Albania’s Parliamentary Election 2009: Is the European Dream at Risk?

http://www.balkanalysis.com/
By Enza Roberta Petrillo

The European Union emerged from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s as a force that seemed capable of guaranteeing stability and peace in a part of the European continent perceived as a fracture-zone, an area of Europe known for its clashes.

Since 1991, Albania has radically changed, undergoing a complex transition period and a controversial process of institution-building. In contrast with countries like Serbia, Montenegro or Croatia, in Albania the power structures inherited from the Communist period were destroyed or swept away during the 1990s, especially during the explosion of violent conflict in 1997.

These old and disintegrated structures were replaced during a long period of transition characterized by lawlessness, with a growing gap between the southern part of the country and the northern, and what the historian Ian Jeffries describes as a kind of “gangster land anarchy.”

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