Education, Religion, and Nation-Building in Interwar Albania

This paper has two goals: first, it aims to introduce Albania into the scholarly discussion of the development of state-led nationalism; second, it tries to correct some of the main arguments of the classical works on nationalism. Using different theoretical approaches and variables, authors like Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm have somehow dismissed the role of the state in the spread of nationalism. According to them, the national idea disseminates in a social and cultural context prepared by capitalism and promoted by political actors not necessarily related to the state. In the Balkans, the situation was different. This was especially true for Albanian nationalism. Albanian speakers were split into three main denominations (Muslims, Christian Orthodox, and Catholics) and with a plethora and contesting identities and political allegiances. Here, the forging of a national identity was a result of top-down social engineering with the state as a central actor. Lacking the capital to transform the country's economy and give economic substance to the imagined community, the Albanian state authorities used education as the main instrument to undermine the role of the religious groups and introduce the modernizing Weltanschauung of Enlightenment. Indeed, nationalism and modernization, known also as Westernization, were two elements of the same transformative process. This produced a tension between the sacred and the secular, which is usually associated with the communist period, but the latter was obviously only an exacerbation of a process rooted in the interwar era.