The reenchantment of culture and flexible citizenship in a hardening world

Ideology and life strategies in middle-class migration to Europe and beyond

Virtual Workshop at the Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest

in co-operation with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

26 November 2021

Convenors

NYÍRI Pál (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Centre for Social Sciences) and XIANG Biao (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)

The quest for a better life that drives global migration flows, from boat people to students, is overwhelmingly understood as economic accumulation. Yet as the global balance of economic power shifts and as the nature of work and migration governance changes, migration that is driven by consumption rather than accumulation is becoming more visible. In Europe, an increasing share of middle-class migrants, both within the continent and from outside it, are seeking the consumption of a particular lifestyle and environment. Their destinations are often Southern and Eastern European countries that successfully market an authentic "European lifestyle" at lower costs (Nyíri and Beck 2020).

For the global middle class, Europe - in contradistinction to the "world cities" of liquid, hybrid ultramodernity (Ong and Roy 2011) - has long been a purveyor of slowness, luxury, "authenticity," and purity in such things as food, cosmetics, or "culture." Such ideas are central to the ongoing tide of nativist sentiment -- but equally central to attracting the "tourist gaze" of a consuming Other (Urry 1990, 2011). Nativism often goes hand-in-hand with opposition to immigration; yet nativism, which emphasises authenticity and wholesomeness, can paradoxically also be a draw to lifestyle migrants, many of whom seek to move away from societies they perceive as crowded, competitive, polluted, expensive, and materialistic environments and in some cases seek to satisfy a nostalgia for a simpler life and more meaningful human relations they can no longer find in their native environments (cf. Constable 2003, Toyota and Xiang 2012). For such migrants, an attractive lifestyle can be heavily ideologically laden.

Well-to-do migrants from outside the West, Chinese in particular, have been recognised as expert practitioners of "flexible citizenship" (Ong 1999). Yet as a new non-Western consumer class emerges in a world racked by a backlash against the liquid and the hybrid and a rising "reenchantment of culture" (Ong 2005), Europe increasingly becomes the unadulterated Other there to be consumed. In this quest for authenticity - in a particular variety of a Polányian "double movement" - "flexible citizenship" may be more widely practiced than before, yet it may have lost much of its emotional appeal. Middle-class migrants may be flexible citizens, but they want to achieve or recover a sense of hard cultural citizenship they feel they have lost or never had. In this sense, we can speak, for some, of a "reproduction migration."

In this optics, lifestyle migrations may intersect in unexpected ways with currents of ideologies of environmental, cultural, and racial purity. This is what happened in Hungary, where an investment-immigration programme successfully targeted middle-class Chinese in 2013-17 even as the country made global headlines with its supposedly uncompromising opposition to immigration. Simultaneously, Prime Minister Orbán Viktor declared: "We do accept real refugees, those who are fleeing political correctness in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and France.”

While middle-class Western Europeans moving to the East in the decade after the end of the Cold War may have seen themselves as harbingers of cosmopolitanism and teachers of cool modernity, these days they may be regarding themselves - like religious settler colonists in North and Central America and Siberia in the 17th-19th centuries - as refugees seeking an authentic, white, Christian haven (Le Figaro 2016). Neither group of migrants has much sympathy for the left-wing politics of "inclusion" that calls into question Europe's historical centrality and seeks to relativise its sociopolitical model.

Format

Our aim is to seek the most productive lines of inquiry into the developments described above (thus we do not look for coherence, a single focus etc.). Four short texts will be circulated ahead of the workshop. The discussion will be organised into four sessions, each of which will aim to address a different set of questions. In each session, we will depart from empirical cases and proceed towards comparison and generalisation. The speakers listed under the sessions are expected to play a central role in kicking off the discussion, but not to give formal papers.

The workshop is planned in online format.

Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86297347927?pwd=NEFoY0s2cHhZOGdFWWJaY1VjdFlJZz09

Passcode: 419477

9.00-9.20 Introductory remarks

Professor TRENCSÉNYI Balázs, Central European University, Vienna

9.30-11.30 Migration decision making

One way to understand the shift in migration driven by economic accumulation to lifestyle consumption is, in Weberian terms, as a shift from Zweckrationalität (instrumental rationality) to Wertrationalität (value rationality). Alternatively, as Biao has done, one can conceptualise it as a shift from production to reproduction migration.

• Could this Weberian distinction be useful in understanding lifestyle migration as motivated both economically and ideologically?
• How to make use of this distinction to reformulate gravity-based push-pull models in migration theory? If we take a closer look at where are those aspirations-ideologies- values are grounded, we could rather identify them as push factors. Yet, they continue to play a significant role as the most important implicit preconceptions/ presumptions about the destination country.
• How useful is the production / reproduction distinction? Or should the role of social reproduction be acknowledged in shaping migration decision-making more generally in shaping both the symbolic (Wert) and economic (Zweck) landscape of mobilities?

Professor XIANG Biao, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology & University of Oxford

Professor Susana NAROTZKY, University of Barcelona

Professor Pei-chia LAN, National Taiwan University

11.30-12.45 Lunch

12.45-14.30 Generational reproduction / parenting / education

What is the role of children in middle-class migration? How generalisable is their centrality that we observe in our case? Is it sufficient to subsume children in the framework of reproduction or is it important to regard them as agents shaping migration? How is middle-class migration shaped by shifting family ideologies, and how does it shape (or challenge) them (such as the ambivalent relationship to "neofamilism" in the case of the Chinese middle class)? Is the concept of the "global care chain" (Nancy Fraser) useful here?

Dr Krzysztof KARDASZEWICZ, University of Warsaw

Ms BECK Fanni, Central European University, Vienna

Dr Anders Sybrandt HANSEN, Aarhus University

Professor Andrew KIPNIS, Chinese University of Hong Kong

14.40-16.40 Destination countries: a symbolic and economic geography

• What is the destination country’s symbolic meaning for immigrants? What role do ideologies play in choosing a destination country? How should we define these ideologies – what would count as ideology in this context? Where are those ideologies grounded?
• Reenchantment of culture and authenticity: Europe functions as a purveyor of cultural authenticity, environmental awareness, and affordable lifestyle to a global middle class. Our Chinese interlocutors have been attracted specifically to a European rather than an Anglo-American version of modernity, which they perceive as more capitalistic and therefore more similar to China's ("pastoral occidentalism" in Fran Martin's term). But how special is Europe's place as a destination of middle-class immigration? What do we know about the scale of this phenomenon? What other places in the world serve a similar role? Is the quest for authenticity/purity (both in physical and spiritual terms), an important driver of migration? What are the differences between immigration from outside Europe and intra-European migration in terms of the projection of "pastoral occidentalism"? Do Eastern / Southern / Northern Europe have a particular place in this imagination?
• Transnationalism is enabled by a form of arbitrage of differing and unequal economic and social regimes (geoarbitrage – Hayes, 2014). How are destination countries positioned economically in relation to sending countries? To what extent do these economic determinants/structures produce ideologies or the other way around? – How should we understand the interplay between economy and ideology?
• How should we understand ‘less developed country citizenship’ in terms of social prestige? How should we reinterpret/revise the notion of flexible citizenship in order to accommodate these developments (or rather retrogression/backsliding)?

Mr Stephen DAVIES, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw

Professor FEISCHMIDT Margit, Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest

Dr Matthew HAYES, St Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick

16.40- 17.00 Coffee

17.00-19.00 Migration and social stratification: a new global middle class

• How does migration both reflect and constitute social stratification? How could we connect that to the idea of production-reproduction migration? Is the "global middle class" a useful term and, if so, is there a useful definition for it? Does it have a shared class identity? Is there a possibility for criticism of sending-country class structures within this transnational middle class?
• Racial, spatial, temporal reconfiguration: Is there a relationship between this "global middle class" and a particular temporality (present- rather than future-oriented), set of values ("postmaterial"), and spatiality (downscaling rather than upscaling)? How does it reconfigure global racial hierarchies?

 

 

Dr Sarah KUNZ, University of Bristol

Dr Theodoros RAKOPOULOS, University of Oslo

Dr John OSBURG, University of Rochester