Founding a Balkan State

Founding a Balkan State: Albania's Experiment with Democracy 1920-1925, by Robert C. Austin. Toronto, Ontario, University of Toronto Press, 2012. xi, 237 pp. $48.00 US (cloth). In the last twenty or so years since the end of Enverist communism in Albania there has been a considerable increase in work on late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Albanian history. Pioneers such as Peter Prifti and Nicholas Pano have been joined by many other scholars and authors. With the crisis in the Albanian transition from communism, and its protracted nature which culminated in near state collapse in the armed uprising in 1997, scholarly interest has perhaps naturally turned towards issues of state formation and development. Albania has always had a fragile state, since independence, and this applies as much in the recent contemporary period as a hundred or more years ago. The late exit of the small country from the Ottoman Empire and its extreme economic backwardness has meant that the progressive middle class was always very small; seeking somehow to govern and modernize a profoundly conservative rural and mountainous hinterland. At the same time, ever since 1912, unfriendly neighbours, principally Greece and Serbia, have attempted to destabilize the new capital in Tirana and impose their territorial ambitions on parts of the infant nation. It was not surprising that the Italian fascists found it easy to assimilate Albania as a dependency in the 1930s. The period immediately after the First World War has not, though, had the same attention in the historiography as the period leading up to independence. The Canadian scholar Robert. C. Austin, in this new study has sought to remedy this, and in a clear and convincing account centred around the brief period of rule of the American Orthodox priest Fan Noli, shows how tribal chieftain Ahmet Zogu--with his base in the central Mati region where large landowning Bey domains continued after 1918--was able to destabilize the country and secure his rule with Serbian and White Russian help. The strongest parts of Austin's study are those which situate Fan Noli as a product of the established and progressive Albanian Diaspora in the United States, with its centre of gravity in and around New England, and in the city of Boston in particular. Noli is often seen in a stereotypical way, as an ambitious careerist politician, who basically used the Orthodox Albanians and their church for his own ends; however, Austin presents a much more nuanced and convincing picture of both the man and his intellectual and social orbit. The great disadvantage of a Diaspora background, one shared by many well-meaning, modernizing politicians in the Balkans throughout the twentieth century was that ideas which were part of the natural assumptions of the Diaspora world meant little or nothing to the inhabitants of the country, and they also threatened the old privileged classes

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