Albania joins Yugoslavia

Hoxa toyed with the idea before Tito's break up with Stalin. Hoxa, who was a devote stalinist, broke then relations with Yugoslavia. Later, as we all know, he broke relations with the USSR after Stalin's deat and the erasing of its "legacy", and drove Albania into the Chinese ideology camp. As a result, Albania became a pariah in Europe and it still is the poorest country in the continent.

There are two possible PODs to achieve this. The first is Tito becoming a puppet of Stalin, or Tito being eliminated and replaced by someone who is it.

The other, probably with less butterflies, is eliminating Hoxa and replacing him with somebody willing to follow the original plan, even if Yugoslavia isn't a soviet lapdog.

Possible consequences? I think Albania would be far more developed today, even if affected by the Yugoslav Wars (which it surely would). Albania would be a major player on the breaking of Yugoslavia, and Albanese might end up in only one country. Can Europe stand a second Bosnian War happening in Kosovo and/or Macedonia at the same time or shortly after than the other, for example? Plus, all the Kosovo disputes of today wouldn't exist. I wonder if this could have major implications in the current world policy and especially in Russia's approach with Serbia.
 
Hmm odd, never heard of this. Albanians aren't Yugo (or any) Slavian so particularly strange.

I'm not so up on this part of history though to really comment.
 
I doubt it would work though.... Albanians are not Slavs, and only around 3-5 percent of people in Albania are any kind of Slavic people (mostly Bulgarians).... so I don't know why they would want to join a south-Slavic state.
 
Albania ? Join Yugoslavia ? That is certainly not natural at all. Simply because they aren't Slavs. Also that Albanians are rather more closer to the Greeks than to the Slavs. And the Greeks were failed to gain Albania IOTL...
 

ninebucks

Banned
A willing union may be a bit difficult, but how about Yugoslavia invading and annexing Albania? Probably part of a proxy war between any pair of Cold War rivals...
 
Albania ? Join Yugoslavia ? That is certainly not natural at all. Simply because they aren't Slavs. Also that Albanians are rather more closer to the Greeks than to the Slavs. And the Greeks were failed to gain Albania IOTL...

The Greeks took about half of it from the Italians before Hitler decided to get in on the act. If the greeks had overrun it before Hitler decided to get involved do you think they might have annexed it?
 
Albania ? Join Yugoslavia ? That is certainly not natural at all. Simply because they aren't Slavs. Also that Albanians are rather more closer to the Greeks than to the Slavs. And the Greeks were failed to gain Albania IOTL...

The Greeks took about half of it from the Italians before Hitler decided to get in on the act. If the greeks had overrun it before Hitler decided to get involved do you think they might have annexed it?
 
The Greeks took about half of it from the Italians before Hitler decided to get in on the act. If the greeks had overrun it before Hitler decided to get involved do you think they might have annexed it?


Well I'd say even if the Greeks had managed to occupy Albania, in the end they'd be squashed by by the Axis nations anyway. And I don't think the Greeks would have ever be let to go even further than their reach IOTL.

And actually, I was talking about during the Balkan War...
 
I know Albanese aren't Slavs stop repeating it! :D

I found it yesterday while searching information in Encarta for other things. It striked me as a very rare thing so then I googled it. I didn't found many info in the subject but came with this:

http://www.marxist.com/curse-nationalism-war-yugoslavia.htm

Tito, Georgi Dimitrov and Enver Hoxa discussed the possibility of Bulgaria and Albania joining the “new Yugoslavia”. However, the last thing that the Moscow bureaucracy wanted to see was the creation of a Socialist Federation in the Balkans which could serve as an alternative to the “cradle of socialism” and shake their privileged positions.
Maybe the new state wouldn't be know as Yugoslavia but as Balkania or something like that. We are not talking about Nationalists but Communists, after all...
 
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