Spyless in Tirana – new book out

The lessons of Albania

In the spring of 2019 I spent a month in the Albanian capital of Tirana as part of research for a book about European cities. I was halfway through writing the first draft when life was overtaken by Lockdown Britain and my move to Portugal. As time went on, and it became clear that Western society had changed irrevocably, the book I'd planned receded into a lost world. I reconciled myself to shelving the project indefinitely.

But fast forward to 2023 and, instead of fading, the memory of my time in Tirana became more vivid. Albania is a crazy place, hilarious and tragic by turns, its way of life almost that of another planet and yet eminently human. I decided I had to tell my little bit of its story.

The kind of travel writing I do combines narrative and reportage, aiming to get under the skin of a place from an unashamedly Western perspective. Thanks to the willingness of many people in Tirana to share their time and insights with me, I was able to get an amazingly good picture of life in post-dictatorship Albania in a short time. A stint volunteering at the capital's first hostel gave me a sense of what Albanians were thinking, how they felt about their past and what they hoped for in future. People in think tanks, independent media and charities told me about the conditions which create trafficking, how politicians control the press and life for the disabled. I interviewed a former political prisoner, the world head of the Bektashi order (a mystical branch of Islam) and watched the locals paint-bomb the prime minister's office.

Revisiting the material after the Covid years and alarmed by the centralised controls being put in place by Western governments, I saw my Albanian experience with new eyes. My time there had been framed by the attitudes of someone from an established liberal democracy confident she was witnessing the aftermath of authoritarian period of history that would never be repeated. But since 2020 I've come to see how threats to human flourishing can come in many forms and from unexpected directions. Instead of my complacent assumption that Albania could learn from us, I now felt that – if we had the eyes to see – the West could learn from Albania.

I am publishing the story of my spring in Tirana as a 'travella': a midform publication or short travelogue of about 35,000 words, a bit over a third of the length of a full-length book. I have written it as a travel narrative which reflects my experience at the time and does not feature any of my retrospective reflections. These I am publishing on this Substack in two parts, first with some initial 'lessons from Albania'. The second part will follow later in the year and will assume some familiarity with the people and incidents that feature in the book.

The history of Albania is an object lesson in the many forms oppression can take and the resilience of the human impulse for freedom. Empire and independence, monarchy and republic, occupation and liberation – the little mediterranean country seems to have seen it all. In 1912, having been part of the Ottoman Empire since the fifteenth century, the Albanians rose up and declared their independence, only to suffer repeated incursions by neighbouring states during World War I. World War II brought occupation first by Mussolini and then the Nazis. In 1946, Albania became the People’s Republic of Albania under Enver Hoxha whose nationalist brand of communism cut the country off from the rest of the world for nearly fifty years.

In 1984, while I was sight-seeing in neighbouring Italy, the Prime Minister of Bavaria managed to secure a transit visa to drive through Albania on his way to Greece. His testimony paints a stark picture of Tirana: ‘As we entered the town, we noticed a rather dramatic difference. At night, the town was in total darkness. There were no cars. We saw only a few trucks, most of them broken down. Some people were trying to repair them … The roads were in a sorry state.’

Control Doesn’t Work

The logic or, to use more contemporary language, the 'energy' of control always wants more. This was the 'momentum' identified by Hannah Arendt in her study of Nazism and Stalinism in The Origins of Totalitarianism: ‘It is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes to demand unlimited power. Such power can only be secured if literally all men, without a single exception, are reliably dominated in every aspect of their life.' The grasping nature of power sets in train a movement - something that Jonathan Sumption warned about at the beginning of Britain’s Covid response - which can only go one way, towards total control. And because total control is incompatible with the messiness, creativity and reality of life, a kind of implosion or collapse inevitably follows.

Albania under Hoxha illustrates the forward-march of control. In the 1940s the new government began requisitioning people’s property and assets. Local businesses and the wealthy were taxed at prohibitive levels, with those who could not pay put in prison. New agrarian laws enabled the government to confiscate large estates and redistribute them as small holdings. But even small-scale ownership did not last: farmland then became collectivised as agricultural cooperatives, first as a voluntary process and then as a compulsory handover. By 1961, communist party leaders were able to declare that there were now only two types of property in Albania: state property and cooperative property.

For some years cooperative members were allowed to raise livestock for their own consumption. But in 1981, Albanians were prohibited from keeping their own sheep or cattle and in 1982, the keeping of ‘private’ chickens was also outlawed.

When the communist regime collapsed in 1991, there was nothing left for the state to take or ban. Albania was the third poorest country in the world, its population subsisting on food rations, with many people suffering from malnutrition-related diseases. The people of a largely agricultural society had lost the means to feed themselves and many in rural areas were close to starvation. The international community stepped in with emergency food supplies and humanitarian aid.

The collapse of authoritarian regimes is well documented. But a less-recognised aspect of how control ultimately fails could be expressed in Newton's famous formulation: ‘To any action there is always an opposite and equal reaction'.

Control requires dependence and with hindsight, it is easy to see the self-sufficiency of Albanian peasants and farmers was a threat to the Hoxha regime. So was people’s ability to move around freely. The Hoxha regime also requisitioned cars and Albania became the only country in the world to ban private car ownership. Naturally Hoxha and his politburo had a fleet of cars at their disposal which included limousines with padded seats to protect passengers from the bumpy roads.

Now I don’t know about the physics of this, but observably, across human history and society, a kind of law of the pendulum seems to be in operation. It could be expressed in psychoanalytical terms as the return of the repressed, or in spiritual terms as the law of karma. In any case, post-communist Albania had a huge reaction to the ban on private car ownership. Cars became a status symbol, with Mercedes (a model favoured by Hoxha) the most prestigious. This 1994 piece from the Los Angeles Times gives an insight into what happens when thousands of cars are imported into a country where drivers lack basic skills and the roads are equipped for donkey carts: 'The anarchy on the roads is an apt metaphor for Albania today, as two generations of totalitarian control and repression give way to chaos.'

Had things improved by 2019 when I was there? Not really. With no culture of road safety, crossing the road could be terrifying. Cars didn't even respect pedestrian crossings in the centre of Tirana, inching closer to people's legs in a way that suggested they resented the seconds they wasted waiting for the road to be theirs again.

Lesson No 1

Think twice before dismissing a new restriction as temporary or 'just another regulation'. Does it represent a shift in the balance of power? Even if it seems trivial now, could it be extended or applied in a way that changes society permanently and, if so, how?

‘Thou Shalt Not Commute’. Hackney Council, 2024

The Red Flag of Absurdity

When authoritarian energies hold a population in their grasp, rapid changes and nonsensical instructions come from above. The people are expected to abandon long-established values and habits overnight, to believe this and not that, to support blue and not red, or vice versa, to stay in safely or go to fight a foreign war …

Edvin, an exceptionally smart man who studied philosophy in the last years of the Hoxha regime, told me about the constant changes under the dictatorship. Books that contained anything other than materialist ideology, even communist texts, were banned. Hegel, whose philosophical thought had birthed Marxism, was outlawed because of his idealism. Only some of Marx's writing was allowed. Then Hoxha, a prolific writer himself, fell out with the Soviet Union. 'In the end, we were just allowed to read what our leader wrote,' he said.

The same pattern played out with art. As in the Soviet Union, Albanian artists were only allowed to paint in the style of socialist realism, producing art that expressed the values of communism. But the Hoxha regime kept changing its mind about what constituted the right kind of socialist realism. At times, artists were supposed to portray a vision of fully industrialised society, at other times something more representative of reality. 'There were waves when it was more liberal, and then it got strict again. Someone would come and say, “that looks funny”, and suddenly it was wrong,' said Edvin. 'You never knew what the rules were.'

Behind the absurdity of such rapid, often contradictory, changes is a single command which, from the point of view of Control, makes complete sense: Obey Only Me. Arendt pointed out that a distinguishing characteristic of totalitarian regimes was 'their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member … Such loyalty can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.'

Understanding this helps us to see why such regimes are so keen on destroying anything that stands between them and the obedient citizen. Communist governments famously attack religion, and Albania became the only country in the world to outlaw religion completely. But the same applies to anything that serves as a source of meaning beyond the reach of Control, be it nature, family, music or inner wisdom. There must be no other resource for the self to draw on, so that ultimately all the individual can do is check whether her responses conform to the latest instruction from above. This kind of loyalty creates a disconnection from the world and ultimately from reality itself, as neatly encapsulated by Orwell: 'The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.'

That’s where ideology comes in - but that’s for another Substack.

Lesson No 2

When things don’t make sense, especially as part of a sequence of rapidly-changing instructions and events, alarm bells should ring. Is a pattern emerging? If so, in what direction is it headed and who does it benefit? Most of all, trust your own internal feelings and reactions.

Then

Now

It Takes a Country to Make a Dictator

By way of background for writing Spyless in Tirana, I read Blendi Fevziu's biography, Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania. It seems that Hoxha had an ordinary childhood and, in youth and early adulthood, displayed no particular interests or strong ambitions. It wasn't until his early thirties that he started to become prominent in the Communist Party of Albania, becoming leader, Fevziu suggests, precisely because his lack of political activity made him the least threatening candidate.

Yet once prime minister, he quickly became the embodiment of the power-crazed tyrant, instructing one of his generals: 'Set up prisons and concentration camps and imprison all those charged with serious offences, high treason and open collaboration. Do not show mercy to anyone who collaborated with the occupiers; execute them on the spot. Assemble all prisoners in concentration camps; try to avoid mass arrests because such actions will frighten people. Be careful. Stop, arrest and execute influential individuals, make them an example for others.'

The mystery of how an apparently ordinary man turns mass-murderer recalls Hannah Arendt's conclusions about Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who orchestrated the holocaust. At his trial in Jerusalem, it was widely expected that the man who had been central to the deportation and death of millions of Jews would reveal a murderous, sadistic personality. And yet Arendt, reporting on it for The New Yorker in 1962, found that ‘the deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous’. Eichmann had been examined by psychiatrists and deemed to be ‘normal, with one finding ‘his whole psychological outlook, including his relationship with his wife and children, his mother and father, his brothers and sisters and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable.”’

The phenomenon led to Arendt's famous and much-misunderstood thesis of the 'banality of evil', the idea that human wrongdoing lies in a failure to think rather than explicit intention. From that follows the troubling thought that humans in general have the capacity to commit atrocities and this, in turn, is linked to another aspect of Arendt's insights. It would be a mistake to forget, she says, that 'totalitarian regimes, so long as they are in power, and the totalitarian leaders, so long as they are alive, “command and rest upon mass support” up to the end'.

I know this to be true. In the 1930s my father, who was conscripted into the Nazi army at seventeen, and his twin sister recalled the crowds cheering Hitler as the führer moved through the streets of Vienna. Reading for my doctorate half a century later, I learnt about the prominent role that 'bystander effect' had played in the holocaust; the fact that the majority of people in Nazi-occupied countries had an idea about was going on but said and did nothing. Visiting Syria in the early 2000s, I was surprised to learn that a significant proportion of the population actively supported the Bashar regime. Having been in power since 1963, it remains in power as the world's longest-standing totalitarian government after North Korea.

The distribution of power is a collective matter, the fruit of a shared decision, however quietly made. No single person or small group of people, however powerful, can dominate a society without the active or tacit consent of the population.

In a world which likes to lay the blame for evil at the feet of a few individuals, this is not a popular view and I suspect Hoxha's biographer might not agree with me. (In the early 1990s, Blendi was a student journalist involved in the protests which brought down the communist regime and at points in the biography his anger at the dictator is palpable.) But the evidence of the popular support which gave Hoxha his power is undeniable: students and youth groups enthusiastically carried out the commands to destroy religious buildings and beat and humiliate religious leaders in the early years of the regime. By the end of the regime, as many as one in three or four people in Tirana were working as volunteers for the secret police, informing on their neighbours, fellow workers and family members. Hoxha stood at the top of a pyramid which was built on the support of Albanians.

Lesson No 3

I think it's better if readers to arrive at their own formations on this one.

From ‘We Do Lockdown’ by Miriam Elia

Democracy Requires Vigilance

Democracy is much more than a point of development at which a country arrives and stays. Recorded human history is full of empires, monarchs and despots, but 'rule by the people' is recent and exceptional. It’s a form of government that rests on consent and makes leadership conditional on the respect of basic rights. The kind of liberal democracy pioneered by Britain arose out of a consensus about the importance of values such as freedom of speech which could not rightfully be infringed by either government or ‘the tyranny of the majority’.

The mechanisms designed to bring about such a system are secondary. An electoral system is no guarantee that democracy will be maintained: regular elections are held in both Syria and North Korea. Constitutions can be changed or ignored by those in power, something which has happened in a number of Western nations since 2020.

When the communist regime collapsed in 1991 and Albanians found their freedom, they didn't know how to handle it. Violence, money-making scams and trafficking followed. 'During communism, most of the population was protected: they had education and safety,' Ana Stakaj of the Mary Ward Loreto Foundation told me. 'After the nineties, everything was in chaos. There was democracy but there wasn't a clear understanding of democracy and what freedom means.'

After the disappointments of the Arab Spring, we understand better that a successful democracy involves not just the absence of oppressive government but the creation of a democratic culture. Contemporary Albania is an object lesson in what happens when that process doesn't complete and the power-hungry take advantage of people's passivity.

Founder-editor of the news website EXIT Neritan Sejamini explained to me how, thirty years after the end of communism, Albania was once again in the grip of anti-democratic forces. Corruption is endemic and laws are being made to benefit the legislators and their commercial allies. ‘Without political literacy, without informed citizens, you cannot have democracy,' he said. 'Albanians are still waiting for the government to solve every problem, even problems which are community-based. They don’t understand that unless you distrust government, you are vigilant, it will become a monster.’

The results were evident in the streets of Tirana, where the historic architectural heritage is being replaced by high-rise blocks built by international developers on lucrative contracts. The city's vulnerability to vested interests lay in part, according to architecture academic Saimir Kristo, to political innocence: ‘Politics requires a maturity from the people: if the maturity doesn’t arrive, everything is lost. I believe the new generation of Albanians need to be more active, to speak up. They have to be really responsible citizens.'

During my stay I learnt how the generation who had experienced Albania's liberation from communism, now in middle age, had become disillusioned. Ironically, the new generation seemed to have a much better grasp of the dynamics of power than their seniors. Student activists were acutely aware of how causes can be co-opted by those in power and of the need for change from the bottom up. More than that, they had a spirit, a fire for social justice that I don’t see in mainstream Britain. 'You are millionaires, with villas and cars. I won’t pay for you anymore – and nor will my family!' some told the political establishment.

O my Western complacency. These days I think Albania may have more to teach us than Britain, the cradle of democracy, has to teach it.

Lesson No 4

Be careful where you place your trust. Pay attention and observe: do politicians’ words match their deeds? What do their track records suggest about their loyalties and values? Remember that people often go as far as you let them, and that this is as true for politicians as it is for personal relationships and the workplace.

A note about book-buying

I have tried to make Spyless in Tirana available from a range of different outlets. It can be found on Amazon, with the paperback edition also available at The Great British Bookshop or ordered from a bricks-and-mortar bookstore. Ebook editions are available instantly on Payhip or Amazon. Reviews anywhere are hugely appreciated!