“Ne mutlu Türküm diyene” – “How happy one is to say I am a Turk!” This expression, famously spoken by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the tenth anniversary of the Turkish Republic, demonstrates a simple and seemingly benign Turkish nationalism.1 However, Turkey’s history of compulsory international population exchange provides insight to the early republic’s determination of […]
2020
Do Economies Have to Boom for Migration to Happen?
Once countries started recovering from the devastation of WWII, economies needed to be rebuilt. The USSR had built its command economy around the idea of high levels of extensive growth achieved by a division of labor between countries in Eastern Europe (Comecon) and industrialization. This depended on large amounts of labor as extensive growth meant […]
Migration and the Construction of National Narratives in Turkey and Kyrgyzstan
As republics formed following the collapse of expansive empires, the Kyrgyz Republic and the Republic of Turkey have each utilized certain historical and cultural narratives as a means of establishing a unified ethnic national identity. In the case of Turkey, the influx of new “Turks” from the forced population exchange with Greece necessitated a unifying […]
Soviet Internationalism and Friction in Tajikistan
Beginning in the post- World War II era, the Soviet Union underwent mass rebuilding and industrialization efforts. While the nation experienced extensive urbanization, with many migrating from rural areas to the cities, there were a considerable number of state-mandated migrations from urban to rural regions. Hein deHaas refers to these movements as ‘imperial emigration’. In […]
Use of Female Labors as the Soviet Solution to Labor Shortage before 1970
The discussion in the lecture on using female labors as the soviet solution to labor shortage reminded me of some popular Chinese propaganda from the Great Leap Era, where a giant poster reads “women can hold up half of the sky”. It is known to a saying from Mao Zedong. This public poster has left […]
Turkish Migration to Germany & the Netherlands
I read Rinus Penninx’s A Critical Review of Theory and Practice: The Case of Turkey with interest, as I have heard quite a lot about Turkish migration to Germany and the Netherlands in recent years, but knew very little about its origins. I am particularly interested in the social and political aspects of migration, but […]
For Turkmens abroad and at home, the issue isn’t forced migration but forced containment
In the early summer of 2020, Central Asian migrant workers and students in Russia faced a horrifying problem: capital and jobs were running out and a lack of flights home meant an inability to escape their newfound impoverishment. Turkmen international students, however, still stranded in Russia were fighting another fight: the restriction of financial support […]
Overview: German Policy for Migrants and Families in 20th century Europe
This is commenting on “Family Policy and Labor Migration in East and West Germany” by Paul Adams in 1989. After World War II there was a great influx of migration in Europe and the Soviet Union. This was particularly concentrated in Germany, which was split between the democratic west (Federal Republic of Germany), and the […]
Building an Identity in the Post-Soviet Space
In 1991 Kazakhstan became an independent country for the first time in over two hundred years, and set out to create a homeland for Kazakhs all over the world. In order to achieve this feat, the new government would have to hold a census and ensure that Kazakhs were the majority. However, as history in […]
Guestworkers Needed: A Comparative Look at Post World War II Germans at Home & Abroad
In The Age of Migration, Hein De Haas takes the reader on a journey into the Guestworker Program in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) that arose in the 1950s. This allowed the FRG to recruit millions of foreign workers over two decades to accommodate the labor needed due to industrial expansion and low birth […]