The Albanian government inaugurated the Durrës-Morinë road axis just before the recent national elections, won by Sali Berisha's Democratic Party (EurActiv 30/06/09).
The road is part of a highway connecting its port city of Durrës with the Kosovo border and is expected to become a busy link between Albanians and their numerous ethnic relatives in landlocked Kosovo.
Sali Berisha, Albania's prime minister, said the new road link was the most significant event since the independence of Kosovo (February 2008) and Albania's entry into NATO (April 2009).
Sonila Vathi, a diplomat from the Albanian Mission to the EU, said the new road link reflected efforts by the two countries to align their legislation with EU standards, lifting barriers and bringing Albania's Adriatic port of Shëngjin closer to Kosovo.
She insisted that this was taking place in the context of increased regional and EU integration, in which the two countries remained separate independent and sovereign states.
Relations between Albania and Kosovo are "more than relations between two neighbouring countries," Vathi said. She pointed out that citizens on both sides of the border shared a common language, history and tradition, but this had been broken by the world's great powers over the last century.
A leading expert on road infrastructure in the Western Balkans, who preferred not to be named due to the political sensitivity of the matter, told EurActiv that the EU was likely to keep its distance from the Albania-Kosovo project.
Although the EU would in principle support any attempt to improve the region's poor infrastructure, he said many in Europe are in fact reluctant to back a project that is seen by some as the backbone of a greater Albania.
Another expert said Albania will be able to receive more tourists from the region once the highway is completed. In 2008, the country welcomed one million foreign tourists, many of whom came from Serbia and Macedonia as the two countries are still subject to visa restrictions for the EU, he added. Others came from Kosovo, he said.
The highway, via Route 7, also connects to Corridor 10 from Salzburg to Thessaloniki in Greece, which is part of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T).
