Paper short abstract:

The paper addresses hopeful narratives and visions of Europe and EU within Albanian discourses. It questions whether people's hope for a better future is merely a consequence of their passivity, which embraces the waiting or is it an active stance which facilitates action and builds expectations.

Paper long abstract:

'E duam Shqipërinë si Europa' (I want Albania to be like Europe) was the sentence often heard in the media, political discourse and daily talk of Albanian people after the fall of the communist regime in 1991. Nowadays, when more than two decades have passed from that event, the term Europe as an idea and a place is still very present in peoples' daily conversations. The paper addresses hopeful narratives and visions of Europe and EU within Albanian discourses since the collapse of the communist regime, seeing them as imperatives of modernity and wellbeing. It questions how people replace their feelings of uncertainty with hope as a 'method of knowledge' (Miyazaki 2004) through which they envision their future. Their waiting for accession to the EU could be defined as an indefinite position which gives them feelings of hope (shpresa) and generates belief (besa) for a better future. By addressing what Navaro-Yashin (2003) posits as 'sensing the political' this paper will seek to understand the temporality which is shaped within the expectations and possibilities of articulation and enactment of hope for the future. Here I am particularly interested in how people generate the meanings of political, the state (shteti) and state-making. The question presenting itself here is whether their hope for a better future is merely a consequence of their passivity, which instead of embracing action embraces the waiting (pritje) or is it an active stance which in fact facilitates their action and builds their expectations (pritshmeri).