When Achievement Becomes Suspicion

The same week Berlin authored the harshest conditionality applied to a fully aligned candidate state in the region’s history, the Serbian Progressive Party endorsed the Communist Party of China in writing and the President of Serbia received the Order of Friendship from Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People where Putin had signed his joint declaration four days earlier. The asymmetry is not a methodology error. It is the modern face of an analytic prejudice European chanceries have transmitted from Belgrade onward without examining its origin.

by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana)

This is the third in a sequence. The Brussels Mirage of 21 May named the structural condition of Albania inside the European accession framework as a permanently managed candidacy. Conditionality Without End, written on Sunday and published on Monday morning, named the German authorship of the rewrite the Council adopted on 21 May. This piece names what the rewrite is. The first piece described the room. The second piece described who wrote the document on the table. This piece describes what the document is actually saying, and why it sounds, to anyone who has read a century of European correspondence on the Albanian question, like a translation rather than an original composition.

I want to be precise about the argument and precise about what it does not claim.

It does not claim that Friedrich Merz personally believes Albanians are criminals. It does not claim that Günther Krichbaum, the CDU Minister of State for Europe at the Federal Foreign Office who has received the PD parliamentary delegation in his Berlin office, harbours an ethnic prejudice against the country whose opposition he interlocutes. It does not claim that the German Embassy in Tirana operates from a script written in Belgrade. None of those claims are necessary, and none of them are the argument.

The argument is structural. A government can apply an inherited analytic frame without any individual official ever having selected that frame on its merits. The frame moves through institutions, through diplomatic cables, through embassy reporting, through the standard categories used by foreign-ministry desks to assess Western Balkans files, through the routine vocabulary of European newspapers and policy journals. It becomes the unspoken assumption against which every document is calibrated. When a foreign-ministry desk in Berlin assesses an Albanian government, the assessment is not conducted on a blank sheet. It is conducted inside a frame that has been transmitted from older sources, sources whose authorship the desk no longer needs to remember, because the frame has become the background against which the question is asked.

This piece is about that frame. It is about where it came from, what it does, why Berlin has come to apply it, and what makes the application now visible.

What the frame is
The frame works as follows. Albanian prosperity is presumptively suspect. Albanian institutional achievement is asked to demonstrate itself against a higher evidentiary bar than equivalent achievement elsewhere in the region. Albanian political success carries, by default, the analytical question of who is actually behind it; the burden of disproving criminal facilitation becomes a permanent condition of Albanian participation in European institutions, rather than a question raised when specific evidence requires it. The frame is not a single proposition. It is a set of working assumptions about what an Albanian institution is most likely to be, applied before the institution has done anything in particular.

This is not my characterisation. It is the analytic posture of every senior European foreign-ministry assessment of Albania I have read in twenty-five years of work, and it is the analytic posture, restated in slightly more polite vocabulary, of every Italian television documentary on Albanian organised crime that has aired since 1991, and it is the analytic posture, restated in considerably less polite vocabulary, of every Belgrade media treatment of Albanian Kosovo since 1981. The vocabulary varies. The structure is constant.

The frame did not originate with Berlin. The frame is older than the Federal Republic. Its modern codified form is the 1986 SANU Memorandum, the founding ideological document of the Belgrade nationalist project, which described Albanians in Kosovo as conducting a slow demographic conquest against an indigenous Serbian population and presented Albanian land tenure as a wrong to be reversed. The Memorandum’s intellectual scaffolding had been built earlier through inter-war Yugoslav state writing on Albanian Kosovo and earlier still through late-Habsburg diplomatic reporting on Albanian commerce in the Ottoman vilayets, where the analytic frame was already set: Albanian economic activity was presumed to be smuggling, Albanian political organisation was presumed to be banditry, and Albanian land tenure was presumed to be encroachment. Slobodan Milošević transmitted the codified version into international fora in the 1990s, framing Kosovo Albanian self-government as a criminal enterprise requiring suppression. Noel Malcolm’s Kosovo: A Short History, published in 1998, dismantled the historical foundations of the frame with a thoroughness that has not been seriously challenged in the anglophone scholarly record since. The dismantling did not stop the transmission. It rarely does. A working analytic frame, once embedded in a diplomatic culture, does not depend on its historical foundations for survival. It depends on its administrative utility. European chanceries continued to use the frame after the academic foundations had been removed, because the frame remained useful for sorting Western Balkans files at speed, and the chanceries had no replacement analytical structure ready to hand.

What Berlin has done is apply the frame without examining its lineage. I will not claim that specific German Foreign Office officials read SANU sources or transcribed Belgrade analytical categories into German vocabulary. The claim I can sustain is narrower and harder. The vocabulary of the COELA text adopted on 21 May 2026 has no European accession-document precedent in any prior IBAR or Common Position. The equivalent analytical vocabulary does exist, in long-standing form, in one identifiable source tradition. That tradition is the Belgrade-aligned analytical writing on Albanian political mobilisation that has been continuous since the late 1980s. The structural inference, in the absence of any other identifiable source tradition for the vocabulary now in the COELA text, is that the source tradition is the lineage. The inference can be tested. Berlin can name the European accession-document precedents for “patronage networks,” “generalised and wide-spread corruption,” and the real-estate and construction-sector framing as applied to a candidate state. If such precedents exist, the inference falls. If they do not exist, the inference holds.

How the frame appears in the document
The Common Position adopted by COREPER on 21 May 2026 and to be received by Albania at the Eighth Intergovernmental Conference is the operative document. The Brussels Mirage and Conditionality Without End have described its institutional structure. I want to describe its vocabulary against the documentary record of what Albania has actually built.

The text describes corruption in Albania as “prevalent in most areas of public and business life, including in all branches of central and local government and institutions.” It describes corruption as “generalised and wide-spread.” It introduces, for the first time in any Albanian accession document, the term “patronage networks.” It introduces a paragraph on real estate and construction-sector corruption that has no equivalent in Montenegro’s 2024 IBAR text and no equivalent in Serbia’s accession files. It marks the investor citizenship law for repeal, a benchmark Montenegro never received despite having operated a far larger and more contested citizenship-by-investment scheme. It wires the Venice Commission immunity standard into a closing benchmark, a condition that has not been wired into closing benchmarks for any current member state and could not survive contact with the immunity practices of France, Italy, or Germany itself.

Read against the SPAK record, this vocabulary describes a country that does not exist. SPAK in 2025 alone indicted eighteen senior officials, registered 871 proceedings, and analysed more than six hundred pieces of digital evidence including over five hundred mobile phones and tablets across high-priority corruption files. Approximately €45.4 million in assets was seized and confiscated during the year, including cryptocurrencies. Two former prime ministers are in active prosecution. A former deputy prime minister is a fugitive abroad. A sitting deputy prime minister is under SPAK investigation, summoned in connection with the €190 million Llogara Tunnel procurement, and a corresponding investigation of the project’s supervision contracts is open in parallel. The mayor of the capital sits in pre-trial detention on charges of passive corruption, money laundering, and abuse of office. Sitting MPs are under indictment. Former ministers have been convicted. A former general prosecutor has been convicted. The specialised anti-corruption court is producing verdicts at first instance and on appeal. The vetting process has removed roughly half the country’s judges and prosecutors from office through documented integrity proceedings, a constitutional intervention into the judiciary that no current member state has undertaken at comparable scale. The CFSP alignment rate is 100 percent. The NATO infrastructure programme includes the Adriatic-Ionian corridor, the Kuçovë airbase upgrade, the Italy-Albania Fincantieri-KAYO joint venture for naval construction signed in April 2026, and the southern-flank defence transformation that the same Federal Republic has, in other documents, treated as a model.

No other Western Balkans country produces this record. Bulgaria and Romania were admitted in 2007 against records less institutionally advanced than this.

The document acknowledges SPAK in a paragraph of praise. The document then, in the same paragraph, conditions the closing of the fundamentals cluster on results that exceed what the praised institution has produced, against a benchmark Berlin has not defined, in a timeframe Berlin has not specified, to a standard Berlin will declare met or unmet by judgment alone. The structure of that paragraph is the structure of every Belgrade response to every Albanian institutional achievement for the last century and a half. Yes, but. The yes is conditional. The but is unbounded.

What the same week revealed
On 24 May 2026, the Serbian Progressive Party published, on its own institutional letterhead, signed by its party president Miloš Vučević, a communiqué from the Museum of the Communist Party of China in Beijing. The text adopted the formal Chinese designation “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” endorsed the model named, described the Communist Party of China as “today the largest political party in the world,” and committed the SNS to deepening the friendship “for the benefit and interest of the Serbian and Chinese peoples.” The same day, the SNS President’s principal, Aleksandar Vučić, was at the Great Wall explaining that the Serbian Armed Forces could not have reached their current strength without Chinese equipment, with the deputy Chief of the General Staff described approvingly as “the legendary general from the era of NATO aggression who participated in shooting down NATO aircraft.” On 25 May, Vučić received the Order of Friendship from Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People where Putin had signed a 47-page joint declaration with Xi on 20 May calling for the “complete elimination of the root causes” of the war in Ukraine.

The Serbian Progressive Party sits in the European People’s Party. The Christian Democratic Union of Germany sits in the European People’s Party. The Christlich-Soziale Union in Bavaria sits in the European People’s Party. Friedrich Merz, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic, leads the CDU. Günther Krichbaum, the Minister of State for Europe at the Federal Foreign Office, is CDU. Manfred Weber, the EPP President in the European Parliament, is CSU.

Seventy-two hours after the SNS communiqué was published, no statement from the CDU. No statement from the CSU. No statement from the EPP. No protest. No call for discipline. No question about whether a party that has endorsed the Communist Party of China in writing belongs in the European centre-right group that the CDU founded.

In the same seventy-two hours, the COELA process under German authorship had adopted an Albanian Common Position with thirty-two substantive changes from the Commission’s February draft, every one in the direction of sharper conditionality, against a government that has aligned 100 percent with EU foreign and security policy, has joined every Russia sanctions package, has hosted Afghan refugees Germany refused, has built the rule-of-law architecture the Berlin text demands more of, and has produced four electoral cycles with the same party in office and the same trajectory toward Brussels.

This is the asymmetry. The Christian Democratic Union shares an EPP parliamentary group with a party that has publicly endorsed the Communist Party of China and has, three days on, declined to say so. In the same window, the same Christian Democratic Union, through the Federal Foreign Office it controls, was authoring the conditionality text that the Council adopted against Albania. The two facts sit beside each other in the public record of the same week. They describe a single political reality. The reality is not that Berlin is fighting communism in the Balkans and rule-of-law deficits in Albania with equal seriousness. The reality is that Berlin is silent on the first and unprecedentedly aggressive on the second, against a candidate state whose CFSP alignment with the Federal Republic is higher than several existing member states can sustain.

What Berlin is actually doing to Rama
The argument that Berlin is fighting Edi Rama personally is sometimes presented as a personality dispute, as though the chancery had developed an irritation with a specific Albanian prime minister and was expressing it through accession conditionality. The reading is too small. Berlin is not fighting Rama because Rama is irritating. Berlin is fighting Rama because Rama has produced too much achievement for the frame to absorb.

He is an artist before he is a politician, which gives him a cultural register the German political class does not have and cannot match. He has built relationships outside the German channel with Washington under multiple administrations, with Erdoğan, with the Gulf, with the Vatican, with the African Union. He has held Albania at 100 percent CFSP alignment through a war in which Germany itself has not been able to hold its industrial base in alignment. He has taken in Afghan refugees Germany would not. He has built SPAK against the resistance of his own party. He has presided over the prosecution of a deputy prime minister from his own cabinet. He has produced four electoral cycles. He has converted Albania from a peripheral applicant to a country other capitals approach for cooperation rather than instruction.

In the frame, none of this is possible. The frame says Albanian achievement is suspect by default. Rama’s achievement is too large to be plausibly absorbed by the frame, and the frame’s response to inputs it cannot absorb is to generate procedural mechanisms that prevent the inputs from registering as achievement. The thirty-two changes in the COELA rewrite are the procedural mechanism. Each one is a future humiliation structured to be received by the Albanian Prime Minister, in Brussels, at a podium, in a photograph. The cumulative effect is to convert the most successful Albanian government in the country’s modern history into a sequence of public defeats, distributed across years, until either the leader exhausts or the electorate decides the cost of his international ambition is greater than the benefit.

This is not a methodology that has run off course. This is a frame protecting itself against an Albanian government that has exceeded the assumptions on which the frame was built. The frame requires Albania to remain auxiliary. The frame requires Belgrade to remain anchor. The frame requires the Albanian achievement to be discounted so that the Belgrade indulgence remains defensible. The frame, in the end, requires Rama to be cut down to a size the frame can accommodate.

That is what the document on Monday’s table is for.

What is sickening
The word sickening is precise.

What is sickening is not that Berlin has misread the Albanian file. Misreadings can be corrected. What is sickening is the recognition that the misreading is not new. It is the application, in updated vocabulary, of a frame that Albanians have faced from European chanceries for a century and a half. Late-Habsburg diplomatic reporting coded Albanian commerce in the Ottoman vilayets as smuggling networks rather than trade. The SANU Memorandum coded Albanian Kosovo as demographic invasion. Italian television documentaries from 1991 onward coded the Albanian state itself as a cocaine logistics enterprise. The COELA text of 21 May 2026 recodes Albanian institutional life through the language of patronage and criminal susceptibility, in vocabulary sanitised for European accession use but tracing back to the same analytical ecosystem. The vocabulary is updated for each generation of European interlocutors. The structure underneath has not been examined by the institution applying it.

The trust Albanians extended to Berlin, over three decades of reform, of NATO membership, of Russia sanctions alignment, of military transformation, of rule-of-law construction, was real. The trust assumed that the Federal Republic of Germany was an institution that examined its inheritances. The recognition this week is that the Federal Republic, on the Albanian file, has not examined the inheritance. It has applied the frame, sanitised the vocabulary, distributed it through the procedural architecture of the European Union, and produced a document whose analytic categories are traceable to source traditions the Federal Republic itself has, in other contexts, identified as adversarial.

That is the finding. The finding does not require intent. The finding requires only that the conduct be named.

The Federal Republic of Germany has, in the COELA text adopted on 21 May, applied an analytic frame whose vocabulary and structure are traceable to sources outside the European accession tradition, and the same Federal Republic, through the party family that holds its Chancellery, has declined to speak on a sister party’s public endorsement of the Communist Party of China in the same week.

These are descriptions of documented institutional conduct in a single week of May 2026. The conduct is what the conduct is. The trust was real. The recognition is the betrayal of that trust. Tirana now knows what it is dealing with. Knowing is itself a finding, and the finding is the end of the file that the trust assumed was being administered in good faith.

The record
The argument above rests on a set of documentary anchors. Each is sourceable. Each is on the public record. Each can be tested by any reader who wishes to do so.

One. The Common Position adopted by COREPER on 21 May 2026 in the version that succeeded the Commission’s February 2026 draft. The thirty-two substantive changes, every one in the direction of sharper conditionality, are visible in the comparison of the two texts. Both texts circulated within the Council architecture. The German authorship of the rewrite has been described in the Tirana Examiner pieces of 21 May and 25 May 2026.

Two. The Montenegro Chapter 23 IBAR of June 2024, which describes corruption as “an issue of concern” and asks Podgorica to “intensify efforts,” set against the Albania text of 21 May 2026, which describes corruption as “prevalent in most areas of public and business life, including in all branches of central and local government and institutions,” “generalised and wide-spread,” and “an area of crucial concern.” Montenegro’s text contains no regret about parliamentary votes, names no patronage networks, binds closing to no Venice Commission immunity standard, requires repeal of no specific national law. Albania’s text contains all four.

Three. The SPAK 2025 annual record, published March 2026. Two former prime ministers in active prosecution. A former deputy prime minister as a fugitive. A sitting deputy prime minister under investigation in connection with the €190 million Llogara Tunnel procurement. The mayor of the capital in pre-trial detention. Sitting MPs under indictment. Former ministers convicted. A former general prosecutor convicted. Eighteen senior officials indicted in 2025 alone. 871 proceedings in a single year. Approximately €45.4 million in assets seized and confiscated during 2025, including cryptocurrencies. Six hundred pieces of digital evidence analysed across high-priority files. Joint Investigation Teams active in multiple European jurisdictions including France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

Four. The SNS communiqué from the Museum of the Communist Party of China, published on sns.org.rs on 24 May 2026, signed by SNS President Miloš Vučević, formally adopting the designation “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and committing the SNS to deepening party-to-party cooperation with the Communist Party of China.

Five. The Putin-Xi joint declaration of 20 May 2026, signed in Beijing during the Russian President’s state visit, the language on the “complete elimination of the root causes” of the war in Ukraine, and the parallel Xi-Vučić ceremony of 25 May 2026 in the same Great Hall of the People at which Vučić received the Order of Friendship and signed a joint statement on “building a community with a shared future for the new era.”

The seventy-two hours of CDU, CSU, and EPP silence following the SNS communiqué of 24 May are documentable by their absence from the public record of those parties through the period 24-27 May 2026.

These are the anchors. The argument above rests on them. Where the argument advances beyond the anchors, it has done so as structural inference, named as inference, available for testing.

Albatros Rexhaj is an author, playwright, and analyst with a background in national-security studies and nearly three decades of experience with international organisations dealing with political and security affairs.