ABSTRACT
National fulfillment then becomes nationalist frustration. The new political map is dotted with irredenta. The emergent states grow up in an atmosphere of mutual hatred and suspicion. In 1918, after all the Balkan states had achieved independence of sorts, they were exposed to a new factor in international relations—the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination——which gave priority to ethnographic considerations in the formation of states. By the end of World War II, the situation in the Balkans had completely changed. Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania became Communist states. Like the Yugoslav party, the Albanian Communist party largely fought its own way to power, whereas the future Bulgarian and Romanian regimes had trailed in the Red Army's wake. Bulgaria and Romania began their Communist histories as Soviet satellites. Communist Albania, dominated by Yugoslavia, began more as a Soviet subsatellite but graduated to satellite status after 1948.
