Morality, loyalty and citizenship: the organization of youth in interwar Albania

Abstract

This study explores the interwar Albanian state youth organizations, the National Entity “The Albanian Youth” and the Federation of Artistic and Sports Associations “The Albanian Brotherhood.” They constitute the first examples of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports that we find in present day Albania. These institutions, which related youth, education, sports and culture to a patriotic platform that deeply affected the political culture in the country, become for the first time the subject of a particular socio-historical research. This study proposes that these institutions advanced a project of citizenship for Albanian society. This project consists in the organization of national society through the youth and by projecting onto the city youth the good citizenship. Approaching national citizenship as being political this study suggests that the city emerges at the same time as a space of subversion of and compliance to power. This works stands in the intersection of education, citizenship, and youth studies and it is based on the examination of many original documents that were not explored previously. Youth represents its key concept and term. The other dimensions, loyalty and morality, emerged as key elements in understanding diverse aspects of the good citizenship. The idea that intellectual elites could shape society according to what they regarded as “developed,” “western,” and “civilized,” patterned the state’s and regime’s logics of creating the good citizen. Nevertheless, this study shows that the values the state youth organizations promoted and the practices they advanced cannot be simply regarded as state or elite projects. On the contrary, they were the product of the interaction of multiple actors and dynamics that founded and shaped the state itself.