With the exception of the coastline, all Albanian borders are artificial. They were established in principle at the 1913 Conference of Ambassadors in London. The country was occupied by the warring powers during World War I, but the 1913 boundaries were reaffirmed at Versailles in 1921. Finally demarcated in 1923, they were confirmed by the Paris Agreement of 1926 and were essentially unchanged in 1970. The original principle was to define the borders in accordance with the best interests of the Albanian ethnic group and the nationalities in adjacent areas. The northern and eastern borders were intended, insofar as possible, to separate the Albanians from the Serbian and Montenegrin peoples; the southeast border was to separate Albanians and Greeks; and the valuable western Macedonia lake district was to be divided among the states whose populations shared the area.
When there was no compromise involving other factors, borderlines were chosen to make the best possible separation of national groups, connecting the best marked physical features available. Allowance was made for local economic situations, to keep from separating a village from its animals' grazing areas or from the markets for its produce. Political pressures also were a factor in the negotiations, but the negotiations were subject to approval by powers having relatively remote interests, most of which involved the balance of power rather than economic ambitions.
Division of the lake district among three states required that each of them have a share of the lowlands in the vicinity. Such a distribution was artificial but, once made, necessarily influenced the borderlines to the north and south. The border that runs generally north from the lakes, although it follows the ridges of the eastern highlands, stays some ten to twenty miles west of the watershed divide.
Proceeding counterclockwise around northern Albania, the watershed divide was abandoned altogether along the northeast boundary. In the process a large Albanian population in Kosovo was incorporated into Yugoslavia.
In the extreme north and the northeastern mountainous sections, the border with Yugoslavia connects high points and follows mountain ridges through the North Albanian Alps where there is little movement of the people. There is no natural topographic dividing line from the highlands, through Lake Scutari, to the Adriatic, but the lake and a portion of the Buene River south of it were used. From the lake district south and southwest to the Ionian Sea, the boundary runs perpendicular to the terrain trend lines and crosses a number of ridges instead of following them.
LOCAL ADMINISTRATIVE AREAS
The twenty-six districts that are the primary administrative subdivisions of the country have evolved from divisions that have existed for many years or have developed over a period of time (see fig. 3). In the northern third of the country, district lines were based on the territory occupied by tribal groups. In the part of the country south from about Tirana, they were based on the large landholdings controlled by those who in earlier years had governed the areas for the Ottomans.
Upon independence most of the old local boundaries, long understood if not always precisely defined, were retained, and the areas became prefectures. Before World War II there were ten prefectures, which in turn were divided into about forty subprefectures. The Communist regime did not abandon the prefectures immediately but eventually replaced them with districts that were, generally, based on the old subprefectures. In a series of changes, the latest of which were made in December 1967, the districts were consolidated into the twenty-six that existed in 1970. The districts are much the same size. Sixteen of them have areas ranging between 300 and 600 square miles. The largest, Shkoder, has about 980 square miles; the smallest, Lezhe, has about 180.
Changes in the areas and boundaries of the districts made during the 1960s were based chiefly on economic considerations, although political and security considerations also played a part. A major factor has been the collectivization of agriculture. In 1968 and 1969, for example, when the government decided to enlarge the collective farms, district lines were shifted in order to keep all of the land in a collective within the same district ([see ch. 6], Government Structure and Political System).