Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, America.gov, as part of its feature “The Unfinished Work of Democracy,” is asking academics and journalists from the United States and elsewhere to comment on the challenges to democracy that still lay ahead for countries of the former Eastern Bloc. What follows are their responses – and yours are welcome as well.

Albania’s “transition” from dictatorship to democracy has been difficult and long. Too long, most of its citizens would say. I take some issue with the term “transition” as a start. It is too soft and fails to capture what Albania, and the rest of the post-communist world, had to go through to get from one stage to another. That said, it was a revolutionary period where ordinary people made huge sacrifices. For Albania, which had a delayed start to de-communization, the road from one system to another has been fraught with worrying setbacks. It is worth recalling that Albania did have further to go than any other country. It was the poorest and most isolated. Add to that the extraordinary challenges that Albania faced before then: an almost feudal economic system up until the end of the Second World War, mass illiteracy and the near total absence of any kind of infrastructure — be it roads, canals, bridges or universities. I always remind my students that Albania had its first university in 1957.

When Albania finally started in 1991 to break with the past, it confronted so many obstacles, and the governments that followed the final defeat of the communist rulers in 1992 have not always risen to the challenges. Too often Albania’s leaders chose short-term gains over true national interests. In the intervening years between then and now, we have witnessed massive corruption, creeping authoritarianism, and economic collapse in 1997. Albania has had multiple elections but it has never had a flawless election. Even today, Albania’s electoral losers still challenge the validity of the results. One of the preferred tools of those outside of power is the parliamentary boycott. Hardly helpful for a country that needs a credible opposition.

This is not to say that Albania has not made progress. Indeed, anyone who saw the country in the early 1990s and today can only conclude that for most people, life has indeed improved. However, the price for what can only be called a flawed revolution is being paid by Albania’s citizens. The biggest challenge ahead for Albania is to restore the link between the citizen and the state as so many people now perceive the state and the government as an enemy. This is not surprising to people when they can see with their own eyes that politics still often triumphs law. Thousands of Albanians already “voted with their feet” and left, and the effects of the brain drain in Albania are palpable. The government and civil society need to recognize that Albania’s complete Euro-Atlantic integration means that the government must convince its citizens that it is working for them, not themselves.

Learn more about Professor Robert Austin (PDF, 24KB).