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

Abstract

AbstractPeripherality 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.