Kristaq Prifti 

The Concept Of The League Of Prizren For The Albanian National State

Historical Studies (3-4/2003)

The concept worked out by the League of Prizren for the national state constitutes the culmination of the development of the political thought of the Renaissance during the XIX-th century, and marks, also, the first effort of the Albanians to solve the national question since the years of the Eastern Crisis of 1875-1881, at the same time with the other peoples of the Balkans, in the framework of the changes which the Great Powers made then in the political map of this Peninsula.
Put forward since the first decisions of the League, its concept for the solution of the Albanian question, founding a national and autonomous state, underwent its evolution, taking a broader meaning and a more determined form. The demand for a vilayet or united province, with administrative-cultural autonomy, which was formulated as the first form of the organization of the Albanian state in the decisions of the founding Assembly of Prizren, (with the petition of 15 June 1878) took a fuller content in two memorandums, one approved in Janina, on July 24, 1878, and the other in Prizren, in July of the same year, in which the League requested from Istanbul the union of the Albanian vilayets in a unique vilayet, “to gather and unify in a single body all Albania”.
The leaders of the League considered the autonomous state as one of the transitional forms towards the independence and the full detachment of Albania from the Ottoman Empire. It was a well-beaten road followed even by other peoples. The international practice, especially the Balkan one, had proved that in this road had passed even Rumania (divided before in two autonomous provinces), Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria or even Egypt in Africa, which at the beginning won the status of autonomy, of the vassal states under the suzerainty of the sultan to pass later on to the proclamation of the full independence
The autonomy was dictated to the leaders of the League by the internal and external circumstances. The autonomy of Albania was such a solution of the national question which would unite all the patriotic trends of the Albanian movement, the radicals and the moderates, and could be accepted easier even by Istanbul, if it would be obliged to make this. The autonomy was regarded by the League as a solution which did suit even to the policy of the Great Powers which insisted on the preservation of the status quo of the Ottoman Empire and were not inclined to accept the detachment of Albania from it.

The proclamation in January 1881 of the Provisional Government guided by the head of the League, the distinguished kosovar personality Ymer Prizreni, marked the culmination of the war for the formation of the national state in the period of the League of Prizren.

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