war of liberation versus civil war debate
해방전쟁 대 내전 논쟁
A conceptual entry for the historiographical conflict over the character of Albania's 1943–1946 transition. Official socialist-era historiography defined it as a communist-led National Liberation War, legitimizing the communist seizure of power in 1944; post-war Western and post-socialist scholarship describes the armed clashes between the National Liberation Movement (LANÇ) and anti-communist forces such as Balli Kombëtar as a civil war. The core dispute is less the name than how resistance to occupation and domestic power struggle are to be distinguished and assessed.
In depth
By the Mukje Agreement of 1–3 August 1943, LANÇ and Balli Kombëtar agreed on a united front against the occupiers and the formation of a Committee for the Salvation of Albania, but the agreement collapsed over the status of Kosovo and the opposition of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The collapse is taken to mark the formal start of the civil war on 1 October 1943: Enver Hoxha declared that unity with Balli Kombëtar was no longer a subject for discussion and that the priority was now its destruction, and instructed regional committees to wage armed struggle against it.
After the Italian surrender in late 1943, Germany occupied all of Albania; Balli Kombëtar struck a deal with the Germans, set up a "neutral government" in Tirana and continued the war against LANÇ and the Yugoslav Partisans. Southern Albania was the main battlefield, and both sides carried out massacres and assassinations. At the Permet Congress in May 1944 the Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council was constituted as a provisional government with Hoxha as chairman of its executive committee, and the fall of Shkodër on 29 November 1944 is fixed as the official liberation day. Civil-war accounts also cover the anti-communist risings in the north in 1945–1946 (Postribë, Koplik), their suppression, and the proclamation of the People's Republic in 1946.
Second World War Albania was a central subject of socialist historiography. Historical writing was a highly centralized process in which party bodies supervised the application of Marxist-Leninist principles and the party line, and after the 1990s the history of the Second World War was revised within a broader reconsideration of Albanian national history. Historiography then developed as an open process including foreign historians, unlike earlier socialist isolation, and the degree to which wartime history had been distorted or fabricated under socialism shaped that rewriting. In the post-socialist period Albanian scholarship retained a legacy of seeing history in black-and-white terms; Robert Elsie stressed in 2010 that there was no reliable and objective Albanian historiography on which to draw for a historical dictionary, and Oliver Jens Schmitt judged that the post-war Albanian regime propagandized the official version of the past by every means.
The naming dispute between civil war and National Liberation War is an ongoing scholarly debate. Some historians have studied the relationship between the two wars, and there is a scholarly rebuttal holding that selectively citing Albanian and foreign documents to argue that after October 1943 there was no national liberation war in Albania, only a civil war, is an attempt to obscure the truth. The entry denotes the clash of interpretations rather than the events themselves, and belongs with comparable historiographical entries such as the Second Front controversy or the Poznań June historiography debate.