I’m not going to explore the various successes and failures of immigration laws and migrant integration. Nor will I try to do a critique of today’s political choice, namely that of our inability to welcome all the world’s suffering, the latter in itself a problem that must be «controlled». We don’t live today in a world of political decisions on behalf of our elected politicians, but rather in a state of the situation that within the sphere of policymaking allows only the management of the consequences, which needless to say arise from a savage domination by a free market economy, and its agents. In turn, I will try to touch certain phenomenological aspects of a particular exile that happens to be the object of this text, so the readers can draw their own sociological, economical or ontological conclusions, if they wish.
Settled and naturalized Kosovan migrants and ex-refugees in Switzerland and German speaking communities, but also beyond, have been nicknamed «Shatzi» for ridicule by their own ethno-national community; it became a general term for the stereotypical exile after the Kosovo conflict of 1999. In German this word has the same usage as does «sweetie» in English, or «habibi» in Arabic.
Shatzi is a soft slur whose identity could be provisionally summoned as follows: They dress conspicuously and when visiting their homeland, they compare their experience with the civilised countries of destination, where they permanently abide. For Shatzis, the West sets a standard of superiority, which is understandable, because Shatzi’s ancestral homeland happens to be underdeveloped, byzantine and archaic, contrary to Shatzi’s better-life place of refuge, namely the West, where one finds order, security and hygiene. Where people don’t care about each other’s business, possess the concept of privacy, and where alienation brings discretion which in turn allows for a certain sense of freedom from one’s own community super-ego. Another element of Shatzi identity, which is also a well known trait of individuals that live in diaspora communities is a certain diligence toward a previous way of life, oftem making Shatzis the guardians of dated habits of their ancestral homeland.
Shatzi is the other face of the immigration «problem». When they go back, they discover, that they can’t return.
The Shatzi temporality is a broken temporality, characteristic of every exile. A Shatzi can’t engender two temporalities at the same time; can’t be at the same time both, abroad and home. This splitting, this tearing between two states and societies creates a feeling of groundlessness, although it equips the Shatzi with a double vision. Shatzi is the other face of the immigration «problem». When they go back to their own country, Shatzis discover that they really can’t return. As if by some sort of a Hegelian dialectic their return is rendered impossible – too much has already changed, too much has been transformed, within the subject and her/his homeland, so that the only feeling left is the feeling of estrangement. As if sometime, during the period of Shatzi’s absence their membership in the homeland and its ancestral community were to be repudiated.
With Shatzis otherness is twofold. Shatzis are other even where they are supposed to be the same. They carry with them a certain model, or a seed, for a future subject of cultureless up-rootedness – for losing one’s root could just as well mean separating from one’s life-world and stimulating some kind of a new, maybe more genuine coexistence. If not a global citizenship, then at least a different attitude towards one’s own culture. An attitude that would hopefully disallow ideological deceptions, making the individual capable of seeing their own culture beside many other cultures for what it really is: an artificially constructed set of habits, myths and collective memories.
Shatzis want to help, to invest in their homeland. Shatzis are ambitious. They dream another life-world, although, once arriving at some eventual truth about the discrepancies, which usually happen to be prevalent socio-political complexities of the homeland, withdraw in utter disappointment.
There are also traits of the Shatzi which are generic throughout all exile identities. The psychology of distance is one of them, something all exiles have in common – an important factor that can either lead a subject toward regressive and reactionary dispositions, or otherwise progressive and universal, depending on which, for example, a Shatzi might either end up applying at the European Graduate School’s (EGS) division of Critical Thought, or become a subscriber to the neo-fascist New European Order’s (NEO) monthly Courrier du continent.
Shatzis that go to extremes with integration tend to become more xenophobic than the conservative natives of their destination country. This paradox of the victims of xenophobia who have become xenophobes themselves is a good indicator of the inconsistency of ethnocentric feelings and also a true manifestation of the fact that identity is a shared living existence between us and all the kind of things that are not us.
A Shatzi is an extension of a group identity. But we know by now that every group identity is but a foolish identification with the common things that connect its members to the world. Shatzi is impermanent, likewise, the self’s ultimate impermanency is a Shatzi.
Shatzis become Shatzis only when they return on a visit to their ancestral homeland. In their destination country they cease being Shatzis. There they have often other denominations of ridicule applied to them. The impermanent emergence due to the clash between the destination country’s culture and the culture of their mythical homeland could also serve as a metaphor for the self itself.
Shatzi identity is not strange to the identity of the Swiss or German European of a programmed juggling between workaholic agony and extensive distribution of analgesics and tranquilisers. Shatzis create a bridge between the leisurely world of civilisation and the dark regions of suffering, regions of endless hungry children playing amidst poverty stricken lands where religion still persists. Shatzi breaks the security cordon between the developed and underdeveloped. Between master and pupil.
Shatzi might just turn out to be an identity that is needed for what we currently don’t have
Finally, there are two types of Shatzi. The first is the common Shatzi. I call it diasporic because it is made of dispersed identities that maintain political ties with their homeland and consider integration into the host country pragmatic, but they guard against assimilation. The other type is what I’d like to call the dissipative Shatzi. The dissipative Shatzi is the one who has realised that the only home is the awareness that there is no such thing as home. The dissipative Shatzi has opened up to dis-identification to the point of no return. A dissipative Shatzi speaks in the name of identities that they must not act out, therefore going beyond their interest groups. The dissipative Shatzi is a true political exile. No longer a representative of a particular community, but rather an identifier with anonymity.
On the one side, the existentialist thinking teaches us that all identities are imprisonments in a role. On the other, exclusion of the other happens to be the glue that keeps every community inside the myth of harmony and consistency. But more and more we are seeing the blackmail of electoral opportunism for what it really is: politics as police work, catering to the whims of the market economy and the management of the latter’s dire consequences inside the global temple of our plutocratic empire, whose two main columns are the power of wealth and the management of (in)security – from illegal foreigners to far right racists, from totalitarian terror to landslides and viruses.
Shatzi, in its ripe and dissipative form, metaphorically speaking, in its formless form, might just turn out to be an identity that is needed for what we currently don’t have, the might that grasps the pillars of our empire and brings the latter down to its ruin. And who knows, maybe one day this image could become a reality.