‘It borders on the Adriatic’

Albania should ditch its ‘Balkan’ label
By ANDI BALLA
As regular readers might have noticed, this newspaper has been using the word “Balkans” in reference to Albania less and less. We prefer “the Adriatic republic” or the “Southeast European country” instead. With this editorial, we invite all Albanian and international media to follow suit.
There are good reasons to do so.
The geographic peninsula in which Albania is located takes its name from a mountain range in Bulgaria. The name literally means “Old Mountains.” Old and stale is what the label has become. It has entered the English language vocabulary as “balkanization,” meaning divide something into small, often hostile parts. It is synonymous with war, backwardness and divisiveness. Who wants to be part of that? We certainly do not.
The number of countries who get hammered with the Balkan label is also shrinking. And there is a good reason for that, because the label is rarely applied with kindness. Rich and orderly means European, poor and disorderly means the Balkans.
Look up media coverage on Greece and Slovenia. They are very rarely referred to as “Balkan countries.” By comparison to the rest of the peninsula where they are located, these countries are rich and long-time members of the European Union. They have made a concerted effort, particularly in the case of Slovenia to shed the label. The Slovenes, the richest of the former Yugoslavs, were first to see the dangers of the B-word, insisting they were a Western or Central European country, not a Balkan one.
New EU members Romania and Bulgaria, whose image has been unfairly smeared in European media in recent months, are also less likely to be slapped with the Balkan label. Mind you, they are “Eastern Europeans.”
But let’s get back to Albania, which we believe is a Balkan country in geography only, and an Adriatic-Ionian one in cultural identity. Albania has now been included in the “Western Balkans,” a made-up cheap label that brings Albania together with a bunch of former Yugoslav countries where Albania sticks out like a sore thumb, because as a non-Yugoslav, non-Slavic country, it is culturally and linguistically very different. (Kosovo and Western Macedonia are obvious exceptions to this argument, though a century of political partition has put a wedge there too).
Financial disparities aside, in temperament and outlook of the world, most of Albania has far more in common with southern Italy and Greece than it does with Bosnia and Serbia. The sea and climate have much to do with this, thus the reference to the Adriatic. In addition, there is news this week that the EU is planning an Adriatic-Ionian macro region, and Albania sits in the middle of it. There is no better time to re-brand the country as an Adriatic nation.
But perhaps more important than anything else, removing the Balkan label would be a historical vindication against all that tried to strip Albania of its European identity. During the communist regime, the teachers were instructed to drill this phrase in the pupils head: “Albania is in the Balkan Peninsula.” Little was mentioned of the fact, that Albania is European. It was a clear political goal. Capitalist Europe was a mess. Albania was a workers’ paradise, or so the story went.
So why not refocus away from the cold, hard Balkan image and move toward the soothing, warm seas. As anyone in the English-speaking world who watched the popular 1980s sitcom Cheers (and YouTube today), will tell you, there is at least one thing about Albania they learned in a song the characters sang at the bar: “It borders on the Adriatic.”