The research scrutinises how former activists, who massively engaged on behalf of the national cause in the 1980s and 1990s, construct and communicate meanings about ethnic and national belonging in the narratives of their mobilisation. Via the stories of their past engagement, they shape their particular ways of belonging to the “nation” without ever defining these directly (Cavarero 2000). The articles presented in this PhD focus particularly on three specific forms.
They scrutinise how feelings of attachment to the “nation” emerge during demonstrations, how different discourses of national belonging arise as a response to exclusion and a lack of recognition, and how gender categories participate in shaping the national constructions. Here, I will briefly review how I operationalised in each article the scholarship presented earlier. The three articles reproduced in this thesis relate the story of the former Albanian-speaking activists in Switzerland, from the celebrated years of engagement to the search for a new status.
5.1.1 Demonstrating for Kosovo: relating the glorious times
The first article scrutinises how the research participants related their belonging to the
“Albanian nation” via their participation in demonstrations. As I was conducting the fieldwork, many of the former militants were actively celebrating the first demonstration on behalf of the national cause abroad that was organised on 11 April 1981 in Bern. The memory entrepreneurs celebrated the demonstrations as glorious events in which activists joined in the streets of diverse cities and united around the idea and feeling of Albanianness. They mainly organised commemorative events as well as publications that recalled the engagement of several activists.
As many interviewees passionately spoke about the demonstration of April 1981 and the further protests that took place across Europe, I decided to examine this topic in more detail.
Recently, numerous scholars of nation and nationalism have claimed that nationhood and ethnicity cannot be studied solely as discursive categories of practice to classify people or look at the world, but their capacity to generate collective phenomena should also be explored, such as a shared consciousness, solidarity and the feeling of belonging to a unique group called a
“nation” (Calhoun 1997, 2007, Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Experts of performance and ritual have in particular attempted to demonstrate “how national sentiment is experienced” (Taylor Woods and Tsang 2014: 2).
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In line with the recent literature, the first article focuses on the marchers’ points of view in the nationalist demonstrations organised on behalf of “Kosovo” in the 1980s and seeks to understand the successful “collective effervescence” developed in these performances. It analyses the narratives of former leaders, organisers, helpers as well as marchers who did not play an important role in the preparation and conduct of the demonstrations. As such, the research pursues a comprehensive approach that does not artificially separate the perspective of the “organising elite” from that of the “banal demonstrators”, as usually presented in the literature. It thus makes it possible to perceive and understand the emotional heights created in these performances through different perspectives and offer a more complete analysis. At the same time, it makes it possible to glimpse the distinctions constructed by the interviewees themselves between different categories of activists.
Furthermore, I also paid particular attention to the methodological challenge of studying affect in relationship with national identification. Via an oral history approach that emphasises the importance of narratives of the self, I attempted to reconcile the conventional opposition between, on the one hand, discourse and the mind and, on the other, emotion and the body (Barbalet 2001, Wetherell 2012, Athanasiou, Hantzaroula, and Yannakopoulos 2009, Koivunen 2010). Hence, I focused on the links between the emotions and the narratives.
5.1.2 Shifting the boundaries of belonging: fighting non-recognition in Kosovo
The second article scrutinises how the former activists respond to their lack of recognition and lower status in Kosovo in their narratives of homeland engagement. The inspiration for this article was the regular remarks made by the research participants, especially before and after the recorded parts of the interview. Many expressed great disillusion regarding Kosovo. They spoke of their sometimes-problematic relationships with their acquaintances in Kosovo. Almost all of them harshly criticised the new political forces in the country. They mentioned feeling abandoned by the new state and also complained of the lack of acknowledgement for their enormous engagement. In fact, they felt symbolically degraded after the end of the mobilisation and were trying to find solutions in order to recover. I thus sought to explore their different strategies to response to this negative transnational position in their memories.
The literature developed in the last few years regarding the responses to stigmatisation and discrimination on the basis of ethnic or national criteria has frequently resorted to boundary work theory (Wimmer 2008a, Lamont and Mizrachi 2012, Witte 2017). Scholars have sought
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to explain how external boundaries affect individuals and groups’ identification and, in turn, how these stigmatised individuals or groups pursue different strategies to change undesirable boundaries or modify their position in relation to them (Wimmer 2008a). In the field of migration studies, several researchers have chiefly attempted to explain migrants’ responses to stigmatisation in their country of settlement (see for example Duemmler, Dahinden, and Moret 2010, Morosanu 2012, Dahinden and Zittoun 2013). Scholars have only rarely appraised the responses given to transnational forms of stigmatisation.
Contrary to the majority of the recent literature on the responses to stigmatisation, this article concentrates on stigmatisation in the country of origin, rather than the country of settlement.
This specific focus stems from the transnational perspective adopted in this study that makes it possible to distinguish new phenomena that could not otherwise be perceived. This approach also makes it possible to take into account all of the possible discourses of national membership that are present across diverse social fields, from local to the transnational spaces (Dahinden, Duemmler, and Moret 2014).
Furthermore, by applying a boundary-work perspective, the article seeks to analyse both facets of the stigmatisation and exclusion processes. On the one hand, it shows how the research participants perceive the erection of boundaries in Kosovo that exclude or belittle them. On the other hand, it also analyses their boundary-making strategies to improve their negative position.
Finally, in this article, the boundaries between the groups are marked on the basis of the
“narratives of liberation of Kosovo”. Scholars of nation and nationalism have long analysed the role of memories as the “cultural stuff” that can be used to draw boundaries and create distinct national groups (Armstrong 1982, Barth 1969, Smith 1999a). In the particular case of memories crafted by migrants, the narratives of the past also testify to their self-representations and situations in transnational spaces (Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013).
5.1.3 Crafting the new “Albanian man” in Switzerland: fighting for a more favourable image
The third article examines how former activists seek to construct a more positive image of the
“Albanians” in Switzerland while integrating gender categories. This article stems in large part from my observations of the gender relations exhibited during the fieldwork. On the one hand, I noticed that some (but not all) of the political organisations of Albanian-speakers in
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Switzerland are overwhelmingly composed of men. For their part, women often participate in parties, cultural representations or humanitarian work. On the other hand, I was struck by the difficulty of finding women who were willing to be interviewed. I thus decided to explore questions of masculinity into more detail.
Since the 1980s, scholars have endeavoured to demonstrate that men and women are differently incorporated in national projects (Nagel 1998, Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). While feminist researchers initially concentrated on highlighting the different roles played by women in national projects, they then started exploring the links between nationalism and masculinity. In recent years, scholars have, in particular, demonstrated the multiplicity of masculine constructions and their differentiated relations with national ideas. They have also called for greater consideration of the emergence and transmission of gender constructions in transnational spaces.
The article mainly relies on the two last strands of scholarship in analysing the construction of national masculinities within the memories of homeland engagement. It attempts to convey the multiplicity of masculine constructions and their interdependency. It also observes the interrelated influence of the different sources of interpretation produced and conveyed within the national, international and transnational levels in the construction of the “Kosovo Albanian man”. The article not only demonstrates how Albanianness is partly constructed in gendered terms, but also shows how the former activists endeavour to create new identity models in order to enhance their status in Switzerland post-independence.
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5.2 Demonstrating for a Kosovo Republic in Switzerland: emotions, national