INTRODUCTION ‘The seim anew’? 87 The policies introduced by the Ministry of Labour were transitional policies, and were generally perceived as novel and constituting a radical break from the past, reflecting the general immediate post-communist eagerness to throw off that heritage. The feeling that everything even remotely similar to the past was bad was predominant. No attention was paid to exploring the mechanisms of communist welfare programmes and whether there were positive aspects that could have bene­fited the establishment of the post-communist welfare institutions. ‘Since leaving my Government job, I have been researching and have come across a huge literature on social policy. Only now can I see why civil servants, including myself at that time, were accepting as new the social protection platform, when it was in fact merely an updated extension of the welfare policies that the communist government had extensively developed in the past. I now think the ma­nia of ignoring the past was a mistake, and still is. Social policies are what they (the communist regime) had- just with different names’. The policies and programs sponsored by donor organisations, were gladly re­ceived as a refreshed perspective, symbolic of anything new, progressive, western, removed from the backward socialist past that was to be absolutely bunkered. Un­der this belief, there was a failure to recognise the previous social model and ap­preciate any positive aspects they may have had. The changed language and terminology of modern policies camouflaged their aims and objectives, yet there was little difference in essence. Indeed, while the communist regime policies were overloaded described almost euphemistically, re­ferring to‘welfare for our people’ or‘we work for a better future for our children’, whereas policies during transition were called, rather dolorously,‘targeting unem­ployment and poverty’, the descriptive difference hiding many structural and con­ceptual similarities. It sets a clear distinction between the ideal of working for the common good and the benefit of all, and that of the stigma associated with those in hardship accompanied by the sense of‘working for others to benefit.’ Social Policy was existing in the past, but in moving into the new context, something worthwhile may have been lost in translation. Concluding Remarks Based on the narrative presented above, one might find it difficult to be opti­mistic on the future of the institutions and policy making in Albania. Any policy is at best only ever a sub-optimal solution to a problem- in the context and pressures of transition, with scarce resources, little could be hoped for beyond short-term answers. I have remarked elsewhere that policy making in Albania is still charac­terised by weakness in innovation as well as implementation(Tahiraj, 2007). How­87 Joyce(1939). 215