Description
Role Theory suggests that National Role Conceptions (NRC) are self-defined, often informed by socio-economic needs, political goals, and elite and popular culture. However, when totalitarian regimes born of war and revolution merge party and state structures, the ruling ideology and animating narratives of a formerly underground organisation can directly provide a state’s understanding of the international. This is conducive with Niklas Luhmann’s notion of organisations as self-reproducing communication systems which construct their environment with internal resources. Indeed, because party-states strongly resist functional differentiation, they act as if one giant national organisation.
This paper considers the self-radicalisation of the Albanian Party of Labour and its path to international isolation. Its performance of NRCs such as ‘example’, ‘defender of the faith’ and ‘anti-imperialist agent’ strongly confirmed its self-understanding as an exemplary organisation which destroyed the class domination of foreign-backed elites and secured national independence. The extremely repressive form of nationalist Stalinism developed thereafter lent on indigenous, Jacobin and Leninist sources which valorised violence and conceptualised the outside world as intensely hostile to Albanian sovereignty. This created a path dependent cybernetic loop of internal purge and international isolation, leading to its final destination as a last bastion of high Stalinism into the 1980s. Communist Albania provides a useful limit case for the study of similar processes in post-conflict regimes like that in Zimbabwe, North Korea and other ‘isolate’ dictatorships.
