Other Migrants and Migrants´ Others: Cultural citizenship and migration from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine to the Czech Republic
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper is based on the doctoral research at a critical re-examination of the concept of “integration of i/migrants” via a thorough empirical investigation of everyday experiences and adaptation strategies among the first generation i/migrants from three countries of the former Soviet Union (Belarus, Russia and Ukraine) in the Czech Republic. After the fall of the iron curtain, migration from and to countries of the former Eastern bloc has been perceived both as a significant achievement of transformation towards democracy and as a challenge to the established national order. “Cultural differences” - understood mainly in ethnonational and/or racial terms - between the migrants on the one hand, and the host societies on the other, has become one of the major concerns in the public discussion on migration and “cultural diversity” has been represented as the major challenge that has to be dealt with in order to re-achieve “social cohesion”. In the case of the Czech Republic immigration after 1989 has been represented as challenging the ethnically homogeneous unified national entity. Immigration from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine to the Czech Republic has been a particularly interesting case for the study of inclusion of i/migrants and related processes of Czech and post-Soviet nation-building. These i/migrants have been positioned in a specific configuration between closeness and distance towards the imagined Czech “core group”. On the one hand they have been perceived/perceive themselves as culturally similar referring to the ideologies of (white, Christian) Slavic nations and Slavic languages (as opposed to the non-Slavic “i/migrants from the East”); on the other hand not being Czechs and being the “i/migrants from the East” they also represent the Other. In this paper, I will analyze how are the collective representations (of the “Russians”, “Ukrainians”, “Belarusians”, “migrants from the East” etc.) related both to the past and present migrations negotiated in the process of i/migrants civic inclusion/exclusion in the Czech Republic in the context of the history of Soviet colonialism, post-communist transformation towards capitalism and democracy and wider processes of nation-building in the Central Eastern Europe. I will use the concept of civic inclusion (Alexander 2006) and cultural citizenship (Ong 1996) to interpret the narrated experiences of i/migrants from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia who came to live to the Czech Republic after 1989. I will identify the opportunities and constraints for their inclusion in the complicated process of identification with variously defined imagined communities as well as facing their hegemonic representations of oppressors, low-skilled workers, poor, mafioso etc. Finally, I discuss my findings in the framework of the concept of assimilation that despite of its wide refusal by both political and academic community seems relevant to the observations of the processes of inclusion/exclusion of i/migrants in my study. Biographical-narrative and thematic interviews with thirty migrants are the core of the analyzed material. |
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