Defining social spaces by way of deletion: the untold story of Albanian migration in the postwar period

Abstract

European migration has been characterised since the end of the Second World War as one shaped by migratory work schemes and economic opportunism. The underlying rationale which induced hundreds of thousands of people to move to Western Europe during the period, therefore, has been largely reduced to economic factors. This article challenges the value of such approaches by identifying a largely forgotten community whose extensive settlement in European cities has never been studied as part of this postwar migration. The case of Albanian-speakers reveals a large number of reasons why people settled in Europe. The article further explores the sociological consequences for these Albanian communities as a result of their unrecognised condition in their host societies, in particular as it concerns their capacities throughout the postwar period to politically organise and to adopt measures of self-representation that were deemed important to them.