How Albania kept choosing a protector and then breaking with it

Why Albanians were the last to leave the empire

George Kastrioti, renamed Skanderbeg by the Ottoman officers who trained him at Edirne, deserted the sultan's army in November 1443 and fought the empire for the next twenty-five years. He summoned the Albanian princes to Venetian-held Lezhë to form the League of Lezhë and held off campaigns under Murad II and Mehmed II with a force of around 10,000 men. None of the help promised him by the popes or by Venice, Naples and Milan arrived. He died in 1468 leaving no clear successor, and the Ottomans completed the reconquest at the siege of Shkodra in 1479.

Accommodation followed. Conversion to Islam spread from the 17th century into the 18th, and it brought access to Ottoman trade networks, to bureaucratic positions and to the army; Britannica records that two-thirds of the population had converted by the end of the 17th century, with a crushing tax on Christians among the reasons. Albanians entered the Janissary corps and the devşirme system in numbers, and more than two dozen served as grand viziers. The Köprülü family, Muhammad Ali of Egypt and Ali Pasha of Tepelena were all Albanian.

An empire that hands out careers is difficult to secede from. Albanians were the last of the Balkan peoples to want separation from the Ottoman state, held back by the degree of Islamic influence among them, by their own social divisions, and by a well-founded fear that Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece would take the Albanian-speaking territories the moment the empire let go.

The League of Prizren shows the calculation in its founding document. Forty-seven Ottoman beys met at Prizren on 18 June 1878 and issued the Kararname, setting out their intention to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire by supporting the Porte, while defending the wholeness of the Albanian territories in arms. Ottoman authorities helped the league at first. When Abdyl Frashëri pushed it towards autonomy and open war, the sultan sent an army under Dervish Turgut Pasha, and its leaders were arrested and deported.

The cultural half of the programme outlived the political half. Albanian émigrés in Bulgaria, Egypt, Italy, Romania and the United States paid for textbooks, and at the Congress of Manastir, held from 14 to 22 November 1908, Albanian intellectuals settled on a single Latin-based alphabet to replace the Arabic, Greek and local scripts. The language had a standard orthography four years before the country had a government.

How a declaration in Vlorë outran the state

The Young Turks who seized power in Istanbul in 1908 ignored their commitments to Albanian autonomy, and three years of armed struggle from 1910 to 1912 forced them in effect to concede. The concession alarmed the neighbours more than it satisfied anyone in Albania. Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria declared war on the empire in October 1912, and their armies moved in until what remained outside their control was a patch of land around the coastal town of Vlorë.

Ismail Qemal, who had held several high positions in the Ottoman government, went to Istanbul, then to Bucharest, then to Vienna, where he obtained the agreement of the powers with interests in the Balkans. He returned with Austro-Hungarian backing and convened an assembly. Forty delegates met at Vlorë on 28 November 1912 and resolved with one voice that Albania was from that day on its own, free and independent. The text was written on a single sheet of letter paper, partly in Gheg, partly in Tosk and partly in Ottoman Turkish.

Qemal told the assembly, in the account printed by the newspaper Përlindja, that the Albanians had always been faithful to the empire and had never been recompensed for the services they rendered it, and that with the Ottoman army beaten and the Balkan allies agreeing to divide the territory, the only road to salvation was separation. The flag raised from the balcony that afternoon copied Skanderbeg's, in use more than 500 years earlier.

The declaration ran ahead of the state it announced. Vlorë was the only town under the delegates' control, which made the proclamation more theoretical than practical and effective anyway in a vacuum of power. A provisional government followed on 4 December 1912, watched by a Council of Elders, and the assembly resolved in advance to accept whatever form of government the great powers settled on. On 1 March 1913 a congress at Trieste brought together 119 representatives from six countries to petition the European capitals.

Who drew the borders and staffed the new state

The ambassadors of Britain, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France and Italy convened in London in December 1912 and recognised Albania de facto on 17 December. Their formal decision of 17 May 1913 made it an autonomous state under the sovereignty of the Ottoman sultan. After the Second Balkan War they went further, and on 29 July 1913 they recognised full independence on conditions of their own drafting.

Those conditions were the state. A European prince elected by the powers would govern. Neutrality would be guaranteed jointly by all six. The International Commission of Control would supervise organisation, finances and administration for a decade, and the gendarmerie would be organised by Dutch officers. The commission also drafted the country's first constitutional document, the Organic Statute of Albania, in 1914, providing for a national assembly of thirty-six members, some elected, some nominated by the prince and some sitting ex officio. The First World War arrived before one could be convened.

The borders were drawn on the same principle, under pressure from Albania's neighbours and with demographic realities largely set aside. Kosovo went to Serbia and the greater part of Çamëria to Greece, leaving roughly half of the Albanian lands and population outside the new state, including the districts that produced most of its food grain and livestock. About 35,000 ethnic Greeks were enclosed within it. Both questions have shaped relations with Belgrade and Athens ever since.

The prince arrived and left inside a year. Eighteen delegates representing eighteen districts offered the crown to Wilhelm zu Wied on 21 February 1914; abroad he was styled prince, and in Albania Mbret, king. A revolt led by Essad Pasha Toptani and then by Haxhi Qamili collapsed his regime, and he left on 3 September 1914 without renouncing the throne.

Six armies then occupied the country and the war nearly ended it. Under the secret Treaty of London of April 1915 the Entente promised Italy the port of Vlorë and a protectorate over the fragment of Albania that would remain, with the north going to Serbia and Montenegro and much of the south to Greece. In January 1920 negotiators from France, Britain and Greece agreed at Paris to place the country inside Yugoslav, Italian and Greek spheres of influence. The assembly that met at Lushnjë that month rejected the plan, appointed a four-man regency and moved the government to Tirana. Woodrow Wilson blocked the Paris agreement in March 1920, and admission to the League of Nations that December gave Albania recognition as a sovereign state for the first time.

How Zog traded stability for Italian money

Interwar governments came and went; between July and December 1921 the premiership changed hands five times. Fan Noli, an American-educated Orthodox bishop, took office on 16 June 1924 after a peasant-backed insurgency and announced a twenty-point programme of land reform that he had no means to pay for. Foreign recognition and foreign money both stayed out of reach, and on 13 December 1924 Ahmet Zogu crossed the border at the head of a mercenary force Belgrade had furnished with weapons and about 1,000 Yugoslav regulars.

Zogu was elected president on 31 January 1925 under a constitution that let him appoint and dismiss ministers, veto legislation and name a third of the Senate, and in 1928 he had himself proclaimed King Zog I. He then changed creditors. Turning his back on Belgrade, he signed the First Treaty of Tirana in 1926 and the Second in 1927, and Italian loans underwrote the budget while Italian instructors trained the army.

The bill came due in the depression. In 1932 and 1933 Albania failed to pay the interest on its loans from the Society for the Economic Development of Albania, and Rome answered with demands: Italians to direct the gendarmerie, a customs union, control of the sugar, telegraph and electrical monopolies, Italian taught in every school, Italian colonists admitted. Zog refused, cut the national budget by 30%, dismissed the Italian military advisers and nationalised the Italian-run Catholic schools in the north. Mussolini suspended payments, sent warships in 1934, and in 1935 tried a gift of 3 million gold francs instead.

Refusal had a limit. Rome delivered an ultimatum on 25 March 1939 and invaded on 7 April. Durrës fell that day after the sharpest of the resistance, Tirana the next, and almost the whole country by 10 April. Zog left for Greece and then London, and on 12 April the Albanian parliament voted to depose him and offer the crown to Victor Emmanuel III.

Why Albania quarrelled with every patron it found

Germany took over after the Italian surrender of September 1943, dropping paratroopers into Tirana ahead of the guerrillas and buying support by backing the annexation of Kosovo. The communist-led partisans took the capital on 17 November 1944 and cleared the country by 29 November. Together with Yugoslavia, Albania was one of only two European countries to expel the Germans without allied assistance. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration reported about 30,000 Albanian war dead and about 100,000 people left homeless. It was also one of the very few occupied countries that ended the war with more Jews in it than before, some 1,200 having been hidden by Albanian families.

Winning the war alone did not translate into standing alone afterwards. Belgrade extended credits worth 40 million dollars in 1947, equal to 58% of that year's state budget, and Tito used his hold on the party to press for incorporation. The economic planner Nako Spiru, who argued for self-sufficiency against Yugoslav demands for raw materials, was assassinated in 1947 and his death recorded as suicide. Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform in 1948 released Hoxha, who purged the pro-Yugoslav interior minister Koçi Xoxe and switched patrons.

Moscow paid the bills for thirteen years. Albania joined Comecon in February 1949, took Soviet advisers and gave the Soviet navy a submarine installation on Sazan Island; foreign aid amounted to about half the economy through the 1950s. Hoxha came back from Moscow in April 1957 with roughly 105 million dollars of loans cancelled. Albania was a founding member of the Warsaw Pact in 1955, the first promise any communist state had made to defend its borders.

The break came over economics as much as ideology. At the Fourth Party Congress in February 1961 Tirana allocated 54% of investment to industry, rejecting Khrushchev's proposal that Albania become socialism's orchard. Moscow cancelled the aid programmes and the credit lines, severed relations in December 1961, withdrew its advisers and dismantled the installation on Sazan.

China took the place Moscow had vacated, supplying about 90% of the parts, foodstuffs and other goods the Soviet Union had promised, lending on better terms, and sending technicians who drew Albanian wages. Albania spoke for China at the United Nations and formally withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in September 1968 after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the only member to leave the alliance before 1990. Beijing cut aid off in 1978 after Tirana attacked its reform and opening policies.

How Albania wrote isolation into its constitution

The campaign against religion came first. After Hoxha's speech to the Fifth Party Congress on 6 February 1967, student agitators went through the countryside forcing Albanians to stop practising, and by the end of that year every church, mosque and monastery had been closed or turned into a warehouse, a gymnasium or a workshop. The regime announced that Albania had become the world's first atheist state, in what was then the only Muslim-majority country in Europe.

The second constitution of the postwar era, adopted in December 1976, wrote the rest of it into law. Article 37 declared that the state recognised no religion and supported atheist propaganda, and the preamble boasted that the foundations of religious belief had been abolished. Autarky was made a legal principle, and the government was forbidden to seek financial aid or credits, or to form joint companies with capitalist or revisionist communist partners. A state that had never once financed itself made it unconstitutional to ask for help.

Two readings of the period compete, and both rest on the same record. Britannica's assessment is that Hoxha's modernisation programme took Albania from an agrarian economy to an industrial one within four decades, with historic progress in industry, agriculture, education and the arts, the drainage of the malarial coastal swamps, and a unified literary language merging Gheg and Tosk. By the 1970s chromium was the country's principal export.

The other reading rests on the Sigurimi. Travel abroad was forbidden to all but those on official business, purges were used against opponents inside and outside the party, and 43,000 people were imprisoned or executed across forty-five years of the regime, about 6,000 of them executed between 1945 and 1991 according to the Albanian Association of Former Political Prisoners. Mehmet Shehu, the prime minister and Hoxha's long-standing colleague, was denounced in November 1982 as a spy who had worked for the American, British, Soviet and Yugoslav services at once.

After 1978 the ban on patrons met its consequences. Shortages spread from machine parts to wheat and animal feed, living standards fell, and the World Bank measured gross national product at around 750 dollars a head through much of the 1980s. Hoxha died on 11 April 1985. His successor Ramiz Alia legalised some foreign investment, restored the right to travel abroad in 1990, restored freedom of worship, and in December 1990 accepted independent political parties.

Why the transition collapsed into armed anarchy

The first multi-party elections on 31 March 1991 returned the former communists, a general strike brought them down within two months, and the Republic of Albania was proclaimed on 29 April 1991. The Democratic Party won the elections of 22 March 1992 and Sali Berisha became president. Agriculture led a genuine recovery, annual inflation fell from 25% in 1991 towards zero, and the lek stabilised.

What grew alongside it was an informal credit market financed by the remittances of Albanians working abroad. Three state banks held 90% of deposits under tight credit ceilings, private banks were few, and deposit-taking companies filled the gap and became pyramid schemes. The IMF's account of the episode records that their nominal liabilities reached almost half of the country's GDP at the peak and that around two-thirds of the population had money in them. Several companies gave money to the ruling party during the 1996 elections, and in November 1996, with the schemes already crumbling, the prime minister and the speaker of parliament accepted medals from one of them.

The collapse in early 1997 took the state with it. Rioting became a near civil war in which some 2,000 people were killed by the IMF's count, the army disintegrated instead of suppressing it, and the lek lost up to half its value before recovering. Italy led a multinational intervention, Operation Alba, authorised by the United Nations Security Council. At the elections that followed the Democratic Party took 25 of 156 seats, and a new constitution was approved by a referendum in November 1998 that the opposition boycotted.

Two further pressures arrived at once. In 1999 some 450,000 ethnic Albanians took refuge in the country from the war in Kosovo, and emigration drained it: the 2023 census counted 2,402,113 people against 2,821,977 in 2011, and as much as a third of those born inside the borders now live outside them.

Who supervises the Albanian state today

Albania was invited into NATO at the Bucharest summit in 2008, joined in April 2009 and applied for European Union membership on 28 April 2009. Candidate status followed in June 2014, the first intergovernmental conference on accession opened in July 2022, and by November 2025 negotiations had been opened on all six clusters, the last of them covering resources, agriculture and cohesion.

The heaviest condition attached to that process revived the arrangement of 1913 in modern dress. The constitutional reform of 2016 required every sitting judge and prosecutor to be re-evaluated on assets and on professional competence, with removal as the ordinary outcome of failure. An annex to the constitution created an International Monitoring Operation, led by the European Commission, to oversee the whole re-evaluation. Its observers must have at least fifteen years of experience as judges or prosecutors in their own countries, and they may file findings, request evidence and recommend appeals. First-instance decisions on removals were completed in 2024.

The economic position under that supervision is the strongest the country has had. The IMF's 2025 Article IV consultation, concluded in December 2025, describes an economy growing fast by European standards, with real GDP growth of 3.5% projected for 2025 and 3.6% for 2026, inflation near target and public debt falling below half of GDP. It also records income per capita at about a third of the European Union level, and names membership by 2030 as the government's objective.

The difference between 1913 and now lies in who asked. The commission of six foreigners and one Albanian was imposed as the price of recognition; the monitoring operation of 2016 was written into the constitution by an Albanian parliament that wanted the accession it opens. A country that spent the 20th century acquiring protectors and breaking with them has spent the 21st applying to join one, on terms it negotiated and can be held to. Albania: politics takes up the institutions that resulted, and Albania: overview what the state looks like now.