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Albania
The Break with China and Self-Reliance
Albanian-Chinese relations had stagnated by 1970, and when the
Asian superpower began to reemerge from isolation in the early
1970s, Mao and the other Chinese leaders reassessed their commitment
to tiny Albania. In response, Tiranė began broadening its contacts
with the outside world. Albania opened trade negotiations with
France, Italy, and the recently independent Asian and African
states, and in 1971 it normalized relations with Yugoslavia and
Greece. Albania's leaders abhorred China's renewal of contacts
with the United States in the early 1970s, and its press and radio
ignored President Richard Nixon's trip to Beijing in 1972. Albania
actively worked to reduce its dependence on China by diversifying
trade and improving diplomatic and cultural relations, especially
with Western Europe. But Albania shunned the Conference on Security
and Cooperation in Europe and was the only European country that
refused to take part in the Helsinki Conference of July 1975.
Soon after Mao's death in 1976, Hoxha criticized the new leadership
as well as Beijing's pragmatic policy toward the United States
and Western Europe. The Chinese retorted by inviting Tito to visit
Beijing in 1977 and ending assistance programs for Albania in
1978.
The break with China left Albania with no foreign protector.
Tiranė ignored calls by the United States and the Soviet Union
to normalize relations. Instead, Albania expanded diplomatic ties
with Western Europe and the developing nations and began stressing
the principle of self-reliance as the keystone of the country's
strategy for economic development. However, Hoxha's cautious opening
toward the outside world stirred up nascent movements for change
inside Albania. As the dictator's health slipped, muted calls
arose for the relaxation of party controls and greater openness.
In response, Hoxha launched a series of purges that removed the
defense minister and many top military officials. A year later,
Hoxha purged ministers responsible for the economy and replaced
them with younger persons.
As Hoxha's health declined, the dictator began planning for an
orderly succession. He worked to institutionalize his policies,
hoping to frustrate any attempt his successors might make to venture
from the Stalinist path he had blazed for Albania. In December
1976 Albania adopted its second Stalinist constitution of the
postwar era. The document "guaranteed" Albanians freedom of speech,
the press, organization, association, and assembly but subordinated
these rights to the individual's duties to society as a whole.
The constitution enshrined in law the idea of autarky and prohibited
the government from seeking financial aid or credits or from forming
joint companies with partners from capitalist or revisionist communist
countries. The constitution's preamble also boasted that the foundations
of religious belief in Albania had been abolished.
In 1980 Hoxha turned to Ramiz Alia to succeed him as Albania's
communist patriarch, overlooking his long-standing comrade-in-arms,
Mehmet Shehu. Hoxha first tried to convince Shehu to step aside
voluntarily, but when this move failed Hoxha arranged for all
the members of the Politburo to rebuke him for allowing his son
to become engaged to the daughter of a former bourgeois family.
Shehu allegedly committed suicide on December 18, 1981. It is
suspected, however, that Hoxha had him killed. Hoxha, obviously
fearing retaliation, purged the members of Shehu's family and
his supporters within the police and military. In November 1982,
Hoxha announced that Shehu had been a foreign spy working simultaneously
for the United States, British, Soviet, and Yugoslav intelligence
agencies in planning the assassination of Hoxha himself. "He was
buried like a dog," the dictator wrote in the Albanian edition
of his book, The Titoites.
Hoxha went into semiretirement in early 1983, and Alia assumed
responsibility for Albania's administration. Alia traveled extensively
around Albania, standing in for Hoxha at major events and delivering
addresses laying down new policies and intoning litanies to the
enfeebled president. When Hoxha died on April 11, 1985, he left
Albania a legacy of repression, technological backwardness, isolation,
and fear of the outside world. Alia succeeded to the presidency
and became legal secretary of the APL two days later. In due course,
he became a dominant figure in the Albanian media, and his slogans
appeared painted in crimson letters on signboards across the country.
The APL's Ninth Party Congress in November 1986 featured Alia
as the party's and the country's undisputed leader.
* * *
Because Albania's fate is so tightly interwoven with developments
in the Balkans, it is recommended that readers unfamiliar with
the region first examine Barbara Jelavich's two-volume History
of the Balkans, which provides an excellent overview as well as
sections on Albania and the formation of the state. Robert Lee
Wolff's The Balkans in Our Time is another entertaining survey
of Balkan history. Edith Durham's High Albania and her other travelogues
on Albania from the early twentieth century read like adventure
novels and provide insight into the cultural underpinnings of
the nationalism endemic to the Balkans. The best examination of
the Albanian nationalist movement in the late nineteenth century
and the creation of Albania itself are Stavro Skendi's The Albanian
National Awakening and Joseph Swire's exquisitely written Albania:
The Rise of a Kingdom. Anton Logoreci's The Albanians: Europe's
Forgotten Survivors and Peter R. Prifti's Socialist Albania since
1944: Domestic and Foreign Developments are both solidly grounded
surveys of Albania and its trials, especially after World War
II. Postwar Albania, especially the last years of Enver Hoxha's
regime, is well treated in Elez Biberaj's Albania. No reader on
Albanian affairs, in fact no student of the former communist world,
should overlook With Stalin, The Titoites, or Enver Hoxha's other
official works, which would be right at home shelved beside George
Orwell's Animal Farm and other works in the genre of dystopian
fiction.
Data as of April 1992
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