“Brussels and Washington had imposed a regime that subordinated the long-term
goals of Albanians to the economic and political agendas of the Western powers.”
The Albanian Question
Looms Over the Balkans Again
ISA BLUMI
T
hroughout 2019, hundreds of thousands
of citizens of Albanian-inhabited coun-
tries—Kosovo, North Macedonia, Albania,
and Montenegro—took part in regular demon-
strations. Their protests expressed a deep frustra-
tion with a new era of painful economic austerity,
a lack of progress toward joining the European
Union, and an entrenched political oligarchy that
continues to thwart attempts to curb its power.
Elections in Albania and Kosovo, which had been
expected to help bring change during the summer,
yielded mixed results. In Albania, local elections
were boycotted by the inept opposition, which
allowed unpopular Prime Minister Edi Rama, in
office since 2013 (and now holding the post of
foreign minister as well), to strengthen his posi-
tion.
In Kosovo, by contrast, the results of the snap
October parliamentary elections accurately reflect-
ed the collective frustrations of voters. The fore-
most opposition party, Lëvizja Vetëvendosja! (VV,
or Self-Determination), and its charismatic leader
Albin Kurti seem to have won a mandate to di-
rectly challenge Kosovo’s EU/US masters. Yet their
efforts to form a new government ran up against
the stalling tactics of the second-largest opposition
party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). By
all accounts, the LDK, loyal to Washington since
the 1990s, has embraced the US embassy’s hostility
to the prospect of working with a government led
by Kurti. A new coalition government was finally
formed on February 5, allowing Kurti to take of-
fice as prime minister. But a difficult partnership is
expected, with the LDK seeking to block VV from
enacting its most radical corrective policies. This
spells trouble for 2020.
ISA BLUMI is an associate professor of Turkish and Middle
Eastern studies at Stockholm University.
95
What happens in Kosovo will go a long way to-
ward determining the extent to which instability
again spreads across the Balkans. Backed by rival
sponsors in Brussels and Washington, the widely
despised old elites in Kosovo and Albania face con-
stituencies utterly alienated from them. Troubling-
ly, this rage is also directed at the larger circle of
external powers hoping to keep the Balkans stable.
Relations with the EU have been rapidly deterio-
rating since its shocking reversal of earlier prom-
ises to admit new member states in the Western
Balkans. An extraordinary rebuff in late October
by French President Emmanuel Macron basically
ended any further discussions, suggesting that the
regional political order on which the United States
and its NATO partners have long depended to pro-
tect their interests in the larger Mediterranean
world is at best in transition.
The consequences will likely prove destabiliz-
ing, both locally and beyond. Opposition to an
entrenched political elite may take a more violent
turn if citizens realize that yet again, voting in
elections will not result in real change. That would
further expose the clear divergence of strategic in-
terests that has arisen among NATO partners dur-
ing the Trump era. Without the prospect of nego-
tiations for EU membership, Brussels risks losing
influence in Albania, Kosovo, and North Mace-
donia. That would give Turkey and Russia greater
leverage, as outside powers once again jockey to
shape the region’s politics.
TRUST DEFICIT
The rapidly deteriorating situation in the West-
ern Balkans is a product of the violent disintegra-
tion of the Cold War order. The transformations
of the 1990s put the region at the center of the
North Atlantic strategic calculus, and by the early
2000s it seemed that Brussels and Washington had