Description
The History of the Party of Labour of Albania was the key text of the Albanian Communist party-state. Like the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (known as the ‘Short Course’), it sought to orientate cadre and citizens to a virtual world of triumph and threat by relating party origins, achievements, and enemies. Using organisational theory and foreign policy role theory it is possible to elaborate how the ‘self-descriptions’ (to use Niklas Luhmann’s term) of ideologically committed authoritarian states both shape and constrain their international posture. This approach facilitates an understanding of Communist Albania’s conduct of foreign affairs as an outgrowth of its origins in a conspiratorial struggle against foreign domination and elite collaboration within a former imperial periphery. The text provided a schematic rendering of the state’s environment which had to be referenced to communicate in an ideologically correct manner. The roles conferred on itself in the text became ‘self-observation’ mechanisms which created a system specific reality with its own path dependencies. As Communist Albania twice broke alliances with powerful allies for ideological reasons, becoming a last isolated outpost of high Stalinism, it is a fascinating limit case of a state choosing internal coherence and outsider status over engagement. This has wider relevance for the study of states who, unable to act to their own advantage, disengage from international co-operation. In Albania’s case, retreating into a Manichean coding of the self/other distinction and adopting a rhetoric of ideological purity and self-dependency.
Keywords: Dictatorship; Isolationism; Organisation Theory; Role Theory; South Eastern Europe.
