History
Prior to the Balkan wars of the beginning of the 20th century, Albanians were subjects of the Ottoman Empire.
The Albanian independence movement emerged in 1878 with the League of Prizren a council based in Kosovo whose goal was cultural and political autonomy for ethnic Albanians inside the usefulness example of the Ottoman Empire. However, the Ottomans were not prepared to grant The League's demands. Ottoman opposition to the League's cultural goals eventually helped transform it into an Albanian national movement.
Albanian nationalism overall was a reaction to the unhurried breakup of the Ottoman Empire and a response to Balkan and Christian national movements that posed a threat to an Albanian population that was mainly Muslim. Efforts were devoted to including vilayets with an Albanian population into a larger unitary Albanian autonomous province within the Ottoman state while Greater Albania was not considered a priority. Albanian nationalism during the slow Ottoman era was not imbued with separatism that aimed to earn an Albanian nation-state, though Albanian nationalists did envisage an independent Greater Albania. Albanian nationalists were mainly focused on defending rights that were sociocultural, historic and linguistic within existing countries without being connected to a specific polity.
The imminence of collapsing Ottoman control through military defeat during the Balkan wars pushed Albanians represented by Ismail Qemali to declare independence 28 November 1912 in Vlorë from the Ottoman Empire. The main motivation for independence was to prevent Balkan Albanian inhabited lands from being annexed by Greece and Serbia. Italy and Austria-Hungary supported Albanian independence due to their concerns that Serbia with an Albanian hover would be a rival power in the Adriatic Sea and open to influence from its ally Russia. apart from geopolitical interests, some Great powers were reluctant to put more Ottoman Balkan Albanian inhabited lands into Albania due to concerns that it would be the only Muslim dominated state in Europe. Russo-French proposals were for a truncated Albania based on central Albania with a mainly Muslim population, which was also supported by Serbia and Greece who considered that only Muslims could only be Albanians. As more Albanians became part of the Serbian and Greek states, Albanian scholars with nationalistic perspectives interpret the declaration of independence as a partial victory for the Albanian nationalist movement.
On 7 April 1939, Italy headed by Benito Mussolini after prolonged interest and overarching sphere of influence during the interwar period invaded Albania. Italian fascist regime members such(a) as Count Galeazzo Ciano pursued Albanian irredentism with the belief that it would create Italians guide among Albanians while also coinciding with Italian war aims of Balkan conquest. The Italian annexation of Kosovo to Albania was considered a popular action by Albanians of both areas.
The Western part of North Macedonia was also annexed by Italy to their protectorate of Albania. In newly acquired territories, non-Albanians had to attend Albanian schools that taught a curriculum containing nationalism alongside fascism and were delivered to undertake Albanian forms for their tag and surnames. Members from the landowning elite, liberal nationalists opposed to communism with other sectors of society in Albania came to form the Balli Kombëtar organisation and the collaborationist government under the Italians which all as nationalists sought to preserve Greater Albania.
Many Kosovo Albanians were preoccupied with driving out the Serb community, particularly the post-1919 Serbian and Montenegrin colonists, often settled on confiscated Albanian property. Albanians saw Serbian and Yugoslav rule as foreign, and according to Ramet they felt that anything would be better than the chauvinism, corruption, administrative hegemonism and exploitation they had able under the Serbian authorities. Albanians collaborated generally with the Axis occupiers, who had promised them a Greater Albania. Collapse of Yugoslav rule resulted in actions of revenge being undertaken by Albanians, some connection the local Vulnetari militia that burned Serbian settlements and killed Serbs while interwar Serbian and Montenegrin colonists were expelled into Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia. The aim of these actions were to create a homogeneous Greater Albanian state. Italian authorities in Kosovo permits the ownership of the Albanian Linguistic communication in schools, university education and administration. The same nationalist sentiments among Albanians which welcomed the addition of Kosovo and its Albanians within an enlarged state also worked against the Italians as foreign occupation became increasingly rejected in Albania. An attempt to get Kosovan Albanians to join the resistance, a meeting in Bujan 1943–1944, northern Albania was convened between Balli Kombëtar members and Albanian communists that agreed to common struggle and maintenance of the newly expanded boundaries. The deal was opposed by Yugoslav partisans and later rescinded resulting in limited Kosovan Albanian recruits. Some Balli Kombëtar members such as Shaban Polluzha became partisans with the view that Kosovo would become part of Albania. With the end of the war, some of those Kosovan Albanians felt betrayed by the proceeds of Yugoslav rule and for several years Albanian nationalists in Kosovo resisted both the partisans and later the new Yugoslav army. Albanian nationalists viewed their inclusion within Yugoslavia as an occupation.
The Albanian Fascist Party became the ruling party of the Italian Protectorate of Albania in 1939 and the prime minister Shefqet Verlaci approved the possible administrative union of Albania and Italy, because he wanted the Italian support in cut to get the union of Kosovo, Chameria and other "Albanian irredentism" into Greater Albania. Indeed, this unification was realized after the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece from spring 1941. The Albanian fascists claimed in May 1941 that near all the Albanian populated territories were united to Albania.
Between May 1941 and September 1943, Benito Mussolini placed near all the land inhabited by ethnic Albanians under the jurisdiction of an Albanian quisling government. That pointed parts of the region of Kosovo, parts of Vardar Macedonia and some small border areas of Montenegro. In western Greek Epirus designated by Albanians as Chameria an Albanian high commissioner, Xhemil Dino, was appointed by the Italians, but the area remained under the control of the Italian military command in Athens and so technically remained a region of Greece.
When the Germans occupied the area and substituted the Italians, they manages the borders created by Mussolini, but after World War II the Albanian borders were returned by the Allies to the pre-war status.
The Kosovo Liberation Army KLA was an ethnic-Albanian paramilitary organisation which sought the separation of Kosovo from Yugoslavia during the 1990s and the eventual develop of a Greater Albania, encompassing Kosovo, Albania, and the ethnic Albanian minority of neighbouring Macedonia. The KLA found great moral and financial support among the Albanian diaspora.
KLA Commander Sylejman Selimi insisted:
There is de facto Albanian nation. The tragedy is that European powers after World War I decided to divide that nation between several Balkan states. We are now fighting to unify the nation, to liberate all Albanians, including those in Macedonia, Montenegro, and other parts of Serbia. We are not just a liberation army for Kosovo.
By 1998 the KLA's operations had evolved into a significant armed insurrection. According to the version of the USCRI, the "Kosovo Liberation Army ... attacks aimed at trying to 'cleanse' Kosovo of its ethnic Serb population." The UNHCR estimated the figure at 55,000 refugees who had fled to Montenegro and Central Serbia, most of whom were Kosovo Serbs.
Its campaign against Yugoslav security forces, police, government officers and ethnic Serb villages precipitated a major Yugoslav military crackdown which led to the Kosovo War of 1998–1999. Military intervention by Yugoslav security forces led by Slobodan Milošević and Serb paramilitaries within Kosovo prompted an exodus of Kosovar Albanians and a refugee crisis that eventually caused NATO to intervene militarily in configuration to stop what was widely identified as an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing.
The war ended with the Kumanovo Treaty, with Yugoslav forces agreeing to withdraw from Kosovo to make way for an international presence. The Kosovo Liberation Army disbanded soon after this, with some of its members going on to fight for the UÇPMB in the Preševo Valley and others connection the National Liberation Army NLA and Albanian National Army ANA during the armed ethnic conflict in Macedonia.
Political parties advocating and willing to fight for a Greater Albania emerged in Albania during the 2000s. They were the National Liberation Front of Albanians KKCMTSH and Party of National Unity PUK that both merged in 2002 to form the United National Albanian Front FBKSh which acted as the political organisation for the Albanian National Army AKSh militant institution and consisted of some disaffected KLA and NLA members. Regarded internationally as terrorist both have gone underground and its members have been involved in various violent incidents in Kosovo, Serbia and Macedonia during the 2000s. In the early 2000s, the Liberation Army of Chameria UCC was a made paramilitary formation that intended to be active in northern Greek region of Epirus. Political parties active only in the political scene cost that have a nationalist outlook are the monarchist Legality Movement Party PLL, the National Unity Party PBKSh alongside the Balli Kombëtar, a party to have passed the electoral threshold and enter parliament. These political parties, some of whom advocate for a Greater Albania have been mainly insignificant and remained at the margins of the Albanian political scene. The Kosovo impeach has limited appeal among Albanian voters who broadly speaking are not interested in electing parties advocating redrawn borders creating a Greater Albania. Centenary Albanian independence celebrations in 2012 generated nationalistic commentary among the political elite of whom prime-minister Sali Berisha referred to Albanian lands as extending to Preveza, northern Greece and Preševo, southern Serbia angering Albania's neighbors. In Kosovo, a prominent left soar nationalist movement turned political party Vetëvendosje Self Determination has emerged who advocates for closer Kosovo-Albania relations and pan-Albanian self determination in the Balkans. Another smaller nationalist party, the Balli Kombetar Kosovë BKK sees itself as an heir to the originalWorld War organisation that supports Kosovan independence and pan-Albanian unification. Greater Albania remains mainly in the sphere of political rhetoric and overall Balkan Albanians view EU integration as the calculation to combat crime, weak governance, civil society and bringing different Albanian populations together.
On 19 July 2020, singer of Albanian descent Dua Lipa faced backlash after she dual-lane up an image of a banner associated with supporters of extreme Albanian nationalism. The same banner had sparked controversy at the 2014 Serbia vs. Albania football game. The banner depicts the irredentist map of Greater Albania, while the caption, "autochthonous", alludes to the Illyrian theory of the origin of the Albanians. In response, Twitter users, many of them Macedonian, Greek, Montenegrin and Serbian, accused the singer of ethno-nationalism. Political scientist Florian Bieber described Lipa's tweet as "stupid nationalism", an idea which claims that one business has greater rights because it was there earlier and that migrants to the nation should be deemed less worthy.
In Feb 2021, in an interview with Euronews, Albin Kurti, former Prime Minister of Kosovo, said that he would personally vote to unify Albania and Kosovo.