Abstract

This article examines the paradoxical position of Albanians in Balkan nationalist historiography. Despite being among the earliest proponents of a trans-confessional, language-based nationalism in a region dominated by rigid Orthodox ethno-religious identities, Albanians were frequently portrayed by Greek and Slavic nationalist narratives as traitors due to their association with Islam and the Ottoman state. The article argues that this portrayal reflects nationalist myth-making rather than historical reality. Furthermore, it challenges the reductionist depiction of the Ottoman Empire as a purely brutal occupying force by emphasizing the institutional pragmatism that enabled its long-term rule. Albanian nationalism, it is argued, represented a more structurally modern response to the post-imperial condition than many of its Balkan counterparts.

Introduction: The Problem of the “Albanian Exception”

Modern Balkan historiography has largely been shaped by national liberation narratives that frame history as a struggle between oppressed Christian nations and an alien Muslim empire. Within this framework, Albanians occupy an anomalous position. They do not conform to the binary of Christian victim versus Muslim oppressor, nor do they align neatly with confessional nationalism.

This anomaly has often been resolved discursively by labeling Albanians as collaborators or traitors. Yet such interpretations obscure a more complex reality: “Albanians were among the first Balkan peoples to articulate a nationalism explicitly detached from religious affiliation”, privileging language, shared origin, and territorial continuity.

Early Albanian National Consciousness and Trans-Confessional Identity

Long before the crystallization of Albanian nationalism in the nineteenth century (“Rilindja Kombëtare”), Albanian elites demonstrated political organization that transcended confessional boundaries. The semi-autonomous rule of Kara Mahmud Pasha Bushati in the late eighteenth century, and his vision of an Illyrian confederation, illustrates an early attempt to construct regional autonomy independent of both Ottoman centralization and Balkan confessional rivalries.¹

Unlike Greek, Serbian, or Bulgarian national movements—which were closely tied to Orthodox ecclesiastical institutions—Albanian nationalism emerged as consciously multi-religious. As Nathalie Clayer notes, “religion was deliberately subordinated to language in the Albanian national project.”² This was a structural innovation in the Balkan context.

Islam, Loyalty, and the Construction of “Betrayal”

The portrayal of Albanians as traitors rests on an anachronistic conflation of religion with national loyalty. In Greek and Slavic nationalist discourse, Islam became synonymous with Ottoman oppression, rendering Muslim populations inherently suspect.

However, this logic projects nineteenth-century nationalist categories onto an imperial world in which identity was layered rather than exclusive, loyalty was often pragmatic, and religion functioned as a legal-administrative category rather than a national one.³

For many Albanians, conversion to Islam facilitated social mobility and political participation without erasing local or ethnic identity. To interpret this as betrayal presumes the prior existence of national consciousness that, in most cases, did not yet exist.

Ottoman Rule and the Myth of Pure Brutality

The persistence of the Ottoman Empire for nearly five centuries in the Balkans fundamentally undermines the claim that it ruled solely through terror. As Karen Barkey has demonstrated, Ottoman governance relied on negotiation, incorporation of local elites, and flexible institutional arrangements.⁴

The millet system granted religious communities autonomy, while provincial administration often depended on local power holders—many of whom were Albanian. This does not absolve the empire of violence or inequality, but it situates Ottoman rule within the broader logic of early modern empires rather than nationalist caricature.

As Mark Mazower observes, “empires endure not by constant repression but by making themselves indispensable.”⁵

Albanian Nationalism as a Post-Imperial Model

Ironically, Albanian nationalism proved more adaptable to the post-imperial world than many of its critics. By rejecting religious exclusivity, Albanians avoided the internal fragmentation that plagued other Balkan states.

While Greek and Slavic nationalisms often reproduced the confessional logic of the Ottoman millet system—substituting ethnicity for religion—Albanian nationalism consciously dismantled it. This allowed Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic Albanians to imagine themselves as part of a single political community.

In this sense, Albanian nationalism was not only anti-imperial, but post-imperial.

Historiographical Consequences and the Politics of Memory

The marginalization of the Albanian experience in Balkan historiography reflects the needs of nationalist myth-making rather than empirical history. Narratives of liberation require clear villains and victims; groups that blur these categories destabilize the story.

Albanians were thus not condemned for collaboration, but for refusing to conform to confessional nationalism. Their example exposed the contingency of religiously defined nationhood, which made it ideologically threatening to neighboring nationalist projects.

Conclusion

The depiction of Albanians as traitors and the Ottoman Empire as a purely brutal occupier are products of nineteenth-century nationalist imagination rather than historical necessity. Albanian trans-confessional nationalism represented an early and structurally modern response to the collapse of empire—one that anticipated later European models of civic identity.

The irony is that those most successful at adapting to post-imperial modernity were often those most excluded from its nationalist narratives.

References

1. Noel Malcolm, *Kosovo: A Short History* (London: Macmillan, 1998), 172–176. ↩︎
2. Nathalie Clayer, *Aux origines du nationalisme albanais* (Paris: Karthala, 2007), 94–101. ↩︎
3. Frederick Cooper, *Citizenship between Empire and Nation* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 34–38. ↩︎
4. Karen Barkey, *Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 109–136. ↩︎
5. Mark Mazower, *The Balkans* (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 54. ↩︎

6. Miranda Vickers, *The Albanians: A Modern History* (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 1–20.

7. Benedict Anderson, *Imagined Communities* (London: Verso, 1983), 145–148.