Reframing Anti-Soviet Defiance: Albania, Romania and Global Circulations of Sovereignty (1960–1964)

Abstract

The article reframes Albania’s and Romania’s defiance of the Soviet Union by situating it within global debates about sovereignty. We use the latter as an umbrella term that encompasses concepts such as equality in international relations, economic self-reliance and self-determination against hegemony. During the 1950s and 1960s, these notions gained popularity across the globe because of decolonisation, non-alignment and the dynamics of dissent within world communism. The article argues that the regimes in Tirana and Bucharest employed these concepts to assert autonomy and legitimacy within the Cold War order. The discourses and actions of Albanian and Romanian party elites were not isolated expressions of national dissent, and instead, were shaped by and actively contributed to transnational debates that were catalysed by anti-colonial emancipation. We compare Albania and Romania by juxtaposing each party-state’s transnational projections of sovereignty in relations with the Soviet Union, China and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, as well as post-colonial countries. The article highlights that from the vantage point of the margins of Eastern Europe, focusing on sovereignty brings the impact of decolonisation upon the pluralisation of state socialist identities during the 1960s into focus.