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RESEARCH PRODUCT

An Easy Game? Experiences of ‘Homecoming’ in the Post-Socialist Context of Croatia and the Czech Republic

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The obstacles that often accompany remigration, planned and imagined as a ‘homecoming’, are seldom the topic of investigation in migration studies. Returning is not always an ‘easy game’. To explore this aspect of remigration, this chapter intends to focus on narratives of return produced mainly by so-called co-ethnic migrants who moved back to Croatia and the Czech Republic during the past two decades of post-socialist transformation. The empirical base of the chapter draws on the experiences and struggles accompanying remigration, and of arrival and acceptance in the respective society as described by returnees in biographical interviews. Attention is given to everyday social interaction in which alternating expectations and specific patterns of behaviour become apparent, as well as to processes of identification in which self-perception and perceptions of the ‘other’ confront each other and where ‘belonging’ is negotiated. These narratives of return also suggest that the concept of return should fundamentally be reconsidered, as should the notions of ‘homeland’ and ‘homecoming’ on which it is based. They challenge us to investigate and reflect on remigration as immigration, as has previously been suggested in another context. Since migrants—whether or not co-ethnic—generally bring along other languages, worldviews, values, patterns of behaviour and aesthetic preferences, which they have acquired and assumed elsewhere, co-ethnic transnational migration and remigration encourage processes of cultural diversification. These factors are sometimes involved in the collisions, tensions, conflicts and learning processes that accompany the process of integration, even into a host society imagined as the cultural country of origin. This line of thought leads us to conclude that co-ethnic remigration ultimately contributes to social transformation and cultural diversification in the host societies. This assumption will be explored in the following examples and discussions. We will also examine whether the frictions, dynamics of communication and transfer processes which shape and accompany the integration of returnees, can perhaps advance or trigger social and cultural change, or whether the inertia of habitual actions and prevailing rules of the game, along with the intrinsic behaviour they demand, make it difficult for people who have been away for long periods of time to take part in ‘the game’ as returnees.