Phd Dissertation
Morality, Loyalty and Citizenship: The Organization of Youth in Interwar Albania, EHESS, Paris, 2012
By relating organically youth, culture, education and placing these in a patriotic platform, the state youth organization advanced a project of a politicized society in a country were political activity and political parties were forbidden. It was the political content of citizenship that was supposed to preserve some socio-cultural relations and to transform others. Morality was an important element of this content as it was a crucial means in inciting profound changes in perceptions and (political) attitude. Therefore, state institutions attempted a control on morality education transforming its content by introducing political values, firstly national, then related to the survival of the regime.
The research 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.
Notes from the conclusin:
By relating organically youth, culture, education and placing these in a
patriotic platform, the state youth organization advanced a project of a politicized
society in a country were political activity and political parties were forbidden. It was
the political content of citizenship that was supposed to preserve some socio-cultural
relations and to transform others. Morality was an important element of this content
as it was a crucial means in inciting profound changes in perceptions and (political)
attitude.1001 Therefore, state institutions attempted a control on morality education
transforming its content by introducing political values, firstly national, then related
to the survival of the regime. State youth organizations were means to spread these
values, but also to introduce loyalty as an institutional dynamic.