I ask if they care about what happens to Kukës, but the question is redundant. It is basic economics — people will move if they are paid more. A decade of unprecedented migration into this country is proof of that. Loyalty to land and community has lost. Still, I try to resurrect that dead idea: is there not more dignity in being a professional in Albania than a labourer in the UK? “I did dignity for 20 years,” says a police officer, smoking behind us, “and now I have nothing.” To prove his point, he takes me out on patrol. “Look,” he says pointing to the streets, “all old people, no future.” Corruption, neglect: this is the story of Kukës he gives me. A place where after the fall of communism, the end of history never arrived. The last major construction work that was completed on time? A nuclear bunker on the orders of the country’s mad dictator Enver Hoxha, finished just as the Cold War was winding down.

Out of town, we head into what has become known as “the exodus zone”: the villages nestled in the foothills of an Albanian mountain range nicknamed the Accursed Mountains, from where most of its men have left to work undocumented in England. Here, the journey across the Channel starts to make sense. In one abandoned hamlet, 72-year-old Zehrito emerges from her newly refurbished house. Three years ago, her son landed in a dinghy on the shores of Kent. He walked into town, jumped on the train and spent the next three years building luxury apartments in London. The money he sent home paid for his mother’s heart surgery. “If it weren’t for him,” she says, “I’d be dead.”

Soon all this may end. Everyone I speak to in Albania, from the Crown Prince to the hotel receptionist, is trying to imagine a future in which half the population does not flee. They know the British Government is trying to close the door. News of Conservative ministers who want to bar Albanians from seeking asylum and fast-track deportation schemes make the evening news. More who leave illegally are being sent home. And for a country where 31% of GDP relies upon money sent back home by emigrants, this is not good news. The economics of the great diaspora are starting to be tested. The population is ageing. In some towns, patients must cross the border to Kosovo or Greece for healthcare. Schools are emptying out. Beyond the capital, large swathes of civil society are virtually non-existent because there is no one to do the jobs required. The World Bank predicts that soon a third of the country may be below the poverty line. This is despite the country’s consistent rise in GDP in the last decade — one largely driven by foreign investment. For those left behind, the age of exodus is starting to unravel.

On Albania’s Day of Independence in late November, the grandson of its last King, Crown Prince Leka, walks me through the capital. The Crown Prince recently broke his ceremonial silence to appear alongside Piers Morgan and Reform UK leader, Richard Tice, and defend his countrymen from Suella Braverman’s talk of an Albanian “invasion” in Kent. When I meet him, the prince is full of hope for the country. Guiding me through the open boulevards of Tirana, he talks not only about the country’s past but the promise of its future. We walk past the national bank being rebuilt, a place that will soon coordinate the growing investment in the country’s tourism sector. Despite the pandemic, visitors to the country generated more income than ever. Cranes tower over half-built apartment buildings.

“Albania has always been on the edge of Great Empires and this is what makes it unique,” he tells me as we near his grandfather King Zog’s old palace. It was the last European colony of the Ottoman Empire, the last under the most severe form of communism. In Albania, history has often happened too late. But now it is at the vanguard of trying to solve the global problem of international exodus. It has become the testing ground for different policies aimed at deterring people from leaving the country. British investments to prop up the country’s local economies and stop the flight have seen £6m poured into the region of Kukës. The money will be used to build infrastructure and  kickstart the region’s hopes of making the Albanian Alps a tourist destination. For a country weary of politicians swindling public money, there is scepticism. But the model of investment makes sense, and the £6 million is a trifle compared to the estimated £150m it would cost to find and deport those who have crossed the channel illegally this year alone.

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For Lavdrim Krashi, MP for the Dibra region just south of Kukës, this is only half the problem. There is also a need to lure back the people who left the country. “The diaspora is our biggest asset,” he tells me on the night of Albania’s Independence Day. The former senior local government manager from London, a poppy pin in his lapel, is an example of his own vision in action: to see those who have lived and worked abroad bring back their experiences and regenerate Albania. Others have done the same. One of his constituents arrived illegally in the UK and ended up serving the Queen lunch. Now he has returned to Tirana and runs a successful chain of restaurants. Lavdrim also makes it clear that he wants the values of these countries brought home too — particularly those of Britain.

When I hear this, I tell Lavdrim the story of Xhevahir, the schoolteacher I met in Kukës. Before the pandemic his visa application for the UK was rejected. Now between his job as a teacher and running an English-language school, he spends his time trying to convince his students not to leave. I had asked him in Liverpool House what he said to them, and he laughed at me: “It’s hard to know what to say when you are planning to leave too.”

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I ask Lavdrim if the hope of the returning diaspora, “British values”, and targeted investment in Albania’s local economies can really be enough to stop the lure of higher wages. He found it difficult to answer. Much of this wishful thinking is dependent on factors beyond the country’s control. To end the exodus, whether progressive thought likes it or not, requires countries such as Germany, England and France to stop encouraging the country’s “brain drain” with visa schemes. In addition, it requires a commitment by both the Albanian government and private enterprise to invest in something whose returns may not be immediate: the local economies of the nation-state. To rebuild a community, and indeed a country, hollowed out by a decade of hyper-globalisation.

Curiously, to explain their frustration, the men in Kukës turned to those values that Lavdrim seemed to want to bring home. A sense of respect and integrity they saw in Britain, but also its monarchy and history. They could not understand why other nationalities — Afghans and Iraqis — had apparently escaped the Home Secretary’s ire. A visa should be about love for the Queen and respect for the country, said one.

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After I spoke with Lavdrim, I went to see the statue of Skanderbeg, one of the heroes of Liverpool House (along with Steven Gerrard) who, in Albanian historical legend, saved Europe from the scourge of the advancing Ottomans in the 15th century. On the night of the Independence celebrations, a stage was being prepared for a concert by London-born English-Albanian popstar Dua Lipa. The day before, she had been given citizenship. There were plenty of young people on their way to the concert. They reminded me of the teenagers I had seen at Liverpool House, watching on TikTok the lives of their luckier contemporaries in England.

Beneath the husks of Tirana’s new construction, they walked past the statue of Skanderberg and towards the lights of the concert. I remembered something Bedri had told me in Liverpool House. “Deep down, no one wants to leave their home country.”

 ***

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Recently, I found myself in an intelligent conversation with a minister in the present government. That itself was something of an achievement: one reason why the government is so bad is that the present prime minister has as far as possible surrounded himself with yes-men and deep mediocrities. His hope, perhaps, was that they would be slow to recognise his laziness, unseriousness and inability to cope with his job; and that their inadequacies would distract the electorate from focusing on him. My interlocutor slipped through the net — and had been thinking about the wider world quite deeply.

His conclusions were depressing. They were, in short, that it is an exceptionally dangerous place, far more so than most realise; and that however grim 2020 and 2021 were, 2022 could be the most perilous year, particularly for the West, since the end of the Cold War.

We talked through his reasons for this gloom, beginning close to home. Since it was at the forefront of most people’s minds, we discussed the fear, promoted by the government, that the National Health Service could collapse as a result of the supposedly highly-transmissible Omicron variant. Before the NHS reached that stage (with its inevitable effects on public morale), action would have to be taken that would badly affected the economy here, with the promise of a renewed taxpayer-funded furlough scheme if businesses were forced to close. The Conservative party was divided over the need for such measures, not least because the lethality of the Omicron variant had yet to be proved. Now, although the rate of infections has reached record levels, the rate of hospitalisations and deaths lag far behind. This is encouraging a substantial cadre of MPs to argue that we must learn to live with Covid, supported by a vaccination programme. Should Boris Johnson remain prime minister, such dissent in his own party would, if his form is any guide, lead to an unclear and confused response by the government and therefore by other agencies. That, too, would be costly, but it would be only the start.

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The new wave of Covid has attacked Europe, disrupting “normal” life. Even “rich” nations such as Germany (where the cost of the pandemic now exceeds €2 trillion, and inflation is above the EU average of 2.2%) are feeling the financial effects of a long period of subsidising non-productivity; in poorer countries in southern and eastern Europe, the prospects are even more stark, and tempers are fraying. Italy has a budget deficit of around 10%, and a new wave of restrictions will cause growth targets to be missed. Inflation will drive up interest rates across Europe, and the higher cost of servicing debt would put pressure on everyone with a bank loan or a mortgage: a factor behind, it seems, the Bank of England’s reluctance to raise rates in Britain, a reluctance that cannot be maintained indefinitely.

Poland and Hungary have both been sniping with Brussels over what they consider to be undue EU interference with their internal affairs — Poland about its justice system, Hungary about migration. Both countries, with an eye on the money that Brussels contributes to them — stress in public their commitment to a future within the EU, but an internal debate is being cranked up in both countries about when a breaking point will come, as it did in Britain in 2016. The EU has learned nothing from Brexit — quite the reverse, it seems — which is always a sign that history may repeat itself.

On the eastern, western and southern fringes of the EU, there is a respite in illegal immigration, brought on by the fact that, even in the balmy Mediterranean, it is winter. But the constant traffic (and trafficking) of predominantly economic migrants from Africa into Greece and Italy will keep up and doubtless expand during 2022, with the EU apparently as incapable of restricting it with a coherent policy for all 27 of its members as it was to fight the arrival of the pandemic.

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In the East, with the cynical and mischievous support of Vladimir Putin, Belarus has been allowing illegal migrants to mass on its borders with Poland and Lithuania in the hope of destabilising the Union still further. And Anglo-French relations have, according to various historians, reached a low not seen since Waterloo (the less hysterical might point to the results of the Royal Navy sinking much of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940, before the Nazis could get their hands on it), because of France’s willingness to allow its own illegal migrants easy passage out of its jurisdiction while attempting to enter the United Kingdom. This has now been compounded by President Macron’s decision (made with an eye to grandstanding before his attempt at re-election) to close his borders to visitors from Britain for fear of importing more Omicron — a disease with which his country is now, in any case, swamped.

The divisions in the EU over the management of the pandemic exploded the myth that the only difficulties in the bloc were over Brexit, and once Britain had gone all would be serene. That serenity has turned out to be elusive, with fissures opening up not just between eastern and western states, but between southern and northern ones.

And there are other aspects of politics within the European Union that make matters seem highly unstable, and inward-looking, as 2022 arrives. Olaf Scholz, the new German Chancellor, has a near-impossible act to follow after Angela Merkel’s 16 years in office. One of his difficulties is that the man who would succeed Merkel as the leading political figure in Europe, Emmanuel Macron, must fight a presidential election in April and May; and despite being notionally of the centre is engaging in straightforward Gaullism — or rather populism — to get himself back into the Élysée palace.

With another five-year term under his belt, Macron could successfully pull rank on the novice Scholz. There is nothing in Scholz’s political DNA that suggests he is remotely interested in such a virility contest; instead, he is likely to assume that because Germany has a significantly larger population, and significantly larger economy both in absolute terms and per capita compared with France, that leadership of the EU is his by right. Macron had no choice but to defer to Merkel; he would defer to Scholz only with insincerity and ill-grace. Suddenly, however, he faces a highly plausible Républicain candidate in Valérie Pécresse, and an off-the-wall populist in Éric Zemmour, who shares many of the views of Marine Le Pen but has none of her movement’s baggage. The French election is one of the least predictable in the history of the Fifth Republic: an outcome that destablises not just France, but the EU, is not beyond possibility.

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Yet it is in wider geopolitics that my ministerial friend believed the real dangers lie. Until recently, these were questions that attracted the interest only of foreign policy wonks, but they have started to force their way out of the foreign pages and into the front parts of newspapers and home pages of websites. Might Russia continue to unsettle Europe, and especially Germany, with threats to limit gas supply, and so push up energy prices during the coldest months of the year? Perhaps not, since those higher prices wouldn’t compensate for the loss of business, and Putin needs all the money he can get. But is Russia massing 100,000 of its troops on the border with Ukraine purely to twist the tail of the West, or does it propose to invade and raise its flag over Kiev? The answer to that, given Putin’s populist tendencies, is less predictable.

Similarly, have China’s naval exercises off Taiwan been merely a show of strength, or does it intend to attempt re-incorporating into the homeland the island that resisted the Communist takeover in 1949, and has flourished by comparison ever since? And if you were an aggressive power that has either little idea of western democratic standards, or little interest in emulating them, what better time could you choose to engage in lethal provocation than when an under-performing Joe Biden is, nominally, leader of the Free World?

Recently Biden admitted that if either China or Russia were to engage in acts of aggression the United States would be unable to intervene. Contrast this with the highly ambitious rhetoric of our Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, who has warned Russia of “severe consequences” were it to invade Ukraine. But both Biden and Truss feel economic sanctions would bring Russia to heel, which would seem to be the triumph of hope over experience. Sanctions have been operating on Russia since Putin’s first attack on Ukraine in 2014, and have been tightened progressively. However, they have had no effect on the behaviour of the country’s kleptocratic leadership, whose management of rivals to Putin ensures that the “electorate” in Russia has nowhere else to go, despite the existence of courageous resistance groups. All gung-ho threats of sanctions need to be tempered by a recognition of Russia’s indifference to the views of tens of millions of its people. Recent protests by the West about the treatment of Alexei Navalny, one of Putin’s highest-profile opponents, have done nothing to get him released from his corrective labour camp just over 100 miles from Moscow.

No-one expects America or any other western power to send troops in to resist an invasion of either Ukraine or Taiwan. But the West has forgotten one Cold War lesson, which is that neither of these potentially aggressive powers — Russia very much one in decline, in terms of its population, wealth and demand for its resources, whose international last hurrah this might conceivably be; China very much one in the ascendant — gives the slightest respect to other “powers” they consider decadent. And decadence in this case has been the determination of the West, and particularly of Britain and of EU nations, to run down their armed forces since the end of the Cold War. Again, the purpose of these forces was not aggressive: it was to observe the old truth that no nation can engage in serious diplomacy unless it has force as a last resort. When Russia and China spot so-called powers that take a relaxed view of defending themselves, they act accordingly.

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Biden could take a detached view of the Ukraine problem (as the Obama administration did when Russia helped itself to the Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine in 2014) because no NATO power was involved. But what if Russia were to engage in further provocation, by demanding permit- and visa-free travel across Lithuania from its puppet state of Belarus to its exclave of Kaliningrad, formerly Konigsberg in East Prussia, a spoil of the Second World War? If Putin really wants to turn ugly, he would demand a 100km land corridor across the Suwalki gap, which runs from Belarus along the border between Poland and Lithuania. Both are members of the EU and NATO. What would Biden, or for that matter the EU, do then?

It could be that we sail through 2022 with vaccination programmes bringing down Covid, with the West’s economies reviving rapidly, stability reasserting itself in its democracies, America establishing a new authority in the world and the bullies of Beijing and Moscow abandoning their aggressive designs. For good measure, inflation could suddenly fall, and the West’s ambitious climate change policies could be implemented without some of the feared economic consequences. Sadly, however, the alternative to each of those conjectures appears the more likely short-term outcome.

But what should perhaps worry the West most of all, at the dawn of this dangerous year, is that none of its constituent nations has a leader of the experience, the clout and the moral authority required to deal with this bouquet of challenges if, or when, they arrive.