Perspectives and challenges of Albania’s integration in the EU - From the fall of communism to the Thessaloniki Summit 1991-2006

In 1991 students filled the squares of Tirana under the slogans “We want Albania like Europe”, only few of them would have imagined that after 32 years from the fall of the communist regime, Albania would still be waiting to be part of the European family. The most optimistic thought that, once the regime fell, freedom and democracy would triumph and the integration process would take only a few years. As for the rest, this process would take time, but even for the pessimists it would never pass 2020. The challenges of Albanian integration in EU, from 1991 to 2006, have been different and often the progress of undertaken reforms within the framework of the European integration has been slow and not at the required level. This slowness is often reflected in the European Commission reports or in declarations of different summits. This phenomenon reflects the limited culture in the state-building and that of political dialogue, which comes as a result of a strong isolation period, almost half a century under the communist dictatorship. Between 1991 and 2006, the Albanian governments received financial and human resources from European organizations to help them abandon this self-centered strategy. This paper is written within the framework of International Visegrad Fund (IVF) Research Grand Programme of 2022, which involved consulting a significant number of archival papers in the European Union’s Historical Archive in Florence, Italy.