Varieties of Economic Nationalism in the Communist Albania of the late 1970s
Adrian Brisku, Charles University (Prague)/Ilia State University (Tbilisi)
Overview
Abstract
The very few economic history accounts on communist Albania offer a similar perspective on the country’s path to national economic development – a centrally-planned drive to autarchic self-sufficiency that ultimately led to the country’s economic implosion and bankruptcy. This perspective might well describe some of the economic impulses this small socialist economy shared with other socialist economies of the Eastern bloc, and not necessarily a similar outcome for all of them. However, it does not provide a full account of the national economic alternatives of development before the country succumbed to this variant of ‘extreme’ economic nationalism in the last decade, i.e., the 1980s, of the communist regime. Deploying the conceptual framework that I have recently developed of varieties of economic nationalism, which conceives the political-economic phenomenon of economic nationalism – defined as interventions (in investment, productions, redistribution, and (de) regulations within national economic contexts – manifesting in variant forms, as ‘liberal (nations in competition)/progressive (nations in cooperation),’ as ‘conservative/defensive (nations in a zero-sum game),’ and ‘extreme’ (aggressive/expansionist and/or autarkic nations), this contribution posits that especially in the late 1970s when the small economy could no longer shelter under the large Soviet and subsequent Chinese economies, such alternatives became available and contested. To reconstruct such alternatives, this contribution primarily will draw on archival material containing discussions and debates in the economic committees of late 1970s communist Albania.
Introduction to the speaker
Adrian Brisku is Associate Professor of History at the Department of Russian and East European Studies at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. His research interests include intellectual and comparative history, empire, European identity and the transnational history of contemporary Europe, reform, political (national) economy, ethno-political conflicts, modern Albanian and Georgian history, the history of the modern Caucasus, nineteenth-century Ottoman and Russian history, and Czechoslovak history.
In his book, Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires: A Comparative Approach (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), he has contributed to the debates around the reformation of the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Additionally, he has investigated, from a comparative perspective, the discourses on Europe in Albania and Georgia in his book Bittersweet Europe: Albanian and Georgian Discourses on Europe, 1878-2008 (Berghahn Books, 2013). He has also co-edited the volume Varieties of Economic Nationalism in Cold War Europe. Small State Responses to Economic Changes, 1960s-1980s (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. Email: adrian.brisku@fsv.cuni.cz.