Peripheral Futurities. Emigration Plans and Sense of Belonging among East Central European Youth

Abstract

Peripherality is a matter not only of politics and geography but also of self-identification. One important measure of peripherality as lived experience is the desire of rural youth to emigrate—it is a future imagined elsewhere, coupled with a denigration of those unwilling to relocate (as Miggelbrink has shown, see Meyer and Miggelbrink, Peripheralization: The Making of Spatial Dependencies and Social Injustice. Springer VS, Wiesbaden, 2013 and Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 73(1): 17–30, 2015; also Leibert, Geographische Rundschau 67: 34–41, 2015). Based on grounded theory, this chapter provides a comparative analysis of the focus group discussions conducted with the students of the 11th grade in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania on their visions of the future. It comes down to two findings: young people largely articulate their expectations to emigrate, but they talk about this with a great deal of ambivalence. Most want to live within the European Union, seeing in this option a chance to seek their fortune elsewhere as the greatest achievement of EU citizenship. And so, secondly, they think of EU citizenship as an important tool to manage their futures. They thus articulate a functionalist rather than an affectionate relationship with the EU.

Peripherality is a matter not only of politics and geography but also of self-identification. One important measure of peripherality as lived experience is the desire of rural youth to emigrate—it is a future imagined elsewhere, coupled with a denigration of those unwilling to relocate. Based on grounded theory, this chapter provides a comparative analysis of focus group discussions conducted with students of the 11th grade in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania on their visions of the future. It comes down to two findings: young people largely articulate their expectations to emigrate, but they talk about this with a great deal of ambivalence. Most want to live within the European Union, seeing in this option a chance to seek their fortune elsewhere as the greatest achievement of EU citizenship. And so, secondly, they think of EU citizenship as an important tool to manage their futures. They thus articulate a functionalist rather than an affectionate relationship with the EU.

1 Peripheralisation of Identities and Affective Politics

To label regions or their inhabitants as peripheral is to assign them to a particular place in a representation of order. If the order is spatial, peripherality refers to a setting at a certain distance from a centre, whether this distance be defined in terms of the extendedness of an interstitial area, the travel time to urban centres, or population density. If the order is social, then this assignation refers to a set of people or the relations of these people to a centre of power. For instance, an area of conflict in which power is concentrated at the centre and fragmented at the periphery may be called peripheralised (see p. 42 in Kreckel 1992). Or a group of people may be labelled peripheral to a process, by which they are characterised as marginal, second-class, and less heard than those more central to the process (see p. 112 in Deppisch 2022).

Recent literature on peripheralization—that is, studying the way peripheries are produced and reproduced—has to consider socio-economic processes and the role of negative and stereotypical images (Fischer-Tahir and Naumann 2013; Meyer and Miggelbrink 2015), but we cannot assume that peripheralised populations regard themselves as such (see p. 65 in Meyer and Miggelbrink 2015). For whilst peripherality does not have a single meaning, it becomes clear that the label is generally not a favourable one. And so, an area characterised as having such a set of relations or people are considered something less than. Given Ian Hacking’s description of looping effects (Hacking 1995), whereby people react to being socially classified by adopting or rejecting the classifications applied to them, we could expect people whom outsiders consider peripheralised to react to that framing of their lives, whether affirmatively and defensively, or by contesting the classification. For people to define themselves as appropriately labelled “peripheral”, it presupposes that they define themselves relative to one centre (or another).

Such labelling as peripheralised might even have positive aspects for the classified, as it gives them an opportunity to frame themselves in contradistinction to a centre. So for instance, the denizens of rural areas might see themselves as being less exposed to the cultural options of their capital or regional centre, or even the political possibilities associated with Brussels, and might also regard themselves as more central in a moral order that might be quite distanced from a capital city and Brussels, but perhaps more resonant to their values. In such situations, it might be the capital, Brussels, or some other urban centre that is seen as peripheral in the moral sense. This might very well involve an alternative moral geography in which their own social setting is viewed as being more central (see p. 49 in Graff and Korolczuk 2022; Malewska-Szałygin 2017), if not in a regional sense, then in a moral or cultural sense. Thus, those peripheralised by geography, the economy, or infrastructure may yet contest their own position in the social order as being on the periphery and refer to the “centre” as the true periphery in a moral sense. There are thus objective and subjective criteria in accordance with which people can be referred to as peripheralised. More research is needed on the subjectivities of peripheralisation, and this chapter seeks to make a modest contribution to the field by analysing a sample of interviews with teenagers in peripheral, East Central European locations.

2 The JMCoE Research Process

In a research project run within the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at Leipzig University, groups of students in secondary and vocational education were interviewed on their perspectives on EU citizenship; these interviews took place in Nowa Ruda and Sandomierz in Poland, in Karcag and Siófok in Hungary, and in Sokolov and Chrudim in the Czech Republic, all locations selected because they are located in peripheral areas with a relatively low GDP, low employment, a low median age, and poor accessibility (see Lorenz and Anders 2023). Those interviewed in the winter of 2021/2022 were 11th grade students in upper vocational and secondary schools. The group discussions were collectively interpreted in a research seminar¹ during the summer term of 2022 using grounded theory and situational maps as developed by Adèle Clarke (2005).

Grounded theory is a style of qualitative research that aims at systematically interpreting qualitative data using both inductive and deductive approaches (see p. 15 in Strübing 2014). The analysis of the first case allows for some initial theoretical concepts. This is followed by a three-stage coding process that, as a rule, is a collective process. The first step consists of open coding and the structuring of the material according to themes in an interactive process; the interpretation is intersubjectively secured (ibid., p. 99). The next step consists of developing categories, which are abstracted and generalised themes (see p. 204 in Przyborski and Wohlrab-Sahr 2014). Finally, selective coding allows for the determination of core categories that serve to explain the phenomena being researched and allows for the generation of the central theory (ibid., 211).

A positional map helps us to reduce the complexity whilst showing the positions people take on with reference to two different sliding scales. Positional maps are a method developed by Adèle Clarke in order to map positions taken by the different protagonists generating data:

Positional maps lay out the major positions taken, and not taken, in the data vis-à-vis particular axes of variation and difference, focus, and controversy found in the situation of concern. The discursive data can include interviews, observations, media discourse materials, websites, and so on. Perhaps most significantly, positional maps are not articulated with persons or groups but rather seek to represent the full range of discursive positions on key issues in the broad situation of concern. They allow multiple positions and even contradictions to be articulated. Discourses are thus disarticulated from their sites of production, decentering them and making analytic complexities more visible. (p. 14 in Clarke et al. 2016; p. 125–136 in Clarke 2005)

3 “People are Drowning in Their Own Mediocrity”

Few students in such a collective setting explicitly identified themselves, especially as they were not asked to do so. They do classify their fellow townsfolk, of whom some are quite critical, when asked how they felt about their place of abode. This devaluation, whilst not ubiquitous, can be unequivocal and disdainful: one student referred to their cohabitants as “people drowning in their own mediocrity” (220113A_Moreni). The speakers present themselves implicitly as clear-minded about their own lack of mediocrity and as having their heads above the mud. But such categorical devaluative classifications were rare in this research. Most utterances of contempt by the students were gradual rather than categorical: Some regard their town environment as one in which it is difficult for them personally to strive: “It is practically impossible to breathe here” (211118A_Nowa Ruda).

The metaphors in each case refer to a lack of air, though in the first quote, this lack of air was lethal, perhaps at least brain-damaging, whereas in the second case the focus is on the ability to breathe, perhaps by emigrating. This talk of figurative or actual mortality brought on by residence in these small towns resonates with research on “post-socialist excessive mortality”.

[A] slew of qualitative research also revealed that deindustrialization in former socialist industrial towns led to social disintegration; status loss; the loss of communities; and a cascade of infrastructural, social, and health problems, prolonged stress, depression, and despair in Eastern Europe (see the recent thorough review by Ghodsee and Orenstein 2021). (p. 308 in King et al. 2022)

These “deaths of despair” were initially determined for a subset of an American working-class population (Case and Deaton 2020). The US economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton noticed that before the pandemic, life expectancy had stopped increasing in the United States for white people for the first time since World War II. They argue that this trend is driven by an increased mortality from drugs, alcohol, and suicide among working-class people, and “white” men in particular. Such self-destructive behaviours, they argue, are best explained by a collective “despair” felt as a result of the social changes brought about by rapid industrial decline, which, so they argue, has led to over half a million excess deaths since the turn of the century. As the social scientist Lawrence King and his colleagues argue, such “deaths of despair” are not specific to the US: In Eastern European countries, the decade from 1989 onwards translated into 7.3 million excess deaths (Stuckler 2009). “It represents one of the largest demographic catastrophes seen outside famine or war in recent history” (p. 300 in King et al. 2022). The literature focusses on three hypotheses about the causes of such excess mortality: Firstly, social stress might be caused by the strain associated with the economic reforms. Secondly, working-class alcohol consumption and dysfunctional health habits might be to blame. And thirdly, economic woes lead to declining levels of social and economic capital and thus lead to individual and collective expressions of social disintegration (Case and Deaton 2020).

The post-socialist economic reforms, then, might very well have led to situations in which people in peripheralised areas are particularly sensitive to the decline in social, economic, and environmental capital and find their own aspirations stifled. And the peripheralisation of the inhabitants of these to some extent subordinate regions might additionally inspire opprobrium at their characterisation as such: “The stigmatisation of a certain group may cause direct and negative effects on their living standard, which, in turn, can become manifest and visible in new signs of poverty and deprivation that can easily be viewed as evidence in support of the primal prejudice” (p. 209 in Meyer and Miggelbrink 2013, own translation). So stigmatisation is part of the “looping effect” described above: the stigma contributes to the social status of those classified as such and serves to justify their devaluation. Thus, those struck by peripheralisation have not only a lack of infrastructure, poverty, life chances, and a general dejection to complain about but also a lack of a future, to which their classification as peripheralised might very well contribute.

The rational response to such economic decline, the attrition of the infrastructure, and the denigration of the population is emigration: “most people like me leave, either to study or for other reasons, and only the adults, the old people, who can’t really change from this point of view, remain” (220113A_Moreni). Emigration from areas seen as peripheralised is so significant that it is often seen as a characteristic of such areas. Emigration serves as a signifier of the sustainability of a region, and mass emigration without immigration is often part of a spiral of decline: Jobs get lost, fewer children are born, schools are closed, bus lines are discontinued, and a lack of investment soon provides new structures of inequality (see p. 91 in Weber and Fischer 2010; pp. 200–204 in Leibert 2020). The motives for deciding to stay or to emigrate are not merely economic, however, but may include family and regional bonds, local, regional, and national pride, or alternative perspectives for which a peripheralised life might provide advantages. Some have shown the role communication plays in such decisions: The higher the likelihood that everyone talks about the intention to emigrate, the higher the pressure to actually do so (Meyer and Miggelbrink 2015; Wiest 2016). This intention to emigrate, as previous research has shown, correlates with an articulated perspective on the home region as lacking a future. The young come to feel they have to emigrate if they want to pursue a fulfilling life (see pp. 38–41 in Leibert 2015). Those willing to migrate in turn stigmatise those who are deliberating to stay as “not capable of finding the train station”, leading to a situation in which emigration becomes the norm and staying the anomaly (see p. 1041 in Meyer 2018; cf. p. 204 in Leibert 2020).

4 Our Village “Has No Future”: Deliberations on Emigrating

Many students who participated in the group discussions clearly articulated their intention to emigrate, frequently articulating this intention while identifying as members of a trans-personal movement. One Polish student said: “I don’t think anyone wants to stay here” (211118B_Nowa Ruda), or more specifically: “Sandomierz is not that big, and there’s no prospect of living further here because Sandomierz has no future. So, I think people will leave to other cities”, which she names: “if someone wants to develop, then [they will go to] Kraków, Warsaw, Rzeszów, well, …!” (211116B_Sandomiercz). Another interview in Sandomierz included the utterance: “I don’t see any future in Sandomierz. I’ve lived here for eight years, and I wouldn’t be able to stand it mentally and emotionally.” (211116A_Sandomierz) A third student in the same group discussion also wanted to leave:

In ten years, I see myself in a bigger city, and if I stay in Poland, I’d also like to go to the army. I definitely wouldn’t want to live in such a small city as Sandomierz. I don’t like it at all. I don’t like the way it functions. For example, there were those construction works there, and the whole city was closed during rush hours. There was no passage from one part to another, and generally everything in Sandomierz is so unorganised. (211116A_Sandomierz)

The students thus articulate three topics, all related to the futurity of place, and in particular, its lack of it:

• A. A “place stuck in time” “drowning in mediocrity” (220113A_Moreni). One important set of deliberations concerns the accessibility of cultural venues and the possibility of conspicuous consumption: “there could be more nightclubs, zoos, playgrounds, malls, big shopping centres, a university, more kindergartens, more daycares” (220125B_Karcag). Sometimes this lack of infrastructure makes the students feel like they just want to leave. They occasionally attribute this to a feeling of being pushed out by the characteristics of the area itself. They say, for instance, that the place itself is “stuck in time” (220113A_Moreni) or is wholly absent and negative, more like a black hole than can only be characterised by absence: “It’s more like a hole where there are only negatives” (211118B_Nowa Ruda). Some say it explicitly: “Life just forces us [to move]” (211118B_Nowa Ruda). But most seem to feel disloyal to characterise their hometown or country in this devaluative manner and focus more on what they expect to achieve, choosing their future abode where they deem their chances of success highest.

• B. “Safest country in the world.” Internal Migration. Those contemplating regional migration usually focus on larger cities with more opportunities to study and work. One Hungarian student explains that there are reasons to stay—family, their own past—but that this does not suffice to plan a future there:

  I would also like to study in Debrecen or Budapest. I would like to be a lawyer. I would also like to stay in Hungary, but preferably in the Transdanubian region. I have no special attachment to Karcag, apart from my family and memories. There are few opportunities, the quality of the roads is… desperate. That’s really all. […] Because of the better financial opportunities. (220125A_Karcag)

We see in many of those who are contemplating regional migration very little categorical abnegation of their place of origin: “I would definitely like to settle somewhere in the Czech Republic because just as [another participant of the focus group] mentioned, I think it’s one of the safest countries in the world, a low crime rate and all that. I think overall the standard of living here is high” (211001A_Chrudim). The debasement of their region is much more a matter of degree: the quality of the roads is worse than elsewhere, the opportunities are fewer, the pay is lower, etc., but here, we see no particular desire to leave, but rather one to arrive at an even better place, with more opportunities for the students personally.

This focus on arriving at a better place, of shaping and taking charge of their own futures, gives many willing students a chance to consider different options, to move regionally first, internationally later, should the first move not go far enough: “I’m not going likely to find a job in my profession, if I do, but I don’t think so, then I will stay in Siófok. The outlook, well, Pest first and then abroad” (211117_Siófok).

• C. “Big Ambitions”. International Migration. Some students don’t just want to improve their life chances; they have very specific ambitions for which being abroad, in their perspective, is a prerequisite. So, for instance, one student in the Czech Republic sees himself as having big ambitions and as being the boss of his own restaurant:

Well, I would like to become a chef, or just a higher cook, and I would like to build a small business in some other country than here in the Czech Republic in ten years. I would like to go to Germany or Switzerland and build a restaurant there. But those are very big ambitions. (211001B_Chrudim)

The hopes associated with international careers are connected to higher salaries (“it’s difficult to survive on the lowest average wage”, 211118B_Nowa Ruda; or “But the reason why we want to leave is that the salary we get in Romania is only enough to live on. If we want something else or want to do something with our lives, we can’t do it with the salary we get in Romania”, 220113B_Moreni), but frequently, the students are also looking for something else, a sense of belonging, of recognition. One Polish student argues: “the place where I will live in the future will be more friendly to people with the same interests and from the same social group” (211118A_Nowa Ruda), another in Romania quips: “In Germany, if you throw a cigarette butt on the ground, you get fined…” In response, another jested: “Well, yes, bro, civilized people” (220113B_Moreni).

• C1. “In the West there is a great hatred of communism”. Ambivalence. All students interviewed in this research project who contemplated international migration meant to go to the West, usually to Western or Central European countries. Germany was cited most frequently, as was Sweden. Some also mentioned the United States or Switzerland. But mostly, they seemed to not see this personal migration as one with unmitigated chances of success. As a Romanian student explains:

I would have liked to stay in Romania, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s possible because what I want to do is not so well financially supported in our country, […] it’s not paid very well as in other European Union countries, for [the moment]. […] I’ve obviously researched this topic in many countries, and the most advantageous one seemed to be Germany, although socially I would suffer a little bit, from what I’ve heard, and the people there are not very open. (220113A_Moreni)

Students elaborate on this perspective:

[T]here’s a big difference between the Western states and the Eastern states, there’s a certain behaviour that Westerners have shown towards us. What could be the reason? We look at history and we realise that there is this difference: in the West there is a great hatred of communism, the Russians were communists, we were communists, and we realise where it comes from, but we still remained poor. And nobody helps us. (220113A_Moreni)

Eastern Europe, by contrast, is framed as backward economically and socially, an area “disadvantaged by history”, but also as having this history in common. The students feel as if East (Central) Europeans were assigned a lower rank when they go West. This is an astute observation and correlates with recent sociological research by Hungarian-American sociologist József Böröcz, among others. Böröcz has recently argued that there is a long tradition of anti-Eastern European racism with an imaginary line east of Germany/Austria/Italy, demarcating gradations of whiteness behind a backdrop of “epidermalising” power relations, thereby creating “concentric gradations of putatively decreasing humanity, roughly proportionate to distance from western Europe” (see p. 1123 in Böröcz 2021). He argues that this epidermalising of power relations was compounded by the enlargement of the EU, in an interesting perspective worth quoting at length:

The establishment of the European Union and the unexpected collapse of the political-geographical separation between the eastern more-than-half of the continent and the territories where west European “Whiteness” flourished raised the volume of the conversation concerning the “center of gravity” of proper “Whiteness” and the outside borders. […] I propose a way to make explicit the two key identity practices that have implicitly emerged in regulating these fields of identity. The first one—I will call it “eurowhiteness”—encapsulates the idea of a self-racialization that is imagined as a pristine, un-tainted “White” subjecthood. It distinguishes itself from identity locations racialised as non-“White,” as well as distancing itself from presumably less immaculate, either diasporic or “eastern” varieties of “Whiteness.” Its counterpoint—I will call it “dirty whiteness”—embodies a demand for acceptance as properly “White” despite the absence of any apparent willingness on part of occupants of the “eurowhite” subject position to accept it as such. […] The end of the period of state socialism and the opening of the European Union for the movement of all “factors of production,” including labor, resulting in a steep increase in the proportion of east European subjects who had gained experience in working in western Schengen-Land, to a considerable extent working alongside co-workers who had a long experience in being racialized as non-“White,” could have been expected to raise a popular consciousness of anti-racism among east European subjects racialized as “dirty white”. (ibid., 1128–9)

Böröcz thus argues that there are gradients of belonging to the hegemonic European identity, and whilst “EU whiteness” is most frequently contrasted to “non-whiteness” (thought of as “non-European”), there are also those “white but not really” Eastern European identities that are not seen as quite belonging to the EU and which Böröcz suggests calling “dirty white”. As Böröcz argues, the freedom of movement that Schengen provides for all “Schengen-Land” inhabitants comes with different costs attached, and the costs for migrating West are for some higher than for others, as particularly the Romanian students are worried about. “Going West” is thus not going towards the promised land, even though it solves some economic and personal problems.

So the students, in particular the Romanian students in our study, articulate some trepidation about moving West: They anticipate being assigned a lower social status for coming from a region of lower rank and fear the subsequent disparagement. They explain this assignation as resulting from a disdain for communism, as that will be the narrative framework most likely to have been used by their immediate ancestors. If we follow Böröcz, however, we might see a longer genealogy for this inequality.

• C2. “He’ll kill you in your sleep.” Ambivalence about diversity. Interestingly, the second source of ambivalence concerning migration concerns diversity. Diversity is articulated as a problem that is not only located “outside”, although in the Czech Republic, the problems that non-European migration allegedly poses for the West are sometimes mentioned, for instance, in Chrudim: “I’m not surprised the Czechs don’t really want the migrants here. So look at what the migrants are doing in Germany.” (211001A_Chrudim). So, too, diversity is seen as a source of social anxiety. One student recounts how in the same group discussion teased her parents by announcing she would adopt “a black boy”, to which they replied that “when he grows up ‘he’ll kill you in your sleep’”. Such teasing and conjectures about the vagaries of diversity resulting from migration to Western Europe also take on a serious note when students relate their own experiences with diversity in their places of residence. So, when a Czech student tried to mention the good things about her village, she felt unable to answer the question directly and initially took refuge by being ironic whilst talking about an extremely polluting cement plant, but she abandoned the irony (“the worst positive”) when she talked about the inhabitants of her small town as including Roma and Vietnamese migrants:

I live in Prachovice, and it’s nice there [she uses an ironic tone of voice]. We have the cement plant there, a quarry, and if you just stand on a lookout somewhere, it’s nice, it looks like it’s good, but the worst positive I can think of is the Roma. And it’s like, you know, enough, when I moved there, like everything was fine, but now I blame our mayor, and everybody blames her, that she’s supporting them. Like I don’t have anything against them, some of them are nice, hardworking, but we have more shops there, like there’s Vietnamese people there, so they’re always gathering there, just making a mess, ruining the village. It’s nice. We’ve got a newly built outdoor gym up there, we’ve got ponds, we have events, everything, but they’re just trying to ruin it. They’re just trying to basically harm the normal people there, by stealing, puncturing bike tyres and that stuff, so you’re really scared sometimes. (211001B_Chrudim)

A little defensively, she said, “I have nothing against” Roma, although she blames the social problems of her village on this group and sees them as intentionally creating harm for “normal” people. The distinction between “normal” and ethnicised people is commonplace and shows that Böröcz’s distinction between “Euro-white”, “dirty white”, and “non-white” functions in a number of contexts in which explanations are given for deviance with reference to epidermalisation.

To sum up, peripheralised students talk about migration as a way of moulding their futures, but with a great deal of ambivalence. Many prefer to try their luck initially in their own country. Those who want to emigrate to another country usually aim for Western European countries, mainly because they expect economically advantageous prospects.

Overall, the East-West differentiation plays an important role, with some students (particularly in the interviews from Romania) anticipating discrimination, whilst others (particularly those from Czechia) expect being overwhelmed by the diversity of the Western European population. Generally, the differences between the West and the East under discussion are mainly seen as cultural and economic.

5 Inequality

Cultural inequality saturated the debate among the students in Romania. When the debate came to economic differences, there was much less agreement between them. Some argue that the economic inequality within Europe is so deep and so difficult to overcome that it is better to migrate there rather than attempt to achieve a Western standard of living in their own country. Others argue that it is up to “us” to change the system. The “system” is thus regarded as ultimately responsible for the economic inequality between East and West. We have read earlier about communism as the source of systemic differentiation, but it often remains unclear what the students mean by the term “system”, whether they refer to national or EU politics, nepotism and corruption, globalisation, or capitalism—the term functions as a cypher under which a whole range of options are hidden. Given its systematic intangibility, however, the students find it hard to envisage enacting change:

I think it’s more, yeah, the fault of the system […]. It seems like we’re a bit forgotten by the world. And it’s not our fault, in a way. I mean, yes, we could vote for a different mayor […] but is this system going to change so we could be as educated as other people? (220113A_Moreni).

But others do see themselves as a potential source for change: “If we don’t fight the system, then who will. If we don’t change the system, who will change it” (220113A_Moreni).

Overall, extralocal points of reference play an important role for students in determining their position. Economic, infrastructural, and cultural disparities between imagined regional, national, or international centres are mainly connected with inferiority—as the literature on peripherality leads us to expect. As the students are largely not themselves participants in economic, political, or cultural activities, their narratives reflect the social imaginaries available to them, transmitted by their parents, teachers, and older siblings.

6 Oppositional Identities

As the political anthropologist Anna Malewska-Szałygin has argued, rural social imaginaries have in some areas evolved from “the multi-generational experience of organising labour on the family farm, interpreted through the categories of traditional peasant culture, with the notable influence of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church”, an experience she labels “post-peasant” (see p. 68 in Malewska-Szałygin 2020; see also 2011, 2017). This alternative normative pattern is at odds with current political norms, as she argues in a case study of southern Poland:

The post-1989 political-economic reality in Poland has been shaped (to characterize this process in a vastly simplified manner) with the aim of implementing the ideals of liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism. Such ideas, however, quite starkly differ from post-peasant norms. The disparity between the two models consequently encompasses ideological and affective differences. The resulting tension between them causes emotions to escalate. Local affective potentiality, strongly tied up with the post-peasant normative pattern, thus becomes invoked through reports about how reality is being shaped in a liberal direction, which is considered undesirable by the interlocutors. (p. 68 in Malewska-Szałygin 2020)

Malewska-Szałygin shows how older (“multi-generational”) logics are materially based in organisational practices and serve as foils for new identities, in her case, political identities that oppose the “liberal” order and uproot the logics of centrality and peripherality.

These oppositional collective identities are produced through a locally shared repertoire of displayed affects. Such affects, it is often argued, tend to be stereotypical in political contexts (Leavitt 1996; Malewska-Szałygin 2020; Pates and Leser 2021). Thus, one potential practice of resistance against heteronomous peripheralisation is the development of oppositional identities that otherise the liberal status quo as an actually peripheral set of values. In Malewska-Szałygin’s case, this means that, for instance, Pride Parades and expressions of sexual diversity are viewed as anomalous, as against nature, in clear contrast to rural values, which are viewed as “normal” and as part of a “legitimized, sacred order” (2020, pp. 71–2). This rural-urban (or, as some would view it, communitarian-cosmopolitan cleavage, though these are not interchangeable) perspective on what is the good or right order is transposed into an international order, as Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk have argued: “Europe and the Global South are seen as the key battlegrounds” by conservative forces (2022, p. 53). Generally, they argue, in as much as modernity is experienced as a “Hobbesian” world of insecurity, fragmentation, individualism, and violence, a “retrotopic” political imagination might very well find its focus in an idealised past (Bauman 2017), for which Russia is playing the role of poster child in some regions (see p. 53 in Graff and Korolczuk 2022). Such retrotopic imaginaries were not found in our research material, but that might very well be due to the questions asked. Previous studies have shown that the “demand for anti-establishment politics” is greater in some areas than others, leading to a politics of localism and regionalism as well as identity politics (Volk and Weisskirchner 2023). The new strength of some parties that refer to themselves as regionalists rather than nationalists can attest to this strengthening of demand. For instance, the German AfD refers to itself as a “representative” or “voice” of Eastern German interests and identities (Begrich 2018; Weisskircher 2022). But the students in this study did not articulate strong regionalist affects—any positive affection that was mentioned was largely with reference to their own families.

And it is with reference to a future greater sense of belonging that students are considering moving away from the people they love. This futurity is brought to them by the EU, but that does not mean they have to love it:

I don’t feel any connection with other EU citizens just because we’re in the same EU. I mean, I’m Polish, someone’s German, and we’re in the same organisation. So what does that change? I mean I really like the fact that we’re in the EU because it’s easier for us as citizens of Europe, but honestly, what does it change?” (211118A_Nowa Ruda)

Many of the students go out of their way to emphasise their lack of connection to the EU or Western EU countries, as this Polish girl did. In fact, if you seek a correlation between the politics connecting affects and futurities, you find that students tend to speak about the EU as the one organisation or feature in their lives that could help them plan a future that is outside the dead end in which they articulated finding themselves in at the time of the interviews. Thus, they, one can safely deduce, have a mainly functional attitude towards the EU rather than an affective one.

A positional map helps us see what is going on here (Fig. 1). Terms in the map that appeared more frequently are shown in larger font. So mapping the students’ positions in the interviews on the EU shows that the majority of statements made that are regarded as positive concern the economy and finances, but also their personal anticipated mobility and security. These are, however, clearly functional frameworks within which the EU is assessed.

Fig. 1

Positional map on assessment of the EU from a Functionalist or Affective Framework

On the negative affective spectrum, we find a cluster of statements relating to students’ cultural identities. For instance, a Polish student argues that “for the majority of the Union and for me personally, the Union brings a lot of benefits. But not necessarily the feeling of community, because it is imposed from above. After all, the history of a country or even of a local area is something that everyone will be more familiar with”. (211118A_Nowa Ruda) Students frequently emphasise their attachment to their region and country as incomparably intense compared to their attachment to the EU. Other topics are mentioned—some students regard the EU as more attuned to environmental values, which they hold dear, others feel the EU is more open to allowing abortions to be performed than they prefer; but these value-based issues are rare and can be evaluated positively or negatively. Thus, values can be functional or affective, positive or negative—there is no particular pattern that we could discern in the interviews that would allow us to clearly determine the role of values in the students’ evaluations of the EU, unlike cultural identity, which tended to be evaluated as emotionally important to the students, but for which the EU provided more hindrance than help, and unlike migration, which tended to be evaluated as functionally important and for which the EU was deemed an important helper.

We can deduce three things from this map: there is little attachment to the EU, as most positive attributions relate to functionalist framings rather than affective ones. One remedy would pertain to launch more EU initiatives in terms of culture and common EU values. Secondly, there are very few and only very rare functional EU frames that are viewed negatively. And finally, what students appreciate the most, by far, pertaining to the EU is the freedom of movement in that they can relocate as equal citizens to any area or country in which they can work towards fulfilling their dreams. (Mobility through) EU citizenship is, then, what is most attractive for peripheralised East Central European youth than any other function of the EU.

7 In Conclusion

Given the loaded meanings of peripherality, the term can be expected to have implications for the inhabitants of an area so characterised, and not all inhabitants of areas defined as peripheral will regard themselves as such. To be singled out in a study on “peripherality” and European citizenship, then, is to be confronted with the attribution of being seen as either exhibiting the characteristics of peripherality oneself, either in terms of values, the use of dialect, self-identification, or being subject to a second-rate infrastructure. Or of having such characteristics applied to one’s social and perhaps familial environment: “Peripheralization should be viewed as a ‘multidimensional process’ of demotion or downgrading of a socio-spatial unit in relation to other socio-spatial units, one that can only be explained with reference to the interaction of economic, social, and political dimensions” (see p. 374 in Kühn 2015).

Thus, whilst the peripherality of regions or places is indubitably relational (a place may be hard to reach, sparsely populated, or relatively devoid of infrastructure), peripherality as a form of identification is both relational and value-laden. To label someone as coming from a peripheral location brings with it a devaluation, so that it is often the “other” to whom peripherality is assigned.

The students interviewed for this study reacted to their peripheralisation largely by accepting it, and by articulating a desire to emigrate, either nationally or internationally. They, too, characterised those whom they say are unwilling to leave as people without a future, stuck in the mud, so to speak. But simultaneously, they saw their emigration plans with trepidation, as an expulsion, not so much for the promised lands as from a muddy sinkhole that sucked the life out of its residents, and on towards an uncertain future in which their own status would be the ground for battle. And in all this, they see EU citizenship as the way forward, as the guaranteed right to international mobility, allowing them to envisage a future with more options, more money, more success, and better relationships.

What remains to be investigated, however, is the conditions under which the mobility the students envisage is regional or international; in some situations, we found that vocational students tended more towards regional migration, secondary students more towards international migration, and vice versa. Are these bugs or features of the interviews, or is there more going on here? Secondly, it might be worthy of closer analysis why, when it comes to cultural identities, the EU has such little purchase on the students’ hearts, even though many students say that culturally, they feel closer to other Europeans in contrast to, say, Africans—but this does not translate into an affective closeness to the EU.

Group discussions (selection)

1.1 Czechia

211001A_Chrudim, Gymnázium Josefa Ressela (Secondary school)

211001B_Chrudim, Střední odborná škola a Střední odborné učiliště obchodu a služeb (Secondary vocational school)

20210921A_Sokolov, Gymnázium Sokolov (Secondary School)

20210921B_Sokolov, Integrovaná střední škola technická a ekonomická Sokolov (Vocational School)

1.2 Hungary

220125A_Karcag, Karcagi Nagykun Református Gimnázium (Secondary school)

211117_Siófok, Siófoki SZC Krúdy Gyula Technikum és Gimnázium (Vocational and secondary school)

1.3 Poland

211118A_Nowa Ruda, Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Henryka Sienkiewicza

211118B_Nowa Ruda, Noworudzka Szkoła Techniczna

211116A_Sandomierz, Zespół Szkół Gastronomicznych i Hotelarskich im. Komisji Edukacji Narodowej w Sandomierzu (Upper secondary school)

211116B_Sandomierz, Zespół Szkół Gastronomicznych i Hotelarskich im. Komisji Edukacji Narodowej w Sandomierzu (Upper vocational and secondary school)

1.4 Romania

220113A_Moreni, “Ion Luca Caragiale” National College (Secondary school)

220113B_Moreni, Technological High School “Petrol” (Vocational School)

1.5 Slovakia

20210930A_Lucenec, Gymnázium Boženy Slančíkovej Timravy Lučenec (Secondary School)

20210929_Ruzomberok, Spojená škola—Stredná odborná škola obchodu a služieb Ružomberok (Vocational School)