The Ally Berlin Never Has to Thank

Tirana gave Germany the sharpest sentence of the day. Berlin will file it where it files everything from Albania.

Tirana Examiner Editorial Board

Edi Rama posted on Tuesday evening, in English only, that a drone carrying explosives into Leipzig/Halle “is not a grey zone.” He called it “a Russian act of aggression against Germany and against the security of Europe,” wrote that “hybrid warfare cannot be rewarded with hesitation,” and put Albania beside Germany, Ukraine and every NATO ally. He did not translate it for his own public. The statement was written for Berlin, in Berlin’s language. Tirana has been addressing Germany that way for seventeen years.

The rest of the cascade came in on time. Rutte, von der Leyen, Meloni, Sánchez, Stubb, Sikorski, each with the three beats of the day. Rama’s was the only one we could find from the Western Balkans by midnight, and it was personal, “my friend Friedrich Merz,” flag beside flag. We do not expect a reply from the Chancellery, and we expect nobody in Berlin to find that odd.

So let us set the ledger out, since Berlin never does. A NATO member since 2009. Troops in Afghanistan from the beginning of that war to its end. Thousands of Afghan evacuees housed in Albanian hotels in the summer of 2021, on a decision that took Tirana days. Full alignment with every sanction on Russia and every Council declaration, a record the Commission reduces each autumn to a single line because there is nothing to add to it. Nothing here was negotiated. It was done, and then done again the following year, and the year after that.

What came back is on the record too. In September 2019 the Bundestag attached nine conditions to the opening of Albania’s negotiations; by March 2020 the Council had made it fifteen. The first intergovernmental conference took place in 2022, eight years after candidate status. Every German coalition agreement in that period committed Berlin to enlargement.

Between the sentence and the calendar sits the policy.

Now the measuring stick, and it fits inside one day. While Alexander Dobrindt was reading out his findings, Serbia’s president was in the Palace of Serbia addressing the Non-Aligned Movement under the Kurir headline “Serbia does not forget its friends.” Not a word on Leipzig that we could find. His tabloids supplied one. By evening Informer was running a Russian “military expert” who explained that the drone was a German intelligence provocation, that the absence of damage proved it was staged, and that the devices were probably built on German soil. Moscow’s line, printed in Belgrade, on the afternoon Berlin ordered a Russian consulate closed. Angela Merkel’s farewell tour of the region in 2021 began in that city. Olaf Scholz signed a lithium memorandum there in July 2024. Serbia’s alignment with EU foreign policy “remains low,” the Commission wrote in November, as it writes every year, against a €1.58 billion share of the Reform and Growth Facility. Berlin has read those front pages for twelve years and found nothing in them worth pricing.

We owe Berlin a concession, and it is a real one. Germany has argued Albania’s case in the Council more than any other large member state. When Paris, The Hague and Copenhagen blocked the opening of talks in 2019, Berlin kept the file alive. In May Friedrich Merz wrote to fellow leaders that the Union “should stand firm in our promise that the Western Balkans countries and Moldova can join,” and in Tivat in June he put his name beside Macron’s on a plan to reshape the accession process. Advocacy is not nothing. But an ally treated as a fixed input is never priced, and an ally who is never priced is never consulted and never thanked, and learns what Germany intends next door from the newspapers. Advocacy and indifference are the same posture, seen from two chairs.

Dobrindt’s test has three parts: police work, the pattern of conduct, intelligence findings. Run on Moscow, it produced an order to close the consulate in Bonn within four weeks. Run on Belgrade, it has produced a decade of ministerial visits. Nobody has ever run it on Tirana, because Berlin has never had to establish anything about Albania. That is what being taken for granted means in practice. It is also the most expensive compliment in European politics, and Albania has been paying for it since 2009.

Rama wrote that hybrid warfare cannot be rewarded with hesitation. Germany had said as much that afternoon. Loyalty cannot be rewarded with silence either. On that sentence, Berlin has not yet replied.