THE CIVIL AND POLITICAL SOCIETY DURING NATION BUILDING PERIOD IN ALBANIA: 1912-1939

Abstract

The Albanian history is full of consecutive invasions that have continued for different centuries. The power has been in the hands of foreigners for different centuries. Therefore, the social and political conscience was mainly composed of the survival concept. The governance of the Ottoman Empire was based on the military and political power instead of a market's dynamics. This factor hasprevented for a long period of time the development of a middle and urban classthat is the base of every modern society. As the author E. Vlora highlighted thesociety was divided in two main categories: the nobles composed of landowners and some few bourgeois that have never been democrats and the massive population composed of peasants, shepherds, soldiers that used to follow their leaders.Due to these factors, after the declaration of the independence in 1912, the efforts for the development of a civil or political society were not easy to undertake. Thispaper will try to analyze the dynamics and the logic of the creation and development of a civil and political society in the nation building period. The analysis will be focused on the evaluations of different social, historical andcultural factors that have strongly influenced the process of the creation of the civil and the political class. In the framework of this paper the civil society will be assumed as a community based on communication, persuasion, consensus anddiversity (Almond and Verba, 1963). With the term political class will be intended the community of people that is or tries to be to be part of the political power and government.