My national identity has always been ‘the other one’. I moved to Israel
aged six and my childhood was filled with perpetual torture inflicted
on me by my peers, relentlessly pointing out the fact that I did not
belong there: ‘Go back to Russia!’ ‘I’m Ukrainian!’
I would answer, knowing that it made no difference to people who
couldn’t even find it on a map. Coming from a city in East Ukraine and
speaking no Ukrainian, I embraced my ‘Russian’ identity, befriended
young Russian-speaking people my age. It made no difference whether they
had emigrated from Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan. The structure of the Soviet Union was the country of our parents. To those of us born before 1991,
it was our homeland. The results of this method of self-identification
hit me in the face when I encountered youths from current, post-Orange
Revolution Ukraine on a scholarship to an international summer
university in Germany. Not even
speaking the language which has now become an inseparable part of
Ukrainian independence, I no longer belonged in a country I named as my
homeland for 25 years.
Migration is a norm of the 21st century. With the
forced socialisation upon which Israel was built, annulling all
characteristics of previous identity in favour of creating a new loyal
citizen is experiencing a revival. It mostly affects immigrants from
non-European, muslim countries. In 2005 writer Matti Bunzl claimed that Europe’s rising islamophobia was a ‘part of a wide-open debate on the future of the muslim presence in Europe’. Austria’s right-wing freedom party attacked Turkey’s accession to the EU
as a threat to the fabric of Europe’s existence, claiming Turkey lacked
the bases of European culture and values. ‘When the freedom party
abandoned its traditional nationalism in the mid-nineties, it embraced a
new exclusionary project. Instead of the ethnic community it cast
itself as the protector of Europe,’ writes Bunzl.
In 2010 former German bank executive Thilo Sarrazin’s scandalous bestseller Germany does away with itself (Deutschland schafft sich ab)
attacked Turkish immigration in Germany, although it has been followed
up by a contra-book from writers of multicultural backgrounds, Manifesto of the Many. Germany and Britain’s leaders expressed their disbelief in multiculturalism. French president Nicolas Sarkozy was expelling Europeans in the form of Roma immigrants in a country where his arrival instilled the 2007 inauguration of the French ministry of immigration and national identity. Across the EU, Hungary’s elections culminated in a sweeping majority for the radical right wing. In an article published in the New York Review of Books Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk
condemns these tendencies. He accredits them partially to Europe’s lack
of experience in comparison to Americans, ‘when it comes to living with
those whose religion, skin color or cultural identity are different
from their own’.
This gap is being filled in Europe though, with the international erasmus student network (ESN), which has turned student exchange into a widespread norm all over Europe. ESN currently tends to 150,000 students across 34 European countries. Since its second year of existence it has enjoyed an average annual growth rate of 12.3%. Founded four years after the Schengen agreement in 1985, ESN has become the easiest way for young Europeans to spend time abroad. German-Dutch history PhD student Tobias Temming studied in Amsterdam and Granada.
‘I could have chosen to finish my studies at 25 and then work,’
explains Tobias. ‘I don’t know what better investment you could do with
your life than learning another language and living for a year in a
foreign country.’ With nationalists turning to the ‘protection of
Europe’ rather than the ‘protection of the homeland’, it is fair to say
that the erasmus generation is the face of future Europe. ‘Precisely
because the world is their oyster, they feel a stronger sense of
attachment to Europe than they might have had had they not left Europe,’
explains Till van Rahden, Canada
research chair in German and European studies at the university of
Montreal. ‘Bracketing all the internal European differences, one doesn’t
quite realise what’s specific and unique about Europe across national
boundaries and as a political project, until one has lived outside of
Europe.’ As for Tobias, the investment grew – the second erasmus turned
into an internship at the German embassy in Lima, where he met his
Peruvian wife. As he puts it, the mentality differences between them are
not strictly ‘German’ and ‘Peruvian’ - rather ‘European’ and ‘Latin’.
Café Babel, 05.04.2011
אין תגובות:
הוסף רשומת תגובה