Transnationale Räume: Widerständige soziale Sphären oder neue Form der globalen Zurichtung von Arbeitskraft?

Abstract

Starting from a multi-sited research on migration strategies of Eastern European women to Germany, Sabine Hess shows that since the end of the cold war highly mobile, transnational fields have been emerged in Europe. On the other hand, critical scholars point out that the restrictive migration policies in and of the European Union can be described as a „fortress europe“, sealing off the EU against unwanted migration. Normally these two findings are taken as contradiction. An anthropological position takes the transnationalisation of migration as a proof that migrants are creative rebels of a globalisation from below. On the other hand, the „fortress europe“-position comes to the conclusion that the EU migration policies are apparently not working. But Hess argues that these two phenomena are not to be taken as a contradiction, rather transnationalisation can be understood as an intentional effect of the restrictive border regime. By following the ways of migrant women and their decision-making she can demonstrate the interconnections with the rigid migration policies which still exist even in the attempts of the migrants to circumvent them. But the classical conceptualisation of the functioning of the border cannot grasp these relations and thus have to be changed in favour of a Foucaultian reading of the border as a biopolitical space. In the end, transnational practices can be regarded as a creative strategy by migration to come to terms with the difficulties and uncertainties in the migrational context. But by the same token they are a strategy which is totally suitable to the political and economic needs of the new flexible mode of production of the western countries.