Thomas Lacroix

Conceptualizing Transnational Engagements: A Structure and Agency Perspective on (Hometown) Transnationalism

This paper unfolds a conceptual framework of migrants’ transnational engagements. It combines three elements: a concept of social agent apprehended in its plurality of roles and social embedding; the Habermas theory of communicative action accounting for the communicative dimension of transnational engagements; a concept of social institution explaining the role of migrant organizations in framing transnational activities. This framework is applied to the analysis of cross border engagements of Moroccan, Algerian and Indian hometown organizations in the development of their respective sending areas.

Indian and Polish Migrant Organisations in the UK

Indians and Poles are among the most important immigrant groups in the UK. In 2009, with 625 000 persons, Indians are the largest foreign born group, the Poles are now the largest group of foreign nationality (494 000 persons) (ONS 2009). The choice of these two groups was driven by the intent to compare a long standing immigrant population with a recent one to check whether migratory historicity might have influenced the shaping of respective associational fields. The difference of ethnicities (Asian non Christian vs European Christian) was another aspect which influenced this choice: the race relation policy primarily targeted Black and Ethnic Minorities (BME) and therefore left aside white populations such as the Poles. Interestingly, the comparison between the two populations turned out to be very relevant but not for the expected reasons. In fact the Polish associational field we discovered has even older roots than the Indian one: it was basically established during the immediate post-war period. In addition, contrary to what the perceived cultural proximity led us to foresee, Polish associations tend to be more distant from the rest of the British civil society and therefore less sensitive to mainstream social change. These unexpected findings have rendered the comparison all the more fascinating.

Migration and the Village Lifeworld: Exploring the Ambivalence of the Migration Act

What makes village migration so special when it comes to transnational engagement? Indeed, collective remittances and hometown organising are widely observed among communities of rural origin, but hardly so among those of urban background. I have met hometown groups from all over Punjab, Kabylia or the Souss plain areas, but none were from Amritsar, Chandigarh, Agadir or Tizi Ouzou. In this chapter, I would like to show that this very specificity is not to be found in what people do, organise or mobilise once abroad, but in the very conditions that shape their migration. The reason why people migrate informs the nature and content of the relationships they maintain with the homeland. The disconnection between migration and post-migration studies may explain why there has been so little research on this relation. But it turns out to be key for understanding the peculiarity of hometown transnationalism. This simple assumption will serve as a starter for the analysis of collective transnational bonds.

Hometown Organising and the Multipolarisation of Migrants’ Lives

This chapter addresses volunteering in HTOs as an emergent practice that provides the possibility for activists to overcome the multipolarisation of their identity. Indeed, this involvement is to be understood within a history of migration and settlement. One observes a parallelism between the embedding of migrant groups into their host country, the mutation of the “communities of suffering” into more stratified and diverse groups on the one hand, and the surge of the first development projects on the other. The emergence of the first development initiative is not simultaneous with the first arrivals of Indians and North Africans in Europe (which happened prior to the Second World War), but rather with the consolidation of immigrant communities in their respective host settings. My intention is to show how HTOs adapted to the transformation of their context to continue producing a shared communality of belonging. Besides the traditional functions of HTOs highlighted by the existing literature, this chapter brings to the fore their capacity to incorporate social change. They do not exist in spite of change, but due to it. HTOs appear as communicational spaces in which migrants seek to reinvent their shared sense of belonging beyond their insertion into the host society and the ensuing multipolarisation of their identity.

Outline of a Structure and Agency to Hometown Transnationalism

The structure and agency approach was forged in reaction to both behaviourist studies which posit society as an aggregation of interest-driven practices of individuals, and to functionalist and structuralist studies which view actors as nothing but parts of wider societal mechanics. The structure and agency approach can be defined as a heuristic model whose ambition is to unravel the thread that goes from individual action to the constitution of societies as an ensemble of various structural formations (political and economic institutions, culture and pattern of social interactions). This approach is marked by the will to assert actors’ capacity to act upon their lives and make a difference. Under this umbrella term, one can find three competing theories: Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice (Bourdieu 1998), Antony Giddens’s structuration (Giddens 1984) and Margaret Archer’s morphogenetics (Archer 1995). Beyond their discrepancies, what they have in common is to take social practices as the contact point through which actors affect and are affected by social structures.

Migrant Organisations and the New Governance of Development

The structuration of volunteering patterns is driven by a multiplicity of policy and social factors not only at arrival, but also at origin. The present chapter moves on from receiving to sending states and seeks to assess the impacts of their respective attitudes on hometown networks and collective remittances. The previous chapter pointed to the limitations of the POS approach, suggesting that the influence of public policies is an iterative process that depends on the readiness of migrant groups to endorse policy options. And this is all the more true when targeted groups have partaken in the process of policymaking itself. In other words, the bearing of state policies is better understood when conceived as a communication flow between policymakers and actors. In her comparative work on Mexican and Moroccan examples, Natasha Iskander astutely construes the definition and implementation of states’ diasporic policies as a dynamic and interpretative process in which migrant and state actors are engaged. She defines interpretation as a process through which a functional communication is established between actors who do not share the same language, practices or experience (Iskander 2010, 13). The author focused on the “conversational process” that went along with the definition of Moroccan and Mexican diasporic policies. This approach sheds light on the communicational dimension of policy effectiveness.

The Politics of Remittances: Implications for Development

The scholarship usually distinguishes between individual and group-oriented remittances, and between social and economic remittances. A communicational approach to transnational engagement, presented in this chapter, opens the possibility to unravel these categorizations and sheds a new light on the political dimension of transfers. Two levels of political structures shape the act of remitting. On the one hand, there always are the actors already embedded into a moral economy between migrants and non-migrants. And this power relation, which informs what is transferred, evolves over time along with the integration dynamics at stake in the place of arrival. On the other hand, the implementation of structural adjustment policies has affected the balance of this power relation. Local authorities are in competition with the volunteer sector for control of development resources. In this context, migrants and their organisations are key actors of development.

Selecting Groups: Moroccan Chleuhs, Algerian Kabyles and Indian Sikhs in Europe

The question of why the propensity to engage in development practices varies from one group to another remains unanswered. The discrepancy is all the more puzzling when one considers groups sharing a roughly similar migration history. This conundrum will serve as a starting point for my investigation of hometown transnationalism. Confronting the beginning and the outcome of the same process for different groups brings about the question of parallelisms and bifurcations. It points to the relevance of engaging in comparative analyses and of studying the migration process as a whole. By this, I refer to the need to adopt a temporal perspective when examining migrants’ behaviours, rather than using history, as is often done, as a mere decorative background. I have chosen to focus on three groups which scholarship has rarely approached together: North African Berbers (Chleuhs and Kabyles) in France and Sikhs in the UK. The chapter presents the rationale for selecting these groups and the methodological options retained to carry out this study. It then provides an overview of this conundrum in order to unravel the theoretical issues guiding this research.

The Indian and North African Volunteer Sector in Europe

The crumbling of working-class organisations marked the 1980s. The rise of the Khalistani movement from 1984 onwards, the end of large industrial movements after the right-wing parties came back to office in 1986, the end of the Algerian one-party system in 1988, accelerated the end of the amicales IWA, AMF and ATMF as mass organisations. These events revealed a process of identity transformation silently at play since the previous decade. The present chapter analyses the way Algerian, Moroccan and Indian associational fields reconfigured from the 1990s onwards. It lays special emphasis on the forms taken by the “development turn” during this period. After focusing on individual and collective incentives for group-making, it addresses the evolution of the policy (political opportunity structures) and associational contexts (ecological factors) that set the stage for the growth of collective remittances. This chapter discusses HTOs in the context of Indian and North African associational fields in France and the UK. Drawing on a quantitative assessment of the number and types of associations created in both countries, it examines the structure and transnational extensions of investigated volunteer sectors. Specific attention is paid to the growing importance taken by development activities. This is not an isolated process, but a distinctive facet of the broader transnationalisation dynamics of immigrant volunteering.

Conclusion: Moving beyond the Postmodern Trap of Transnational Studies

Hometown transnationalism has been addressed and construed in this book as a collective response that emigrants bring to the question “what is it to be a villager”. This response has evolved over the changing conditions induced by their migration and settlement trajectory. And the surge of collective remittances that started in the 1990s is the latest avatar of this effort to assert an existential continuity where there is nothing but change. This response, it has been argued, has been elicited by a mix of events whose combination became effective from the 1990s onward. It is the outcome of a convergence between decentralisation policies, public discourses, villagers’ expectations and migrant identity processes. The book unfolds at length each element of this arithmetic of hometown transnationalism. The initial conditions of the migration act delineate the grammatical structures that have underwritten the phenomenon ever since: the moral geography that defines the village as a centrality, and emigration countries as both lands of fascination and corruption; initial gifts of departure and arrival that seal the status of village expatriate; the three-fold set of expectations and duties as an individual, a family member and a village member… This initial grammar has been further complexified by the introduction of new roles acquired in the place of arrival in their place of work, of activism or at home.