Diasporas and Ethnic Migrants

Germany, Israel and Russia in Comparative Perspective

Rainer Munz, Rainer Ohliger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135759377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This work adopts a comparative approach to explore interrelations between two phenomena which, so far, have rarely been examined and analysed together, namely the dynamics of diaspora and minority formation in Central and Eastern Europe on the one hand, and the diaspora migration on the other.

PART I
INTRODUCTION

1
Diasporas and Ethnic Migrants in Twentieth-Century Europe: A Comparative Perspective

Rainer Ohliger and Rainer Münz

Within the last 20 years, ‘diaspora’ has become a widely used term in the social sciences and humanities as well as in the political sphere. At least in the Western world, the idea of belonging to a diaspora has lost its stigma. On the contrary, many now see it as a resource for identity politics and the asserting of claims. As a result, scholarship on diasporas and diasporic movements has significantly increased over the last two decades: numerous conferences, dealing solely with the phenomenon of diaspora,¹ take place every year. Even journals completely dedicated to diaspora scholarship and research have emerged.²

This book tries to take the discussion one step further. It uses a comparative approach to explore interrelations between two phenomena which, so far, have rarely been examined and analysed together, namely the dynamics of diaspora and minority formation in Central and Eastern Europe on the one hand and diaspora migration on the other. It explores the history, the minority situation and the migration pattern of ethnic Germans, ‘Russian’ Jews³ and ethnic Russians in Central and Eastern Europe and in Central Asia.

DIASPORA: A USEFUL CONCEPT OF ANALYSIS AND COMPARISON?

The Greek term diaspora, meaning dispersion, was first used in ancient Greece to characterize the exile of the Aegean population after the Peleponesian War. It found its Hebrew equivalent in the term galut (Deuteronomy 28:25), meaning the exile of Jews during Babylonian times.⁴ In Roman times, the term became closely linked to Jewish history. It epitomized the fate of Jews living outside their ‘homeland’ in exile, in particular after the second destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in the year AD 70 and the subsequent dispersion of Jews. Thus Jewish history became crucial to the development of what was understood by the concept and term ‘diaspora’. Forced displacement of population by a catastrophic event, dispersion of this population throughout different territories, countries or even continents, a collective memory of the catastrophe having caused dispersion, and the willingness and intention to perpetuate diaspora existence over generations and not to assimilate became crucial elements within the definition of diaspora (Chaliand and Rageau 1991). In more recent times, however, the concept was transferred from Jews to other dispersed minority and, particularly, migrant groups. The concept became more widely used even for ethnic or national groups who had not been forcibly displaced. Rather, it is argued that multipolar migration in combination with relations and networks of different kinds between these various poles is essential for the definition of diaspora (Ma Mung 2000:8–9).

Being ‘diaspora’ provided the concept and framework for group formation and for the claim-making of minorities. From Jewish historiography the term was transferred to describe the analogous fate of Armenians who escaped genocide in Turkey. The term was also used to characterize dispersed minorities of Greeks and Chinese, whose existence cannot be linked to an original catastrophe that drove them from their historical ‘homelands’. Subsequently, it came to be used to describe immigrant minorities such as the Irish in the United States, or groups which were never conceived of as coherent ethnic entities before the wider dissemination and dispersion of the concept of diaspora (see Chapter 4). This is the case for people of African origin in the Americas, but could also be argued for two out of the three groups under consideration in this volume, namely ethnic Germans and ethnic Russians.

Historically speaking, neither ethnic Germans nor ethnic Russians in the ‘Near Abroad’ (Laitin 1998) can be labelled as diasporas in a strict sense, given the aforementioned criteria of diaspora existence. Neither Germans nor Russians were dispersed in their areas of settlement as a result of tragic events or an historical catastrophe. Both groups settled outside their traditional ‘homelands’ as colonial or colonizing populations enjoying the status of a privileged or even dominant group, for example, ethnic Russians in Tsarist Russia and later in the Soviet Union, or ethnic Germans in the Habsburg Empire. Thus, their situation was initially rather similar to British, Spanish or Portuguese populations in overseas territories who were also not considered to be diasporas, but colonial settlers. However, as the course of history changed, so did the status and the conditions of existence for ethnic Germans and ethnic Russians. Traumatization and catastrophe has become an element of their group existence and history, though only post-settlement and post-dispersion. It can be argued that several events had traumatizing effects on ethnic Germans and, in the final result, on ethnic Russians as well, in particular, the change of Europe’s political landscape after the First World War, Stalinist repression and deportation, expulsion or collective punishment after the Second World War and the demise of the Soviet Union, thus qualifying them to be ‘real’ diasporas.

The effects of the First World War turned some 6.5 million Germans— previously residing in the Habsburg Empire or the German Empire— from members of the titular nation into national minorities.⁵ Overnight they became ethnic Germans residing in newly established and nationalizing nation-states.⁶ Moreover, their expulsion after the end of the Second World War and the discrimination against the remaining population in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had traumatizing effects on many ethnic Germans. A similar argument can be made for 25 million ethnic Russians whose status declined from member of a titular nation to member of a minority, in many cases even an unwelcome minority. All this happened with the demise of the Soviet Union, though expulsion was missing as a severe traumatizing event in the ethnic Russian case. Thus the inclusion of ethnic Germans and ethnic Russians into the concept of diaspora defined in a broader sense seems to be justified without stretching the concept too far.

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES AMONG ETHNIC GERMANS, ‘RUSSIAN’ JEWS AND ETHNIC RUSSIANS

The most obvious similarity among the three groups analysed in this volume is their common area of origin: ethnic Germans, ethnic Russians and European Jews migrating to Israel, Germany, the Russian Federation or the United States overwhelmingly originate in Central and Eastern Europe or the successor states of the Soviet Union. Ethnic Germans who have come to Germany since the early 1950s as privileged co-ethnic immigrants—Aussiedler, resettlers—came almost exclusively from Poland, Romania and, in the 1990s, in particular from the USSR and its successor states (see Chapter 15).⁷ ‘Russian’ Jews who migrated to Israel in the 1970s and again as of the late 1980s came from all over the Soviet Union. However, the Russian part of the USSR, and now the Russian Federation, has been and still is their principal area of origin. ‘Russian’ Jews living in this area have migrated not only to Israel, but also to the United States and to Germany. Ethnic Russians were stranded as a kind of ‘beached’ minority (Kolstø 1995) in all the successor states of the Soviet Union, but there were and are significant differences in relative and absolute size. Whereas Estonia, Latvia and Kazakhstan each became independent states with more than 30 per cent of the population a Russian minority (see Chapters 8 and 9), Armenia’s population included as little as 3 per cent ethnic Russians after independence. For many of them, in particular for ethnic Russians from Kazakhstan and Central Asia, immigration to the Russian Federation has become a common option. At the same time in the Baltic States and in Ukraine, most ethnic Russians did not take emigration or ‘remigration’ to Russia into serious consideration.

Although the three analysed diaspora groups share certain socio-geographical characteristics, there are also distinctive differences. This is particularly true with regard to the share of people living in cities or in rural areas and the resulting social, educational and economic differences. Historically, Russia’s ethnic Germans, who now make up the majority of ethnic German immigrants to Germany, were predominantly associated with agriculture or at least with rural life. This remained true even after Soviet collectivization of the 1920s and the deportation of ethnic Germans to Siberia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in 1941. Ethnic Russians and ‘Russian’ Jews, however, more often settled in urban environments, which resulted in a different educational and occupational structure. Ethnic Russians have a rather high concentration in manufacturing and in the mining and steel industries as a consequence of Soviet-style industrialization and related internal labour migration within the Soviet Union. Russians first migrated to the peripheries of their empire as quasi-colonial settlers and administrative elites. During the twentieth century, however, they settled in large numbers as industrial workers in newly developed areas such as the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, parts of Siberia or the Ida-Virumaa region in north-eastern Estonia. They also dominated the higher ranks of the Red Army and the Russian fleet. As a result, regions with large garrisons or naval bases also had a high concentration of ethnic Russians. Within the Soviet Union, Jews were the ethnic group with the highest proportion of high school and university graduates. Almost all Jews lived in bigger cities. The majority also worked in the service sector, as academics and in the ‘liberal’ professions, as do those who remain.

An obvious similarity among all three groups is their shared minority status. This similarity is a recent phenomenon as a characteristic of all three groups, since only Jews and ethnic Germans can look back on a longer history of minority existence. In the case of Jews, their dispersion in the time of the Roman Empire and beyond created the first notion of diaspora. Since the twelfth century, Germans settling in Transylvania, in the Baltic states in other parts of Central Europe and, since the eighteenth century, in Russia as well, formed ethno-cultural minorities. For this reason, ethnic Germans and Jews, both belonging to old minorities, had socially and politically adapted to minority status over generations. Ethnic Russians, however, first came to Siberia, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Crimea and so on, as part of Russia’s imperial expansion in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, with Soviet settlement policies following that pattern. Russians remained politically and culturally dominant despite formal equality among all recognized nationalities of the USSR. Therefore, ethnic Russians living in Soviet Republics other than Russia only became members of a minority after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Hence we can speak of new Russian minorities and of older German and Jewish ones.

The degree to which the three groups analysed in this volume have assimilated to majority language and culture differs considerably. In the second half of the twentieth century, ‘Russian’ Jews and ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union were highly assimilated, predominantly using Russian in everyday communication, whether in Russia proper, in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan or in Central Asia. In both groups, interethnic marriages became widespread, a development that led to further assimilation. As the Soviet Union enforced atheism, this assimilation weakened Jewish and German religious life but did not lead to any significant conversions to the Orthodox Church. Ethnic Russians, on the other hand, did not usually assimilate to other languages and cultures as long as they enjoyed majority status in the Soviet Union. Even after the demise of the USSR, linguistic and cultural assimilation among ethnic Russians is taking place only at a very slow pace.

The differences in the degree of assimilation are crucial if it comes to the question of ethnic migration to the respective historical ‘homeland’. Ethnic ‘return’ migration usually does not create any linguistic problems for ethnic Russians who come to the Russian Federation. In contrast, Russian, Ukrainian or Central Asian Jews migrating to Israel and ethnic Germans leaving Siberia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan for Germany regularly face considerable linguistic problems. Most of these Jews speak neither Hebrew nor Yiddish. The majority of ethnic Germans did not speak German as their main language even if they acquired some language proficiency from their parents.⁸ For these migrants and their ethnic Russian and other family members, social integration in Germany and Israel is more difficult, and not always successful. Many of them would like to retain key elements of their Russian cultural background.

At the same time, those ethnic Germans and Jews remaining in Russia and some other successor states of the USSR have usually experienced no major problems coping with their position within the post-Soviet nation-states, even if their everyday lives have become more complicated during the difficult transition to a post-communist economy. In general, Jews and ethnic Germans have less difficulty than other ethnic groups in dealing with this transition. The situation is different for the majority of ethnic Russians who ended up as new minorities in the non-Russian successor states. Most of them have little or no knowledge of the new official state languages. They are barely familiar with local culture and religions such as Islam. During the 1990s, they have shown little initiative to learn languages such as Estonian, Latvian, Kazakh or Uzbek.

Another relevant difference is the inclusion into or the exclusion from citizenship of the nation-states that became independent in 1991. Ethnic Germans and ‘Russian’ Jews were all Soviet citizens (for those ethnic Germans from Poland and Romania, respectively Polish or Romanian citizens) even if they were discriminated against or collectively punished on the basis of national origins. In 1991/92, Soviet ethnic Germans and ‘Russian’ Jews all became, for example, Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh or Kyrgyz citizens. Many of them even kept their Russian, Kazakh or Ukrainian citizenship when emigrating to the West, thus enjoying dual citizenship after having been naturalized in Germany or Israel.⁹ Some retain property, such as flats or houses, and businesses in their countries of origin. Others return on a regular basis at least as visitors (see Chapter 23). Because of the growing number of people living in both societies, we are even witnessing the emergence of truly transnational communities.¹⁰

For ethnic Russians, this issue is more complicated. The majority of the successor states implemented a so-called ‘zero option’, thus granting citizenship to all legal residents living on their state territories upon independence, unless these residents explicitly rejected the new citizenship or openly applied for another country’s citizenship. However, there were notable exceptions, namely Estonia and Latvia, where most ethnic Russians were excluded from acquiring citizenship directly upon independence. In these two Baltic states, most ethnic Russians could acquire Estonian or Latvian citizenship only by way of naturalization. Candidates for naturalization were required to pass an examination which tested knowledge of the state language, constitution, political system, history and so on. Latvia introduced a so-called ‘window’ system, restricting the right to naturalization to certain birth cohorts (see Chapter 11). Only ethnic Russians whose ancestors had lived in Estonia or Latvia prior to 1940 had immediate access to citizenship. This led to the exclusion of the overwhelming majority of Estonia’s and Latvia’s ethnic Russian population from the political life and citizenry. As a consequence, political mobilization and representation of Slavic minorities was made more complicated. As non-citizens were not allowed to buy property or to actively participate in post-communist privatization, the Russian minority also had substantial economic disadvantages resulting from restrictive citizenship laws. The original aim of this regulation was to counterbalance the effects of what the Baltic majority populations and their elites interpreted as 50 years of hostile occupation and assimilation, that is, the gradual Russification of public life in the Baltic republics. The implicit hope was that those who were excluded from the polity would sooner or later leave the country and ‘return’ to Russia. For various reasons, this did not happen on a large scale. The two unintended consequences, therefore, were the establishment of large stateless and/or foreign minority populations and the involvement of Russia, the European Union (EU), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Council of Europe in the whole issue. The originally domestic issue of politically negotiating membership as well as redistribution of power and resources turned into a foreign policy issue involving not only Estonia’s and Latvia’s eastern neighbour, Russia, but the whole international community. Special OSCE missions were set up in the two countries in order to constantly monitor the situation of the Russian and other Slavic minorities. The EU made it clear that future membership of the Baltic states in the EU would not only depend on economic performance and legal as well as political reforms, but also on the status and treatment of minorities. In the end, Estonia and Latvia were forced to partially liberalize their very restrictive citizenship laws and to give up hope that the conflict between the new titular...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on Contributors
• Tables, Figures, Maps and Photographs
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Theoritical and Comparative Perspectives
• Part III Making and Unmaking Diasporas: Ethnic Unmixing and Forced Migrations in Twentieth-Century Europe
• Part IV Russia and the Post-Soviet Successor States: New Diasporas and Ethnic Migrants
• Part V Germany: Ethnic Migration and Diaspora Existence in Transition
• Part VI Israel: Old Diasporas and New Immigrants
• References