95 “Brussels and Washington had imposed a regime that subordinated the long-term goals of Albanians to the economic and political agendas of the Western powers.” The Albanian Question Looms Over the Balkans Again ISA BLUMI T hroughout 2019, hundreds of thousands of citizens of Albanian-inhabited coun- tries—Kosovo, North Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro—took part in regular demon- strations. Their protests expressed a deep frustra- tion with a new era of painful economic austerity, a lack of progress toward joining the European Union, and an entrenched political oligarchy that continues to thwart attempts to curb its power. Elections in Albania and Kosovo, which had been expected to help bring change during the summer, yielded mixed results. In Albania, local elections were boycotted by the inept opposition, which allowed unpopular Prime Minister Edi Rama, in office since 2013 (and now holding the post of foreign minister as well), to strengthen his posi- tion. In Kosovo, by contrast, the results of the snap October parliamentary elections accurately reflect- ed the collective frustrations of voters. The fore- most opposition party, Lëvizja Vetëvendosja! (VV, or Self-Determination), and its charismatic leader Albin Kurti seem to have won a mandate to di- rectly challenge Kosovo’s EU/US masters. Yet their efforts to form a new government ran up against the stalling tactics of the second-largest opposition party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). By all accounts, the LDK, loyal to Washington since the 1990s, has embraced the US embassy’s hostility to the prospect of working with a government led by Kurti. A new coalition government was finally formed on February 5, allowing Kurti to take of- fice as prime minister. But a difficult partnership is expected, with the LDK seeking to block VV from enacting its most radical corrective policies. This spells trouble for 2020. What happens in Kosovo will go a long way to- ward determining the extent to which instability again spreads across the Balkans. Backed by rival sponsors in Brussels and Washington, the widely despised old elites in Kosovo and Albania face con- stituencies utterly alienated from them. Troubling- ly, this rage is also directed at the larger circle of external powers hoping to keep the Balkans stable. Relations with the EU have been rapidly deterio- rating since its shocking reversal of earlier prom- ises to admit new member states in the Western Balkans. An extraordinary rebuff in late October by French President Emmanuel Macron basically ended any further discussions, suggesting that the regional political order on which the United States and its NATO partners have long depended to pro- tect their interests in the larger Mediterranean world is at best in transition. The consequences will likely prove destabiliz- ing, both locally and beyond. Opposition to an entrenched political elite may take a more violent turn if citizens realize that yet again, voting in elections will not result in real change. That would further expose the clear divergence of strategic in- terests that has arisen among NATO partners dur- ing the Trump era. Without the prospect of nego- tiations for EU membership, Brussels risks losing influence in Albania, Kosovo, and North Mace- donia. That would give Turkey and Russia greater leverage, as outside powers once again jockey to shape the region’s politics. TRUST DEFICIT The rapidly deteriorating situation in the West- ern Balkans is a product of the violent disintegra- tion of the Cold War order. The transformations of the 1990s put the region at the center of the North Atlantic strategic calculus, and by the early 2000s it seemed that Brussels and Washington had ISA BLUMI is an associate professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern studies at Stockholm University.