This case study of an economically elite, internationally-located secondary school in Switzerland examines how young people’s nationalities articulate with their narratives around belonging in an increasingly globalized world. Studying elite educational spaces is a growing area of research due, in part, to the resurgence of interest in examining the production and maintenance of privilege and power (Savage & Williams, 2008). An important body of literature has strongly evidenced work done by elite national educational systems to produce members of their nation’s elite groups; however, over time, control of wealth and power has, it can be argued, shifted from the national to the international level (Piketty, 2014). Therefore, internationally-located schools are a particularly important site upon which to turn a sociological gaze. They serve as entry-points to considering how a shift from the national to the transnational might be evident beyond the flow of money, people, goods and governance organizations, to educational institutions’ social and political purposes. Switzerland is, moreover, a nation barely represented in the published literature despite it being a key country for the global elite, particularly in the financial and international policymaking sectors.

The research site is the Leysin American School, henceforth LAS. It was founded by an American couple in the Swiss alpine village of Leysin in 1961, as an American curriculum school for the sons and daughters of American expatriates. It currently educates over 300 young men and women ages 12-19 from 41 nationalities to attain the International Baccalaureate diploma or the American High School diploma. Despite its American connections and Swiss location, LAS’s student body is 12% American and less than 3% Swiss. Fees are the equivalent of € 80.000 per year, not including one-time fees of € 9.000 and additional costs estimated at € 21.000 annually. The omnipresent mission statement of the school reads, “Developing innovative, compassionate and responsible citizens of the world.”

This paper explores how students at this site position themselves within the space and how this speaks to global geopolitical relations. To do this, it examines how these young people construct, negotiate and at times contest their relationships with those from their nation-state and with their classmates from other countries. Such active boundary-maintenance work locates these students’ subjectivities within and beyond national class structures and borders. This paper thus engages with “the extent of disidentification of elite groups from local and national senses of belonging” (Ball, 2016). In this way, it extends scholarship that has focused on how national fields of power shape the subjectivities of elite groups and offers further insights into how members of such groups forge multi-sited understandings of themselves and the educational institutions they attend.

This paper is scaffolded by the theoretical concepts of political philosopher Étienne Balibar. Balibar’s analytical tools interweave the subject, the citizen and the stranger as a means to understand mechanisms for power structures and struggles on the global stage (Balibar, 2014). This lens offers a way to make sense of students’ narratives of belonging in relation to their own nation-state and that of their peers. Balibar’s interest in new forms, articulations and contestations of the nation-state, as well as citizenship in the transnational space, can thus be usefully employed in examining how LAS students’ relations of belonging are constructed, negotiated and resisted.

This research draws on ethnographic methodologies deployed over a two-year period of fieldwork. Employing ethnography allows this work to engage with conversations emerging from important ethnographic studies of elite schools (e.g., Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009; Khan, 2011) from a similar methodological standpoint. Data was collected from interviews, documentary sources and participant observation. The author interviewed 19 students and two school administrators. Eligible participants were first narrowed down through stratified purposive sampling; individuals were then selected according theoretical, contextual and practical parameters. The analyses of these interviews were broadly informed by a life history approach. This frames interviewees’ stories as a ‘story of action within a theory of context,’ meaning situated in their own time and place, and emphasises the importance of social context. Documentary data was mostly drawn from autobiographical material, letters, school meeting minutes, memos and yearbooks. In combination, these represent a mix of personal and public materials. The former offers insights into unpublicized motivations and disputes, while the latter can detail everyday life and values but perhaps not without inaccuracies. This data was theorised with an interpretivist and critical approach. Recording observations in a rigorous and standardised way is a key aspect of ethnographic work. In this study, fieldnotes were used to help understand how the perspectives that emerged from interviews and documents translated into everyday practices. This data thus served to highlight both connections and contradictions across data sources. The author formally observed classes, everyday moments in the cafeteria and library, and all-school events, in addition to taking generalized fieldnotes. On an ethical note, the research project from which this paper is drawn names its site. It does so because there are relatively few Swiss boarding schools, each of which has a unique historical and current socio-political emplacement. Openly using the school’s name thus eliminates a potential risk to subjects that their institution would be unexpectedly ‘found out,’ when they participated under the assumption that it would not. This decision is not without precedent. It builds on Bourdieusian conventions as well as on those of recent elite school ethnographies (e.g., Khan, 2011). All student names and identifying characteristics have been changed. The administrators, as visible figures attached to the school, have not been anonymised. They have given permission for this -- as has the Head of School for using the institution’s real name.

Balibar distinguishes between ‘less than foreigners’ and ‘more than foreigners’ (Balibar, 2010), with the former being of similar social status and the latter, of different status. These ‘more than foreigners’ are thus subject to discrimination. This distinction suggests a ‘crisis’ of the nation-state that is “concentrated on its borders but also continuously dislocating these borders” (2010, p. 320). The difference between ‘less than foreigners’ and ‘more than foreigners’ can be interpreted as that between familiar strangers and ethnic strangers. These ideas can be used to make sense of the narratives that LAS students construct in relation to their nation-state through their encounters at school with ‘less than foreigners,’ meaning others from their nation-state. The framework further provides a lens onto the border dynamics that ‘more than foreigners,’ meaning LAS students from different nation-states, construct and resist amongst each other. When viewed through this theoretical frame, these dynamics can be understood as the establishment and contestation of power-hierarchy proxies that are tied to configurations of nation, race and ethnicity. With sensitivity to the complexities and ambiguities inherent to young people’s identity formation processes, then, this paper provides insight into the shifting influences of national context on students’ narratives. This paper thus contributes to the discourses around ‘elites’ circulating today. While academic literature reflects an assumption that a transnational elite social class is forming through educational sites such as this one (e.g., Beck, 2006; Kenway et al., 2016), this paper presents a different yet complementary narrative. It argues that rather than forming a culturally-cohesive ‘class,’ these young men and women are continuing to engage and negotiate their relationships to national and transnational realms.

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