The Politics of Migration and Diaspora in Eastern Europe

Media, Public Discourse and Policy

Ruxandra Trandafoiu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000565836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a critical analysis of the politics of migration in Eastern Europe and an in-depth understanding of the role played by media and public discourse in shaping migration and migration policy.

Ruxandra Trandafoiu looks at emigration, diaspora, return, kin-minority cross-border mobility, and immigration in Eastern Europe from cultural, social and political angles, tracing the evolution of migration policies across Eastern Europe through communication, public debate and political strategy. Trandafoiu investigates the extent to which these potential 'models' or policy practices can be comparable to those in Western European countries, or whether Eastern Europe can give rise to a migration 'system' that rivals the North American one. Each chapter bridges the link between policy and politics and makes a case for considering migration politics as fundamentally intertwined with media representation and public debate. Drawing on comparative case studies of countries including Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine, the book considers how migration is both managed and experienced from political, social and cultural viewpoints and from the perspectives of a range of actors including migrants, politicians, policymakers and journalists.

This book will be key reading for advanced students and researchers of migration, media, international relations, and political communication.

1 Emigration

DOI: 10.4324/9781003055242-2

Most Eastern European countries have become countries of net emigration since the early 1990s. Informed estimates put the number of people emigrating from the region at well over twenty million (Atoyan et al. 2016: 8) with countries like Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Albania more affected (Atoyan et al. 2016: 9). These countries are different in population size and have had different experiences with the post-socialist political and economic transition, while a couple have also suffered ethnic conflict. At prima vista it may not be entirely clear why emigration became a defining feature for them, but not other countries in the region. A deeper look at contextual factors shows nonetheless the presence of an emigration culture prepared by extensive internal migration, higher unemployment and a divisive political transition. Widespread corruption and elite dissention signal the moral collapse of the state and, consequently, of the relationship with its citizens, in these countries.

Generalizations are nevertheless problematic in the context of cultural, political and historical specificities. It is also notoriously difficult to pinpoint the main reasons for emigration, when many emigrants start their emigration journeys as tourists or family visitors, may not be willing to declare specific motivations or their motivations change over time. Emigrants operate in a field of fluidity, where conditions change in their personal or family situation, in the homeland or the receiving country. Itinerant migrants can also change their motivation as they move from one country to the next. Of course, economic motivations are high on the agenda, but political factors that have to do with living in a fairer society with good political management are also important. Of course, structures and policies that allow emigration to happen smoothly either informally (social networks, diasporic websites) or formal (EU mobility rules, labour recruitment programmes, kin-minority privileges) remain the backbone of emigration.

There is a tendency to see the EU’s enlargement to the East as a key determinant of East-West migration. The most extensive EU enlargement in 2004 is a determinant of accelerated East-West labour mobility, but this oversimplification obscures other important factors. Latvia, one of the countries most affected by post-Soviet emigration, may have lost a fifth of its population since the 2004 EU enlargement, but emigration was primarily augmented by the country’s deep economic depression (2009–2011), compounded by the tough economic policies needed to be adopted as a precondition for joining the Eurozone in 2014. The economic crisis would have been a determinant anyway, which was simply accelerated by both EU’s free mobility and EU’s economic policy conditions. Recent research points out that those who felt alienated by the neoliberal culture promoted by Latvian elites with the aim of reconstructing national identity after independence away from the Soviet past, used emigration as a way of regaining emotional confidence through economic prosperity. As a result, their journeys and narratives of emigration reshaped public discourse on migration in Latvia (Ķešāne and Weyher 2020: 40) and created a favourable momentum for emigration. Romania lost half of its doctors in the first decade after joining the EU in 2007 (Adams 2019), but emigration had already become a defining feature of the country’s post-communist transition. Both those underskilled and those overskilled for the new free market conditions looked for opportunities elsewhere. When looking comparatively at welfare systems, it is possible to deduce that one of the causes for higher emigration from Slovakia or Poland might be the very low amounts of social spending in those two countries. In Slovenia, Hungary or the Czech Republic where there is higher social protection spending per capita (Kureková 2013: 728), emigration has remained at relatively low levels, even after EU enlargement. Emigration practices are therefore based on a set of complex and emotionally charged motives, which can quickly imbue economic or cultural desires with political considerations, which are more difficult to measure.

Despite the habit of talking collectively about Eastern European population movements, emigration, remigration and return patterns will thus vary according to the country’s economic situation, historical trends, political circumstances and legal policies and frameworks for migration. Population size, the misalignment of labour skills to market needs and recruitment gaps opening in key economic sectors abroad, play an important role but are not always key determining factors. The level of remittances, whether local home circumstances allow their reinvestment in consumption or rather small business development, as well as the strength of family ties can determine whether emigration becomes a permanent or circular phenomenon. Some migrants have more reasons for return: family and economic prospects. For those who might have entertained the desire to emigrate, who have transnational capital to trade (language and professional skills) and have cultivated transnational networks, unfavourable economic and political conditions back home can offer the final push to transform emigrating dreams and intentions into action. Reasons and motivations work both ways. A cross-country analysis of Eastern European emigration is therefore a challenging undertaking which in this chapter will be carried out by focussing on the story of emigration and the way it emerged as a trend, as a political discourse and as a public issue in Eastern Europe yet was always shaped by local circumstances. In order to analyse emigration, we have to look at both tangible and intangible reasons for emigrating, from politics and economics, to culture and public feeling.

The chapter starts with an examination of the pre and immediately post-1989 emigration that opened the first East-West mobility routes, which then developed according to the diversity of circumstances already outlined. The chapter continues with an analysis of tangible and symbolic factors that create an emigration imaginary. The discussion then moves to the rather patchy and reactive policy initiatives that have attempted to mitigate some of the more negative consequences of mass emigration. Current European wide ‘problems’ such as Roma mobilities and the pandemic are further testing the already inadequate policy responses to emigration. By way of conclusion, the chapter outlines some of the future challenges and possible solutions to Eastern European emigration.

The pre-1989 context

Numbers only tell a small part of the emigration story. It is easier to measure people coming into a country than it is to count those who are leaving and knowing why they are leaving and for how long (Škuflić and Vučković 2018: 1831). Despite this ambiguity and unreliability, numbers saturate and haunt both emigration research and public discourse. It is necessary therefore to provide some specific context to helps us understand numbers, ‘patterns’ and ‘flows.’ Numbers are only noticeable because something has been happening for a while, some trends have been forming, some patterns have sustained the emigration phenomenon for some time.

Until 1989, Eastern European emigration mainly consisted of political and religious dissidents escaping persecution, family members seeking reunification on humanitarian grounds and members of some ethnic minorities allowed to relocate to their ancestral homelands. The de facto disappearance of some geo-administrative structures during and after World War Two, such as Bukovina, led to the ‘resettlement’ of around 100,000 ethnic Germans (Volksdeutscher) to German territories and the emigration of 50,000 Jewish survivors to Israel (Fisher 2020: 2–3). Austria received almost 200,000 refugees in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian uprising and afterwards Austrian refugee camps temporarily homed many Eastern Europeans fleeing communism on their way to Western Europe or North America. The Federal Republic of Germany welcomed hundreds of thousands of Aussiedler (resettling ethnic Germans) from Poland (Miera 2008: 300) and Siebenbürgen Sachsen (Transylvanian Saxons) from Romania, the latter under certain financial arrangements (Koranyi and Wittlinger 2011: 101). A quarter of a million Jews left Poland during the communist period (Stola 2017: 169), due to a combination of communist repression and the dual nationalizing processes happening in Poland and Israel between the 1950s and the 1970s, forcing them out of Poland and attracting them to Israel.

These context-related, politically motivated and limited emigrations carved the initial paths away from Eastern Europe, but also had the effect of building the first collective imaginaries around emigration. The formation of these imaginaries was aided by the ‘luxury’ goods that émigrés occasionally smuggled to families back home, the diasporic voices giving testimony on Radio Free Europe or other banned radio stations that Eastern Europeans stealthily listened to, legal or illegal Western literature and cultural images that started to arrive with occasional film and television imports and particularly with difficult to censor satellite television in the 1980s. Communist propaganda worked hard to counteract any positive imaginaries with more gloomy ones, with some effect. The association of the act of emigration with that of treason or betrayal being one.

Pre-1989 emigration had a complex and intangible effect on Eastern European societies. Communist apparatchiks saw the emigration of ethnic others or of those politically uncomfortable as a purge that would unify the nation ethnically and politically. While the emigration of ‘uncomfortable subjects’ was secretly welcome, public negative associations, accusations of betrayal and widespread gossip about the dangers of illegal border crossings, became common. Like a virus that takes hold gradually, it would spread the ‘infection’ – the negative imaginary of emigration – long term. At the level of private opinion, on the other hand, positive associations emerged between emigration and standing up to oppression, whereby emigration began to be viewed as protest and as freedom. These diverging discourses will both re-emerge post-1989 in the framing of emigration in public discourse.

At a more demonstrable level, even before the 1990s, emigration created depopulation in some rural areas, infrastructure collapse and unprecedented changes in social structure. Transylvanian Saxon villages are an example of these phenomena (Hughes 2008). The emigration of German Saxons intensified the local competition between Romanians and Hungarians, the other two dominant ethnicities in Transylvania. When the Roma started to move from the edges into the centres of villages to occupy the houses formerly owned by the Germans, new ethnic tensions emerged, upsetting the traditional and hierarchical social and ethnic structure of Transylvanian villages. These effects of pre-1989 emigration were magnified after 1989. In 1990 a further 111,000 ethnic Germans left Romania for Germany (Andreescu et al. 2016: 232), which had a further devastating effect at the level of traditional rural economies in multicultural regions like Transylvania. Thirty years of readjustment and rebuilding later, the return of some migrants and buoyant diasporic tourism from former German residents are helping to revive local infrastructure and have brought back cultural and financial investment. However, as Hughes’ (2008) research outlines, the semi-forced emigration of the Germans led to a battleground between diverging values systems within the Saxon village structure and economy, while the occupation of vacated houses by Romanian and Roma populations are still creating unease among EU funded architectural conservation organizations. German emigration and the upsetting of traditional social hierarchies also created new mobility patterns, pushing more people to migrate both internally, to urban areas, and externally, with non-majority ethnicity and multilingualism being important determinants and enablers.

One other effect on post-1989 emigration was the ‘segregation’ of migration practices (Anghel 2016: 360). In multi-ethnic communities like Transylvania, Hungarians and Hungarian speaking Roma preferred to emigrate to Hungary. Romanians, on the other hand, pref...