200 Lekë Albanian-European Integration

Albania applied for membership in the Council of Europe in 1995 and was admitted that same year — a significant diplomatic rehabilitation for a country that had spent the Cold War as arguably the most isolated state on earth, severing ties with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and eventually China in succession. The 2001 date places this issue squarely in the aftermath of the 1997 collapse of the pyramid scheme crisis, which had destroyed roughly half of the country's GDP and triggered a near-total breakdown of civil order.

EU accession candidacy wouldn't formally arrive until 2014, so this coin marks an aspirational moment rather than a concrete one.