4/11/2015: PCE Colloquium “Post-Soviet Diasporas in their ‘Homelands’: Between Isolation, Integration and Europeanisation” by Christin Hess
Post-Soviet Diasporas in their ‘Homelands’: Between Isolation, Integration and Europeanisation
By Christin Hess (FASoS)
Politics and Culture in Europe (PCE) in collaboration with MACIMIDE
ABSTRACT: There have long been vocal calls in migration research to transcend the singularities of national case studies in order to enhance our understanding of what separates general from particular tendencies of migration and integration, particularly in the European context. By the same token, hardly any comparative studies exist tracing the development of post-Soviet diasporas in Europe – notably among them the Germans, Greeks, Poles, Finns and Latvians. This may be because the return to their ‘historical homelands’ – sometimes inadvertently likened to their ‘unmaking’ (Munz and Ohliger, 2003) – can at first reading appear a straightforward process: long-lost “racial brothers”, persecuted in exile, are embarking on their “final march home” to a welcoming homeland deemed lost forever…