A romance in the Balkans
The images that traveled around the globe from US President George W. Bush’s arrival in Tirana were truly impressive. The world leader was in great need of such expressions of admiration during these difficult times, when his popularity back home is at a nadir and half the planet is lambasting him. He got the boost he needed, not in Texas from his ardent fans, but in Albania, from a people who for 50 years had been brainwashed against «evil imperialists.» How can one explain the adoration of the Albanian people toward this – until only recently – abhorred enemy, toward a country in which the overwhelming majority is probably unaware of Albania’s existence? The answer is that the people of Albania believe they owe the very existence of their nation to the United States, which is why they put former President Bill Clinton on a very high pedestal for his ousting of the Serbs from Kosovo. One of the banners held aloft along the road from the airport to the center of Tirana proclaimed the historic – for Albanians – words of former US President Woodrow Wilson: «We have one vote in the League of Nations, and we give it to Albania,» he had said, lending his support to the nascent state, which in the early 20th century lived in fear of being swallowed up by Greece and Yugoslavia. The Americans in turn appear to have chosen Albania as their Balkan foothold. They consider, perhaps not unreasonably, that Albania is the most dynamic nation in the region, a people that will be the first to outdo others in terms of population growth, and they are placing their bets on this emerging power. The grabbing of Kosovo by military force from Serbia and its anticipated forthcoming independence, as well as the de facto federalization of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), are developments which have elated Albania, and it is more or less certain that none of the country’s historical demands would have been met without support from Washington. At the present time, Albanians feel much as the Serbs did before Slobodan Milosevic dragged them down into the gutter: namely, the chosen people of the Balkans, whose territorial ambitions for a Greater Albania have yet to be fulfilled. This conviction, however, fuels irredentism and creates fertile conditions for the growth of Albanian nationalism which, at some point in the not too distant future, the international community and the United States will have to confront and tame.
