Serving the Revolution. Educational Networks and Expertise Circulation in Communist Albania (MSCA)

This project aims to investigate the pivotal role and the impact of the educational networks and expertise circulation in shaping Albania’s economic policies and the formation of a specialised workforce from the 1960s to the 1980s, a key period during which massive industrial economic projects, often of limited benefit and poorly planned, were undertaken for which much expertise and a qualified workforce were needed. The research will also explore the personal experiences of the university students and experts, and the impact of these exchanges on their perception of different realities (East vs West) beyond the Cold War divisions. Thus, the research will debate the concept of isolation in communist Albania by contextualising it better and rethinking isolation from the perspective of a privileged strata of the society, such as that of experts and students.

Flows of people and goods from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s connected Albania to the economic progress of the rest of the communist world (East Europe, Soviet Union, China), while also revealing all the limits of the Albanian communist regime. One element of this was the limited number of experts and specialised workforce. Although the first university was eventually established in Tirana in 1957, creating a large specialised workforce needed for Albania’s economy and society took decades. Therefore, Albania decided to send hundreds of young people to gain knowledge and expertise at foreign universities, including those in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, Korea, Hungary, France, and Italy. The research will primarily rely upon a qualitative analysis of select governmental documents in Albanian, Italian, French, and German archives and, to a lesser extent, Chinese ones, private letters, and interviews.
This project proposal contends that studying these educational and academic exchanges would provide a more complete understanding of the communist regime of Albania from the 1960s to the 1980s, corresponding to the height of the Cold War. Also, the research contributes to the emerging scholarship focused on the agency of smaller Eastern European countries and the transnational networks they created at the margin of the competition between major powers. Ultimately, this research will contribute to exploring the communist regime of Albania from the perspective of some of its most vital members of society, the university students and experts and pose issues of, among others, agency, political control and oppression, self-development, social mobility and creativity under the last Stalinist regime of Europe.

Historical studies may significantly contribute to the European Union’s adoption of adequate policies toward the Balkans. In light of the recent events with the war in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, including the Western Balkans, has become of main concern for the European Union (EU); thus, historical studies have the potential to contribute significantly to the development of adequate common policies towards the Balkans in general and Albania in particular. Consequently, the project not only enriches the recent literature on transnational networks in Southeastern Europe (SEE) but also contributes to the formation of a new comprehensive understanding of the region in such a reflexive way that it has meaning and utility in understanding the historical reasons and challenges of the current EU political project of the SEE European Integration.