Socialist Albania was made by modernisation, and a political pursuit of its aesthetic and sociological derivatives. Enver Hoxha sought to transform Albania into a self-conscious nation-state via the transformation of the physical landscape. This was done according to contemporary discourses connecting modernity and architecture and informed by the acute sense of vulnerability that defined Hoxha’s regime. Socialist Albania was to look like a powerful, industrial state. It was also to be made by a proud Albanian nation. Hoxha appropriated physical space to appropriate a mental one: importantly, the process of making was integral to the affect, and effect, of the feeling.
This ‘performance’, in Albania, manifested itself in the physical construction of the urban landscapes and the experience of living in them, what Glass calls ‘rituals of daily functional use.’[1] Albanians were obliged to carry out the physical transformation of the landscape, and in doing so a collective and associative sense of their national identity was forged. This inverts some scholarship of national identity, that argues consciousness depends on pre-existing frameworks.[2] In Albania, the state made the means for the nation to realise its existence.
During the Cold War, modernity found its physical visualisation in large-scale projections of power and preparedness. Hoxha embraced this sentiment in his mass bunker-building campaign. Bunkers, concrete structures designed to withstand nuclear attack, are distinctive architectural legacies of the era, becoming ‘the most universally known feature of the landscape of the communist period.’[3] Their physical legacy, however, also reflects the paranoid context behind their construction. ‘Their importance and value’, as Uzzell recognises, ‘lie in what they represent.’[4] Bunkers were a show of strength and a promise of state-protection for a population accustomed to foreign attack.
The vulnerability of Albania was physically translated into the scale of the bunker-building project. ‘Devoid of any military logic,’ the military consumed an enormous proportion of economic resources: in 1975, the defence budget was nearly twice that of Yugoslavia.[5] But in Hoxha’s rhetoric, in 1969, they were a promise to his people: ‘The borders of Albania and the Albanian soil are protected by a people and a Party who will shower bullets into the mouths of all who dare encroach upon it.’[6] Albanians confronted bunkers with increasing frequency: the campaign grew exponentially, reflecting Hoxha’s increasing vulnerability in his project of international isolationism. He built bunkers while his neighbours built rockets. Between 1960 and 1986, 800,000 bunkers were constructed; in 1989 there was one bunker for every four Albanians. Their ubiquity reminded the population of the state’s power, and such ‘associability’, for Offe, translates to an institutionalised collective.[7] Their physical endurability and materiality was an assurance to Albanian people. Bunkers had affective meaning because they represented threat and security simultaneously, playing into contemporary fears about the reality of both. As Hamm suggests, ‘Hoxha utilised the strength of this anxiety to direct the collective force of an entire population afraid of ‘history repeating itself’ towards ensuring the survival of Albanianism.’ Hobsbawm’s ‘rhetoric of apocalypse’ was made tangible in these bunkers.[8]
As important as their symbolic significance when completed was the means of their construction. Socialist states ideologically legitimated themselves on the productive process and made the ‘work collective’ the central social organisation around which identities were formed. Hoxha applied this throughout his tenure, calling on Albanians to ‘[build] up a new life for themselves with their own hands.’[9] The civic duty of Albanian socialist students was to spend two months in ‘Youth Action through Voluntary Work.’ The law No 747 of December 1949 dictated the contribution of every adult man. According to one Albanian sociologist, ‘even diplomats roll up their sleeves and give a hand.’ Civic duty became civic performance, which, over time, fostered a sense of civic commonality.
Ultimately, Hoxha’s use of physical space to forge an identity failed. Indeed, the collapse of Albanian socialism has been linked to its inability to maintain the façade of utopian promise.[10] Bunkers were reclaimed for barbecues and meme generation, now ‘a convenient location for toilet use.’ Collective disappointment with state socialism, and rejections of the Albanian Nation according to Hoxha, meant that the cities, roads, and domains that Albanian socialism had spatialised became the spaces where challenges to socialism were located. The Albania of State Socialism was over, in its architectural and ideological form.
[1] Emily Glass, ‘Concrete Memories: Cultural Production in an Albanian Communist Factory’, in H. Orange (ed.), Reanimating Industrial Spaces: Conducting Memory Work in Post-Industrial Societies (Routledge, 2014): 154.
[2] F. Bechhofer and D. McCrone (ed.), National Identity, Nationalism and Constitutional Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); M. Hrochfourg, European Nations: Explaining their Formation (Brooklyn, 2015); H. Koht, ‘The Dawn of Nationalism in Europe’, The American Historical Review, 52, 2 (1947): 279; M. Kenny, ‘The Origins and Drivers of English Nationhood’, British Politics, 10 (2015): 358.
[3] F. Iacono and K. L Kellic, Of Pyramids and Dictators: Memory, Work and the Significance of Communist Heritage in Post-Socialist Albania’, Journal in Public Archaeology, 5 (2015): 109.
[4] Uzzell in Orange, Reanimating Industrial Spaces, 138.
[5] Bennett, 152.
[6] Enver Hoxha, in a Communist Party Publication of 1969, cited in ibid. 145.
[7] C. Offe, Modernity and the State, East, West (Polity Press, 1996): 117.
[8] E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991, (Vintage Books, 1994): 247
[9] E. Hoxha, ‘On the Role and Tasks of the Democratic Front for the Complete Triumph of Socialism in Albania’ (Submitted at the 4th Congress of the Democratic Front of Albania, September 14, 1967) (Tirana, 1967): 4.
[10] D. Dalakoglou, ‘The Road from Capitalism to Capitalism: Infrastructures of (Post) Socialism in Albania, Mobilities, 7, 4 (2012): 585-586.
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