Albania towards NATO membership

By Albert Rakipi
Albania and two other Balkan countries hope to be invited to join NATO at the Bucharest Summit scheduled for the first week of next month. Compared to the previous expansions, this one with the three small Balkan States will perhaps not have the same strategic value for the Alliance, but there is no doubt that for Albania, Croatia and FYROM, and for the entire western Balkan area, that constitutes an investment and an historical development. First and foremost the admittance of the three Balkan States into NATO will undoubtedly reinforce the still fragile security and stability throughout the area. To a considerable extent, security issues in the western Balkans still depend on relations between States. In fact, there are no unsolved issues between the countries aspiring to join the Alliance that may damage security or stability; on the contrary, there exists a European spirit of political and economic cooperation. However, bearing in mind the controversial developments in Serbia and the change to the political map of the Balkans with the independence of Kosova, it is not impossible that even the more consolidated inter-State Balkan relations could be negatively influenced. Today’s Serbia which speaks of NATO using typical terminology of the Cold War era may view the expansion of the Alliance with hostility and exert an influence through its relations with Croatia and FYROM. On the other hand, FYROM’s hesitation to recognize Kosova’s independence, now acknowledged by the majority of the countries in the EU and NATO, could negatively impact on inter-State relations among Kosova, FYROM and Albania.
The NATO membership of the three Balkan countries will enhance stability and security from another angle as well. In the post-Cold War Balkans, relations within states substantially endangered security and stability. And internal strife was not only over inter-ethnical relations, as was the case with FYROM, but also over political conflicts that accompanied the political and economic transition from dictatorships and authoritarian regimes to democracy.
Perhaps there can be no more talk like the claims that several Balkan countries presented towards the existence of FYROM as an independent State at the beginning of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, and although Albanians in Macedonia support a unified State with the Macedonians, in the final account, FYROM’s potential membership into NATO constitutes a strategic investment for the existence and consolidation of a FYROM unitary state.
Likewise, Albania’s membership in NATO is, first of all, an evaluation of the democratic and economic transformation of one of the most extremist communist dictatorships in the entire former Communist Eastern Bloc. Secondly, Albania’s potential NATO membership is an investment in the entire process of the reconstruction of the State and unification with the values of the European Family.
Albania was the first former communist country which sought membership to the Alliance in 1992. In 1994, Albania joined the Partnership for Peace program. During the last seventeen years, since the collapse of the communist regime, Albania has conducted itself as if it were a member of the Alliance. Currently, Albanians link NATO membership with the identification with the West. Albania is perhaps one of those few countries where neither the political elite, nor the society have ever questioned or been in a dilemma about joining NATO. When Albania’s national security was seriously in peril, at the beginning of the 90s with Yugoslavia’s collapse, the first non-communist government did not show the slightest hesitation to entrust and seek national security to and in the Atlantic Alliance. Now, membership into NATO enjoys broad popular support in Albania and the chances of membership at this upcoming Summit have mobilized the political elite in office and the Opposition to cooperate to carry out all internal reforms. There is no shadow of a doubt that membership for a country that is still poor will have a cost, but irrespective of that, there is no dilemma either in the country’s ruling circles or in the society.
In Albania and not only Albania, membership into NATO may have created expectations related to economic issues and other benefits. But irrespective of expectations for immediate benefits, in the final account, medium and long term, Albania’s NATO membership and the other two Balkan countries will create an attractive environment for foreign investments and economic development.