Trans-European Research Network

One of TRANSIT MIGRATION’s primary missions is to collaborate closely with researchers, activists and artists who are working at the local level. Building an interregional network of local experts in the process, the TRANSIT MIGRATION team can help expand the research perspective beyond Southeast Europe to the new transit countries and countries of immigration along the external EU border. Included among these countries are not only the Eastern European border states, but also the Mediterranean countries in which Germany once recruited so-called "guest workers".

Indeed, the expansion of the European Union’s borders as well as new patterns in transnational migration have turned Italy, Spain, Portugal, Tunisia and Morocco into migrant destinations and transit regions in their own right. As in Germany and Southeast Europe, only tentative first steps have been taken in these countries to examine these developments in a methodological fashion. The Trans-European Research Network thus aims to coordinate and combine these preliminary efforts, creating a solid foundation for future research that will be both comparative and synergistic. The project website will provide the Network with the ideal virtual communications and presentation platform.

The international symposium "transnational europe I" (October 2004, Rethymnon, Crete) is designed to be a communicative forum for the Network. It offers researchers, activists and artists a chance to examine, compare and discuss the manifold ways in which the dynamics of migration are transforming Europe. The symposium will focus on the east and south of Europe as the strategic crossroads where these developments meet. These two regions are important, not only because they represent the direct intersection of the expanding EU border regime with transnational migration movements, but also because the fault lines are so clearly visible between old and new borders, and old and new migration regimes. An example of the latter can be seen in the contrast between the system of "guest worker" recruitment employed by the Federal Republic of Germany, which incorporated countries beyond the frontiers of today’s European Union (e.g. Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia). In contrast, it is the Mediterranean today that is being transformed more than ever into a border region. The symposium aims to provide a new view of Europe in which the interactions between "border" and "migration" are revealed as the shaping forces of transnationalization.

The international symposium "transnational europe II" (November 2005, Cologne) will pick up where its predecessor in Greece leaves off, expanding our perspective in two ways. First and foremost, the dynamic interactions between migration and the border in Southeast and Eastern European, as well as their discourses and representations will be set in relation to each other. In this context, the aim will be to show how Germany is an active participant in the new European border regime at the same time that it is an actively affected region in the new European topography of migration. Subsequently, this Eurocentric perspective will be expanded upon using methods and insights from international research on transnational migration. In this manner, the symposium will seek to discuss the questions raised by, and the findings of, the TRANSIT MIGRATION project, both in light of the German discourse on migration and of international research on the phenomenon. Thus, it will strive both to re-localize the analysis of transnational Europe at the same time that it places the discussion in a global context.