L’indipendenza dell’Albania, l’ingresso nella Società delle Nazioni e il ruolo dell’Italia (1920)

In December 1920, Albania was admitted to the League of Nations. Most historiography considers this result the moment in which that country became fully independent and sovereign. Hence the choice of the title of this article which in the first part, after some considerations on the evolution of the Albanian national movement, gives an account of the fragile independence experiment started towards the end of 1912, and then develops some considerations on the Albanian question between the Great War and the Peace Conference. The second part deals with the events of 1920, a crucial year for the history of Albania which ended with the entry into the League of Nations. On the basis of archive documentation (Nitti, Sforza, Schanzer collections, preserved at the Central State Archives in Rome), particular attention is paid to the role of Italy, also due to its military presence beyond the Adriatic since the autumn of 1914. In this paper, therefore, the admission of Albania into the newly formed international organization is seen as the outcome of a decades-long journey towards the achievement of complete sovereignty for the new Balkan state. All this was therefore a point of arrival and, at the same time, a point of departure, since on the one hand it created the political conditions for the Albanian state to acquire a more solid authority, and on the other it stimulated the start of the process of building the institutional, administrative and economic structures of the country.