Democratization from Within: Political Culture and the Consolidation of Democracy in Post-Communist Albania

303 Pages·2016·2.331 MB·English

by  Florian Çullhaj

COLLANA crossroads
Florian Çullhaj
DEMOCRATIZATION FROM WITHIN
Political Culture and the Consolidation of
Democracy in Post-Communist Albania

Edizioni Nuova Cultura
Copyright © 2012 Edizioni Nuova Cultura - Roma
ISBN: 886812825X, 9788868128258

Copertina: a cura dell’Autore
Composizione grafica: a cura dell’Autore

È vietata la riproduzione non autorizzata, anche parziale,
realizzata con qualsiasi mezzo, compresa la fotocopia,
anche ad uso interno o didattico.
5

Introduction

Undoubtedly, the 20th century was dominated by the rise,
development and the fall of the communist systems. In the former
communist countries, nothing is more important for the people than
leading the transition toward a more functional democratic society.
Following the change of the system, Albania, as a former communist
country entered into the democratization process which Samuel P.
Huntington classified as the ‘third wave’1. The nonviolent
revolution of Albania reinforced the belief in the West that
democracy is an exportable good if Western democracies implement
a right combination of pressure and aid in collaboration with
internal political actors2. Western pressure coupled with technical
and economic assistance was domestically understood as a conditio
sine qua non for the successful implementation of the first phase of
democratic reforms. However, efforts to establish a democracy in
Albania raised the following question. Will the framing of the
appropriate constitution and economic system - building

1 It was Samuel Huntington who coined the term, the ‘Third Wave’, and
he included the countries of Eastern Europe in the same ‘wave’ as
Iberian and Latin American democratization. Latin American
specialists like Linz and Stepan et.al have tended to follow his example.
Laurence Whitehead has been an exception among those scholars. In
contrast with Huntington and others, he refers to the process of
democratization in Eastern Europe as a ‘fourth wave’, although
without elaborating the point. See Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave
Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, (Norman University of
Oklahoma Press 1991), p. 16-21, and Laurence Whitehead (ed.), The
International Dimensions of Democratization: Europe and the Americas
(Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 5.
2 Francis Fukuyama, Esportazione della Democrazia, State-building e ordine
mondiale nel XXI secolo, (Publicato da Lindau s.r.l, Trado.S. Castoldi,
M. Passarllo, 2005).
democratic institutions and developing positive attitudes towards
them - take place among Albanians through ongoing
familiarization? Accordingly, the failure of the 1994 referendum on
the new constitution, the overnight changes of the 1998 constitution
in 2008 and the permanent stagnant economy strengthened the
belief among Albanians that a democratic constitution and a
functioning market economy cannot flourish if it is not rooted in an
environment pervaded by a democratic culture.
Therefore, from the very beginning it was understandable
that the continuity of democracy in Albania was not to be taken for
granted. The events of 1997, which almost led Albania to a civil war,
exemplify this idea. Huntington acknowledged that various waves
of democratization were followed by a ‘reverse wave’3 as well.
Countries with previously democratic practices, a mature middle
class and relatively high levels of economic development, fell victim
to autocratic or totalitarian rule. Albania, which had not experienced
preconditions of democratic practices, faced enormous difficulties
passing through such events.

3 See Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave...cit., Pp 13-26 and 290-9 4. See
also, Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition
and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist
Europe, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Pp. 67-69;
and Juan Linz, Alfred Stepan and Richard Gunther, ‘Democratic
Transition and Consolidation in Southern Europe, with Reflections on
Latin America and Eastern Europe,’ in Richard Gunther, P. Nikiforos
Diamandouros, and Hans-Jurgen Puhle eds., The Politics of Democratic
Consolidation: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), Pp. 85-86. For similar
theoretical concerns regarding the definition of consolidation, see
Guillermo O’ Donnell, ‘Transitions, Continuities, and Paradoxes,’ in
Scott Mainwaring, Guillermo O’Donnell, and J. Samuel Valenzuela,
eds., (Notre Dame, Ind.:University of Notre Dame Press, 1992) Pp. 17-
56.
7
Consequently, if democracy has to persist and become consolidated,
it is not enough just to skillfully engineer institutions without taking
into account the effect of political culture.
The study of the political culture paradigm has never been
developed conceptually or methodologically in the academic
environment of pre-and-post-communist Albania. In the early
communist period, direct studies on this concept – i.e., scientific
studies initiated from domestic scholars outside the leading guide
of Marxism-Leninism theories – were absolutely forbidden by the
ideological viewpoint of the regime. ‘Social Sciences and especially
Political Science was seen by the regime as bourgeois science and for
ideological reasons political science was excluded from its activities
as an academic discipline’4. The regime restrictions on empirical
information limited the heuristic power of the theories that could
ipso facto have been utilized by the domestic scholars in today’s
research activities. Consequentially, limited data resulting from
historical arguments and speculation based only on scant evidence
led to studies mostly in the publicist realm with a strong ideological
viewpoint. Following the change of political regime, these
restrictions affected the new generation of political culture
researchers in Albania. Scholars from this generation, generally
employed investigative tools (that is, largely survey methods)5 that
mostly could not delve into the conceptual complexities and internal
contradictions of political culture theories without any literary
legacy on this subject. Moreover, foreign scholars’ accomplishments
lacked contextual understanding, whereas those studies of domestic
scholars were over simplified and based on generalized
assumptions mostly inspired by Western style post-communist
literature. In this situation, it has been a mandatory task to describe

4 Hysamedin Feraj Shkenca Politike, Një hyrje, (Sh.B. Pegi 2001), p. 90
(Translation mine)
5 I will return to these issues in a more elaborated analysis in the third
section.
ex nihilo how Albanians grasp the conception of political culture
both in its development and in its structure6.
Before proceeding with the investigation of the continuity
and change of political culture in this chapter, I will try to outline
within the framework of a historical approach a parsimonious
history of Albanian state. The focus of this chapter will be twofold.

6 A researcher of the Albanian Institute of History analyzes on this issue
as follows: the communist regime between the two worlds left to
‘explain’ difficult situation where people had fallen, to raise up the
morale and, why not, to extend the life time of its existence, the regime
took as example heroic deeds with popular character ‘hiding’ in
history. In this way the communist regime hoped to preserve the
support of the masses hoping for the revival of national sentiments.
While modest historical studies in the period of the Albanian Kingdom
were the product of intellectual development and to some extent
‘freedom’ in the country, the inadequate level of Albanian
historiography during the communist period was one of the aspects of
intellectual crisis in the country. It should be underlined that Albania
has not lacked intellectual capacity, but the restriction imposed by the
regime had allowed no further intellectual developments beyond
politically determined targets. During the communist era Albanian
social sciences were completely closed to influences that might come
from abroad. Such a situation, where Albanian researchers knew very
little about what their colleagues abroad do, definitely contributed to
preserve national values in many cases by presenting them as original
and quite different from those of the neighbors. During the communist
period only one official historiography existed, dictated by the
dominant ideology. Even after 1990 there have been no serious
attempts to create true pluralism in ideas and approaches by
individuals or institutions. Such a situation comes from those who
claim to be able to create an alternative thesis but fail to compete, even
with the official thesis itself. Thinking an alternative theses aim
directly to free scientific research in social sciences from the official
communist way of thought.
9
The first part deals with the Albanian contextual factors7,
from independence to the present days. In a narrow sense, I think
that these factors have an influence on today’s political performance.
The contextual factors that I will briefly attempt to clarify are:
Albania’s historical distinctiveness and its experience in the process
of nation-building; its political style and its demographic and social
stratification system.
The second part investigates the necessary conditions
needed for a political system to promote effective governance. These
conditions will be discussed mainly with reference to the post-
communist transformation and the establishment of the new
democratic system. Some of the factors that promote effective
‘[democratic] governance are: the resolution of pre-existing issues
that were inherited by the generation that had to deal with
fundamental problems of the new regime; a widespread sense of
community based on the well-defined borders with those of the
nation-state; legitimacy of the political system and especially the

7 The ‘transitologist’ Laurence Whitehead, held that ‘internal factors were
of primary importance in determining the course and outcome of the
transition attempt, and international factors played only a secondary
role. Years later he returned to that theme changing his early ideas: ‘As
always, correlation must be separated from causation. It is not
contiguity but the policy of a third power that explains the spread of
democracy from one country to the next’ Quoted in, See Laurence
Whitehead, ‘International Aspects of Democratization’ in Guillermo
O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead (eds),
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives (Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1986), esp. p. 4 and 9.. For a
further discussion on scientific methods in Comparative Politics, see,
Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method. Moving Beyond Qualitative
and Quantitative Strategies, (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1987) and Neal J. Smelser, Comparative Methods in the Social
Sciences, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Press, 1976)
constitutional format; a considerable degree of pragmatism in
political culture8.
These factors contributed to that disalignement between
public policy and national interest that political processes had then
to remedy throughout history. Each of these factors should be
explained and specified. For example, nation-states are not natural
phenomena. They are a form of political organization originating in
deliberate or accidental processes and experiences that eventually
result in the building of the nation-states. Consequently, in the
process of nation-building we may distinguish different models.
The model that Albania chose helps us to understand the influence
of the Albanian history over the nature and contemporary qualities
of its political process.
Therefore, when we try to realize the present situation we
need to clarify the properties of the communist regime and even the
practices that had occurred before it. It is commonly known that in
different countries the experience with the past, and the political,
social and cultural context help to understand the present situation.
However, my intention is not to merely present chronologically the
events that have occurred in Albania throughout history but simply
to identify convergences and to highlight differences with Western
democracies.

8 Lawrence C. Mayer, Politikat Krahasuese, Kombet dhe Teoritë në një Botë që
Ndryshon, Përkth. Ymeri. K, Gazheli. R, (Sh.B, ORA, Pp.12-20),
(Translation mine)