I’ve recently returned to my Albanian history ways. I became interested in the subject after my application to be a Peace Corps English teacher in Kosovo was accepted. I began reading about Albanian history in January 2020, but after COVID made the Peace Corps impossible, I found myself sucked into the world of Albanian history.
This wasn’t truly out of the blue. eRegime, a forum that I used throughout high school, is run by its benevolent dictator and Albanian history enthusiast, Ismail. Ismail has other interests (principally Katanga), but I reached out to him in the early days of COVID to share my newfound interest in his topic. He shared his bibliography with me, and I managed to assemble a good collection of books and PDFs about Albanian history that I can go through from time to time. Because of this collection that Ismail helped me assemble, I’m acquainted with the debates in Albanian historiography. So when, one day, I saw an announcement looking for a historian to write Enver Hoxha’s entry into the online version of the Encyclopedia of the Cold War I put my name forward.
My offer to write was, to my surprise, accepted and I’ve since thrown myself into a world I still remember well from those early COVID days. With one exception, I’m using those secondary sources (books and PDFs) that I collected with Ismail. That exception, however, is Hoxha’s own collected works, of which there are six volumes in English! This is because I’ve decided to focus on the man’s ideas rather than his national leadership. That is because the other entry is being written by a real Albanian historian, Elidor Mëhilli, whose work I respect and, based on what I’ve been given, covers more than I have to say about Hoxha’s leadership. My decision to emphasize a less bloody, “global,” Hoxha will receive pushback, but I stand by my decision. I think it will be more interesting than another stock denunciation of the man in academic form.
As I read those stock academic denunciations and other works, I have been constantly struck by the experience of the Albanian bourgeoisie in World War II. For context, the country was invaded by Italy five months before the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Those Italians overthrew the monarchy of King Zog to create their own quasi-colony, something administratively situated between French Algeria and British India. The Albanian bourgeoisie, small as it was, did not love Zog although he did have his supporters. The same was true of the new Italian regime which legitimized itself in the eyes of the local bourgeoisie with modernizing projects like roads and airports and, in 1941, completing the creation of “ethnic Albania” with the conquest of Kosovo and other Yugoslav territories.
While the Italians succeeded in winning over a small percentage of the Albanian political class there were still underground groups opposed to the Italian government. The supporters of Zog had never gone away but shrank as their hope of being recognized by the allies as a government-in-exile was dashed by an indifferent British government. There were also 200 communists, including Hoxha, who were broadly organized into three committees. They were, mostly, the troubled children of the bourgeoisie, exposed to communist thought abroad since the Albanian working class was in its infancy. The largest resistance to Italian rule, however, was the Balli Kombëtar (National Front, BK) made up of republican nationalists.
These republican nationalists (BK) were supported by the greatest proportion of the Albanian bourgeoisie. They endorsed the Italians’ modernization and the successful creation of “ethnic Albania” as opposed to Zog’s stagnation and maintenance of “royal Albania” within the country’s recognized borders. What the BK opposed was Italian occupation under a nominally monarchical state. They wanted exactly what the Italians had given them, but for it to be an Albanian creation.
These politics have labeled Balli Kombëtar fascists, especially by Hoxha’s historians. They’re not wrong, but they also rhyme with the French revolutionary nationalism of 1791. A militarizing nation under threat of foreign domination, a rising bourgeoisie, and the lack of a proletarianized working class but plenty of sans-culottes. The BK was the Albanian bourgeoisie under arms and they achieved exactly what they wanted in late 1943 when the Italian armistice was signed and the Germans moved into Italy’s previously occupied territories. The Germans offered BK the chance to run their ethnic Albania as a puppet state. The Albanians accepted, and even went about creating, a comical fiction of Albanian neutrality under German leadership.
That fiction was ignored as Albania returned to a state of Yugoslav-backed civil war. Hoxha’s communist partisans – created and organized by Tito – grew in popularity and even received British support while a merry-go-round of the Albanian politicians took turns in the three Balli Kombëtar governments that were formed over their 10 months in power. The state of civil war was certainly awkward. The tribes of northern Albania had never not resisted state power and Hoxha’s partisans had actually worked with BK against the Italian occupation. Hoxha had even signed an accord with the BK promising to maintain Albania’s enlarged borders after the war, but they were forced to repudiate it by his Yugoslav patrons.
Balli Kombëtar had no need to repudiate their belief in “ethnic Albania.” That, like all of their other policies, was the culmination of the Albanian nationalism that had existed since the late 1870s. That is when an Albanian national identity was consciously created by young nationalists. Those beliefs were, of course, rooted in ethnic violence against the Serbs, Greeks, and Macedonians who shared streets with their Albanian neighbors but, like the nineteenth-century nationalists who took to the streets in 1848, there was no serious consideration of what would happen when two invented nations disagreed about where the “natural” border was. But Albanian fascism, like the 1848 revolutions, was never able to reach its logical conclusion. Weak state power meant that Albanian nationalism was concentrated in cities where a national feeling already existed. The countryside was the preserve of partisans, banditry, and roaming nationalist bands prepared to enforce the borders of “ethnic Albania.”
None of this was new, but it did not look like the fascism simultaneously happening in the rest of Europe. It was the revitalized nationalism of 1848. The language of the 48ers, the radical bourgeoisie, rising up across Europe against various foreign oppressors and attempting to liberate themselves from “foreign” oppression by embracing “national” constitutional monarchs and republican governments within the boundaries of a unified nation. Balli Kombëtar would tell you that they were doing the same thing, and they probably were, but it looked very different ninety years later. Nineteenth-century nationalism and the supposedly liberatory power of the nation-state had been abandoned by the Left. Communists and socialists had mostly moved on to internationalism while the rhetoric of liberatory and violent nationalism was ceded to the Right. In Germany, Hitler was “liberating” the German nation from Jews, in Italy, Mussolini was doing the same against democracy. In Albania, however, the non-Communist Left and Hoxha’s partisans still believed in a republican nationalist government like Balli Kombëtar. The Albanian bourgeoisie overwhelmingly supported nationalist policies and the ten-month parliament was filled with debates over the best ways to promote the Albanian national feeling among Albanians.
Balli Kombëtar’s ideas were those of 1848. The rest of Europe had moved on but Albania was late to the show. 1848 is the origin of the prehistory of fascism. Their similarities are disguised by the lifetime between them, but by seeing how BK and the Albanian bourgeoisie aligned themselves with German Naziism the similarities become clear. These are not two intellectual movements with distant relations, they are two strands of the same movement separated, not by time, but by the development of the national bourgeoisie. World War II was the culmination of the ideas of 1848.
In some ways, this is a regurgitation of the history produced in Hoxha’s postwar Albania. As the Germans withdrew from the Balkans, the Albanian partisans, led by Mehmet Shehu, liberated Albania and created the People’s Republic that would rule until 1990. Quickly, the old Albanian bourgeoisie fled into exile and those who did not were shot. Zog and his exiled supporters also remained and although the CIA and MI6 attempted to unite them with exiled Balli Kombëtar fighters in the hopes of rolling back Albanian communism they had no success. The official story of the BK until 1990 was that of the united, fascist, bourgeoisie allied with the Germans to sell Albanians into chains. fascism was proven to be the logical endpoint of all bourgeois governments. Hoxha’s revolution had repudiated the bourgeois revolution of 1848. I won’t wholly endorse Hoxha’s propaganda, but maybe we should take another look at the argument. Understanding European history certainly helps us understand Albanian history, but maybe Albanian history can help us better understand European history. We look back at 1848 with rosy glasses, but in Revolutionary Spring Christopher Clark points out the similarities between the Parisian workers repeatedly storming the National Assembly and January 6. Those revolutionary years were not rosy, but Albania and Clark made it easier for me to see a link between the revolutions of 1848 and fascism.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Normal Thoughts 