Keywords

Introduction

Since the late 1990s, international organizations, European state development agencies, and NGOs have viewed increasingly migrants as potential drivers of and “investors” in development in their countries of origin. As a leitmotiv of this discourse, migrants are portrayed as agents of development via their associations and remittance practices or through their return (CIM/GIZ 2012; IOM and MPI 2012). The optimistic policy framing of the migration-development nexus, referring to a set of multifaceted interdependencies between the two complex social phenomena, has also provoked a growing academic interest in migrants’ transnational practices of giving and their potential to alleviate poverty in their countries of origin. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to single out the effect of various forms of remittances on transformative social change in the countries of origin (Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou 2016; Lacroix et al. 2016; Page and Mercer 2012). While the overwhelming majority of research on the topic has focused on financial flows at the macro level, the micro-level power dynamics of migrants’ collective involvement in concrete transnational aid practices has so far attracted less attention.

This chapter provides an insight into how the discourse of migrants’ contributions to developmental transition is put into concrete practice in the case of Moldova. More precisely, I highlight Moldovan migrants’ subjective motivations to engage in collective transnational aid efforts, understood as transnational practices, in the same vein as other transnational activities, such as return visits and cross-border communication. This encompasses both financial transfers and other forms of remitting practices, commonly known as social remittances, such as the transfer of ideas, behaviors, values, norms knowledge, and qualifications between migrants’ destination countries and places of origin (Levitt 1998).

Whereas most studies of remittances focus on the practices that individual migrants transfer to their countries of origin, this chapter provides an insight into the performances of migrant organizations. It thus highlights aspects of collective remittances, which are exchanged by migrants in their role as organizational members in settings such as migrant associations, church groups, and political parties (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011).

The main argument here is that collective remittance practices emerge from both migrants’ personal everyday lives, connecting multiple localities, and their past and current visions of their home country. Thereby, the chapter aims to contribute to the broader theoretical discussion on linkages between patterns of remittance as social practices of Eastern European migrants living in EU countries and the development transition in the Eastern European “neighborhood.”

I will begin by setting out the theoretical and geographical terrain of the study. I will then identify four types of migrants’ motivations for taking part in aid practices directed toward Moldova (e.g., support of local hospitals and schools). The first two categories of motivations relate to migrants’ individual opinions and attitudes, which are strongly interwoven with their multi-sited social lives and migration experiences, including their integration in different social and spatial contexts and experiences of deskilling, understood as being highly qualified but employed in low-status and low-paid jobs. In section three, I will introduce two patterns of aid practices that are shaped by the home country context—by Moldova’s communist past and the country’s marginalized place within the socio-spatial configuration of Europe today. I will conclude with a sketch of migrants’ personal reflections of their remitting practices in relation to the aid practices performed by mainstream development agencies. This will demonstrate that significant differences of opinion exist between migrants and development agencies concerning the nature of cross-border aid practices. Of particular note in this context is the migrants’ rejection of top-down approaches and the professional “charity practices” performed by aid agencies.

Setting the Scene: The Theoretical and Geographical Terrain

The 2000s witnessed a boom in studies on the impact of migration on various social, political, and cultural outcomes. This body of literature established that besides monetary flows, which imply multifaceted practices, exchanges, and social consequences that reach far beyond the economic realm, non-monetary flows, such as the circulation of ideas, also influence the sociopolitical environment of migrant countries of origin (Boccagni et al. 2016; Lacroix 2014; Piper 2009). In addition, since the transnational turn in the 1990s, migrant associations have increasingly been considered as members of “transnational civil society,” or as actors within transnational spaces (Faist 2000). They have since become a familiar motif in debates within different disciplines where a spatial framework that privileges the transnational is commonly deployed (Mullings 2012). For these reasons, a range of international development agencies have launched migrant association-led programs aiming at maximizing their development potential through financial and technical support, and at bringing the associations’ activities implemented in migrant-sending countries, including Moldova, into the development establishment (IOM and MPI 2012). So far, however, the academic literature on the topic of the diffusion of transnational collective practices has heavily concentrated on Western European countries and the USA on the one hand and African, Caribbean, and Asian countries on the other (Grabowska and Garapich 2016). Although in the past few years, the body of literature on patterns of intra-European remittance practices has been growing, the social practices contributing to the transformation in migrants’ countries of origin within Europe have received less attention (Sinatti and Horst 2015). Yet, as Castles stressed: “The notion of social transformation signifies profound structural modifications of social relations” (2016, p. 19). The transformation in Central and Eastern European countries from communist and centrally planned economies to democratic systems with free market conditions has not only been geographically uneven, with some leftovers from the communist era, and with delayed convergence with Western democratic countries in many spheres of life, but has also profoundly changed social relations. These conditions sometimes create context-dependent gaps for social remittances that can be captured in transnational social spaces (Faist 2000) or transnational social fields (Glick Schiller 2005), for instance within the Moldovan migrant community in Western European countries.

Turning to the geographical background of this study, the small Republic of Moldova—situated between Romania and Ukraine—is one of Europe’s lesser-known countries. Yet, with its intense recent experience of migration, it presents a fertile territory for an in-depth study of intra-European migration-transformation dynamics, with special emphasis on the role of migrant associations. Since Moldova achieved independence in 1991, the country has witnessed out-migration on a large scale. Estimates of the number of migrants range up to 50 percent of the economically active population, or one-third of the total population (UNDP 2019). Financial remittances account for 43 percent of the country’s GDP (IMF 2015), which makes Moldova one of the world’s top recipients of financial remittances per capita. The country’s large-scale emigration has been accompanied by a rise in formal and non-formal organizational activities aimed at Moldova, as well as a grouping of activities under umbrella schemes in migrant destination countries (Cheianu-Andrei 2013). However, most migrant associations are small and volunteer-run, and their role in Moldova’s development remains modest due to shortcomings in their organizational and financial capacities. Furthermore, according to migrants, the morphological transformation of their community toward becoming a “Moldovan community of transnational aid practices” is still in the making due to the relatively recent emigration of Moldovans toward Western Europe and the migrants’ rather weak social integration in their host societies (Odermatt 2017).

The policy discourse of migrants’ involvement in development raises a couple of questions: What are Moldovan migrants’ subjective motivations for participating in collective transnational giving? And what are the migrants’ own reflections on their patterns of remittance practices? I have here opted for a transnational lens in order to answer these questions, taking into account that migrants’ border-crossing aid practices refer to multiple social spaces and reflect different senses of belonging (Glick Schiller et al. 1999). This has allowed me to see how migrants’ ways of being and their ways of belonging affect their collective practices of aid-giving in a reciprocal process. Additionally, as mentioned above, I also deploy a transnational social field approach (Amelina and Faist 2012; Faist 2010). I here conceptualize migrant civil society as a transnational social field in which “transnational spaces comprise combinations of ties and their substance, positions and networks of organizations that cut across the borders of at least two nation states” (Faist 2010, p. 21). This means that I will here trace the transnational social field within which migrants appear not as foreigners to be differentiated, or natives in a specific geographical context, but as actors that connect one another through their collective engagement. Simultaneously, I will analyze field-specific symbolic, organizational, and economic resources. These resources include, for example, the ability of individuals, such as migrants and their associations, to participate in multiple localities (Amelina and Faist 2012). By applying this notion of a transnational field, I seek to delineate the genesis of Moldovan migrant associations as transnational social formations, as well as the particular macro-societal context in which these associations operate, such as the international development aid system. Accentuating the relationships that unfold across several receiving countries has allowed me to access a core group of active migrant leaders living in different countries, who maintain strong transnational social networks across several migrant host countries and with Moldova. For the investigation of the internal logic of interpretations and performances around migrants’ collective performance, I engaged with Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice (1985) and subsequently define the “Moldovan migrant community” as “a community of practice and everyday lives.”

The data collection took place over a period of one year, as part of my multi-sited doctoral research (Odermatt 2017). Employing Marcus’s approach (1995), I followed the “discourse on migrants’ contribution to development” within the transnational social field of migrant civil society and within the transnational field of development organizations across seven European countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Moldova, Switzerland, and the UK. In total, I conducted 84 in-depth interviews with a heterogeneous sample of migrants of various ages, genders, migratory experiences, and occupational backgrounds (low-skilled and high-skilled occupations) and with a variegated group of aid professionals. Additionally, I participated in a wide range of events addressed to migrants and development actors, and drew on a set of further ethnographic fieldwork methods, such as different visual methods and ethnographic walks. Finally, I applied a matched sample approach (Mazzucato 2009) that consisted of four development project settings applied as in-depth transnational case studies.

On Channeling the Good Spirits: Migrants’ Personal Migration Experiences as a Motivation for Collective Remitting

In this section, I will introduce the forms of aid practice that emerged as a result of the lack of sociocultural integration in Moldovan migrants’ host societies and their deskilling. Besides impacting upon migrants’ collective commitments toward Moldova, these migration characteristics are all typical of the complex and dynamic intra-European East-West migration currently taking place, but have to date not been widely examined in the majority of studies on Moldovan migration (Odermatt 2017). I will here analyze the impact of these migration characteristics on the social process of creating a “Moldovan community of transnational collective practice.” To this end, I opted for a processual conceptualization of the migrant transnational community, as “a process in which space, place and time are not static but continuously used, imagined, and negotiated in the construction of both bounded and unbounded identities, communities, and nation-states” (Mavroudi 2007, p. 473). I here investigate migrants’ views on power relations, inclusion and exclusion in the process of their transnational migrant civil society formation, and their definitions of connectedness to Moldova. Finally, I will highlight how within the field logic (nomos), specific categories of practice arise, based on different field-specific symbolic, organizational, and economic resources (Bourdieu 1985).

Belonging and Self-Representation

One particularity of the Moldovan migrant community, compared to other migrant groups, is that the chairpersons of migrant associations are not necessarily highly integrated in their host societies (Lacroix 2011 on Polish migrant organizations in the UK, see Odermatt 2017). According to the core group of migrant leaders, the rather weak social inclusion of many Moldovan migrants in their host countries presents a serious impediment to becoming a “Moldovan community of transnational aid practices.” In their opinion, migrants mostly get involved in local activities because “they feel lonely.” The associations provide them with a place abroad that feels warm and familiar. In the migrant leaders’ opinion, community-related activities with the sole aim of meeting up with other co-citizens and to spend quality time in Paris, Rome, or elsewhere, are unacceptable collective practices. They do not fit into the common shared understanding of development-oriented performances directed toward Moldova. Moreover, these engagements are even regarded as an “ethnic mobility trap” in migrants’ host countries that can hinder the advancement of Moldovans’ collective activities toward transnational humanitarian practices. As Ion (translator and writer, 34, Paris) stated:

Most migrants are not well-integrated, because they think they will go back one day, and they feel lonely. That’s why they create associations, so that they feel less isolated. But they have not yet understood that you don’t need to create an association to organize a barbeque or picnic [laughs]! That’s ridiculous, and that’s why our activities remain so communal, and we don’t develop in a professional way.

While living physically isolated in the spatial and material peripheries of European centers, in Paris, London, or Rome, some migrants aspire to claim a place in the heart of the transnational migrant civil society. Thus, the participants’ overriding motivation to engage in this type of collective remitting is a “performative act of belonging” (Fortier 2000). Put differently, the field logics of these practices is the quest to belong in the migrants’ transnational field.

Another reason why the majority of migrant leaders consider their community morphology as still being too inward-oriented is that cultural activities (such as festivals and concerts) are perceived as too dominant in relation to other practices such as transnational activities directed toward Moldova. In general, the relevance of the leisure side of migrant associations is well recognized, as cultural activities can provide migrants with a welcome distraction from the everyday hardships many of them face abroad (Boccagni 2017). Furthermore, these can also generate much-needed emotional support, a means to escape from their loneliness and isolation, which most migrants do not receive in the local social environments of their domiciles. Christina (housewife, 29, London) commented on the need felt by some research participants for more opportunities in this area:

We would like to have more cultural events for us, events where we can dress up nicely. Real evenings out, where we can forget about our everyday worries. Something nice for us, our community, not only charity events for people in Moldova. We are missing these kinds of events, because we are not fully integrated into British society.

Simply put, and contrary to the above-mentioned statements of migrant leaders, Christina seeks “community” and not “transnational solidarity” in the common understanding of cross-border development practices as expressed by migrant leaders. Although some migrant associations try to combine these two aspects, for instance by organizing fundraising events in restaurants or bars, often in combination with concerts, plays, or lectures performed by Moldovans. Nonetheless, throughout this study, narratives surrounding cultural activities emerged as concise examples of struggles within the migrant space over shared commitments to the value of their common associative practices (Schatzki 2001).

Lastly, an engagement in the diaspora can also provide some participants with a space for self-performance and publicity, which most of them cannot achieve in their destination countries because of their geographically and socially marginalized positions. Once again, this attitude is criticized by other interviewees, who see this as a cult of self-positioning, as a possibility to become, via development interventions, the center of attention in the local or transnational migrant space, and in the Moldovan media. As Rosa (entrepreneur, 43, London) stated:

Every charity activity, even the smallest events, very quickly do the rounds in our diaspora and on the internet. Everybody is always extremely keen that the other leaders see pictures of their events and of the celebrities they invite in the Moldovan media.

In summary, the Moldovan migrants’ rather weak social integration in their destination countries can reinforce the need to belong either to the local migrant community abroad or to the transnational migrant civil society, encompassing several destination countries as well as Moldova. According to migrant leaders who are highly engaged in aid activities directed toward Moldova, however, the motivation to engage in collective aid practices in order to belong to a community is not an accepted motive for a collective engagement. In their opinion, it prevents the capacity-building of migrant cross-border humanitarian interventions in Moldova.

On Becoming a Person Again: Remittance Practices Shaped by Migrants’ Professional Skills

Moldovan migrant leaders exhibit similar characteristics across all the countries studied here. They have a high level of education—most chairpersons of associations have a university-level education—and a high level of networking capacities. They are described by migrants as a “specific type of leader personality” with strong ties to Moldova. Yet, in contrast to other migrant groups, a specific feature of Moldovan leaders is that only a few of them pursue high-skilled or medium-skilled jobs abroad (compare Pirkallainen et al., 2013 by reference to Somali associations in Finland). The majority of Moldovan migrant leaders are high-skilled migrants pursuing low-skilled jobs. This current phenomenon of deskilling among Moldovan migrants living in the Western European countries studied here proved to be a determining motive for participants to engage in development-oriented practices. For many high-skilled migrants working in low-skilled jobs, transnational collective volunteer efforts toward Moldova present a welcome opportunity to apply their individual skills and resources, which they cannot use in their downgraded professional occupations. In other words, they have the freedom to share their passions. The underlining mission of this category of practice is to overcome discrepancies between migrants’ competences and social positions in the host countries as well as a temporal restoration of their professional skills and identities. As Anna (translator/writer, 45, Rome) stated:

We conduct our activities not only for people in Moldova, but also for ourselves, for all of us who are not able to draw on our full professional and individual potentials and our passions, because all of these resources are not in demand in our jobs.

Boccagni (2017) maintained that while the immigrant condition itself is for many migrants a source of lesser social status, over time there seems to be a cognitive adaptation. This is also the case for Anna. For her, a transnational engagement can be understood as a coping strategy to counter the downward socioeconomic mobility that she experienced through migration—from a university lecturer with a national reputation in Moldova to an anonymous care worker in Italy—and to restore her social status.

To sum up, Moldovan migrants’ collective remittance patterns emerge from a complex interplay of mostly understudied migration experiences, such as migrants’ rather weak sociocultural integration in their host societies or their experienced deskilling. Thus, similarly to other migrant groups, Moldovans’ underpinning motivations to engage in collective transnational aid efforts are multifaceted and integrated into different aspects of their everyday lives and biographical projects (Erdal and Borchgrevink 2016).

National Historic Determinants and Core-Periphery Dynamics of the Home Nation

In this section, I will present two aspects that influence Moldovan migrants’ collective remitting, which I argue have not been sufficiently materialized in the academic debate. These are Moldova’s national historical context and the broader geographical core-periphery dynamics of the sending nation.

Overcoming the Soviet Past: Regaining Confidence Through Collective Remittance Practices

The rather negative stance of migrants toward their home country’s Soviet past proved to be an important determinant for cultivating collective aid-oriented links with Moldova. According to Montanari (2001), a dominant national discourse in Romania and Moldova is a resignation and passivity toward their fate—a sort of suffering without rebellion, which is present in national myths and popular art. History has taught Moldovans to be patient, because every savior in the past turned out to be an exploiter, from the Hungarians and the Turks to the Russians (Ammassari 2001). This historical and cultural legacy of oppression in the past is strongly present in the narratives on migrants’ experiences during the Soviet Republic of Moldova. Thus, for some migrants, transnational migrant civil society offers a welcome space for rising from their felt oppression by the Russians, or as a meaning-making resource to leave the past behind and to regain confidence. The following quote by Vasili (physicist, 39, Paris) illustrates that individually perceived oppression is still deeply rooted in Moldovan migrant biographies, even if they consider themselves professionally successful and well-integrated:

My personal motivation for my associational engagement toward Moldova is to take a sort of revenge. Ehm, not a personal revenge, but ehm a revenge for my country, because Moldovans have been badly treated for a long time. We were always seen as second-class citizens, and I want to show that this is not true, that we are capable of doing things, and that we are capable of doing these things well.

The interviewees not only stressed that Soviet imperialism had diminished their self-esteem, but also highlighted that some of their co-citizens compensated for their negative experiences in the past through collective giving, for instance via their own self-seeking practices. The narrative account by Oleg (44, project coordinator, Padova) reflected this motivation:

We are like the typical character in Gogol’s stories, the simple-minded peasant, the small man who wants to gain more dignity after years of oppression. I think this is the reason why so many organizations have been established. Migrants are committed to gaining personal advantages over others, because of their inferiority complex vis-à-vis the Russians, who marked us as second-class citizens. Ehm, how can I say this, by having their own associations, and their projects, and by calling themselves ‘presidents,’ they boost their low self-esteem.

Moreover, memories of the Soviet past can push migrants’ aspirations to move beyond the above-mentioned cultural activities carried out in the host countries toward more transnational practices. As Dragomir’s (construction worker, 48, Paris) stated:

We need to show others that we are able to organize development activities back home, activities that go beyond festivals. We need to show them that we are not here to sing and dance. It would be catastrophic to only do that, because it would mean that those who put us down are right; those who held us back from developing and from having a normal life for many years.

Evidently, migrants’ aspirations to (re-)gain confidence by means of aid-oriented engagements as a pattern of transnational giving illustrates the importance of understanding the ways in which the past is culturally constructed and selectively applied in migrants’ contemporary transnational social practices (Verdery 2005). Viewing migrants’ transnational efforts as an articulation of dealing with their own Soviet past goes beyond the few well-known assumptions about collective practices of post-socialist migrant communities in Western Europe, such as their lack of institutional trust or the expected symbolic practices of an elusive “Communist nostalgia” (Slavoka 2017). Therefore, I argue that there is more to individual and collective memory than the conceptual fuzziness surrounding nostalgification in post-socialist studies, which often erases the complexity and ambiguity of memory practices.

Putting Moldova Center-Stage: (Re-)Connecting Moldova with Europe Through Collective Remittance Practices

A last important aspect of collective transnational aid practices among Moldovan migrants is their home country’s marginalized place within today’s Europe. The Republic of Moldova at the presumed margins of Europe, wherever we claim to fix its eastern borders, is not what one would call a press darling, nor is it a transnational hub. The capital city Chisinau stands in sharp contrast to busy “Eurocities” such as Paris or London, woven with international relations, attracting and hosting the world. It is precisely this spatial European core-periphery dynamic that for some Moldovan migrants presents a motivation for becoming engaged in cross-border activities. These migrants’ incentives to engage in activities in Moldova is that they consider their engagement a form of regaining space or (re-)connecting their marginalized home country with Europe.

First, some of the interviewees are generally optimistic about the country’s prospects and confident in their ability to contribute to positive change in Moldova through their collective transnational remittance practices, although their home country is also marginalized in international funding programs. As Kiril (IT engineer, 38, Paris) stated:

Even if we are not yet a member of the EU, I want to show the members that we have things to share, like ehm our rich cultural heritage and our multiculturalism. Our country is still left out in many European programs for NGOs. But I want to show Europe that we exist. Yes, that’s my aim. With our activities, I want to show that it’s not only political or geo-political ideology that creates a country, but also culture, and ehm grassroots projects, like we do. And that we can move things together.

Second, the fact that Moldova is not a press darling in the migrant-receiving countries studied here has generated two trends. First, the little attention the country receives in public discourse can foster specific forms of relationships between Moldovan migrant associations and Western European NGOs. Liliana (34, freelancer, Paris) touched on this point:

I’ not exaggerating, but we have done consulting for French development NGOs who wanted to get engaged in Moldova, and they really don’t know anything about our country. One was a big international NGO and people there knew everything about Africa, but when it came to Moldova, all of a sudden there was a big silence. Ehm, that’s why I think our association could create more links and connect NGOs here better with Moldova.

This quote shows that Moldova’s unpopularity can motivate migrants to become bridge-builders for development NGOs in their countries of residence and to bring Moldova to international attention. The role of migrant associations is, however, not restricted to connecting development NGOs with Moldova. Collective aid practices are also seen as a means of (re)-connecting their home country with Europe more broadly. Here, the motivation of migrants for creating transnational links with Moldova is to belong to Europe, which is regarded by the majority of interviewees as a territory of “progress” or “open-mindedness.”

The second narrative theme emerged with regard to the core-periphery dynamics of the origin country, namely migrants’ frustration about Western Europeans’ general disregard vis-à-vis their home country. The perception of Moldova as “isolated outsiders” at the territorial edge of the EU is viewed by some leaders as (re-)enforcing parochialism rather than helping to improve the socioeconomic situation in Moldova. In their opinion, the public neglect of Moldova and its attributed backwardness preserves provincial practices in Moldova. This impairs the capacity-building of migrant associations in promoting transformative change in Moldova. Svetlana (journalist, 54, Geneva), a migrant leader, expressed her frustration with Europe’s view of Moldova as a remote eastern flank:

We are a territory in Europe, but we are talking about a country that has never had a say, and as long as Europe treats us as some sort of province, without a genuine interest in us, the backward provincial practices in Moldova and in our diaspora will continue. I don’t think there will be positive changes like this. Some of our migrant leaders will just continue to create associations for their own self-seeking interests, like politicians pursue their own interests in Moldova, because nobody pays the country any attention.

Similarly, some interviewees viewed the emphasis on Moldova’s “otherness” by mainstream development actors as unprofessional. Consequently, they rejected their development interventions in the country and were not interested in teaming up with aid agencies. Svetlana (factory worker and artist, 55, Munich) voiced a typical view on this issue:

We often visited German development programs near the hospital that our organization supports. One was a training seminar by the German ministry on how to write job applications. I was standing there and I thought: Do I see this right? This is very unprofessional. It doesn’t work like that in Moldova at all. This is all nonsense! You can’t teach people how to apply ‘European-style’ there. It’s a completely different system.

By contrast, other migrants engage in activities aimed precisely at supporting development NGOs to enhance their understanding of the “Moldovan way of functioning,” for instance by matching them with potentially trustworthy and reliable Moldovan counterparts. As Natasha (shop-assistant, 48, Paris) stated:

Most of the Western NGOs don’t know how to judge our people, because they don’t know the system. And sometimes, they don’t even know that you need to check, double check and triple check with whom you want to work in Moldova. And we want to help them with that.

Natasha’s account is an illustrative example of how migrants negotiate meanings of their home country’s sociopolitical place in today’s world in their transnational collective activities. These forms of transnational aid engagement can be understood as a mixture of migrants’ compensation for an experienced “backwardness” and a growing malaise about their home country’s image as an out-of-the-way place.

“We Don’t Do Charity […]. We Do Real Things”: Migrants’ Understanding of Development Practices in Relation to Mainstream Aid-Giving

In this last section, I will address the migrant leaders’ self-reflections on their forms of collective remittance contributions, emphasizing the differences which emerged in relation to the development establishment’s ways of doing development.

Most migrants have a positive attitude toward foreign aid investments in Moldova. However, their appreciation of the development industry’s investments in Moldova does not necessarily mean that they also endorse the latter’s development practices. On the contrary, migrant leaders’ understanding of aid practices can significantly differ from those performed by the formal development establishment, including governmental organizations or international organizations. Some interviewees even expressed a rather negative stance toward mainstream aid mechanisms and questioned the development establishment’s contemporary practices. They portrayed the “development set” as being too bright and noble, highlighting that aid workers travel too much, use posh words, and spend their funds on fancy hotels instead of on people in need. Consequently, they distance themselves from the help industry’s professional practices. As Anastasia (tour guide and translator, 46, Berlin) stated:

In Chisinau, you see the development people driving around in their expensive jeeps. That’s what they call charity. That’s not what we do. We don’t do charity. I don’t even like the word charity. We do real things, the most natural things, we help the poor and vulnerable. It’s more, ehm, solidarity.

For interviewees like Anastasia, sending individual or collective remittances to non-migrant kin is constructed as a way of respecting “natural things” (i.e., helping “the poor and vulnerable”), something migrants view as a duty, regardless of the nature of their remitting practices. Additionally, the quote reveals that some participants associate the concept of “charity” with the development industry’s practices, while their own practices are regarded as “solidarity.” Most interviewees interpreted the “charity practices” performed by development actors in a rather limited way as top-down structural support, while the main function of their own “solidarity practices” lies in a bottom-up approach to aid provision. Therefore, an important issue that emerged in terms of migrants’ dissociation from mainstream development practices is the migrants’ self-reflections on their development interventions as doing “real things,” understood as “people-to-people solidarity” as opposed to doing “charity.”

Furthermore, some engaged migrants do not agree with the contemporary practice of professional charity because of their professional nature. Professionally run practices do not fit into their understanding of loyalty toward Moldova as coming from the migrants’ hearts, or as an emotional engagement. Particularly those migrants for whom altruism is their main motivation for humanitarian interventions are reluctant about professionally run organizations, be they aid agencies or migrant organizations. They simply do not aspire to a developing professionalization of their own associations. Instead, they wish to keep their collective activities voluntary. Ion (translator, 34, Paris) represents the opinion of those migrants who see the development professionals or migrants engaged in professional activities as solely pursuing their self-interests by earning their living through aid interventions. Like numerous non-migrant-led alternative development NGOs, migrants like Ion aim to pursue their associative activities as independent NGOs outside the official development industry. As he stated:

I don’t want our association to become professional, because it would mean that I would do my activities just for money. But I am myself interested in the Moldovan community here, that’s why it is a personal interest. There are people who do it professionally, and they get grants. I don’t believe in this kind of people, because they are not genuinely interested in the migrants, nor in the beneficiaries in Moldova. They just want to earn money.

Lastly, and very broadly, obstacles and struggles over definitions of the “collective productive use” of material, social, and financial remittances were found in this study. Migrants reported that the practice of sending material goods to partner institutions, such as medicine or toys, is often complicated. The obstacles encountered included the actual journey of the goods themselves, which is hampered by bureaucratic hurdles (such as restrictive border controls and legal import restrictions) and the passive attitude of “aid consumption” by locals, or the misuse of sent goods. A frequently mentioned example in this regard was that clothes, books, and toys were resold by villagers for their own financial benefit. For these reasons, some research participants preferred to carry out object and project-bound development practices according to the principle of help for self-help. Sandra (factory worker, 55, Munich) explained her conception of “helping people help themselves”:

I am bored of pure idealism—of the idea of just giving. People should be helped, yes. But they should also do something in return, like they do in our micro-credit projects. You know, with so many aid institutions working in the country and many relatives abroad, I somehow see a risk that people start to think that they don’t need to do anything anymore. This also has to do with our migrant associations, who just dump their second-hand clothes and toys in Moldova, assuming that they make children happy like this!

To round off this last section, besides discussions about cultural activities, the migrants’ debate surrounding professionally run activities is another concise example of struggles within the transnational migrant space over a shared understanding of the “right transnational aid-giving practices.” Moreover, the results discussed in this section reflect the importance of the fact that migrants’ collective space of development practices toward Moldova is socially constituted by the relational positions of all actors involved, namely migrants, non-migrants, and development players (Bourdieu 1985). This calls for a more nuanced approach to migrants’ understandings of aid-oriented contributions and their propensity to team up with development actors that also entails social-relational dynamics.

Conclusion

Drawing on a set of empirical examples of Moldovan migrant collective remittance patterns, this chapter provided an insight into the various ways in which migrants experience loyalties and affiliations with place, nation, or the local or de-territorialized transnational migrant community. I stressed how remittance practices are embedded in migrants’ everyday lives and how they are a complex of understandings, commitments, and competences with different purposes, functions, and social positions. This finding confirms that collective remittance practices can account for aspects of everyday life and the conduct of a full range of temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed activities.

The findings discussed in this chapter, I argue, refine the idea of migrants’ engagement in collective remittance practices in several ways. First, viewing migrants’ attachments from the perspective of the places they create—the migrant space of collective development engagement—allows for an understanding of remittance patterns as processes with their own dynamics, rather than reducing them to purely complementary, contradictory, or simultaneous aspects of the migrants’ integration process in their host society. Second, I showed that migrants’ collective aid-giving is interwoven with their multi-sited social lives as well as their personal migration experiences, based on various socioeconomic and cultural indicators, but also on Moldova’s socialist past and the country’s new post-socialist realities—such as the country’s marginal place within Europe. This means that migrants’ remitting is governed by different logics and behaviors, embedded in a complex array of cultural and social determinants and personal motives operating across different spatial and temporal scales. As Nowicka (2020) argued, this focus on the entanglements of national and personal histories of migrants is precisely one of the merits of transnationalism. Third, the core-periphery dynamics as determinants for cross-border activities call for a more nuanced approach to temporal dynamics of migrants’ engagements beyond the limited conceptual prism of looking at the country of origin as a pure continuity of socialist legacy as adopted by traditional studies on migrant formations in the Eastern European context. Finally, the study found significant differences between migrants and mainstream development agencies on the nature, forms, and visions of cross-border aid activities. Notable here are migrants’ suspicion toward top-down approaches and professional charity practices performed by aid agencies. The migrants’ definition of their practices as “bottom-up solidarity” makes them generally rather reluctant about professional development efforts. Subsequently, not all migrants want to be associated with mainstream aid practices, nor do they aspire to integrate their development efforts into the aid establishment. However, migrants’ understanding of their volunteer-run development practices based on the value of “solidarity” does not easily fit into the formal professional field of “charity,” as is commonly postulated in numerous policy documents on the involvement of migration associations in Moldova’s development transition (IOM and MPI 2012, p. 132).

Concerning avenues for further research on this topic, I suggest to better account for the temporal dynamics implicated in the circulation of norms and ideas in general, and in migrants’ understanding of transnational commitments in particular (Vari-Lavoisier 2020). The ways in which migrants’ changing aspirations over time, interwoven with their past and present life trajectories, frame and change their motivations for collective engagement, for instance, have hardly been analyzed in depth. Undoubtedly, a more time-sensitive approach to migrants’ motivations in taking up collective cross-border remitting practices would be fruitful for the broader discussion surrounding collective remittances.

Moreover, there is still a lack of research accounting for the impact of aid remittance practices on destination nations (see Grabowska and Garapich 2016 for an exception). Here, it would not only be interesting to follow up on how the small-scale projects studied here have been sustained over time, but also explore whether and how they “scale out” to other domains, or whether they “scale up” from the local level to a national level (see for instance White and Grabowska 2019 with regard to Poland). Additionally, research efforts are needed to refine the analytical tools suitable to understand how dynamics of economic, social, and political remittance practices interrelate. Parallels and interactions between financial transfers and social remittances in the context of Moldova are certainly ripe for further investigation (see for instance Meseguer et al. 2016 with regard to Latin America).

Ultimately, the findings point to intra-European specificities of the migration-transformation nexus, namely the migrants’ motivation to engage in transnational practices to connect their marginalized country with Europe. In this context, the impact of Moldova’s territorial factors upon migrants’ cross-border engagements calls for an analytical approach that goes beyond the Moldovan national space as an “integral spatio-temporal isolate” (Marcus 1998, p. 178), separated from surrounding Europe, as commonly conceptualized in formal migration-development policies (CIM/GIZ 2012). To advance this line of inquiry, I suggest re-embedding the remittance literature into the broader research agenda of migration and social change (Meeus 2016; Van Hear 2010) and to look at Moldova’s transformation and migrants’ transnational ties as a part of European migration and intra-European social inequalities. However, besides all these considerations, we should not forget that we are living in a time of hostile migration policies involving measures of increased surveillance of borders, mass deportations, and denials of long-standing legal rights of asylum. On a global scale, these measures are threatening financial remittance flows and migrants’ ability to engage in other forms of solidarity practices toward their home countries which global financial institutions and development agencies have proclaimed as stable over a long period of time (Glick Schiller 2020).