game of power politics, Albanian leaders had mastered the rudimentary intricacies of Machiavellianism as played by post-Napoleonic rulers.

Global Experiments on Balkan Backs

Commencing with the French Revolution, major European powers had used the Balkans as a testing ground for their global schemes. Besides being an attractive piece of real estate, this region was useful for territorial trade-offs whenever the European balance of power required adjustment. Because the hierarchy of continental powers changed often, so did the competition for ethnic clients. It was not difficult to find them in the Balkans. The same powers that offered protection to preselected "victims" had also been instrumental in delineating the Balkan borders at the Bucharest and London conferences of 1913. They had seen to it that boundaries were carved in such a way that a state of permanent irredentism was assured. Thus, after the second Balkan war, the borders of no Balkan state approximated its ethnic boundaries, and all sought powerful patrons in order to settle scores with their neighbors and thereby correct the ubiquitous "historical injustices." Few scholars have captured this reality better than Rebecca West in her classic book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Though she wrote it on the eve of World...