When Albanian President Bajram Begaj addressed the Tashkent International Investment Forum (TIIF) on June 17, he was making the case for a relationship that, by his own government's admission, has barely existed for the past three decades.

"Some countries are easy to locate on a map, but difficult to understand," Begaj told the assembled delegates. "Others, like Uzbekistan, quickly reveal their importance to those who have the opportunity to experience them firsthand."

It was an opening pitch — the diplomatic equivalent of a first date conducted in front of an audience of heads of state. Central Asia is back in play for the first time since the days of the Great Game a century ago and finds itself at a nexus on the Middle Corridor that is emerging as a major link between Asia and Europe.

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev invited Begaj as part of his multivector foreign policy of building up good relations with the other countries in his region, but now he is reaching a little further afield into Europe – first stop Albania. In the new transactional world, the old globalisation rules no longer apply. Where countries used to join the big geopolitical blocks, since the coronavirus pandemic, now the supply chains have shortened, the game has been to build up regional alliances with countries a bit closer to home.

But it is still early days. Albania is located on the opposite side of the Eurasian landmass, has no historical or cultural ties to Central Asia, no meaningful trade relationship, and a foreign ministry that until recently described bilateral relations as consisting of little beyond "protocol exchanges".

Mirziyoyev's multivector doctrine

Uzbekistan's outreach to Albania did not happen in isolation. Mirziyoyev has been working on this strategy since he took office in 2016. The multivector foreign policy doctrine is where Tashkent maintains simultaneous, deliberately uncompetitive relationships with every major power bloc rather than aligning decisively with any one of them. The roster of delegations present at this year's TIIF illustrates the point nicely: British Investment Minister Lord Stockwood and a German delegation led by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier were both in attendance courting the same investment opportunities as Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and a high-ranking deputy of Xi Jinping representing Beijing's interests. Top officials from presidents down from all the the other 'Stans were also there. Uzbekistan is, simultaneously, a partner of Washington, a partner of Brussels, a partner of Moscow and a partner of Beijing — a balancing act that a research report from Kazakhstan's Talap Center for Applied Research described as a transformation, under geopolitical stress, into "a policy of emphatic non-alignment — a firm rejection of any involvement in the conflict."

That same report noted that public opinion across the region overwhelmingly supports this stance: most Central Asians, it found, do not want to be dragged into the confrontation between the West and Russia. Russia's own position at TIIF underscored how comfortably Uzbekistan straddles these blocs. Mishustin used the forum's plenary session to highlight that roughly 3,000 Russian companies are now active in Uzbekistan across some 150 major investment projects worth more than RUB4 trillion, with bilateral trade turnover up 20% since the start of the year — a reminder that Moscow's economic presence in Central Asia has, if anything, deepened since 2022. But Tashkent simultaneously courted London, Berlin, Seoul and now Tirana.

The multivector approach has become de rigueur in an increasingly fractured world and Mirziyoyev has shown he is an adept practitioner.

The Middle Corridor, and why Albania matters to it

The deeper structural logic is part of what regional analysts have begun calling the "C6" — the five Central Asian 'Stans plus Azerbaijan, increasingly orbited by Turkey through the Organisation of Turkic States as Central Asia starts to tie itself in with the Caucasus.

With Russian airspace and the so-called Northern Route, which runs from east to west via Russia, compromised by sanctions and a southern route through Iran and Afghanistan unusable, the Middle Corridor — also known as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, running through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian, through Azerbaijan and onward to Turkey and Europe — has become the only viable overland route connecting China's manufacturing base to European consumer markets. Since the start of the Iran war, Azerbaijan-Central Asia has become the only viable aviation route between Asia and Europe.

Central Asia was already the biggest winner from the Ukraine war that sparked a boom in FDI and manufacturing, but since the US attack on Iran the region has got a second fillip. Shipping through Suez or around Africa takes 40 to 60 days; the conventional Northern Corridor through Russia takes more than 30. The Middle Corridor, by contrast, has already cut transit times to 18-23 days, with the new joint logistics company formed by Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia targeting a further reduction to 10-15 days.

Cargo volumes on the route rose 86% in a single year, from 2023 to 2024, and the World Bank projects they could triple by 2030 against 2021 levels, reaching 11mn tonnes annually. The IBRD's trade modelling forecasts a 30% increase in China-EU trade by 2030 attributable substantially to flows through the corridor, with Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan individually seeing trade growth of 37% as a result.

Uzbekistan's position within this architecture is unusually strong and Albania wants a piece of the action, to diversify away from its largely European-facing export routes. The wider Middle Corridor catchment area has access to four billion consumers, about $6 trillion of economic activity and a cornucopia of minerals and raw materials. Every kilometre of new track, every hour shaved off transit time, and every new country that plugs into the corridor's western end increases the value of that central position — which is precisely the logic behind Tashkent's interest in adding Albania to the network.

Begaj made the connection to his own country's infrastructure explicit in his speech: "Uzbekistan continues to strengthen its position with the transport and logistics network connecting Central Asia with international markets. For its part, Albania is expanding its role as gateway to the Adriatic and to the wider European economic space."

He cited the Port of Durrës, the new Porto Romano commercial port, and the Pan-European Corridor 8 transport route as the physical assets that would carry that connection forward. According to bilateral reporting on the visit, the two governments agreed to explore integrating Durrës into the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route directly — extending the corridor's western terminus from Turkey's Mediterranean ports into the Adriatic, and giving Uzbek exporters a further channel into Southern Europe that does not depend on any single chokepoint.

For Uzbekistan, the appeal is twofold: physical market access via a new Adriatic gateway, and political access via Albania's status as an EU candidate country. Albania's accession remains years away and far from guaranteed, but the legal and regulatory harmonisation the country has already undertaken to align with EU standards, and the manufacturing capacity it has built to serve European markets, mean a relationship with Tirana offers Tashkent a foothold into European supply chains that does not require waiting for Brussels to engage with Central Asia directly.

"For many years, countries tend to look first toward their immediate neighbourhoods when seeking new economic partners," Begaj said. "Today's economy rewards a broader perspective. The relationships that will matter most in the coming decade will not always be those that geography made inevitable, but those made possible by shared interest and complementary strength."

A relationship starting from almost nothing

The scale of ambition in Begaj's speech sits in sharp contrast to the trade relationship as it currently exists. Albania's own foreign ministry has described bilateral ties with Uzbekistan bluntly: "Although there are no reservations limiting bilateral relations, currently they are quite modest and can be summed up in cooperation in international organisations and protocol exchanges."

Diplomatic relations were established in November 1993, but for more than three decades the relationship amounted to little beyond solidarity votes at the UN, OSCE and OIC — Albania covers Uzbekistan from its embassy in Moscow; Uzbekistan covers Albania from its embassy in Vienna. Neither country has historically maintained a resident ambassador in the other's capital.

Begaj's visit was, in fact, the first by an Albanian head of state to Uzbekistan since those diplomatic ties were established — a measure of how recent and deliberate this opening is. The relationship only began moving when Begaj and Mirziyoyev met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2025; a cooperation protocol between the two foreign ministries followed weeks later, and the first round of formal political consultations took place as recently as April 30, 2026 — just seven weeks before the TIIF visit. The Tashkent meeting's most concrete institutional outcome was agreement to establish an Intergovernmental Commission, intended to close what regional analysts describe as "the principal gap in the relationship: the absence of a standing coordination mechanism."

There is, correspondingly, almost no trade or investment data to report, because there is almost no trade or investment to measure. Albania's recorded FDI relationships are dominated by the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Italy, Turkey and Bulgaria; Uzbekistan does not feature among Albania's tracked sources or destinations of foreign capital, and bilateral merchandise trade between the two countries does not register as a distinct line in either country's trade statistics. This is a relationship being constructed from a standing start.

If the bilateral relationship itself is modest, the platform on which it was launched is not. This year's TIIF brought together companies with a combined $42 trillion in assets — equivalent to 38% of global GDP — and drew more than 8,300 participants from 100 countries, including 62 government delegations and 2,780 corporate executives.

Uzbekistan is booming and other governments and investors have started to take notice. GDP surpassed $145bn in 2025 with growth of 7.7%, exports rose 23% to $33.4bn, and the government's original target of $160bn GDP by 2030 is now expected to be reached as early as 2026 — four years ahead of schedule. It is against that backdrop of rapid, sustained growth that Begaj's pitch to a still-unfamiliar Central Asian audience should be read: not as a speculative gesture toward a stagnant economy, but as an attempt to get in early on one of the visibly fastest-growing markets on the Eurasian landmass.

Sectors named, but not yet funded

Begaj's speech named the areas where his government sees potential: agriculture and high-value food processing, manufacturing — leveraging Albania's proximity to EU markets and its existing base in automotive components and specialised textiles — tourism, and renewable energy, where Albania's growing solar and wind investment alongside its established hydroelectric capacity could complement Uzbekistan's own rapid build-out of wind and solar generation with Gulf utility partners ACWA Power and Masdar. The list overlaps closely with the priority sectors named in joint statements following the Mirziyoyev-Begaj talks: agro-industry, green energy, geology, digital technology and tourism.

None of these sectors yet have committed capital attached to them. What exists is a framework — an Intergovernmental Commission, a logistics concept centred on Durrës, and a shared diplomatic narrative about complementary strengths — that both governments are betting will, over the coming years, convert genuine but currently abstract interest into the kind of concrete projects that the Tashkent forum was explicitly designed to generate.

Whether Albania ultimately becomes a meaningful node in Central Asia's expanding network, or remains a mere a diplomatic gesture, will depend the pace of Albania's own EU accession, the continued build-out of Middle Corridor capacity, and whether the multivector logic that has served Uzbekistan so well across larger powers proves equally effective at the more modest scale of a relationship with a country of 2.8mn people on the Adriatic coast.