The Construction of Trans-social European Networks and the Neutralisation of Borders: Skilled EU Migrants in Manchester—Reconstituting Social and National Belonging

Abstract

Drawing on an exploratory study conducted in Manchester, the paper examines several different ways in which not only territorial but also primordial cultural borders are being crossed, neutralised, dissolved and rendered irrelevant by the overseas experiences encountered by young, postgraduate EU migrants. At times, this occurs because national cultures are transplanted and constructed anew by expatriate groups within host societies. However, in other situations, especially where migrants remain for longer periods, borders are called into question by the formation of multinational interpersonal relationships requiring intercultural negotiation. These engender multiple affiliations and call into question national identities and a sense of belonging while requiring explorations into unchartered post-national social areas.

Introduction

Skilled migrants possess high educational credentials which can often be exchanged for the economic capital and social linkages they may lack. Their training may also equip them to belong to professional occupational cultures which are readily transportable and permit collaboration irrespective of nationality (Hannerz, 1990). Moreover, skilled migrants are unlikely to be influenced or assisted by their family or other home ties. Even if they possess a few friends and contacts overseas, this is markedly different from the multiplex bonds that normally encapsulate the economic migrant from poorer world regions. Because of their key role in valorising the more advanced sectors of the globalised knowledge economy, the numbers of skilled migrants are increasing rapidly along with the willingness of governments to minimise immigration restrictions in order to attract them (Lavenex, 2006, p. 32). Most are not members of privileged, denationalised transnational business élites (Sklair, 2001) but rather are ‘middling’ people (Conradson and Latham, 2005, p. 290), mostly from middle-class backgrounds. They do not always enjoy equal access to full citizen and other rights or to job opportunities when abroad, particularly if they are women and/or from developing countries (Kofman, 2000). While some are attached to corporations and other organisations and move within internal company labour markets or are sent abroad as members of existing work teams, perhaps accompanied by families (Bozkurt, 2006; Vertovec, 2002; and Yeoh and Willis, 2005), others migrate alone, are usually single and need to construct a new social life (Kennedy, 2004). It is from a group of individuals approximating closely to this latter situation that the findings discussed here are derived.

The paper's theme is that self-realisation projects and the concrete activities enacted by innumerable social agents, here in the form of skilled EU migrants, are both intentionally and unwittingly helping to construct a Europe of trans-social relations and networks that increasingly flourish as if territorial borders did not exist. Although this does not mean that national affiliations and identities are being annulled—quite the opposite—they are increasingly being called into question, blurred and reconstituted. I discuss three overlapping processes—although there may be more—bound up with migration projects of various kinds and conducted by EU citizens, which contribute to this silent and scarcely acknowledged social transformation. In different ways, they involve cross-border mobility but also exploration, interculturality and society-building and they are proceeding simultaneously. At the same time, each migration process contributes to the increasing fluidity, redrawing and sometimes irrelevance of national borders, even if at the same time governments, some businesses and certain national institutions continuously strive to protect and perpetuate the legacy of national identities and territorial integrities.

First, migrants from EU countries, many of them well educated, are likely to arrive alone and without previously arranged employment. Many are likely to be on undergraduate exchange schemes or come to study for postgraduate qualifications. Especially in the early stages of their sojourn, and particularly if they only intend to stay for a short period, they may seek fellow nationals for company and assistance. If their facility in the host language is poor, this tendency may be intensified. In countries such as Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Britain, such networks of youngish EU foreigners can be readily found in cities and university towns. Thus, we find continuous processes of debordering whereby Europeans build social extensions of their countries across territorial borders and construct multiple, shifting replica ‘nations’ within host countries. Here, national borders are treated as if they had little or no significance for EU citizens other than as markers delineating locations on a map where languages tend to change. The first section below explores this aspect of elastic or moving borders.

Another process at work—and examined in the second section—concerns less the crossing of territorial borders but rather the negotiation of cultural differences within the host society and the development of mutual understandings as migrants forge social relationships with locals/nationals, other foreigners—not always Europeans—and/or both or all of these. This requires “critical mutual evaluation” (Turner, 2006, p. 142) and equal recognition, “intercultural dialogue” (p. 144) and therefore a kind of “ethical hermeneutics” (p. 145) where both parties try to respect and interpret each other's cultural differences. Such cultural crossings and the formation of long-term interpersonal bonds are probably more likely to arise where EU migrants decide to remain abroad for some time. Thus, in the case of the Manchester respondents, over a fairly long period their English improved, they established an everyday familiarity with local institutions and built friendships at work, in leisure life and perhaps at local neighbourhood level. Here, therefore, we find not just transnational ties across territorial borders involving family and friends at home, but also the construction of trans-social affiliations within the host society.

A third experience associated with fairly long-stay migration occurred where individuals gradually became relatively distant from, even partly outside, both the host society and the home situation and lost the clear sense of territorial and cultural attachment they had previously felt with regard to their home situation. This social estrangement placed them in a state of neither belonging nor of unbelonging. Territorial, cultural and personal borders were ever-shifting, fluid and difficult to locate or track. Faced with such spatial, social and personal uncertainties, the respondents were compelled to rethink what ties they now possessed, if any, in respect to national identity and their membership of different social collectivities. The third section examines several aspects of this situation.

The discussion that follows is grounded in the findings of a qualitative study of 61 skilled migrants. They came from 13 of the EU member, or associated member, countries. Only three Polish respondents came from one of the post-2004 accession groups. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2005. Reliable databases indicating nationality, gender, age and occupation were not available. EU nationals are not required to register with their consulates. Employers, too, do not compile lists including such information and the UK Data Protection Act prevents them from giving out contact details. The respondents were obtained by sending out e-mails to organisations, by approaching groups and associations which might offer useful leads and by visiting likely venues frequented by foreigners. Initial contacts were then followed up through a snowball technique. The study is therefore an exploratory one which makes no claims for wider validity, although there is no reason to suppose that the respondents were especially different from other skilled, young EU migrants except that they spoke reasonable English and had often stayed for some time. Thus, the average length of stay was 6 years but with considerable variation around this mean. Thirty-four women and 27 men were interviewed. Fifty-four per cent were aged between 27 and 34 years, 23 per cent were between 22 and 26 years old and a similar percentage were 35 years or older. All but two were graduates and all were working—usually full time. They were employed in a range of sectors as professionals in private businesses, universities, medicine, nursing, dentistry and veterinary services, third-sector enterprises and the creative industries. A few were employed in restaurants and shops or in low-wage clerical jobs.

1. Transplanted National Affiliations: Elastic or Neutralised Borders

With respect to recent flows of mostly poor economic migrants from the South, the scholarly literature has argued that the often low-grade and insecure character of the employment opportunities available in the host societies, coupled to the flexibility provided by modern information technology and cheap transport, have encouraged and enabled such migrants to construct “multistranded social relations … that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (Basch et al., 1994, p. 7). Here, the original homeland spreads across borders and becomes merged into the host nation(s). Moreover, the experiences of poverty and discrimination further encourage such migrants to forge “highly particularistic attachments” (Waldinger and Fitzgerald, 2004, p. 1178) which recreate the primordial ties they knew at home. However, such tendencies are not confined to economic migrants from developing countries, although they may be less all-encompassing in other situations. Accordingly, almost everywhere we often find clusters of fellow nationals monopolising certain clubs and bars, attempting to establish exclusive urban zones or moving into particular occupational or business niches, or some combination of these, and irrespective of social class and nationality.

Clearly in the case of EU citizens, the right of free movement, of equal access to employment and most social welfare benefits plus the mutual recognition of qualifications provides them with opportunities for intraregional mobility and a degree of freedom from constraint that can only be imagined by most migrants from outside the region. Yet political, legal and economic rights and freedoms do not necessarily cancel national affiliations, whether these operate within interpersonal relationships or institutional situations (Favell, 2004). Thus, on the one hand EU citizens are able to act almost as if territorial borders did not exist—moving freely and largely unimpeded across the region—yet at the same time many manifestly recreate national clusterings when living outside their nation of origin, whether they are involved in exchange schemes, retirement migration, the search for employment opportunities, the desire for adventure (Favell, 2006, p. 247) and personal development (King and Ruiz-Gelices, 2003) and/or the opportunity to follow a “nomadic and globalizing lifestyle” Recchi (2006, p. 76). Drawing on the Manchester study, this section now explores some of the main factors that help to explain these tendencies in the case of young skilled European migrants.

Going abroad to live and work, whether or not for the first time, is fraught with difficulties. The need to grapple with the local language is probably the most challenging even if some facility has already been acquired. Here, the natives of English-speaking countries enjoy a huge advantage, given that English has become the world's main lingua franca. This is also one of the main reasons why countries such as the UK, the US and Australia remain magnets for migrants of all kinds but especially for tertiary-level students (O'Connor, 2006, pp. 4–6) and why in 2001/02 Britain gained 13 per cent of this growing world-wide student flow. Half of the latter came to Britain from other EU countries. Moreover, according to UNESCO data, the overall impact of these student flows is higher in the UK than in any other EU country (O'Connor, 2006). With respect to the Manchester study, nearly one-third of the respondents cited the desire to learn or improve their English as one, or the most important, reason why they came to Britain.

An initial lack of language fluency goes a long way towards explaining why expatriates seek each other's company, thereby either creating little Italies or Germanies, or find social refuge among a group of expatriates and foreigners who share languages with common roots. Thus, language is not merely the carrier of a people's shared meanings for everyday communication. It also encodes a vast range of secondary meanings and private, localised colloquialisms and common-sense understandings shared by the host group (Schutz, 1964, p. 95). These equip members with a “knowledge of trustworthy recipes for interpreting the social world” which the stranger cannot easily share. It is one thing to learn the group's cultural patterns: it is quite another to master them so that s/he can move beyond mere translation to full “interpretive equivalence” (Schutz, 1964, p. 99). Many respondents talked of their difficulties in overcoming language deficiencies, particularly if they were from France and the countries of southern Europe. Some of the more obvious problems in reaching the kind of understanding that allowed migrants to establish durable relationships with locals—acquiring an understanding of slang terms, the ability to socialise readily in groups and not merely on an individual basis, dealing competently with the speed with which natives talked and so on—are clearly signposted in the following examples.

Sonia came from a Spanish-Venezuelan background and had lived in both countries during childhood. She had studied at a local university before becoming a dental nurse. Explaining why some European people, for example the Spanish, seem to mix together much more with their own national groups than other nationalities, she argued as follows

You see what happens … definitely when you speak, and it is your mother tongue, it is much richer, what you can mix and massage, than what you can do in a foreign language, so maybe the people of your nationality, they will understand a lot more, and you can read a lot more of the message with the people who speak your mother tongue than those who don't speak it.

Pieter was a French-speaking Swiss who came to Manchester in 2001. He ran his own business. The sheer diversity of his current Mancunian social links was highly exceptional for this study. Nevertheless, based on his earlier personal experiences, he commented on the tendency for nationals to cluster together and the obstacles to breaking into local social networks resulting from language difficulties

To be honest with you, if you want to … hold a conversation at a normal pace like English people … I think it takes time … it's not easy at all … And they just talk … so fast and in such a slangish way as well that it was just impossible for me after one year of English background to sort of be able to play an active role in a conversation like that.

These quotes also point to another factor propelling migrants towards expatriate relations—namely, their likely length of stay. A short stay—perhaps as an Erasmus student for one term—hardly provides an incentive to invest huge efforts into acquiring the idiosyncrasies of the host language beyond simply ensuring that university work does not suffer. On the other hand, this situation may change drastically if an individual decides to return later for a more serious long-term project or to stay because unforeseen opportunities arise. We return to such possibilities later.

A third influence that may tip new migrants into the arms of fellow expatriates is the sheer seductive power of primordial attachments—what Hannerz calls the “forms of life” flowing within “households, work places, neighbourhoods” within each nation or society, providing the “formative experiences” of early life and usually “massively present” (Hannerz, 2003, p. 69). The ease with which these can be understood is likely to play a central role in motivating individuals to flock together when overseas. Indeed, it is likely that for some groups this social inertia is being consolidated rather than undermined by globalisation such that in many global cities we find “a regime of differences that are non-interactive” (Sennett, 2002, p. 47). Certainly, many respondents pointed to the continuing influence of such primordial affiliations even among the educated migrants they knew. The following cases explore this theme.

Fabrizio had Belgian-Italian parents and grew up in Brussels where his parents both held high administrative positions in the EU directorates. He was in his early thirties and ran a food-importing company. Talking mainly about exchange students and other short-term visitors, he made the following comments concerning the various comings and goings of numerous young continental Europeans he had known over the years

I mean, yeah, the French people, maybe not the Germans but the Spanish people … they've got their own social groups and they arrive in Manchester and it's all right to stay within this group … It's friends of friends, I mean once you know one group in the University of Manchester you'll get to know others … You know, some houses in Manchester have been like a French stronghold for years … I employ for my business French and Spanish people, and it's so easy to just get someone … because they all know each other.

Lastly, migrants of all kinds, including skilled or educated migrants, are likely to find it difficult to penetrate local social networks, especially during the early stages of their sojourn. Nor is this situation confined to Britain. A number of respondents who had spent periods studying or working in countries such as Italy, Sweden or Greece provided similar accounts concerning the relative social indifference foreigners may encounter from natives who are already locked into their own established family and friendship relationships. Consequently, the former remain within a university-based expatriate network—if the numbers of available nationals permit this manoeuvre—or seek the friendship of other foreign students or perhaps of natives who are themselves ‘strangers’ to that location or region.

Frederik's account bears out this argument. He was a German doctorate student in his early thirties and had previously lived in the Netherlands and Sweden before arriving in Manchester. He explained

At the university in The Hague, there actually was no mix as far as I could see between the Dutch students and the exchange students from abroad … Again when I was in … Stockholm for the first time … it happened that I lived in a student flat … It was very much outside the city centre … And there we were … only exchange students from abroad so there was no mix with … Swedish students … a couple of Dutch girls … moved in to the campus. … And they were telling me the same thing actually, that although they had lived together with Swedes … in their first year of university in Stockholm itself … there was absolutely no mix and the Swedes went to the kitchen, and then left the room and went away … so the foreign students will stick together … because it was obviously very difficult to approach the Swedish students.

This section has argued that a growing number of young, sometimes highly educated, EU citizens, empowered by their right to free mobility, are enhancing their life-prospects and personal experiences by moving abroad. Many go for a short time, perhaps as an exchange student. Alternatively, and especially in the case of Britain's booming economy, they seek temporary, part-time work when little is available at home, or to improve their English. Later, they may decide to stay much longer but in the meantime many find it conducive to move within the rather loose-knit expatriate networks being formed and reformed by other nationals who are coming and going, too. Living in the same lodging houses and low-rental city localities, helping each other to find work and to manage the puzzles of the host culture, its language, customs and rules, they construct a version of ‘home’ in a foreign city. Because young Europeans from many countries are engaged in such explorations, forging ever-shifting expatriate settlements across the continent's cities and towns, a hotch-potch of little ‘nations’ is being built and rebuilt at any one time. Accordingly, territorial borders are being stretched across geographical space allowing citizens to gain the experience of overseas life while minimising their exposure to a foreign culture. Here, therefore, borders have become a moveable entity, deployed by citizens for their own individual purposes and hence their former geo-political fixity is being neutralised.

2. Forging Trans-social and Post-national Relationships: Borders Dissolved

In this section, we discuss the evidence suggesting that over time the experience of living abroad as a skilled migrant set the respondents on a journey of self-discovery, but one that involved the establishment of enduring trans-social relationships. Several factors made this increasingly possible and indeed likely. Since most fellow expatriates tended to be brief sojourners, the need to develop more permanent relationships was likely to engender a degree of dependence on other long-term stayers and these might include other foreigners or locals. As their English improved, along with their detailed understanding of British humour, popular cultural references and preferred leisure habits, it became easier to negotiate relationships with locals. Gradually, too, they established an everyday familiarity with the legal, economic and institutional intricacies of British society and built friendships at work, in leisure life and in the local neighbourhood, perhaps linked to the purchase of property. Here, it is useful to adapt Geertz's (1979, p. 114) insight concerning the bazaar economy in Morocco. While the different ethnic and religious groups there—Jews, Berbers, Arabs and others—engaged with each other across cultural borders within the spheres of work, trade and street life, albeit warily, each retreated into their separate enclave existences when it came to religion, food and, above all, marriage and family. However, for these highly educated, individualistic Manchester respondents whose long-term career ambitions and capabilities could not be satisfied through encapsulation within an ethnic/kinship business milieu and who had grown up in a post-modern culture and in an open Europe, no such strict ethnic demarcations around romantic love and family were experienced as necessary or appropriate. Thus, over time and both through close friendships and romantic partnerships, the respondents crossed primordial cultural boundaries, negotiated intercultural meanings and built social affiliations based on reciprocal trust and liking within the Manchester locale itself.

Some indication of the extent to which the respondents had formed trans-social relationships, including crossing the barriers into British society, is revealed by the following. Thus, when asked about their three or four closest friends in Manchester and/or the UK, nearly one-third did not include any fellow-nationals at all among this group—although these were often present in their wider networks. On the other hand, the closest friends named by over half were individuals who were partly, and sometimes mainly, members of other foreign nations. Similarly, four-fifths of the respondents included at least one British person among their closest friends. Of course, most also belonged to wider social networks which included a mixture of British people, other foreign nationals or expatriates. These might be individuals living in Manchester, or elsewhere in the UK or people originally met in another country.

Turning to their romantic partnerships, nearly a quarter had formed these while in the UK with a long-term partner who was neither British nor a fellow-national. If we include those who were previously involved in several short-term romantic relationships both with foreigners and British partners, this figure increases to just over a third. Moreover, a further six respondents entered long-term partnerships with a British person when living in a third country when both were ‘foreigners’ (see the case of Henri later). Another quarter of the respondents were involved in long-term relationships with British partners and, as we have seen, a further 10 per cent had formed such relationships when overseas. If we add those respondents who were previously involved in temporary relationships with local people and foreigners, we find that nearly half the respondents had been or were in romantic partnerships involving British people. In total, therefore, 70 per cent of the sample were, or had been, involved in mostly long-term romantic partnerships with other foreigners or British people. Only six respondents were in permanent relationships with co-nationals.

Perhaps over time, and at least for the immediate partners and children caught up in such relationships, but also their wider families in both countries, the need to build bridges across national differences through the formation of romantic relationships will prove to be the single most important factor in the growth of a sense of affiliation to a European identity alongside the continuing pull of national identities. Be this as it may, I now provide a brief sketch concerning some of the difficulties reported by the respondents arising from such partnerships and given their capacity to help bind EU societies together. Several women suggested that when they had children it would be preferable to return with their foreign or British partner to their homeland because there they could be assured of help from grandparents. Additionally, however, they suggested that one or more of the following provisions were superior to and often cheaper than their UK equivalents: the quality of infant nursery care, child welfare payments and the educational system in general. However, such possibilities might prove difficult to implement. Thus, a number of respondents living with long-term British partners suggested that, despite their shared inclination to live for a time in the respondent's home country, at least two constraints rendered this rather impractical. One was their British partner's inability to become sufficiently proficient in their home language to be able to obtain employment commensurate with their educational attainments, while the dearth of work in general in their country—compared with the UK—was a major reason why the respondents themselves had come to the UK in the first instance. Continuing institutional and economic differences between the EU countries coupled to cross-national inequities in language competency impose constraints on the mobility of bi-national couples.

Worries concerning the differences between national cultures and how to resolve them generated further complications that were hard to resolve. Nowhere was this more evident than in the case of children. For example, the competing influence that grandparents and families might be able to exercise over the upbringing of children and the likely future identities and affiliations of the latter when they were older, were of central concern both to current and potential parents. Only three respondents had children at the time of the interviews and one of these was Henri. In his late twenties, he was married to a British wife he had first met in Budapest. In Manchester, he worked for a non-governmental organisation. He commented as follows on the cultural clashes between bringing up children in a British city contrasted with family traditions in rural Normandy

I've just come back from two weeks staying with my family in France. And my two little ones … I realized they couldn't understand what was expected of them … generally they're really well behaved but they started messing about at the table and my mother sent them to their room … It's about finding that third way, or your own way through your own cultural values.

However, he had never found such processes to be anything but difficult and not only in respect to family life and national differences.

Several respondents were contemplating the possibility of parenthood and were anticipating the dilemmas this might create. As a child, Frank had lived in Canada and the UK and later in Amsterdam, Sydney, Prague and London before coming to Manchester. He now worked as a business consultant and was married to a Yorkshire woman. Despite his cosmopolitan background, he was very clear that their children will be bi-lingual so that he can pass on some of his own Finnish cultural heritage to his children. Similarly, Pierre, a French lawyer with a British fiancée, who had worked in Britain for 10 years speculated about the future as follows

I think I have lost a little of my roots. And my family links obviously … and what happens if we have children, how are they going to feel towards my French family, will they be bothered to go and see them?

This discussion concerning how and why some longer-staying migrants build bridges across primordial cultural borders by developing a gamut of personal relationships involving individuals with nationalities different from their own, paints a picture of intercultural sociality which contrasts markedly with the previous scenario. Thus, instead of moving and then, in a socio-cultural sense, re-enacting territorial frontiers as and when required, for this second group of Manchester migrants national borders became essentially irrelevant while they were living in the city. The need to engage constantly in negotiating, breaking down and rendering innocuous cultural boundaries is especially evident and pressing in the case of romantic partnerships. Manchester, like other EU locations where migrants remain for long periods, has become a place in the space of flows where strangers have learned to live as if borders of any kind scarcely existed and where they are perhaps only reminded of these when returning home to visit families and friends twice or thrice a year.

3. Belonging and Not Belonging: Living Beyond Borders

In this section, we explore the experiences described by many respondents where they increasingly juggled and dealt with major changes taking place in the ways they viewed themselves, their national identities and their various social allegiances.

First, and despite the strong tendency for virtually all the respondents to maintain regular and quite intense communications with people back home, in addition to continuous interpersonal contacts through frequent visits, most increasingly felt that they had become a relative social outsider with respect to such relationships and had begun to feel they might never be able to return on a permanent basis. Secondly, this relative and intensifying separateness from home—working paradoxically alongside continued contact—sometimes coincided with a sense of attachment to other national friends who had also lived abroad and experienced the same kind of social estrangement. Thirdly, although living abroad had often weakened the respondents' national affiliations and sense of patriotic loyalties, in some instances these same experiences simultaneously brought into much clearer focus exactly what it was about their national identity that was unique while highlighting some characteristics they now found hard to accept but also others which appeared more appealing and worth treasuring than before. Thus, while their patriotism declined in an overt political or nationalist sense, their pride in certain aspects of their society and culture and desire to remain associated with them actually became stronger.

Relative Social Marginality and No Going Back

At some point, many skilled migrants are likely to attain a much deeper sense of objectivity concerning their own national cultural attachments, although, by the same token, it also becomes easier for them to open up to the wider world. Indeed, more than four-fifths of the respondents suggested that living abroad had made them more aware of the world and/or open to other cultures and in most cases this ability to think and feel outside their original national culture was directly linked to specific interpersonal relations they had formed through travel and migration. However, this greater objectivity and world openness had additional consequences, including the ability to begin reconstructing their own persona while making flexible choices with respect to the much wider assemblage of primordial cultural resources that were now on display and daily being enacted within their social space. These might be local in origin, or stem from their relations with other foreigners or simply be fed by their own original bank of national cultural experiences. A further possibility is that they began to feel they could no longer completely identify with or return to their home society. They experienced a sense of social distance from it. The following examples demonstrate these possibilities.

Rosario first came to work in Manchester from Spain in 1999 and had become involved with a British partner. She had worked at a number of different jobs in the local area but was now teaching full time at a university. On the question of her identity after living in the UK for seven years, she had clearly acquired a far stronger capacity for reflexivity

Yes. I like myself much more now. I suppose like everybody going abroad and living in another culture, it's a very enriching experience. You see things from different angles that you didn't see before. You are able to analyse things that you were unable to before. On the other hand, she argued that: ‘it has its negative points in the way you can be very detached from everything, as well. So you don't get involved … It's easy to judge from the outside.

Speaking about how living abroad had changed her, Denise, a French musician working in a local orchestra, said

I really see that your way is not necessarily theirs. That there are other ways. And … in one or two years you don't have enough time to appreciate the other ways, just see them as different, but with time you kind of see the good of it as well, and so it's like you have more and more shades of grey instead of black and white … Well now in some ways I'm less French because when I go back I can see that people are more French than I am. So I am less French in some ways.

Manuel was a Spaniard in his early forties. Because of his job, teaching and fostering Spanish language and culture, he mixed constantly in a network of fellow Spanish people as well as with many individuals of Latin American origin but also with British people trying to learn Spanish. Having lived and worked in several northern towns and cities, including Leeds and Manchester at different times since the mid 1980s, he had also acquired a number of British friends and acquaintances, to some of whom he was very close. On the question of his identity, he commented as follows

I haven't lost my identity, and I can pick up the phone and speak with my niece in the Basque country and with my mother in Spanish … but when I'm in Spain, this might sound stupid, but I tend to feel a bit foreign sometimes … you start to feel like, well, this is not my home anymore, home is back there.

The Abroad People

The very fact of going overseas constitutes a highly significant step for all migrants. However, as we saw earlier, in the case of the kind of skilled migrant we are dealing with here, who goes abroad alone, is usually unmarried and who is not part of a company or organisational team, the experience of migration is likely to create opportunities for personal transformation precisely because they are cut off from the day-to-day social control formally exercised by people at home. Initially, too, many find it difficult to penetrate deeply into local society for reasons already discussed. Thus, as a relative social outsider with respect to both home and host society, the usual norms and expectations may not apply. The migrant experiences what one respondent referred to as an “outside perspective position” and a second described as a “cultural middle ground, neither here nor there”.

Several consequences may follow from this syndrome of experiences, but one is the possibility of finding not only that you now have more in common with other fellow-travellers than anyone else—as we saw in the previous section—but that increasingly your frame of reference depends on an expatriate diaspora. Petra's example demonstrates this very clearly. After training in Berlin as a musicologist, she arrived in Manchester in 2001 and combined part-time teaching at one university with studying for her doctorate at another. Talking about some of her German friends who like her had now moved overseas she said

We have got closer since we all moved. Because you have lived this abroad experience which is kind of similar although they are in a different country … and when you are on the phone to them it's like, “Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean, the same happened to me”.

Partly what she shares with these friends is the fact that they have all had to confront what she called their “German-ness” while living in a different country and the need to modify this. Moreover, she had lost some of her old friends who had not moved away from Germany. Referring to her former German social circle, she also suggested that

The circle of friends narrows down a bit but it basically doesn't matter any more where you live … This is quite a close community now, you know—the abroad people.

Several other respondents also talked about the growing significance of a diasporic network of abroad people in their lives. Increasingly, it was with such individuals that they shared the strongest home friendships. Moreover, like Petra, they also shared a tendency to feel partly stranded from their home society and the need to re-evaluate both the host and home social situation. Anne, for example, was Italian and worked in a multinational corporation as a financial administrator. She was married to a British man.

I have spoken about this to lots of people who live abroad and you don't find yourself fitting in completely anywhere … because if I had never left Italy, not having experienced anything else I would not regret missing anything … and while you experience two places and two lives you always miss something in both places.

The Transformation of National Identity: Stronger and Yet Weaker

The respondents were asked whether and in what ways living abroad had changed their sense of who they were and their various allegiances. Here, one-third claimed that, despite their ability to live a freely chosen, self-directed, socially cosmopolitan life abroad—one that was much more open to the world—in certain respects their sense of national belonging had intensified rather than diminished, although not in an overtly nationalistic way.

Toby was Finnish and married to a British partner and worked for a small computer firm. He talked about what had happened to the original national values he had acquired as a child and in early adulthood

They are important but less and less, they are more and more British I suppose … honesty is probably one of them also punctuality. British people don't have these values to the same extent but I am learning to relax mine as well … I have become more sociable.

He contrasted this British sociability with the Finnish quietness and reserve he had known at home. On the other hand, he insisted that in other ways his sense of belonging to a Finnish culture was becoming stronger

When you are away from your home country I think your culture gets stronger … we [referring to the Finnish community he knows in Manchester] celebrate every Finnish national day now … we listen to Finnish music.

Adrienne was French and worked as a management consultant in a third-sector enterprise. She was married to a British man and had lived in Manchester since 1993. As with Toby, her comments concerning her sense of French national identity and how this had changed point to the same kind of ambivalence, combined with a keener awareness of certain national strengths and the curious situation of having both lost and gained by the experience of living abroad

I've become more Anglicised … I now think and speak in many ways like a British person and build up sentences in French in a British way … I've got different perceptions of France now … I see it as very bureaucratic and not helpful to people in finding jobs … also people find a job and then stay there for life. But health is much better in France—so I pick and choose different good and bad things across the two countries. I'm more objective and critical of both sets of cultural and national values. Yet I'm also more patriotic despite being more aware of French weaknesses—I find myself defending France against British criticisms. As an expatriate I feel I must try to belong somewhere, I need to feel rooted and tied yet at the same time I will probably find it hard to return.

Oscar had lived in Britain for 12 years and after a long period teaching in a local university had recently gone into business as a homeopathic doctor. Although he praised certain aspects of British social and economic life and believed he had absorbed some of these to his own personal advantage, he nevertheless retained a strong sense of being quite proudly German. On one hand he described Britain as “a very dynamic country … there is a feeling in England that many things can happen”. Moreover, talking about his socio-cultural experience of living in Britain he observed

What I would say about the English, what I like about it … this is what my German friends commented on after I'd lived in England for a few years, they said you've become too polite. They noticed that there was a sort of politeness and you know they were sorry … and I must say that is a great thing to have … I quite like the way people deal with each other on a superficial level, that there is a way of politeness, that there is friendliness and so on.

Later, however, he began talking about his sense of national identity and made the following comments.

I will say that my German identity has been more clearly shaped. … I have become more keenly aware of my German-ness. … There was a point when I thought, well, you know, I could actually become an English citizen, get an English passport. And then I thought, it would be totally wrong because I am German. If someone asks me I say … I'm German.

In summary, the respondents’ experiences suggest that, over time, living abroad had exposed them to considerable personal uncertainty; a situation where it was no longer easy—or even possible—to say to which socio-cultural entity they belonged or whether their individual identity could be grounded any longer in a particular location or national way of life. Thus, their sense of attachment to other expatriate migrant friends—also partly dislodged from previous national ties—often became stronger while their affiliations to trans-social friends, partners and their families became of equal or greater significance than homeland relationships. The feeling of perhaps never being able to return home might underpin this. Accordingly, the possibility of possessing a clear-cut sense of belonging became progressively more problematic. Rather, in what had become effectively a personal world without borders, they had to take up ‘residence’ in a moveable social, national and physical space of their own continuous creation.

Concluding Thoughts

Like other cities and towns across the EU, the Manchester locale is functioning as a kind of giant European “switching board” (Zhou and Tseng, 2001, p. 123), akin to a vast railway junction, international airport or motorway interchange. Here, travellers from many locations arrive and descend, each bringing their own personal baggage of cultural and social capital and private dreams of self-realisation but also encumbered with various constraints. As they do so, innumerable routes converge and a gamut of primordial cultural legacies comes into juxtaposition. While some intend to remain for only a short time, others plan to pursue more enduring goals which require the ability to build bridges and forge new alliances. Here, many things become possible. Having placed themselves in an outsider position with respect to both home and host society, it is easier, especially for the skilled migrant, to reinvent their life-course. Secondly, as we have seen, with so many different paths coming into conjunction cultural learning and the formation of new cross-national alliances become highly likely. The city acts as an arena for the exchanging, borrowing and adopting of different cultural ingredients and affiliations. Thus it operates as a kind of human market which hugely augments both the variety of possible social relationships ‘on offer’ and the need and opportunity to explore them—compared with the home society where most remain enclosed within local affiliations and lack the incentive to cross cultural borders. Thirdly, many will find themselves changing route as their trans-social experiences propel them into unanticipated bi-national romantic partnerships and friendships, encourage them to remain longer than they had originally intended or equip them with the skills to move on somewhere else with greater confidence than before.

However, and lastly, because their homeland ties to friends and family remain important while new sets of cross-national affiliations and intercultural attachment are forged alongside, each individual becomes a point of intersection but also dispersal for several cultural flows and exchanges proceeding at the same time and diffusing in a number of different directions. Thus, Manchester is a transnational but also a transcultural social space (Pries, 2001). It forms a site where socio-spatial flows are both initiated and transmitted—a transit point in the European and global space of flows—but, at the same time, it is also a place in it own right with its own dynamics and is increasingly shaped by the multiple cross-national social interactions of its visitors and locals. Through these chains of social interaction and affiliation, fragments of everyday Manchester social life are carried across the continent to become embedded into numerous locations, although the reverse is also true. Through this process, among others, ever more dense webs of transEuropean sociality are being spun and enacted. These do not supercede existing national societies but they overlay, interweave and so silently connect them while generating their own logic, momentum and emergent properties. They are built around the transplantation but also mixing of national cultural elements and peopled by individuals who have acquired overlapping and multiple affiliations, identities, loyalties and indeed lives. These can no longer be completely satisfied, realised or contained solely within the context of their original nations of birth and the latter's territorial and cultural borders.

The author would like to thank Chris Rumford and the two anonymous referees for their very useful comments on the first draft of this paper. Thanks are also due to Benedicte Brahic, Robert Grimm and Jemma Kennedy for excellent help with some of the interviews and the transcripts and to all the respondents for their time and stimulating contributions.