1The Interdigitation of Reality and Imagination in Unreal Conditional Sentences

To show the structure of an unreal conditional sentence, let us use a basic example: ‘If the glass had fallen on the floor, it would have definitely/surely/probably shattered.’

In short: unreal conditional sentences, although seemingly simple at first glance, represent a complex relationship of premise – category – condition – moral judgment. These sentences are decisive for the constitution of what I term the ‘realm of potential.’ The realm of potential refers to events that are possible, or not; that could have been or were possible, but did not occur. The realm of potential is the space of missed opportunities but also of avoided catastrophes. It is the space against which we measure and judge ‘chances taken’ and ‘real developments.’ The realm of potential is also the backdrop against which statements of bad luck, fortune, destiny, or tragedy start to make sense. It is hence constitutive for our self-conception, for our place in the world and therefore for our identity.

Let us briefly return to the migrant (in biographical reports it is usually an admired uncle) coming home and displaying an Apple computer. The imaginary opportunity space of a younger relative meeting him consists of four statements: he was successful – so it is possible to be successful (premise). As my relative I am like him: if he made it I can make it (category). He left at the age I am now (condition) – so now I should give migration a serious thought: should I or shouldn’t I (moral judgment).

In what follows I want to show how engaging with these categories can contribute to a better understanding of three key questions of migration theory: the migratory decision, transnational communities/diasporas, and irregular migration.

2Dreaming about Migration

During the 1960s and early 1970s, a drastic change of outlook with regard to migration took place in the rural regions of Turkey.25 Mass migration from the Black Sea Region to the urban centers of Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir started in the 1950s. Initially only young men from very poor and large families migrated. Their lot was pitied: migration was interpreted as a strategy to combat poverty. In terms of our analytical quadrangle they belonged to the rural underclass rather than to the well-established. With the exception of individual adventurers no one among the better-off entertained the idea. Rather, the life in gurbet was associated with hardship and relative isolation. The idea of having drawn the better lot if one stayed home was reinforced by the fact that migration eased the pressure on land – more land per capita was available than before.

The situation changed radically when the first generation of migrants turned out to be successful, a success that was structurally related to the boom years. When the migrants strolled through the villages in nice clothes during vacation time, feelings of envy surged. What happened was a categorical restructuring. If these subalterns were able to make it, one could certainly have done so as well – and even better. What was regarded as a privilege (namely, to stay in the village) in the 1950s, loomed as a relative failure by the late 1960s – a missed opportunity. This completely changed the outlook on the village: although the living situation was better than ever, life in the village lost its appeal. This was expressed by sayings like ‘the village has no future’ or ‘there is no life in the village.’

Numbers were a significant part of this dynamic. There had been adventurers before, but here, a collective rather than an individual had migrated. Individual adventurers are considered exceptions; they are simply ‘different.’ No law can be deduced, as they do not belong to the same category as oneself. The choices of such isolated village expats provided material for good stories but had no relevance for one’s self-perception. It was only when many migrated that the impression took hold that one could also have been in their position. Hence the rule of ‘you can get it if you really want’ was established. The validity of this law of migration had been established first with regard to internal migration in Turkey and, some years later, for international migration.

The rule did not apply to all categories though, as age set a conditionality: it was believed that only men below 40 would stand a chance to succeed in migrating to Izmir, Ankara or Istanbul, and the age limit was even lower for those migrating to Germany. The rule also applied only to men. The only categorical exception was made for young women who had a professional education (mostly nurses and teachers).

Once rule, category, and conditionality were established, moral evaluation started. The decision to migrate had to be weighed against familial responsibilities: problems arose when the parents were elderly and had to be cared for; when there were young children, or when issues of honor required someone’s presence in the village. All these moral questions were more pressing with regard to migration to Europe than with regard to internal migration: Germany was far away and considered to be the country of infidels, where sexual libertinage, alcohol, and consumption of pork were epidemic. And it was clear that, unlike with internal migration, young men would be outside of social control. While it seemed to be established that migration to Germany was a pathway to economic success, a discussion of the moral implications arose.

Young men faced a situation of moral ambivalence: on the one hand they experienced increasing moral pressure to migrate, exerted primarily by the peer group with whom they compared themselves. One ran the risk of being regarded as a failure if one stayed behind. But there was also moral pressure by older family members who insisted on the fulfillment of familial duties. According to them, migration would only be okay if certain conditions were fulfilled, i. e. after the death of the parents. This conditionality, however, contradicted the conditionality set by the imperatives of the labor market: to wait until the parents passed away would mean to risk that the window of opportunity might close. Moral negotiations led to compromises. The most favored one was to let the elder sons migrate and force the youngest one to stay behind. The older brothers would support the youngest and thus compensate him for having to stay in the village. This compromise failed after it turned out that this obligation of support often ended with the death of the parents. Once this became apparent, the moral evaluation changed. It started to be considered irresponsible for parents to insist that their youngest son would stay; rather, they were pressured to allow him to move to the city. In the 1970s, only a few parents gave in; by the 1990s, the new rule was firmly established. Only a few ‘stubborn’ parents insisted on what had before been considered the normal way.

3Imaginaries of the Transnational Space

The term “imagined communities” is probably one of the most successful terminological coinages of recent years: originally applied to the imagined community of the nation by Benedict Anderson in 1983, imagined communities now also describe diasporas, social and nativist movements. The term refers to (commonly strong) feelings of community and solidarity among groups of otherwise strangers who share the same national space (Anderson 1991, 6), or to feelings of kinship by persons who are of common descent, but beyond that hardly have anything in common (diasporic communities). I want to put forward the claim that imagined communities are based on imaginary spaces.

Benedict Anderson draws our attention to two interrelated phenomena that are constitutive for the phenomenon of imagined communities. The first, and most commonly referred to, is the media thesis: besides novels, daily newspapers were instrumental in developing a nationally imagined space. Day after day, according to Anderson, newspapers represent a space in which certain events play out: “The idea of a social organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history” (Anderson 1991, 26). The second thesis could be called the career thesis. Anderson attempted to explain why the creole communities of the Americas developed a national consciousness well before most of Europe. He put forward the plausible argument that a national space was revealed to bureaucrats through “administrative pilgrimages” (Anderson 1991, 140). In the case of creole bureaucrats, these pilgrimages were restricted not just horizontally (promotion to a different administrative unit in the colonies was generally barred) but also vertically (the highest positions of the imperial administration invariably went to functionaries from the mother country). It was this circumstance alone that turned the reference to an administrative unit into one’s home territory. The idea of the imaginary opportunity structure relates these two hypotheses to each other: the nation as a realm of potential was revealed to creole functionaries since other locations within the respective colonial administrative unit were locations they could have been sent to or gladly would have been transferred to. The mother country, on the other hand, did not belong to the realm of potential. Real/unreal space was limited to the colonial administrative unit: it had the status of a special legal space. That these were also represented in the form of newspapers certainly helped: but the newspapers alone would have been insufficient to develop strong national feelings. As Michael Warner (2002) has accurately pointed out, newspapers constitute publics. Such publics are sociologically different from communities and evolve from reading a particular product. They have symbolic power – but this power unfolds much differently from collectives. Publics can structure one’s conception of the world, but do not account for communities of solidarity.26

What, then, when it comes to “transnational imagined communities”? Again I would argue that there is more to transnationalism than just networks, a feeling related to the fact that networks do not only represent ongoing transactions but also constitute a realm of the possible, a Möglichkeitsraum (Musil 1978), which allows for hopes and dreams, a space where one compares oneself with others. In this realm, unreal conditional sentences of the present (‘if I moved to another country within this space I would fare like my cousin there’) or of the past (‘If my parent had moved / had not moved (let’s say) to Germany I would be in a different position today’) can be constructed.

Let me draw attention to the fact that transnational imaginary spaces, by definition, cross borders. This, in fact, distinguishes them from national imaginary spaces and defines their specific dynamics. Whereas national imagined communities are surrounded by borders (and literally defined by them), transnational imagined communities are internally structured by national borders that cut through them. Some members of a transnational community live in the home country, others in one of the immigration countries. With regard to imaginary opportunity spaces this creates complexity.

National opportunity spaces are also status regimes. The term status regime refers to ideas about the normal (i. e. both in the sense of normative and the regular) correlation of education, profession, income, gender, race, and social background – or, to put it in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms – to the conversion rates of the social, economic, and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1982, 193ff.). Boris Nieswand (2011) coined the term “status paradox” in order to grasp how migration upsets this normal order of things. When labor migrants accept the hardships of migration they do so because it is profitable. For those who stayed at home this means that the migrants circumvented the rules that regulate ascendancy within the nation-state. Referring to Ghana, he states:

[The problem is that] global inequalities in wages and buying power […] provide them with an opportunity structure to gain status in Ghana by transferring resources acquired through their work in Germany. The visibility of the Burgers’ houses, consumer goods, dependents and money in Ghana causes irritation and envy, in particular among those who feel illegitimately overtaken […] Both admiration for their success and moral condemnation for the means by which it is achieved can be observed. (Nieswand 2011, 137)

I observed similar reactions among Turks in Turkey who coined the derogatory term Alamanci for the migrants in Germany. The associations of the terms Alamanci or Burger resemble those about nouveau riches: they have no manners; they gave up the Turkish (resp. Ghanaian) way of life; they dress funny; they make unreasonable claims. Esin Bozkurt quotes a Turkish migrant to Germany who complains about these stereotypes:

They find us ignorant, unmannered, crude peasants. We are great when it comes to pay the bill, but after that we become mountain Turks crude peasants […] they call us Germanized. They say we are no real Turks. We earned money, gained financially, but we lost people’s respect. They do not take us serious anymore. They call us diluted Turks. (Bozkurt 2009, 102–103)

The concept of an imaginary opportunity space provides a clue to this widespread phenomenon. Persons in the same category as oneself pose challenges for the self because one relates to them in the mode of unreal conditional sentences (‘If I were in his/her place,’ ‘if I acted in the way he or she does’). In a way, persons in my category constitute the parallel universes of my own life. They show what I could have reached (or where I could have ended up) in life. This implies feelings of superiority or inferiority and can be a source of pride or depression. The often not very fair judgments about the persons living in the other part(s) of the transnational space derive from this dynamic. When they bypass the normal order of things, they do not commit an abstract violation of the rules of the game: it is very personal. Category, law, and condition – everything is equal, what remains is the question of morality. And this is the stuff from which the venom is brewed. There are a variety of reasons why one did not go or claims not to have gone (because one had to be loyal to the parents, one’s country, one’s traditions), implying – of course – that the other did not care so much about these issues. The moral question is the realm to which those who are worse off (usually in the home country) resort to: the others might be richer – but I am morally superior.

The quotation above makes an interesting point, stating: “We are great when it comes to pay the bill.” There is widespread complaint among the Alamancis that they are charged higher prices or cheated. There seems to be a claim to distributive justice associated with the structure of imaginary opportunity spaces. There seems to be widespread feeling that one is somewhat entitled to a fair share.

While those who stayed on one side of the divide are challenged by the display of wealth, migrants often have different problems. As their new country usually does not recognize their degrees, they accept a devaluation of their social status in exchange for monetary gains. This poses a particular problem when the economic turnout is smaller than expected, e. g. in case of unemployment. One of my interlocutors expressed strong self-doubts when he realized that all his former classmates had taken high administrative positions in Turkey, while he was still desperately fighting for earning money as a worker in Germany. Interestingly, he accused his former classmates of arrogance and of “having forgotten where they came from.”27

Morality plays an even greater role when violence comes into play. The tension between migrants and those left behind is particularly pronounced in cases of flight from civil war or conflict zones, as the irrealis (had I only stayed / had I only left) takes on existential dimensions in instances of physical violence. As a result, the prejudice leveled against refugees returning home is particularly bitter. Those who stayed behind often considered refugees who fled Bosnia and Herzegovina during the civil war of the 1990s as ‘traitors,’ since they did not take part in defending the home territory. This was especially prevalent in Sarajevo, a city that was under siege for two years. The situation was exacerbated by widespread and false rumors about the luxury the refugees allegedly experienced during their stay in Europe (Black and Koser 1999).

Feelings of guilt experienced by emigrants frequently coincide with accusations of treason. Such feelings of guilt can be exploited for the purpose of collecting money. In the case of Eritrea, a ‘voluntary’ tax of 2 % was imposed on migrants living in Europe (Black and Koser 1999). In the Berlin Eritrean community, lists of donors were posted, resulting in more pressure on those who had so far avoided payment. Similar actions have reportedly been undertaken on behalf of the Kurdish PKK and the Sri Lankan Tamils. This rationale also demonstrates an interdigitation of the real and unreal: since the migrants live in another country and are physically and materially better off, the structure of the irrealis can fully manifest itself. This helps explain an initially confusing set of circumstances: a secured residence permit and relative economic success in the country of immigration seldom lead to a weakening of the ties to the homeland but often increase the readiness to donate (Black and Koser 1999).

The relevance of opportunity structures for maintaining transnational imagined communities has been recognized by nation-states. During the 1990s and early 2000s most nation-states revised policies that previously aimed at bringing migrants back home, instead encouraging them to stay where they were while at the same time reinforcing their ties to their home country. This is usually accomplished by granting citizenship rights to émigrés, thus turning them into ‘expats.’ The state of Israel, for example, grants a right to citizenship to all Jews, wherever they are, and in this way effectively creates ties to those who live in other countries. Thus the sentence: ‘if I were there I also would be affected by (let’s say) acts of terrorism’ becomes a real unconditional sentence. When Hungary passed a status law in 2001 that granted citizenship rights to Hungarians living in Romania, Serbia or Slovakia in order to further their national sentiments, it came as no surprise that Romania protested this attempt of extension of the imaginary community. By favoring national sentiments both the governments of Israel and Hungary also try to build up pressure groups in the other countries.

The same holds true for attempts to accord migrants special status with regard to the right to return. It would be interesting to compare states that grant such opportunities to migrants with those that do not. During the wars of independence in former Yugoslavia, the Croatian diaspora, which enjoyed such rights, was much more active than the Serbian diaspora, which at the time did not. This culminated in the electoral success of Franjo Tudjman, with donations of $ 4 million collected from members of the American and Canadian diaspora.

It is the possibility to form unreal conditional sentences which creates a space ‘one can relate to’ or ‘which matters.’ Transnational media do have an impact on this process, but it seems to be secondary. I would argue that it is the possibility to construct irrational conditional sentences that constitute interest in transnational media, a prerequisite for the creation of transnational ties. It is the interplay of categorical equality and difference that is crucial in this process. Rather than shared norms, relations set by the unreal conditional sentence structure an imaginary community. In this vein, an observation by Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robins about Turkish television viewers in London might be of interest: media convergence has not produced higher levels of identification with the home country among these viewers, but rather more distance. The disgust or anger experienced by Anglo-Turkish viewers at television reports exposing the failure of Turkish institutions during national crises (e. g. after an earthquake) have led to sentiments like ‘good that we don’t live there anymore’ (Aksoy and Robins 2000).

What matters here, however, is not just the irrealis of the present, but also that of the past. The migration decision of parents or grandparents is structuring diasporic awareness. Sabine Mannitz described this awareness among students at a high school in Berlin. During a group discussion the young participants complained about limited mental horizons and parochial values they encountered while on vacation in the respective homeland villages of their parents. “Not having a limited horizon like the relatives ‘there’ made the biggest difference and was marked by a mixture of pride and fortunate coincidence. After all, they could have easily become like them, had their parents not emigrated […]” (Mannitz 2002, 267). A time dimension seems to be involved here: in an analysis of three generations of Turkish migrants roughly ten years later, Bozkurt (2009) managed to show how a growing temporal distance led to an increasing mystification of the home-country. While children of the ‘Gastarbeiter’ in Mannitz’s study had rather ambivalent feelings about the home country, their grandchildren started to romanticize it.

Turkey is perceived as a space of embracement, hope and belonging as opposed to Germany, which is illustrated as the refusing, exclusionary place of residence […]. This gaze finds its expression in the way youngsters depict Turkey as seen in their emphasis on its history and beauty that sound like taken from a travel catalogue (like ‘warm-blooded and hospitable people’, ‘wonderful nature’ and ‘ever present sun’). The way they refer to Turkey and the extent to which they mystify their homeland depends on imaginary extensions of short summer holidays and their retrospective reconstruction in Germany. (Bozkurt 2009, 154)

Again, this awareness is often greatly intensified when violence was involved. It is especially pronounced among descendants of Polish and Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States near the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. The sentence: ‘Had my grandfather not decided to emigrate, my parents would have perished in a concentration camp and I would not be alive today,’ expresses an existential experience. The incomprehension many Jewish intellectuals expressed over European attitudes after September 11 followed this pattern.

An interesting case is given by the Armenian diaspora. After the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide, a series of terrorist attacks started against representatives of the Turkish state. It seemed that the public staging of the collective memory had led to an actualization of the unreal conditional sentence, and had reinvigorated hatred. If the unreal conditional sentence determines the structure of imaginary space, then the history of the migration movement must be decisive for the expression of this imagination. It determines who is comparing him or herself to whom. I have the impression that the Holocaust plays a different role in Ashkenazi and Sephardic Judaism – mainly because the former (due to the structure of the unreal conditional sentence) was more strongly affected than the latter. Or, to put it another way: the above-mentioned sentence comes from an Ashkenazi Jew. Abhorrence of the Holocaust is of course widespread among all Jews, but the extent of that concern is dependent on the spatial modality.

To sum up: what looks like a network from a bird’s eye view resembles an imaginary opportunity space from an actor’s point of view. Networks certainly allow access and open opportunities (and this is what has been studied), but networks and transnational communities have a collective psyche. The concept of the imaginary opportunity space allows us to access it.

4Imaginaries of Irregular Migration

What was said in regards to premise in our imaginary quadrangle has to be modified by the aspect of risk. The risks of migration can be arranged on a continuum starting with low risk/low profit on one end and high risk/high profit at the other. Usually, low risk/low profit is the rule in regular migration whereas high risk/high profit is the rule in irregular migration.

Marta Kindler conducted an excellent study of the risk analysis Ukrainian women performed when engaging in irregular migration to Poland. They distinguished between low risk/low profit countries and high risk/high profit countries. Poland was low risk because languages were similar; add to that cultural similarity and spatial proximity. Migration was irregular but the difference to legal migration was minor. Risk, in other words, was calculable. Migration to Italy, on the other hand, was considered to be high risk: young women in particular might be forced into prostitution; earned wages might be withheld and in case of illness it might be difficult to find support. But it was also high profit – one could make four times more money than in Poland (Kindler 2011, 80, 84). It was clearly Italy that sparked fantasies. The stories of successes, missed opportunities and failures almost had fairy-tale qualities. Italy was an adventure; Poland very clearly was not. In terms of our imaginary quadrangle, high risk/high profit versus low risk/low profit refers to the category of law. It has implications for the other dimensions as well:

Low risk/low profit entails broad categories: almost everybody can do it. High risk/high profit is much more selective. It usually attracts young singles (or, in the case of Ukraine, women in their forties whose children can already take care of themselves), while parents of small children tend to avoid it. Condition works in a similar fashion: the cost for high-risk border crossings usually correlates with travel costs. And, while moral issues associated with low risk/low profit are also low, as decisions are reversible, high-risk migration choices are heavily debated. Kindler mentioned warnings issued in Ukraine, cautioning against the dangers of falling into prostitution (Kindler 2011, 87), as well as articles pointing to neglected children (“Italian orphans”) in the home country (Kindler 2011, 93).

A prominent example of high profit/high risk migration occurs from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. In this case, it seems that the daring and dangerous voyage to Europe is conceived as a challenge and often as a test of manliness. “It is the possibility to fail […] which emphasizes the ‘courage,’ the ‘persistence,’ the ‘energy,’ if you want the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ demanded as a condition for success” (Hoffmann 2016, 96). Heidrun Friese similarly refers to rap songs about illegal border crossings: “To accept the challenge, the ability to overcome dangers and risks on the way you had decided for; to assert oneself, to prove oneself, to succeed – all these are dimensions of male subjectivity, male self-confidence and dominant representations of manliness” (Friese 2012, 235).

In the hothouses of Almeria in Southern Spain, such exaggerated fantasies clash with a harsh reality.28 The risk of finding no job, or only an extremely badly paid one, tends to be dramatically higher than expected. A vicious circle sets in. Difficult access means there are reality checks on the Jimmy Cliff-law-of-migration (“you can get it if you really want, but you must try, try and try”). Those who stay behind usually have no idea of the real working conditions of the migrants. They are not aware of the fact that failure, not success, is the rule. The validity of the law or its consequences are not questioned: rather, what is said is, “You did not get it – so you either did not really want it or you did not try hard enough.” As a consequence, the virtue of those who report the truth risks to be questioned. An informant of Boris Nieswand told him that “only if he is able to adequately perform his gain of status which is related to his stay in Europe, will it render him respectable. This leads to the fact that when migrants contact their families and friends in the home country, they usually paint an embellished picture. When returning to the home country, they are under pressure to give material evidence of having been to Europe. Again people in Ghana “could question his moral integrity if he refused to perform his migrant’s status or might even doubt he had physically been to Europe” (Nieswand 2011, 141). Nieswand describes migrants who postponed a visit to their home country because they were not in a position to make these statements (142).

Factual information counts little when it is confronted with dreams. One of Hoffmann’s informants in Almeria recalled his own childhood when he told him: “‘I would not believe it – because some our houses are close to each other in Africa – so every month I saw that they were sending back money to their parents. So when they told me: ‘Do not come here, it’s too hard, I would tell them: ‘It is bullshit boy! You don’t tell me that! Because you are sending money to your parents! And you expect me to stay here and you tell me that place is hard?’” (Hoffmann 2016, 101). It is very clear that the selection of information is governed by desire.

High risk/high profit makes for good stories. It seems to be especially relevant that this type of information circulates in the form of narratives. As Kindler notes they are told and re-told again, and again (Kindler 2011, 81). In this process they acquire a dramatic form: exposition, rising action, culmination, falling action and denouement follow each other. It seems to me that this literary form reinforces longings and desires. In this vein, Frank Pieke (2002), who studied illegal migrants from the Province of Fujian in East China, has demonstrated how a culture of migration as such develops:

Discourses on social mobility that prescribe what constitutes success and how to attain it, while proscribing (often simply by remaining silent about them) others that locally quite literally are not considered an option. In the source areas of Fujianese mass migration a culture of migration has taken root that prepares all able-bodied men and women for their eventual departure. In the Fujian home communities, the culture of emigration stigmatizes local alternatives to emigration as second rate or even a sign of failure. (Pieke 2002, 32)

These narratives seem to play a crucial role in arousing collective obsession over the process of migration.

5Conclusion

The concept of the imaginary space allows us to take a fresh look at the migration process. It gives us access to the emotional life of opportunity structures, social and economic networks. What from above can be mapped as a web of social relations connecting actors in different countries actually looks like an assemblage of possible worlds from below. A network consists to a large part of people like me. It is people like me to whom I compare myself. They show through their very existence what my life could look like, or could have looked like, if I just had made a different decision. They thus stand for alternatives of the present and possible futures. These alternatives incite hopes, doubts, fears, desires, and dreams, as well as the jealousies and irritations associated with the migration process. The emotional dimension also allows us to understand seemingly irrational decisions.

By enabling us to analyze the emotional side of networks, the concept of imaginary opportunity structures allows us to close the gap that exists between postmodern and postcolonial approaches on one hand, and sociological and political economy approaches on the other. By analyzing the degree to which networks form imaginations and imaginations relate to ‘real’ structures, we can approach the material basis of imaginations without reducing the latter to the former.

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