By the mid-19th century Turkey was in the throes of the “Eastern Question,” as the peoples of the Balkans, including Albanians, sought to realize their national aspirations. To defend and promote their national interests, Albanians met in Prizren, a town in Kosovo, in 1878 and founded the Albanian League. The league had two main goals, one political and the other cultural. First, it strove (unsuccessfully) to unify all Albanian territories—at the time divided among the four vilayets, or provinces, of Kosovo, Shkodër, Monastir, and Janina—into one autonomous state within the framework of the Ottoman Empire. Second, it spearheaded a movement to develop Albanian language, literature, education, and culture. In 1908, in line with the second program, Albanian leaders met in the town of Monastir (now Bitola, North Macedonia) and adopted a national alphabet. Based mostly on the Latin script, this supplanted several other alphabets, including Arabic and Greek, that were in use until then.

The Albanian League was suppressed by the Turks in 1881, in part because they were alarmed by its strong nationalistic orientation. By then, however, the league had become a powerful symbol of Albania’s national awakening, and its ideas and objectives fueled the drive that culminated later in national independence.

When the Young Turks, who seized power in Istanbul in 1908, ignored their commitments to Albanians to institute democratic reforms and to grant autonomy, Albanians embarked on an armed struggle, which at the end of three years (1910–12) forced the Turks to agree, in effect, to grant their demands. Alarmed at the prospect of Albanian autonomy, Albania’s Balkan neighbours, who had already made plans to partition the region, declared war on Turkey in October 1912, and Greek, Serbian, and Montenegrin armies advanced into Albanian territories. To prevent the annihilation of the country, Albanian national delegates met at a congress in Vlorë. They were led by Ismail Qemal, an Albanian who had held several high positions in the Ottoman government. On November 28, 1912, the congress issued the Vlorë proclamation, which declared Albania’s independence.

Creating the new state

Shortly after the defeat of Turkey by the Balkan allies, a conference of ambassadors of the great powers (Britain, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France, and Italy) convened in London in December 1912 to settle the outstanding issues raised by the conflict. With support given to the Albanians by Austria-Hungary and Italy, the conference agreed to create an independent state of Albania. But, in drawing the borders of the new state, under strong pressure from Albania’s neighbours, the great powers largely ignored demographic realities and ceded the vast region of Kosovo to Serbia, while in the south Greece was given the greater part of Çamëria, a part of the old region of Epirus centred on the Thíamis River. Many observers doubted whether the new state would be viable with about one-half of Albanian lands and population left outside its borders, especially since those lands were the most productive in food grains and livestock. On the other hand, a small community of about 35,000 ethnic Greeks was included within Albania’s borders. (However, Greece, which counted all Albanians of the Orthodox faith—20 percent of the population—as Greeks, claimed that the number of ethnic Greeks was considerably larger.) Thereafter, Kosovo and the Greek minority remained troublesome issues in Albanian-Greek and Albanian-Yugoslav relations.

The great powers also appointed a German prince, Wilhelm zu Wied, as ruler of Albania. Wilhelm arrived in Albania in March 1914, but his unfamiliarity with Albania and its problems, compounded by complications arising from the outbreak of World War I, led him to depart from Albania six months later. The war plunged the country into a new crisis, as the armies of Austria-Hungary, France, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia invaded and occupied it. Left without any political leadership or authority, the country was in chaos, and its very fate hung in the balance. At the Paris Peace Conference after the war, the extinction of Albania was averted largely through the efforts of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who vetoed a plan by Britain, France, and Italy to partition Albania among its neighbours.

A national congress, held in Lushnje in January 1920, laid the foundations of a new government. In December of that year Albania, this time with the help of Britain, gained admission to the League of Nations, thereby winning for the first time international recognition as a sovereign nation and state.

Bishop Noli and King Zog

At the start of the 1920s, Albanian society was divided by two apparently irreconcilable forces. One, made up mainly of deeply conservative landowning beys and tribal bajraktars who were tied to the Ottoman and feudal past, was led by Ahmed Bey Zogu, a chieftain from the Mat region of north-central Albania. The other, made up of liberal intellectuals, democratic politicians, and progressive merchants who looked to the West and wanted to modernize and Westernize Albania, was led by Fan S. Noli, an American-educated bishop of the Orthodox church. In the event, the East-West polarization of Albanian society was of such magnitude and complexity that neither leader could master and overcome it.

In the unusually open and free political, social, and cultural climate that prevailed in Albania between 1920 and 1924, the liberal forces gathered strength, and by mid-1924 a popular revolt forced Zogu to flee to Yugoslavia. Installed as prime minister of the new government in June 1924, Noli set out to build a Western-style democracy in Albania, and toward that end he announced a radical program of land reform and modernization. But his vacillation in carrying out the program, coupled with a depleted state treasury and a failure to obtain international recognition for his revolutionary, left-of-centre government, quickly alienated most of Noli’s supporters, and six months later he was overthrown by an armed assault led by Zogu and aided by Yugoslavia.

Zogu began his 14-year reign in Albania—first as president (1925–28), then as King Zog I (1928–39)—in a country rife with political and social instability. Greatly in need of foreign aid and credit in order to stabilize the country, Zog signed a number of accords with Italy. These provided transitory financial relief to Albania, but they effected no basic change in its economy, especially under the conditions of the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s.

The social base of Zog’s power was a coalition of southern beys and northern bajraktars. With the support of this coalition—plus a vast Ottoman-style bureaucracy, an efficient police force, and Italian money—King Zog brought a large measure of stability to Albania. He extended the authority of the government to the highlands, reduced the brigandage that had formerly plagued the country, laid the foundations of a modern educational system, and took a few steps to Westernize Albanian social life.

On balance, however, his achievements were outweighed by his failures. Although formally a constitutional monarch, in reality Zog was a dictator, and Albania under him experienced the fragile stability of a dictatorship. Zog failed to resolve Albania’s fundamental problem, that of land reform, leaving the peasantry as impoverished as before. In order to stave off famine, the government had to import food grains annually, but, even so, thousands of people migrated abroad in search of a better life. Moreover, Zog denied democratic freedoms to Albanians and created conditions that spawned periodic revolts against his regime, alienated most of the educated class, fomented labour unrest, and led to the formation of the first communist groups in the country. Italy, on the other hand, viewed Albania primarily as a bridgehead for military expansion into the Balkans. On April 7, 1939, Italy invaded and shortly after occupied the country. King Zog fled to Greece.

World War II

In October 1940 Italian forces used Albania as a military base to invade Greece, but they were quickly thrown back into Albania. After Nazi Germany defeated Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941, the regions of Kosovo and Çamëria were joined to Albania, thus creating an ethnically united Albanian state. The new state lasted until November 1944, when the Germans—who had replaced the Italian occupation forces following Italy’s surrender in 1943—withdrew from Albania. Kosovo was then reincorporated into the Serbian portion of Yugoslavia, and Çamëria into Greece.

Meanwhile, the various communist groups that had germinated in Zog’s Albania merged in November 1941 to form the Albanian Communist Party and began to fight the occupiers as a unified resistance force. After a successful struggle against the fascists and two other resistance groups that contended with them for power—the National Front (Balli Kombëtar) and the pro-Zog Legality Party (Legaliteti)—the communists seized control of the country on November 29, 1944. Enver Hoxha, a college instructor who had led the resistance struggle of communist forces, became the leader of Albania by virtue of his post as secretary-general of the party. Albania, which before the war had been under the personal dictatorship of King Zog, now fell under the collective dictatorship of the Albanian Communist Party. In 1946 the country officially became the People’s Republic of Albania and in 1976 the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania.

The Stalinist state

The new rulers inherited an Albania plagued by a host of ills: pervasive poverty, overwhelming illiteracy, gjakmarrje (“blood feuds”), epidemics of disease, and gross subjugation of women. In an attempt to eradicate these ills, the communists drafted a radical modernization program intended to bring social and economic liberation to Albania, thus completing the political liberation won in 1912. The government’s first major act to “build socialism” was swift, uncompromising agrarian reform, which broke up the large landed estates of the southern beys and distributed the parcels to landless and other peasants. This destroyed the powerful class of the beys. The government also moved to nationalize industry, banks, and all commercial and foreign properties. Shortly after the agrarian reform, the Albanian government started to collectivize agriculture, completing the job in 1967. As a result, peasants lost title to their land. In addition, the Hoxha leadership extended the new socialist order to the more rugged and isolated northern highlands, in turn bringing down the age-old institution of the blood feud and the patriarchal structure of the family and clans and thus destroying the semifeudal class of bajraktars. The traditional role of women—namely, confinement to the home and farm—changed radically as they gained legal equality with men and became active participants in all areas of society.

In order to obtain the economic aid needed for modernization, as well as the political and military support to enhance its security, Albania turned to the communist world: Yugoslavia (1944–48), the Soviet Union (1948–61), and China (1961–78). Economically, Albania benefited greatly from these alliances: with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and credits and with the assistance of a large number of technicians and specialists sent by its allies, Albania was able to build the foundations of a modern industry and to introduce mechanization into agriculture. As a result, for the first time in modern history, the Albanian populace began to emerge from age-old backwardness and, for a while, enjoyed a higher standard of living.

Politically, Hoxha was disillusioned with his communist allies and patrons and broke with each one, charging that they had abandoned Marxism-Leninism and the cause of the proletariat for the sake of rapprochement with the capitalist West. Alienated from both East and West, Albania adopted a “go-it-alone” policy and became notorious as an isolated bastion of Stalinism.

Hoxha’s program for modernization aimed at transforming Albania from a backward agrarian country into a modern industrial society, and, indeed, within four decades Albania had made respectable—in some cases historic—strides in the development of industry, agriculture, education, the arts, and culture. A notable achievement was the drainage of coastal swamplands—previously breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes—and the reclamation of land for agricultural and industrial uses. Also symbolic of the change was a historic language reform that fused elements of the Gheg (Geg) and Tosk dialects into a unified literary language.

Political oppression, however, offset gains made on the material and cultural planes. Contrary to provisions in the constitution, during Hoxha’s reign Albania was in effect ruled by the Directorate of State Security, known as the Sigurimi. To eliminate dissent, the government periodically resorted to purges, in which opponents were subjected to public criticism, dismissed from their jobs, imprisoned in forced-labour camps, or executed. Travel abroad was forbidden to all but those on official business. In 1967 the religious establishment, which party leaders and other atheistic Albanians viewed as a backward medieval institution that hampered national unity and progress, was officially banned, and all Christian and Muslim houses of worship were closed.