Albania's Course Toward Statehood
ALBANIA’S COURSE TOWARD STATEHOOD A CASE OF INTERACTION BETWEEN GREAT POWER’ POLICIES, THE OTTOMAN AND BALKAN POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT AND ALBANIAN CULTURAL AND BIOLOGICAL NATIONALISM A REVIEW ARTICLE The Albanian National Awakening 1878-1912, by Stavro Skendi, Princeton N. J., Princeton University Press, 1967, 498 pp. This book deals essentially with the emergence of the Albanians’ aware ness of their ethnic character in the multinational Ottoman empire during the thirty-four years that preceded the establishment of Albania as an indepen dent and sovereign nation-state in 1912. Thus, within the broader historical context, this bulky and laborious volume constitutes a small though far from uninteresting chapter in the long story of the gradual disintegration of the Ottoman empire and, more specificallY of the breakup of its European terri tories into several nation-states, with Albania being the last to achieve that status, in the face of increasinglY strenuous Ottoman efforts since the nine teenth century to fight the centrifugal tendencies becoming manifest in its territories elsewhere too, in Egypt, for example. Although lacking in many respects in internal continuity, in spite of its broad chronological outline, partly perhaps because some of its chapters are based on separate articles Mr. Skendi published between 1953 and 1960; re vealing, too, a certain weakness in organization because of the seeming absence of any unifying esthetic form or of an underlying conceptual framework; although lacking a map that would show the territorial extent of the Albanians’ habitat and of their territorial aspirations as compared to the territorial extent of Albania as an independent state; and, finally, suffering from rather poor editing, several typographical errors, and imperfect indexing, ultimate respon sibility for which lies mainlY with the publishers, this study, nevertheless, is an important contribution to Balkan history, making use of unpublished documents from Austrian, French, British, and Italian state archives, though 30 Stephen G.
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