Pax Europea and the final integration of the Albanian state

By Dritan Shano

For more than four centuries, Albanian lands lived under a peace they did not choose themselves. Pax Ottomana, as scholars call it, was neither benevolent nor beloved: strong enough to end the private wars of feudal lords and clans, but distant enough to let everyday life follow its own course. Instead of freedom, it offered a readable order: a tax regime, a hierarchy of judges, a final arbiter; and it kept the peace by freezing society. Many Albanians flourished within this order as individuals — as soldiers, governors and grand viziers. Talent advanced by leaving, because that order rewarded movement, not accumulation, while the country remained quiet, peripheral and poor.

Today Albania stands before the door of another supranational order: the European Union, a Pax Europea that governs through standards, money, free movement and law, reversing the Ottoman method. The Empire neutralised elites by force and kept society in place; the Union disciplines elites through rules and keeps society in motion. One imposed peace without modernising. The other modernises in order to impose peace. The question is whether Albania will use this new order differently, or repeat the old model, simply dressed in designer clothes and branded sneakers.

Let me state my position at the outset, so that nothing that follows is misunderstood. We have seen the door close once before, in 1996, when Albania was ahead of its Balkan neighbours on the road to Europe and our government’s behaviour made Europe turn its back on us. It took two decades to regain that ground. Membership is not a national objective among many others. It is the national objective, a raison d’État, the only project in a century that can simultaneously anchor this country to the rule of law and to prosperity. It must be protected at all costs; everything else, however important or principled, comes after it. State reason is not to be questioned, not even for causes that are just.

The same model, in another suit

Let us look at ourselves in the mirror for a moment. Almost half of all Albanians today live abroad, most of them inside the Union, and many already hold an Italian, Greek or another European passport. About two-thirds of our trade is conducted with the Union and Italy is, by far, our largest partner. Half of the money in Albanian banks is held in euros. The people integrated themselves, family after family, a generation ahead of the state. The economy is integrated too, but at the end of the chain: it sews clothes and shoes for Italian brands, exports its chromium as concentrate, sells its sun at the hour when it is worth least and imports almost everything else.

This is again the Ottoman equilibrium we just mentioned. The Albanian rises within the larger order; Albania remains at its edge. Nowadays emigration is the modern career in the empire’s service, while remittances are the tribute that returns home.

What has not integrated is the state. Strip away the rhetoric, and membership is the process of placing the Albanian government, its politicians and its administration under the rules by which Albanian citizens already live in Milan, Athens and Munich. The Union is not accepting a people it does not know. It is accepting a government it is not yet sure about.

They accept us for the map

Albania is small. It sits in a region that in a year produces as much as the Union produces in three or four days; Albania itself produces about as much as half a day of European production. Nobody in Brussels will accept us for our market. They will accept us for our location on the map. The Western Balkans is a hole in the Union’s belly, surrounded by member states, and holes in the belly bring trouble.

Enlargement has always been driven more by Europe’s fear than by the candidates’ merits. The process that froze for a decade after 2013 thawed within a single season in 2022, when Russian tanks entered Ukraine. In Tirana nothing changed; in Berlin and Paris everything changed. With Montenegro and Albania inside, the Union controls the eastern Adriatic coast, from Trieste to Saranda, except for Neum. The Strait of Otranto ceases to be a border and becomes a corridor. Albania already implements part of Italy’s migration policy on its territory, in Shëngjin and Gjadër. Add the NATO air base in Kuçovë and the ports Europe would not want in Chinese or Russian hands. This is security geography, and Europe is buying it. When Ursula von der Leyen told us in Tirana on 30 September that we now see the world with the same eyes, she was appreciating our alignment in foreign policy — precisely the part Europe needs most.

I say it without any equivocation: Albania will not enter the European Union. The European Union will bring Albania in. Fulfilling the conditions writes the script; politics delivers the verdict. Geopolitics can open the door. It cannot decide what enters through it.

2030: a wish with a deadline

The arithmetic is more merciless than the rhetoric. Thirty of the thirty-three chapters remain open; the government promises to close them by the end of 2027. Then, under Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union, a treaty must be signed and ratified by every member state. Croatia needed nineteen months from signing to membership. At that pace, a treaty signed in 2028 brings membership in 2030 only if nothing is delayed; and in enlargement, something is always delayed.

Here is a prediction few make today: Montenegro’s treaty will be the first to face Article 88-5 of the French Constitution, which requires a referendum for every new accession, except when both chambers of Parliament, sitting together, approve it by three-fifths of the votes. Croatia was exempted; Montenegro will not be. That provision was written in 2005 with Turkey in mind. Albania’s real accession date will be decided less in Brussels and more in Paris, on the day the first Balkan treaty reaches the French Parliament.

The year 2030 is the best-case scenario; the base scenario falls a year or two later. A date that requires everything to go well is a wish with a deadline.

The French provision also leads us to something we prefer not to discuss. Albania would be the first member state where Muslims form the largest community, and Europe will ask, openly or not, whether it is accepting a member or someone else’s outpost. The answer must be beyond any doubt. Albania cannot enter Europe as a foothold for political Islam, Ankara, the Gulf or Tehran. Our strongest asset is our tradition: a secular state, religious coexistence older than the Union, and citizens whose faith has never been their politics. This tradition must be protected with iron resolve, now more than ever.

Marriage for papers

Opening and closing chapters is one thing. Structural and cultural change is another. A generation of Albanian men and women entered Italy, Greece and beyond by marrying, on paper and for papers, Europeans twice their age. The papers came; the marriage, as a rule, was never consummated. Membership can happen in the same way: chapters closed, laws transposed, criteria ticked off, and nothing in how the state behaves having changed. Closing chapters makes a prime minister look good. Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose name the Union gave to its student programme, set a harder test in 1516, in The Education of a Christian Prince: a ruler is judged by the prosperity of his people, not by his own glory. By that measure, membership succeeds when it restructures the economy so that Albanians benefit from it, not when the last chapter is closed.

Europe knows this trick. It saw it in Sofia and Bucharest, which lived sixteen years under a toothless verification mechanism, and more bitterly still in Budapest, where a member state that had closed all its chapters dismantled, from inside the club, the mechanisms of control over its own power, while the Union took more than a decade to learn how to freeze its funds. Albania’s treaty will be among the first written after Hungary. Every provision will be drafted with Budapest in mind and Tirana before its eyes.

The answer Europe has built is what I call the supervised corridor. The finish line is being replaced by a long passage that begins before membership and continues for years after it. Before entry, gradual integration gives candidates pieces of membership: the single euro payments area, EU programmes, roaming at domestic prices, and money tied to reforms through the Growth Plan, where Albania has fulfilled over 80 per cent of the steps and received 213 million euros. After entry come the safeguards. In Tirana, von der Leyen spoke of a roadmap to ensure respect for the commitments on democracy and the rule of law even after membership. The draft enlargement strategy, which the Commission is to adopt on 7 October, goes further: new members would commit not to block the Council’s unanimous decisions in the first years, while Brussels would have instruments to react to backsliding.

It is like the immigration officer who knocks on the door a year after the wedding to see whether anyone really lives there. This is the discipline Pax Europea exercises over the elites, written into treaty law. Edi Rama and Aleksandar Vučić asked in February for the single market without full voting rights. Most likely, we are getting the voting restrictions — and, together with them, the inspection.

The new order, the old model?

Membership corrects part of what does not work in the state. Every competence that passes to Brussels takes a piece of discretion away from Tirana and gives citizens and firms a court above the national one.

Politicians will have less power over trade, competition, standards, procurement and the right to leave. But the Union corrects rules, not capacity. The school, the hospital, the cadastre, the permit and the tender remain national, while European money raises the value of controlling them. Structural funds can become the new timars. Bulgaria and Hungary showed that state capture survives membership by shifting from the rules to implementation. The structure of the economy is not corrected; membership reinforces what it finds.

That is how the Ottoman model can survive the European order. Free movement turns the exit that half the nation has taken into a right for the other half, including the working-age generation that stayed. Prices converge faster than wages. State aid rules put an end to tax privileges for chosen investors, and public procurement opens to Italian and Greek contractors. The firms that meet European specifications will win; the others will close or be sold.

For me, the worst news comes from agriculture. About 350,000 farms, averaging 1.2 hectares, would start receiving payments from the Common Agricultural Policy; the subsidy would be capitalised into the price of land and consolidation would become unaffordable. Bulgaria entered with millions of fragmented parcels and the subsidies froze them in place. My expectation is that the Commission’s pre-enlargement reviews, expected on 6 October, will propose the gradual introduction of agricultural and cohesion payments, as in 2004. This is the last breathing period for land consolidation. Otherwise the Albanian would again prosper in Europe, and Albania would remain its periphery — now paid for through structural funds.

The last window of sovereignty

The years before membership are the last in which Albania decides these issues with the full instrument of sovereignty, and the last in which it still has something to bargain with. A country that in a year produces as much as the Union produces in half a day cannot bargain with its size. It bargains with its usefulness, and the cards it holds lose most of their value on the day it stops negotiating and starts implementing.

None of this requires a state that picks winners. It requires a state that finally does its own job. Albania has a strategy for almost everything. What it lacks is politics: a decision that commits money, sets a deadline and names who answers for it when the deadline passes.

Land comes first: clean ownership titles, a functional cadastre, and rules that allow parcels to be consolidated before the payments arrive. Then energy. On a clear summer day, the solar surplus is exported at midday for thirty to fifty euros per megawatt-hour; on winter evenings we buy it back for a hundred and more. We sell the sun and buy back the darkness. Storage systems can be permitted and built today in under two years; after entry, European environmental rules stretch that to many years. Then minerals. The copper, nickel, cobalt and feldspar Albania has are on the Union’s list of critical raw materials, and the Union can support strategic projects outside the EU. Serbia has such a partnership; Albania does not. We extract chromium as concentrate and buy it back as ferrochrome, while Europe’s bottleneck is processing. The state should negotiate the partnership and license the investors, not build the smelter. The same goes for defence: SAFE, worth 150 billion euros, is open to partners like Albania, but our firms’ participation must be negotiated now; and for Corridor VIII, which needs a freight railway, logistics and digital customs clearance, not more asphalt. Schools need a compulsory reading exam by the third grade. Justice must be predictable for the investor and fair for the defendant: court decisions, not media leaks; trials, not years of pre-trial detention.

Each of these is a choice that governments with comfortable majorities have had the freedom to make and have chosen not to make. Each is a way to make staying in Albania as rational as leaving it.

The border nobody mentions

Today, the region is a column with only two cars. Montenegro aims to enter in 2028, Albania follows behind, and the rest of the Western Balkans is stuck. With membership, a new member leaves CEFTA, the Central European Free Trade Agreement, as Croatia did in 2013, and applies the EU customs code. The crossing points at Morina with Kosovo and at Qafë Thanë with North Macedonia become the Union’s external borders, with customs and sanitary controls. The Albanian national space will be divided by a European border in the very week Albania celebrates entering Europe. Tirana needs a policy for Kosovo for the day after membership. On paper, none exists. To serve the citizens on both sides of the border, Tirana and Pristina must decide today, with Brussels, how this European border will function tomorrow — not discover it after it has become a fait accompli.

What we talk about and what we keep silent about

If what remains to be integrated is the state, then the story of membership is the story of the state — and that is precisely the story that is told the least. The most harmful disinformation about the EU in Albania is homemade, and it has two narratives. One version sells membership as a date already won and every delay as sabotage by an opposition that reports to Brussels. The other sells Brussels as the external force that will clean up Albanian politics on our behalf. Both keep attention away from what the state itself must do, and both prepare the same disappointment.

The media covers membership as protocol: flags, handshakes, counting chapters. The substance remains unreported. Chapter 11 is the story of 350,000 small farms and of what subsidies will do to land prices. Chapter 15 explains why we sell energy cheaply at midday and buy it expensively at night. Chapter 8, which tax privileges come to an end and who loses them. Newsrooms owned by businesses that live on public contracts are part of the state that has not yet integrated; that is why these stories remain unwritten. A newsroom that covered the chapters as household economics and power issues would do more for integration than any government campaign.

In the end, the state

The European Union will bring Albania in for its own reasons. The treaty will change the rules under which Albanian politicians operate. It will not change the politicians, the administration or the habits of the state on the day of entry; they enter as they are. To become European on paper is one thing; to be a European country is another. A generation of Albanians has already shown that the first can be done without the second. To turn the first into the second is work that no treaty does for us. The supervised corridor exists because Europe expects the Albanian state to try the same thing.

Membership is the only framework within which this work can be done, and precisely for that reason it is a raison d’état for us. For everything else in Albanian public life we can debate along the way; the road itself cannot be called into question. Most Albanians, and most of what the Albanian economy sells, are already in Europe. The still-open question is whether Albanian politics and government will follow them, and whether Albania will become a country where it is worth staying.

This article is published as part of a series of articles on the theme “Media and European Integration” of the Albanian Media Institute.