Colonial Citizenship and Everyday Transnationalism: An Immigrant’s Story [1 ed.] 036722013X, 9780367220136, 9780429270321

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Colonial Citizenship and Everyday Transnationalism This book uncovers the contradictions and convergences of racism, decolonisation, migration and living international relations that were shaped by the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism and from nationalism to transnationalism between the 1950s and the present. It takes up the story of Nicholaos Charalambou Kanaris, a colonial migrant to the UK from Cyprus, as a reflection on how the everyday lives of minor figures offer an unexplored window into international relations. The research uncovers and offers insight into the complexities and messiness of everyday life and of (trans)national identities as they are lived and have been lived at the heart of imperial, colonial and postcolonial systems and processes. The innovative methodological approach adopts memoirs gathered through a series of lifenarrative interviews and is guided by theories of minor transnationalism that look to foreground horizontal relations between minor figures. Various themes of international relations are examined through the lens of Nicholaos’ story and his family life, including colonialism, geopolitics, citizenship, security, migration and transnationalism. Examining how these themes play out in everyday life permits his practice and lived experience to theorise the international politics of colonialism, migration and citizenship. This book argues that Politics and International Relations can benefit from a transnational approach and offers a method of theory-in-practice for exploring the everyday experience of transnationalism, through the methodology of lifenarrative and memoir. Alexandria J. Innes is currently a Senior Lecturer of International Relations at the University of East Anglia, having received her PhD in 2011 from the University of Kansas. She returned to the UK in 2013 after eight years of living in the USA. Alexandria grew up in the North East of England, spending lengthy summers in the care of her grandparents in Paphos, Cyprus, and this book represents a deeply personal project. This is her second book exploring themes of migration using experiential and ethnographic research methods. Her research focus is at the intersection of security studies and migration studies with an interest in gender and security, and in postcolonial citizenship and security. Alexandria has published research in various academic outlets, including International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Geopolitics and International Relations. She has also contributed to public debate on European migration via various media outlets including the BBC, National Public Radio in the US, and at Politics.co.uk. Her current project in progress continues her focus on migration journeys, examining the convergences and overlaps among human trafficking, human smuggling, and the undocumented crossing of borders by people seeking asylum.

Interventions Edited by Jenny Edkins Aberystwyth University

Michael J. Shapiro University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA

Nick Vaughan-Williams University of Warwick

The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first 5 years we have published 60 volumes. We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics. We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project: just contact us for advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted directly to the Series Editors: • •

Jenny Edkins ( [email protected]) and Nick Vaughan-Williams ([email protected]).

‘As Michel Foucault has famously stated, “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting” In this spirit The Edkins - Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary.’ Colonial Citizenship and Everyday Transnationalism An Immigrant’s Story Alexandria J. Innes Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics Edited by Shine Choi, Anna Selmeczi and Erzsébet Strausz Necrogeopolitics On Death and Death-Making in International Relations Edited by Caroline Alphin and François Debrix For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ series/INT

Colonial Citizenship and Everyday Transnationalism An Immigrant’s Story

Alexandria J. Innes

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Alexandria J. Innes The right of Alexandria J. Innes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-22013-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-27032-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Charalambous Frank Topinka: My beautiful Bambos, this book would not have been written without you.

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

ix x

Introduction

1

PART I

Colonial migration; becoming transnational

17

Excerpt 1 The stock I come from

19

1

The global and local politics of everyday life in 1950s Famagusta

Excerpt 2 2

Colonial subjectivity, colonial immigration and national identity

Excerpt 3 3

Improvise to survive

Going down the pit

Ontological security, affective environments and the future

23 40 43 64 67

PART II

Transnational family life 4 5

83

Theorising the transnational family in international relations

85

Transnational citizenship: from Wallsend to Paphos, a feminist narrative of migration

106

viii Contents

Conclusion

126

Postscript: citizenship, subjecthood, identity Index

133 135

Figures

1.1 Nicholaos with his delivery bicycle 1.2 Nicholaos (standing, right) with some friends in Famagusta 2.1 Nicholaos (back, centre) with his mining shift 3.1 Nicholaos enjoying the beach at Whitley Bay 3.2 Nicholaos and Sylvia shortly after they met 4.1 The Haralampous family circa 1961 5.1 Nicholaos and Sylvia on their wedding day 5.2 Sylvia at work 5.3 Sylvia (left) and Giota, the wife of Nicholaos’ nephew, by the communal ovens in Anavargos 6.1 Nicholaos today

29 37 59 73 79 93 109 115 122 131

Acknowledgements

This project emerged as an idea long before it took shape as a book. I’m very grateful to the various people who have encouraged me in its development, both in a professional setting and in a personal one. I explored my first early iterations of this project in 2015, and worked through some ideas on a panel entitled Postcolonial Bordering and Ontological Insecurities. I want to thank Catarina Kinnvall and John Cash, whose feedback and advice was informative to the development of my ideas as they began to take shape in 2015 and 2016. As I drafted the work into a book manuscript, I am grateful for the feedback I received at a workshop on ‘The Everyday and Ontological Security’ convened by Chris Browning and Alexandra Homolar at Warwick University in 2016, and a follow-on workshop in 2017 at the International Studies Association annual convention, convened by Chris Browning, Alexandra Homolar and Brent Steele. I received careful advice and critique on the initial project idea and some very early drafts of the work. I am particularly indebted to Alexandra Homolar for directing me towards the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, which has proved a particularly useful resource, and for following up with great resources and readings that I continue to use and for which I am very thankful. I am also particularly grateful to Noelle Brigden, Heather Johnson and Myriam Fotou for their consideration of the project, both as part of the ISA Panel 2017 Experiencing Change: Migration in International Relations, and continuing beyond that panel. I’m lucky to have such wonderful colleagues who give honest and constructive feedback on my work, and I hope the project reflects and does justice to the thoughtful inputs they have provided. I also want to acknowledge the continued support I receive from the Critical Global Politics Research Group at UEA. I feel myself to be incredibly fortunate to have such supportive colleagues who are willing to read drafts and engage in discussion on a regular basis. Distinct thanks to Lee Jarvis for his untiring generosity with his time and expertise; I have benefitted hugely under his mentorship. Also thanks to Adriana Sinclair for comments and for providing both professional and emotional support every time I have most needed it. Finally, my sincere thanks to the editors of this series: Nick Vaughn-Williams and Jenny Edkins for receiving the manuscript so positively and for providing me

Acknowledgements xi with guidance as I have finalised it. And thanks of course to the reviewers who helped me put the research contribution in focus. This book is a very personal project and I could not have completed it without the support of my extended family, to whom I continue to be very grateful. I want to acknowledge of course the participants in the research. My Aunty Anna, Uncle Andy and my Mam who agreed to be interviewed and also talked me through their experiences and gave me their thoughts about my grandfather’s story and all of those tales that have formed part of our family folklore. My Mam and my sister Anna both read early drafts and helped me see the book from a variety of perspectives, thinking through how other family members might interpret my research. And I continue to be thankful to my Mam and Dad for their unfailing support for the decisions I make and the work I pursue. I do not know how I can express in words the myriad ways and reasons why I am grateful to my partner Rob Topinka. I would not have been able to finish this project without the enormous tireless and patient support given to me by Robby, for which I am eternally grateful. He read the entire thing at various points in its development, giving constructive feedback. He is a constant sounding board for my thoughts and ideas. I would not be the scholar or the person I am without his input. I began this project when I was pregnant with our first son, Charalambous Frank Topinka. So much of the impetus for the project was generated by him, by Bambos’ existence, which made me a mother and highlighted to me the importance of family ties. Devastatingly, the project survived Bambos, who we lost ten days before his second birthday in July 2018. I could not have begun to cope with the trauma of losing our firstborn without the steadfast love and strength I get every single day from Robby, and without my second son, Marios Alexander. Bambos gave me a reason to start the project and Marios gave me a reason to finish it. Finally, I am of course most indebted to my grandparents, Nicos and Sylvia Haralampous. My Granda Nick has always been my hero. He has influenced my path in life, from my childhood summers spent in Cyprus where he taught me to swim, dive and later drive, to my undergraduate degree in Modern Languages and my subsequent interest in international politics. I am so grateful for his collaboration on this project and I hope the finished product does justice to all of the work he has put into it with me. In writing this book I learnt more about my grandma’s experience than I expected at the beginning of the project. As the book took shape, it became important to me to tell her story, in addition to that of my grandad. Female voices are so often obscured in international politics, and she had a unique experience that shows her to be a truly strong and remarkable woman. I am so proud to have her as a role model, to have followed in her footsteps in my own transnational family experiences, and to tell her story too. Thank you both, Grandma Sylvie and Granda Nick.

Introduction

Nicholaos Charalambou Kanaris was born in Anavargos, a village on the west side of Cyprus about 3.5 kilometres to the northwest of the town of Paphos, on the 5th of March 1934. He was the eighth child (seventh then living) of Barbara Nicholaou and Charalambous Christodoulou. As a small child, he was primarily cared for by his maternal grandmother, Eleni, until she died when he was about six years old. Although they were poor, Nicholaos had a warm, close family. Both his parents worked to make a living from the land. They lived in a large, oneroomed house in the village; Nicholaos attended the village elementary school in Anavargos and was a good student. He enjoyed school and he found that learning came easily to him. He was determined to go to high school and passed the qualifying exams but he had difficulty obtaining the consent of his father to continue studying. He had to earn the money for school fees himself. He worked all summer and saved the money; however, shortly before the end of the summer, he was persuaded by a relative to gamble the money he had saved, and he lost it. Unable to produce the £1 necessary to pay a year’s school fees Nicholaos left the village in which he was born and walked to the market in Paphos town. On the 3rd of October 1947, aged thirteen years and seven months, Nicholaos left his home as a stowaway on the back of a bus headed to Limassol. He did not return to his village for twenty-four years. The journey that he began hanging on to a ladder on the back of a Ford Bedford transit bus ultimately took him from his parochial Cypriot village to an English mining town in the North East. In this white, working-class mining community he raised a transnational family, experiencing the contradictions of racism, deindustrialisation, and living international relations that were shaped by the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism and nationalism to transnationalism. This book takes up his story as a reflection on how the lives of minor figures offer an unexplored window into international relations. Various themes of international relations are examined through the lens of Nicholaos’ story, allowing his practice and lived experience to theorise international relations. In 1947, Nicholaos went to an uncle in Limassol who helped him secure a job. For £1 per month he worked as a live-in 24-hour worker in a draper’s shop, performing duties in the shop Monday to Saturday and household tasks during weekends. His contract came with an obligation to remain in the position for two years. At the end of the two-year period, he decided to go to Nicosia because he

2

Introduction

thought he would find a better job there. He found a similar position in Nicosia, but in that instance his boss was abusive. When Nicholaos responded to physical violence in kind he was arrested. Luckily, the arresting officer was a distant cousin who agreed to help him. Nicholaos avoided imprisonment and instead, in the spring of 1950, went to the town known in Greek as Ammochostos, or more commonly as Famagusta. Famagusta was unlike any of the places Nicholaos had been previously. It was newer and busier. There were more foreigners, especially from Britain. In Famagusta Nicholaos connected with a friend from his village and managed to get a job immediately working in an upmarket drapery. Yet adversity still followed him. After a misunderstanding with the business owner he left to work first on a building site and later in the market delivering groceries. This was the point at which Nicholaos finally found his place in the world. Famagusta was a growing city in the early 1950s. The surrounding area was already home to a large British base and many soldiers lived in the suburban areas of town, which was growing quickly. Famagusta was the deepest port in Cyprus and therefore was the most diverse city on the island, as boats destined for the Middle East and beyond stopped there. British and American warships visited quite frequently. The British presence in Famagusta increased steadily in the 1950s, particularly from 1953–1956 when Britain was withdrawing troops from Suez and establishing Dhekelia as the main base for British ground troops in the Middle East (a plan that changed in 1956, when the port at Famagusta proved too shallow for the necessary launches during the Suez crisis). Nicholaos took English lessons and made many British friends over his four years in Famagusta. In particular, he met and became close friends with a British couple, Dorothy and Alan Scorer. Alan was a British conscript serviceman from Wallsend, an industrial mining town in North Tyneside. Nicholaos spent a lot of time with Dorothy as Alan was called away to Suez when she was in her third trimester of pregnancy, so she relied on Nicholaos to help her. It was Dorothy who suggested that he pursue a future in the UK. Nicholaos was not completely convinced that he wanted to travel to the UK. He was happy in Famagusta. Nevertheless, he heard people talking about how much their relatives earned in the UK, and he believed that as well as earning money he would have the opportunity to continue his studies. He had always enjoyed school and wanted to continue his education. At the time he had been studying with the Orthodox Christian Union of Youth; however, as a leftist, Nicholaos did not share the political affiliation of the conservative nationalist organisation and was keen to continue his education elsewhere. This was what ultimately convinced him to make the journey to Britain. Yet, Nicholaos had some difficulties obtaining a passport. His mother had died in 1949 and he had left home and so did not feel able to ask for his father’s help. He had no relatives in the UK to vouch for him and was from a peasant background; Nicholaos was not the typical Cypriot immigrant of the 1950s. In 1954, it was necessary for colonial migrants to have a guarantor already resident in the British Isles, and most Cypriots who made the journey were joining family members who had previously emigrated. There was already a growing and thriving community of Cypriots in London, which swelled

Introduction 3 in the late 1950s. Despite Nicholaos having no contacts within the Cypriot diaspora in London, he was able to travel because Alan Scorer’s mother agreed to be Nicholaos’ guarantor. This meant she would sign a legal affidavit of support guaranteeing him a place to stay until he found work and became financially independent. It also meant that Nicholaos would migrate directly to Wallsend, a small industrial community dominated by mining and shipbuilding, close to the north bank of the river Tyne and a short distance from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. This was not a common destination for Cypriot immigrants to the UK, or indeed in the 1950s for any immigrant to the UK. Nicholaos travelled to the UK in the summer of 1954. He began his journey on a large cargo ship, sleeping with fellow travellers in hammocks strung on the lower decks. The boat stopped at ports in Turkey and Greece before docking first at the Southern Italian port of Bari, then at Venice where Nicholaos disembarked. After a brief stay in Venice he travelled onwards by train through Ostend to Folkestone and on to London Victoria. He spent one night in London as it was too late to catch his onward train immediately, and the following morning travelled the final leg of his journey that took him to Newcastle Central Station. He spent eight of his final ten shillings on a taxi to Mrs Scorer’s house in Wallsend where he arrived in August 1954 carrying a bag containing only a single change of clothes. After arriving in North Tyneside Nicholaos found work immediately, cleaning boats on the Tyne, before he’d even met his hosts. Over time he settled in to his life in the North East, finding a better job in a hospital and making friends. In February of 1955 Nicholaos met Sylvia Patterson, and after a short time they became a couple. They were engaged in late 1956 and married the following June. They had three children born in 1957, 1958 and 1959 respectively: Barbara, Andreas and Anna. Meanwhile, in early 1955, Nicholaos had received a letter from the British government informing him that he was being called up to perform his national military service. He had no desire or intention to join the military and left immediately for Surrey, thinking that if he was in a different administrative district he would not be found. However, he was stopped and briefly detained so he returned to Newcastle. Due to a combination of good fortune, his reluctance to fight, and his Cypriot nationality that marked him as a foreigner despite holding British citizenship, he was offered the opportunity to work as a coalminer as his national service duty instead of being required to perform active military duty or be imprisoned. He agreed willingly to this compromise and entered the mines on an understanding that he would work as a coalminer for two years, and could then pursue education and work of his choosing. He joined a mining shift at The Rising Sun Colliery in Wallsend in the winter of 1955. As family life and fatherhood intervened in his freedom to leave, Nicholaos remained a coalminer for the following thirty years, retiring in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s government closed the majority of the British coalmines. He had visited Cyprus several times in the 1970s and 80s with his family, and returned there with Sylvia to live permanently in 1986 following the closure of the coalmines in the North East.

4

Introduction ***

The preceding account provides the bare bones of the memoir that forms the empirical data referenced throughout this volume. The outline suggests the potential richness of IR themes that are threaded throughout Nicholaos’ story. Indeed, it is impossible to narrate even this pared-down version of Nicholaos’ story without recognising the significance of the British presence in Famagusta that produced the circumstances in which someone from Nicholaos’ background could immigrate to the UK. The questions of citizenship, identity and belonging in a colonial context emerge throughout the story because it is a story of the immigration of a colonial citizen, which had particular implications, not least the responsibility to perform national service for a colonial power that was engaged in active domination over the homeland. The role of military service is a key theme in the account that leads Nicholaos down the mines, with coalmining ultimately becoming his profession and his local identity in North Tyneside. Overall, this volume is primarily a work that explores the minutia, the mundane and the everyday life of international politics through the life narrative of Nicholaos and the memoirs and voices of his immediate family members. International relations (IR) has conventionally relied on the nation state as the main unit of analysis, or as the unit around which the concepts and boundaries of the discipline are built. Yet, in recent years IR scholars have made concerted efforts to move beyond the nation state. Feminism has led the way, along with significant research in postcolonial and critical theory. Migration represents a key thematic area that problematizes the nation state. Here I situate migration in the context of a life narrative to re-insert the human into international relations. I unpick the development of transnational identity for a colonial immigrant and his family, and develop and explore themes of colonialism, geopolitics, citizenship, security, migration and transnationalism as they play out in everyday life.

Everyday life There has been renewed interest in work on everyday life in international relations in recent years, with a focus on the international politics of popular culture and drawing from cultural studies and sociology (Bousquet 2006; Dixit 2012; Dodds 2008; Grayson et al. 2009; Innes and Topinka 2016; Innes 2017a; Neumann and Nexon 2006; Power 2007; Pusca 2015). Critical security studies in particular has begun to incorporate everyday forms of security through paradigms such as vernacular security (Bubandt 2005; Croft and Vaughn-Williams 2017) and work on surveillance and bureaucratic security practices or what Jef Huysmans (2011) termed ‘little security nothings.’ Nevertheless, it has been feminists who have sustained attention to everyday life over time in international relations, with the seminal work by Cynthia Enloe (1989) turning attention away from elites and the patriarchal institutions of international relations and of governance, to attend to everybody and the everyday of international relations. Enloe argues that the female agricultural workers embroiled in the structures of international trade,

Introduction 5 diplomat’s wives whose role it is to offer hospitality, and domestic workers in the tourism industry all make the stuff of international relations and are part of the structures and systems of global politics. This work has generated research that foregrounds female encounters with international phenomena and makes it clear that, in order to avoid the elite bias of power, it is necessary to study everyday life (Stern 1998; MacKenzie 2009). How people experience international politics in the everyday – whether through direct experience with major political events (Wibben 2011) or through more mundane, although no less meaningful, secondary encounters (Dauphinee 2013) – matters for the theoretical and the practical analysis of international politics and for a politics of resistance that can challenge the systems of power that make the world and that make the academic discipline of international relations. In a 2011 reflection, Enloe traces the process that led her to recognise the importance of everyday life. Her observation to this effect provides the feminist underpinnings for this book. Enloe noted that a study of female factory workers revealed to her how the structuring of their working lives by factory bosses did not accommodate the various pressures in their lives. Here the system of international trade intersected with female everyday life. To truly understand the whole system of international trade, Enloe realised she needed to understand female experiences not just in the workplace, but outside of it, in personal lives and in the home. This was the only way to successfully uncover how gendering of international trade functioned. To understand the relevancy of everyday life in international relations requires an appreciation of how the systems and processes of international relations go all the way down and infiltrate everyday experience. As a means of going beyond the inherent structural biases in IR (such as the masculine bias, or gendered assumptions of soldier-men and caring-women) we need to examine the intricacies and complexities of the everyday. Life is not compartmentalised as it is lived. All parts of life blur, overlap and intersect; thus, we need to attend to everyday life with a view to uncovering how inherent structural biases play out and are experienced by people in their everyday lives. It is only in doing this that we can begin to address these structural biases at the level of lived experience. One of the primary objectives of this research is to excavate the ways in which (trans)national identity is both experienced and (re)produced in everyday life. The assumption of nation states existing as bounded units, within sovereign borders, and as unitary political actors in an international system has formed the core of international relations since its inception, although it has been challenged by various schools of thought, not least feminism as cited previously. The assumed value of the nation state in international politics produces national identity as a valueladen identity that can then justify imperialism, war, surveillance, and exclusions of various types as a means of protecting and reproducing the nation. The value of the nation comes to the fore in the politics of migration. Immigration has become one of the foremost security issues, influenced by factors such as right wing political propaganda, fear of cultural dilution in a globalising world, persuasive use of political rhetoric, speech acts constituting threat, the need for othering in the constitution of identity and a conservative or anti-immigrant media (Huysmans

6

Introduction

1998, 2000, 2006; Huysmans and Buonfino 2008; Guild and Van Selm 2005; Innes 2010, 2013; Waever et al. 1993), all of which to some degree rely upon an ideological acceptance of the nation state as the natural political unit. Yet the nation state model forecloses acknowledgement of the existence and importance of non-state-based identities. Work in postcolonial studies, and postcolonial IR has foregrounded these non-state-based, postcolonial, transnational and diasporic identities. These identities disrupt the myth of linear narrative state identity, and instead are segmented into pre-colonial being (which is often denied existence), colonised and dehumanised subjecthoods, and postcolonial hybridities (Helland and Borg 2014). Such identities need to be foregrounded and accounted for in order to practice an inclusive international politics in a mobile, globalising, colonial and decolonising world. This book argues that IR can benefit from a transnational approach and offers a method of theory-in-practice for exploring the everyday experience of transnationalism, through the life narrative of a colonial immigrant to Britain. The very state of being a colonial immigrant, particularly in the years between 1948 and 1962 when British citizenship was defined by the 1948 British Nationality Act to include colonial subjects, calls to question the relationship between citizenship and national identity. Turning to everyday life in this context permits an analysis of how the forces of colonialism and imperialism, and the related international geopolitics those forces were bound up in at the time, were experienced in the everyday, which allows for a new understanding of how those processes of domination work and the impact they have had on producing an uneven understanding of national identity. Given the occurrence of ethnic and political conflict in postcolonial states, as well as racism, discrimination and anti-immigrantism is colonising states, not to mention shifting borders and changing citizenship laws and norms around the world during the twentieth century, this research uncovers and offers insight into the complexities and messiness of everyday life and of (trans) national identities as they are lived and have been lived at the heart of imperial, colonial and postcolonial systems and processes. International relations has conventionally been a discipline that focuses on the way states as unitary actors interact with each other. It often seems hard to reconcile that understanding of the field with work that looks at local experiences or at individual bodies. Yet, international relations at its most basic and raw is the study of war and conflict, which is primarily about the (local) spaces in which wars are fought and the impact on the individual bodies who contribute, fight, and become casualties. The study of international relations that focuses on territory and strategy loses sight of the humans of IR, the everyday experience of IR. Feminists have led the way in recapturing that humanity of IR by drawing attention to the human experience of international relations in a way that has highlighted the masculine bias at the heart of international relations. Further to that, attending to emotion is part and parcel of human experience and forms a core part of feminist research in IR (Stern 1998; Ackerley and True 2008; MacKenzie 2009; Dauphinee 2013). The recognition of emotion in international relations has then led to a resistance of the objectivist academic style which privileges rationality

Introduction 7 and removes emotion from the way in which research findings are communicated. Elizabeth Dauphinee’s (2013) book The Politics of Exile successfully blurred the boundaries between the academic style and narrative prose, and is joined by work of Himadeep Muppidi (2012, 2015), Richa Nagar (2006) in collaboration with the Sangtin Writers, and Richard Jackson (2014) among others in shifting academic writing to a register that can communicate emotion, feeling, and affect, and can better articulate experiences of international politics. Thus, this book is part of the movement towards everyday life in international relations, and adopts a narrative style that blurs the boundaries between the academic register and narrative prose, or storytelling. It can be conceived as part of the politics of resistance that appeals against the reification of the state, the bias towards elitism in the academy, and the privileging of objectivist and rationalist approaches. Nevertheless, it is a mistake only to think in terms of what is dominant, and thus only in terms of resistance to that dominance. This is articulated by Lionnet and Shih (2005), who identify the problem of vertical analysis in terms of understanding what they term minority politics. Thinking vertically, for Lionnet and Shih, means constantly striving to understand identity in relation to the dominant culture. Horizontal thought, on the other hand, allows for identity to be understood in relation to other identities, without hierarchy. For example, rather than immigrants understanding themselves only in relation to the culture of the receiving country, they can think of their similarities, differences, experiences and circumstances in relation to other immigrants. Lionnet and Shih are writing for what they broadly term ‘minority studies’ to encompass a broadened field of area studies that is inclusive of diaspora and transnationalism, but this way of constituting identity is useful for the study of international relations. Of course, IR tends to be constituted in terms of how research reproduces or resists the framework of the nation state (and nation states within an international system). This has resulted to some extent in a field with several variations of ‘minority’ schools of thought: feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and so on, all of which relate to each other but do not always speak to each other. Thus, work on the everyday of international politics can draw from and speak to these research paradigms, effectively resisting the dominant IR framework, without positioning itself exclusively in terms of that resistance. In this sense, this book forms part of a ‘minor literature’: a body of work that speaks within the discipline of IR, using the language of IR, but does so in a way that contests the hierarchical forms and structures that make up the discipline. Deleuze and Guattari (1986) define a minor literature as deterritorialising language, having political immediacy, and producing a collective assemblage of enunciation. The politics of resistance that is championed by IR feminists, postcolonialists, and critical theorists forms a minor literature that deterritorialises IR from the confines of the sovereign state, that allows for the messy layers and textures of everyday life to form part of the analysis, enunciating an IR that resists and reconfigures the hierarchies entrenched in the mainstream of the discipline. More than being a framework for a politics of metatheoretical resistance in IR, this work is a rendering of international politics as they played out over the course of a life. International politics impacted the everyday of this life through

8

Introduction

influencing both mundane and major decisions. Yet, life does not reside in the decisions but in the things that happen, the banalities that flow through the everyday and that lead a person from one time of life to another, usually without conscious recognition in the moment. In this volume I ask where the international politics are in those banalities. While the narrative at the heart of this volume is particular and relatively unusual, migration as a phenomenon is not unusual. Yet each migration story is exceptional for the person or people that live it. Through considering the banality of this particular exceptional story, I locate the politics of citizenship and identity, transnationalism and imperialism. I consider how these politics play out in everyday life and how we can expand our understanding of conceptual and theoretical questions of international relations and the politics of migration through looking at local and particular experience.

Method The production of memory as described by Jenny Edkins (2003) is both performative and social. To use memoir as method it is necessary to recognise the context in which a memoir, or a life narrative, is produced and the relationships to which it is subject. Of course, a life cannot be told verbatim. Such was the plight and the effort of Jorge Luis Borges’ character Funes el memorioso; to recount a life as it happened would inevitably mean taking the time of that life over again. Thus, narrative memoirs are made tell-able. Ochs and Capps (2001) identify that events have to be tell-able to qualify for a narrative recounting; in other words they must be in some way remarkable in order to inspire remarks. Yet, not all unusual events are suitable for telling in all circumstances. Norrick (2005) argues that there is both an upper boundary and a lower boundary to tell-ability. Something has to surpass the lower boundary to be interesting enough to be worthy of remark, yet has to remain within the upper boundary in the sense that it remains appropriate for the audience and will not cause offence. Jackl (2017) looks at tell-ability in the specific case of romantic relationship origin stories, identifying that origin stories that fall outside of canonical expectations results in a process of what she terms ‘storying around’ the untellable part of the tale – which can be entirely fictional or can be a patchwork assemblage of truths that obfuscate the untellable event. Thus, narratives are never a perfect recounting of events, and memory itself is imperfect from an objectivist standpoint. Molly Andrews (2017) identifies that ‘a narrative approach to the study of politics brings with it layers of meaning . . . it demands a level of reflexivity from the researcher . . . combined with a temporal and moral framing which refuses to stand still’ (Andrews 2017: 276). There is a tension between first-person eyewitness accounts of major events and the story of the events themselves that is preserved in the collective memory or the official narrative of an event. The latter is always already imbued with meaning from states and publics that is preserved through educational and political discourses. The experience of an event in the first person might not produce memories in the same way as the official narrative portrays it, or may foreground other things that were happening at the time. Official narratives of national identity employ

Introduction 9 markers such as ceremonies, monuments and memoirs to reproduce collective identity and belonging through the founding myths of the nation (Edkins 2003). These patterns are replicated amongst diasporic communities whose identity is often tied both to homeland and the trauma of separation from the homeland through migration (Sharma 2016). Power saturates these official narratives and their acceptance by the relevant community who share in the collective memory (Ferreira 2013a, 2013b; Innes 2017b). In order to uncover and understand the power that is part of the production of collective memory and that imbues the acceptance or rejection of a narrative recounting, one can turn to the individual eyewitness account, not as a means of contesting and rewriting an official narrative, but as a means of offering perspective on that official narrative. The core of this volume is the life narrative and memoirs of Nicholaos Charalambou Kanaris, who also happens to be my grandfather. I use both terms life narrative and memoir because, while the interviews focused on a life narrative, the memoirs of his migration to the UK were his focus in speaking and indeed have been part of family folklore for a long time. Of course, my close relationship with my interview participant and my personal investment in the narrative is something that needs to be acknowledged throughout the book, and within my interpretation of the data. My close relationship with my grandfather allowed me unique insight into his everyday life, and into the everyday experience of transnational migration and transnational family life. My grandfather’s stories are filtered through family folklore and through the claims that other family members have on these stories, through the way my grandfather relates to me, and through my training and experience in the field of international relations. All of these factors impact how my grandfather tells the story and how I interpret it. The complexity of my everyday experience is therefore relevant to the process of the research. This book situates the single life narrative of my grandfather, Nicholaos Charalambou Kanaris in political contexts both from the time during which events recounted occurred, which shape the experience of events, and from the time of the telling. Life narrative is also subject to the inevitable revisions of hindsight, which impacts how narratives are understood by their teller, and how they are produced for an audience (Freeman 2010). Furthermore, the events foregrounded in a narrative are those which are understood as the most tellable (Norrick 2005; Jackl 2017) and also those that provide accounting for both decisions and events in the life narrative, and also ways in which the life narrative might deviate from conventional normative ideals (Riessman 2008; McAdams 2006). Nevertheless, the selection of events to emphasize and foreground, or the identification of ‘tellable’ events is subject to political climates and contexts. This story revolves primarily around a migration journey, with details of the events that led to the journey and the events that transpired as a result of the journey. That migration is the central motif is testament to the relevancy of this migration in the life of the teller, a relevancy that is produced by the political and social circumstances in which that migration was lived. I collected the narrative data over a series of interviews during which my grandfather, Nicholaos Charalambou Kanaris, recounted his life story. We recorded

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lengthy interviews five times over approximately eighteen months. Of course, we met several other times during that time period too, during which stories and anecdotes arose. I left my grandfather with a voice recorder over the eighteen months, and when he was alone he would record additional memories. During the interviews, my grandfather told his story with very little interaction from me, aside from occasional prompts for clarification or for further specificities on events he raised. My grandfather is a natural storyteller and many of his anecdotes are well known within the family. I wanted his voice to be foregrounded in order to better access his interpretation of events as opposed to my interpretation of events. Participant-led interviews to some extent avoid subconscious biases of the researcher, and instead allow interview participants to fully foreground what is important to them. My grandfather has often raised the idea of writing a book of his life story. I decided to pursue an academic book with his life narrative at the core because of what I learn and continue to learn about international politics and about the politics of identity, citizenship and belonging from my grandfather and from other familial experiences. I supplemented the narrative life story with semistructured interviews with my grandmother and with each of my grandfather’s children: my mother, aunt and uncle. I wanted to include their perspectives and also to recognise their relevancy to the narrative, and I wanted their experiences to inform my interpretation of the data that I would use to write the theoretical chapters. This work is not autoethnographic, but it is personal. It is impacted by my own experience of transnational identity, citizenship, migration and belonging. As Carol Hanisch (2000 [1969]) famously argued, personal problems that require political solutions are political, therefore the personal is political. Of course, Hanisch was talking about female experiences of power relations and discrimination. Yet, her work has informed this research to help me understand that personal experiences of negotiating transnational identity and belonging are equally political experiences. This is a study of the ways in which state institutions like national identity, citizenship, and national security intersect with the everyday, assert power over the most mundane aspects of everyday life, and are remade in the everyday. It is also a study of where these institutions are challenged, negotiated and worked around and how they change or reassert themselves in response to those challenges. I treat these concepts as ongoing dialogues that happen in both national conversations and in local settings. My grandfather was in his early eighties at the time of telling, and a second-time immigrant to the UK. He and my grandmother returned to live in the North East in 2013 in order to be closer to their daughters. Almost all of the interviews took place in their apartment, within sheltered accommodation housing for retirees in the North East of England, indeed in the very same neighbourhood into which he immigrated in the 1950s. My grandmother was also present during much of the time spent interviewing, and my husband was present during one interview. My first son was born while this project was in progress and his infant cries and my grandmother soothing him can occasionally be heard on some of the interview recordings. One interview was taken while we were on a family holiday in Cyprus, and my mother was also present during this interview. The semi-structured

Introduction 11 interviews I gathered with my mother, aunt and uncle took place at their homes with the exception of my mother, who I interviewed on the aforementioned family holiday. During some of these interviews, other family members were occasionally present but not engaged in the interview process. It should also be noted that contemporary politics of the time impacted the narrative. My grandfather’s contemporary experience of immigration and his interpretation of his past experience of immigration were impacted by right wing anti-immigrant politics and the Brexit vote, which happened between interviews. Following the Brexit vote he experienced active and unpleasant xenophobia. This involved a woman telling him he had no right to live in the UK, and forcing him to move seats in a café despite him being in his eighties with a neurological disorder that has left him with limited mobility. Such is the nature of the everyday experience of international politics. This xenophobic act further influenced his telling of the story. In collecting narrative data, it is necessary to think not only of the teller but also of the interviewer as the tell-ability of a narrative is subject to the intersubjective relationship between the particular teller and the audience. Therefore, it is necessary to account for the setting, the people who were present, and their relationships with the person telling the story. Importantly for this particular narrative is the upper boundary of tell-ability, which depends on a recognition of appropriateness. The protagonist of this volume is my grandfather, therefore the intersubjective relationship between me in my guise as researcher and interviewer, me in my guise as granddaughter, and my grandfather in both his position as narrator and in his position as grandfather is relevant to what he will have identified as tellable and what he will have ‘storyed around’ (Jackl 2017). For example, there are elements of his story that have been adapted for appropriateness: I am aware that there were things he was uncomfortable saying to me both as a woman and as his granddaughter. After one interview, he commented to my father and my husband that there were details he was unable to share with me. Moreover, my grandfather produced his portrayal of life events in a way that was compatible with how my grandmother also experienced events, designing his telling in such a way as to avoid conflict as my grandmother was present during much of the telling. During the recorded interviews, at times when they disagree, my grandmother interjects. Sometimes disagreements are resolved, other times they are not. Both of my grandparents are generally outspoken in their opinions, therefore they tend to voice disagreements rather than passively avoid them. Nevertheless, I recognise the boundaries to tell-ability and the nature of ‘storying around’ as a characteristic of narrative storytelling and as holding particular importance in this context given my relationship with the protagonist, my grandfather. I accept that these elements of narrative do not undermine the overall narrative memoir. Of course, I would be unwilling to publish something that my grandfather was uncomfortable sharing, both because of ethical considerations as a researcher and personal considerations as a granddaughter, thus uncovering the details that he has storeyed around would not be relevant to the analysis. The nature of memory and narrative always includes absences and these absences, rather than detracting from the relevancy of the research, can also be revelatory for analysis.

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Outline of the book This book is comprised of two parts. The first is focused around Nicholaos’ life narrative. Three theoretical chapters are interspersed by fragments of his narrative, told in his own words. It was important to me to retain his voice in the book by including large excerpts from his memoirs because the story remains his own, while the theoretical analysis is mine. I have extracted his words, and edited them for clarity as he did not always tell his narrative memories in a chronological fashion. Nevertheless, including his voice again emphasises another form of minor literature (Deleuze and Guattari 1986), a commentary on the hierarchies and dominance of academic knowledge, voiced through experiential knowledge. Retaining my grandfather’s voice foregrounds the value of experiential knowledge and communicates that knowledge in its own language. The excerpts precede the first three chapters and tell fragments of his story in his own words. The first chapter deals with the theoretical paradigm of minor transnationalism, drawing from Lionnet and Shih (2005), and the politics of everyday life. I look at the period Nicholaos lived in Famagusta and the events that inspired his move to the UK. Nicholaos narrates his decision to move to the UK as being more passive – something that happened to him – rather than an active choice. He identifies a convergence of international forces that create circumstances in which he moved. These include British decolonisation, the resistance Britain demonstrated to decolonising Cyprus, the strict and oppressive governance of Cyprus that enacted a logic of ‘divide and rule’, and the consequent ongoing fight for enosis by Greek nationalists in Cyprus. Simultaneously the rise of Nasser in Egypt and his relative power led to the removal of British troops from Suez. Many of these troops were moved to the Dhekelia base near Famagusta. Famagusta was a growing port city and, as a port, was a diverse city as boats stopped in Famagusta frequently on their way to the Suez Canal, the Middle East, and beyond. These forces of international politics aligned with Nicholaos’ personal experiences that had brought him to Famagusta and created the circumstances in which he met the Scorers and ultimately brought about his journey to the UK. I identify a minor colonialism in the life experiences of Nicholaos that becomes a minor transnationalism, illustrating the relevancy of the hyperlocal to understanding the impact of international geopolitics. The second chapter delves into literature on citizenship, identity and belonging, using three key events from Nicholaos’ story. This chapter theorises citizenshipas-practice by foregrounding how Nicholaos talks about citizenship in his narrative memoir, and how his identity shifts and changes over time. The rendering of identity that I use in this chapter is performative and I consider how citizenship identity is performed both in Nicholaos’ narration of his story and in the events he is describing. I situate this in a discussion of literature from citizenship studies. I distinguish citizenship identity from national identity and I linger on the complexity of (post)colonial citizenship, particularly in the British context between 1948 and 1962 when the rights of colonial citizens to immigrate to the UK were protected in law (if not in practice). I argue that the performative

Introduction 13 citizenship-as-practice theorised in the chapter shows a citizenship that is affective and responsive to place, time, circumstance and interaction. I argue that the relationship between population, territory, and sovereignty that is preserved in international relations theorising does not reflect a practical and experiential citizenship that can account for postcolonial, transnational and diasporic identities. Attending to a practice of citizenship offers an understanding of the nuances and interactions of legal, affective, and perceived citizenships and the ways in which they fit into extant conceptual understandings of citizenship. The third chapter examines integration and identity for Nicholaos as an immigrant in working-class Northern Britain in the early 1950s. In his narrative telling, Nicholaos returns to a comparative motif, speaking of his life in Famagusta as ‘freedom’ and his working life in the North East of England as ‘slavery’. I use this motif within the framework of ontological security theory in international relations. I build on existing theorising of a performative ontological security that resides in fluid and hybrid identities as they manifest in everyday life, and which permits a conceptualisation of ontological security in IR that circumvents the role of national identity. The connection between ontological security and everyday experience is clear, in that ontological security can be found in a sense of comfort and certainty in the routines and practices of everyday life, thus locating security in the everyday. In this chapter I combine this focus on everyday life with a point of contention with what Giddens described as a ‘futural sense’ of social life that permits the formation of stable expectations. While it can be argued that every migration story disrupts the futural sense of social life by the person migrating, I pay particular attention to the role a bourgeois, Western capitalist notion of the future that relies on stability, property and pension plans plays in the motif of freedom and slavery in Nicholaos’ memoir. I argue that the importance of a futural sense of social life led to an ontological insecurity whereby identity was ultimately disrupted as it was rewritten by both the state in the form of conscription, and by subsequent social pressure. The second part of the book comprises two chapters, which move beyond Nicholaos’ memoirs of his migration journey to examine how the themes of citizenship identity play out in everyday family life. This second part draws on aspects of Nicholaos’ narrative and the supplementary semi-structured interviews I took with other family members. Chapter 4 examines postcolonial citizenship as it manifests inter-generationally, looking to the importance of hybrid and transnational identity for Nicholaos’ family life in the UK. The main empirical data for this chapter is drawn from a series of semi-structured interviews with Nicholaos’ children, Barbara, Andreas and Anna. The theoretical focus of this chapter is on the transnational family. Family life continues to be a space in which national identity is made and reproduced. Thus, the transnational family can be understood in some contexts to provide an emancipatory space for identity; yet this must be contextualised in dominant national narratives and in negotiation with racism and xenophobia. This chapter explores the space of the transnational family as a place for the making of transnational identities that are relevant to global politics.

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Chapter 5 also explores transnational citizenship from an intergenerational perspective, focusing on Nicholaos’ return to Cyprus. This chapter mirrors Chapter 1, which examines the minor colonialism that leads to Nicholaos’ outward migration journey. However, a main difference is that in this chapter, the voice of Nicholaos’ wife, Sylvia, my grandmother, is dominant. Sylvia became transnational when she married Nicholaos and that identity was fundamental to family life. She became a migrant when she moved to Cyprus. I foreground her voice as a means of providing a working-class feminist narrative model, which depicts the realities of the everyday processes of becoming transnational. Overall, this volume theorises the everyday of international politics. The theory and method foregrounds theory-as-practice and the objectives I explore and the conclusions I draw focus around citizenship and identity, and (post)colonial and transnational experiences. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of the volume is to illustrate where international politics manifest in everyday life. Everyday life of course makes international politics, but equally international politics makes everyday life. The everyday life at stake here transcends the boundaries of the nation state, and demonstrates spaces in which the traditional categories of IR cannot capture the everyday.

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Introduction 15 Ferreira, Marcos Farias. 2013a. “Coping with the Lost Revolution: Memories of the 1970s and 1980s in Nicaragua.” In Memory and Trauma in International Relations: Theories, Cases, Debates. London: Routledge. Ferreira, Renata B. 2013b. “Healing and Reconciliation in Contemporary Post-Conflict Scenarios: Securitization Movement of War Trauma in Perspective.” In Memory and Trauma in International Relations: Theories, Cases, Debates. London: Routledge. Freeman, Mark. 2010. Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backwards. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Grayson, Kyle, Matt Davies, and Simon Philpott. 2009. “Pop Goes IR? Research the Popular-Culture-World Politics Continuum.” Politics 29 (3): 155–63. Guild, Elspeth, and Joanne Van Selm, eds. 2005. International Migration and Security: Opportunities and Challenges. New York, NY: Routledge. Hanisch, Carol. 2000. [1969] “The Personal Is Political.” In Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, edited by Barbara A Crow, 113–7. New York: New York University Press. Helland, Leonardo Figueroa, and Stefan Borg. 2014. “The Lure of State Failure: A Critique of State Failure in World Politics.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16 (6): 877–97. Huysmans, Jef. 1998. “Security! What Do You Mean? From Concept to Thick Signifier.” European Journal of International Relations 4 (2): 226–55. ———. 2000. “The European Union and the Securitization of Migration.” Journal of Common Market Studies 38 (5): 751–77. ———. 2006. The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. New York, NY: Routledge. ———. 2011. “What’s in an Act? On Security Speech Acts and Little Security Nothings.” Security Dialogue 42 (4–5): 371–83. Huysmans, Jef, and Alessandra Buonfino. 2008. “Politics of Exception and Unease: Immigration, Asylum and Terrorism in Parliamentary Debates in the UK.” Political Studies 56 (4): 766–88. Innes, Alexandria J. 2010. “When the Threatened Become the Threat: The Construction of Asylum Seekers in British Media Narratives.” International Relations 24 (4): 457–77. ———. 2013. “International Migration as Criminal Behaviour: Shifting Responsibility to the Migrant in Mexico-US Border Crossings.” Global Society 27 (2): 237–60. ———. 2017a. “Everyday Ontological Security: Emotion and Migration in British Soaps.” International Political Sociology 11: 380–97. ———. 2017b. “Mobile Diasporas, Postcolonial Identities: The Green Line in Cyprus.” Postcolonial Studies 20 (3): 353–69. Innes, Alexandria J., and Robert J. Topinka. 2016. “The Politics of a Poncy Pillowcase: Migration and Borders in Coronation Street.” Politics Online First, October. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263395716675371. Jackl, Jennifer A. 2017. “‘Do You Understand Why I Don’t Share That?’: Exploring Tellability within Untellable Romantic Relationship Origin Tales.” Western Journal of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2017.1347274. Jackson, Richard. 2014. Confessions of a Terrorist. London: Zed Books. Lionnet, Francoise, and Shumei Shih, eds. 2005. Minor Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. MacKenzie, Megan. 2009. “Securitization and de-Securitization: Female Soldiers and the Reconstruction of Women in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone.” In Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives, 151–67. London: Routledge.

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McAdams, Dan. 2006. The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Muppidi, Himadeep. 2012. The Colonial Signs of International Relations. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ———. 2015. Politics in Emotion: The Song of Telangana: Interventions. London: Routledge. Nagar, Richa and the Sangtin Writers. 2006. Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Neumann, Iver B., and Daniel H. Nexon. 2006. Harry Potter and International Relations. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Norrick, Neal R. 2005. “The Dark Side of Tellability.” Narrative Inquiry 15 (2): 323–43. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Power, Marcus. 2007. “Digitized Virtuosity: Video War Games and Post 9/11 CyberDeterrence.” Security Dialogue 38 (2): 271–88. Pusca, Anca. 2015. “Representing Romani Gypsies and Travelers: Performing Identity from Early Photography to Reality Television.” International Studies Perspectives 316 (3): 327–44. Riessman, Catherine Kohler. 2008. Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. London: Sage. Sharma, Shailja. 2016. Postcolonial Minorities in Britain and France: In the Hyphen of the Nation-State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, Maria. 1998. “Reading Mayan Women’s In/Security.” International Journal of Peace Studies 3 (2). Waever, Ole, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup, and Pierre Lemaitre, eds. 1993. Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe. New York, NY: St Martin’s Press. Wibben, Annick. 2011. Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach. London: Routledge.

Part I

Colonial migration; becoming transnational

Excerpt 1 The stock I come from

I grew up in Anavargos. My father had a big house. He got it through exchanging land that was my mother’s. Fields all the way down the coast belonged to my mother, and my father gave them to his brother. My father’s brother and his family got millions from them in the end. My father gave them the land so he could build that house in Anavargos. It was just a huge house, propped up in the middle with wooden beams. And everyone stayed in one corner or another. The house had about half a dozen troughs on one side, although we didn’t have any animals. One was full of onions. Another would be mainly potatoes, and then there would be peaches or whatever you could pick around. There were always onions, because if you have bread and onions, you have a meal. The house had no sanitation. There was just a huge yard that we called kopria and everything would be thrown in there. There were all sorts of waste, human muck, rubbish left over from cooking, ashes from the fire. We had wood fires in the winter. And left-over water would get thrown in there too. We would use water purified with ashes because that was hygienic. Everything was improvised like that. I was the eighth child. My father, my mother, and even some of my sisters were completely illiterate. My father and mother couldn’t even count the fingers on one hand. My father, Charalambous, was so proud, he was arrogant. He was always the macho man, his idea was to drink anyone under the table, to beat anyone into submission and to outwork anyone. He would carry two hundred okes1 on his back, in those days it was usually of carobs, he could beat anyone that way. He used to sit out in the yard and sing, the whole neighbourhood could hear him. And if anyone complained he’d tell them to keep quiet or he’d use his hand or his shepherd’s crook on them. My grandma lived past ninety-seven. When she was ninety-seven I was about four or five and she tripped me up with her stick because I was staring at people or talking or something. She lived under the Ottomans and she would tell us stories. I was her favourite. She said Cyprus was much better under the marmaladeeaters as she called them, than under the Ottomans. She used to say that the Ottomans treated Cypriots like donkeys. The British, they were better until they started to cause trouble. It was normal for the kids in the village to have just one dress to wear. You’d have it from being two or three years old and that’s it until you go to school. All of

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us, we just had one dress. You’d wear it in summer and in winter, any time. Mine was a little red one. And because I was one of eight children, or of nine children but one had died as a baby, we would always be in competition to get up early. If you got up early enough, you could use someone else’s dress to dry your face. No one ever got mine though, I was quick off the mark. We would congregate outside the school. We had one teacher for six classes, from age six to twelve. Because that’s what the British would allow. After that, you had to pay. But we would sit, the younger kids, outside the school, listening to the lessons. They weren’t very good because there were six classes, from age six to twelve, but only one teacher. She had to teach one group, then teach another, and so on. Sitting outside, we were better off than the kids inside. My generation was the first one to get an education. The Ottomans did not really provide for any education and when I was growing up the priest was the only person in the village who could read. My sisters didn’t really get any education. My sister Eleni went to school for a little while, but it was really when the schools had only just started. She met her husband and was passing notes to him and things, and they took her out of school because it was traditional that women would get married and keep the home. The British would send inspectors to check the schools. One time, the inspector came and he asked for a volunteer to stand on his hands against the wall. I was outside the school and I shouted out I can do that, and I can do it without the wall and all. And on one hand. So I was showing off. But it was just a dress I was wearing, no knickers, nothing like that. And so I’m walking on my hands and the teacher rises shouting ‘stop, stop!’ And I didn’t know what was the matter, I was saying ‘why, I’m better than them you know!’ I was only about three or four years old. My brother Tolis was the only one who went to high school and he didn’t do very well. When he was in first school and I was outside because I was three years younger, I would listen to the lessons and I could do his homework for him. I found it easy. I was only about four years old, outside the school listening to maths lessons and I just picked it up. I could tell the tables right up to ten thousand.2 And I would do Tolis’ homework for him, because he couldn’t do it. When we got a bit older we had everything you’ve got here. Athletics and all that. In fact, we were organised, our school. We used to go down to Kato Paphos to compete, but we had no bathers.3 I used to pinch one of the shirts from my brothers and use the sleeves for trousers for the legs, tied underneath with string and I used to win some of the races. After Easter we had Floods Day, Kataklysmos. Oh I used to look forward to that for the whole year! I used to go and compete, you know, chasing the duck. Tolis used to be the best one for that, my father thought he was great. Sent him to high school and everything, till he changed his mind because when Tolis was sixteen in high school he asked him to milk a goat and he couldn’t milk a goat. My father said to him ‘ah, I’m wasting my money, they haven’t taught you anything in that school!’ My father thought that they would teach him to milk goats.

The stock I come from

21

Of course, when I went to high school I was top from elementary school. I went to take the test and everybody had to write. And of course, the kids in the town were laughing a lot that we couldn’t do that. So I went, I wrote, and I went through no bother, but I had to pay. It was a pound and I couldn’t pay it. The church used to help some of the kids. But of course not if you didn’t have any pull. I used to labour on the pier for a shilling a week. I had nothing. All the summer I had been working. I was straightening the little nails from old shoes, and I used to make poems for the other people, to make them laugh. I was also picking carobs with a Turkish family in Poliniethia, in Limassol. And I just couldn’t get the money together for a pound, because my relative pinched some of the money. He was gambling, and I went with him, because I was too young to go to the carob-picking by myself. I was working by myself and I was exceptionally good because I could climb trees and everything. I was very well fed, I worked about a fortnight. I made the money but I was sleeping on the roads, outside on the pavements and when my relative got the money, he went away. He went gambling. So, we went back to the village, broke again. When I went to the school they tried to say to me do this, do that. I said, do you think I haven’t been working all summer? They said to me you can’t have your report. So I just walked out, and I went to the bus station. Kypriaki Etairia Metaforon, the Cyprus company of transport. You know the buses, the old ones used to go about 10 miles an hour? I jumped on the back, and I was laughing. I never looked back. ... When I arrived in Famagusta I was so impressed because it was different than the other towns, it was new, and there were a lot of people because it was a holiday destination. It was one of the first ones apart from Lebanon. There were a lot of English people, mainly, and also British camps, there was a transit camp in Agios Memnos a couple of miles from the town to the West, and to the East was a base, they used to call it tessaris milis, the fourth mile. There was a base there, a British base so there was a lot of business, every day. And I got a job, the same day I got there, in a posh drapery shop. I found the job just by asking. I had a friend from the village and he was working in Famagusta and he said it would be no problem. Just about 100 yards from where he was working I asked, it was about the first or second place I asked if they wanted any help, any employees. There were two brothers and they had a clerk they told me between the three of them we need somebody just to clean the shop, water down outside the pavement to keep the dust down and so on. And of course, they had a place for me to stay because that was the first thing I asked. So I stayed in the garage, because it wasn’t used. And it was very good, actually, it had a very nice view. In the end I only worked there a few weeks. I finished there, and the story is a Jeremy Kyle show itself. It was a jealous wife. Well, she was a lovely wife, but she thought her husband was playing around. He was a nice bloke. Quiet spoken, not like all Cypriots but he used to go with his mates to the cabaret. They had two kids and I was their hero. I taught them how to catch birds, I used to take them down

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Colonial migration; becoming transnational

the beach. The wife was from a village and she was feeding me and everything. It was heaven, to be with them. But this morning I was told to clean the car, which I had to because it was scratched. So I cleaned the car, washed it, polished it, excellent job. And I took the roast, whatever it was that week, to the bakery, to be cooked.4 Every Sunday I used to take them – I used to make my own sometimes and take it on my bike. So when I was going to collect it she [the wife] says to me ‘Niko, will you pass such and such a place, and if the boss is there, don’t say anything. Just go and get the roast and bring it and we’ll have something to eat. And if he’s not there,’ she says, ‘I’ll sort it out I’ll keep it for him, we’ll keep some for him.’ Well, I never thought anything of it, I jumped straight away. The only job I’d done that morning was clean the car and I was going to take the kids out later on to the beach. It was great. Like I said, the kids used to love me, I was their hero. So I jump on the bike and go, and I pass by the cabaret where she told me to go, Trocadero. He was there sitting under the umbrella, with his friends and some girls. I never said nought. I went back and told her. Next thing, there was World War Number Three. She started it you know, calling him. . . . And it was, ooh. It had nothing to do with me. I didn’t know. But anyway, the next day his brother says to him that he should sack me. If I wasn’t there, that wouldn’t have happened. And I could hear my boss, because I was in the partitions in the shop with the clothes, because we used to sell big bales of clothing. My boss says to him ‘it’s not the lad, he’s not to blame for that. The poor lad. You know how jealous she is, you know how crafty she is. You know. So he only did what he’s been told’. And his clerk says ‘you know, you can’t blame the poor lad, and he was frightened for his job. He had nothing to do with it.’ The boss says ‘I know he had nothing to do with it. How can I help him? I’ll find him another job.’ But at five o clock in the afternoon I was found with no job, no money, no anything. I got a little paper bag and I put everything I owned in that paper bag. So, I went to a building site first, when they were finishing, putting their tools away, and asked if I could have a job and they told me to come tomorrow. It was midnight. I went down Agios Memnos, beside the fresh spring. There was a dry wall and a huge tree. I was watching families leaving the house and their daughters saying ‘good night love’ and I thought well, I couldn’t move then, had no transport or anything and I crouched till the morning, just to get a job in the building site.

Notes 1 2 3 4

An oke is a Cypriot unit of measurement equal to 1.27 kilograms. Multiplication tables. ‘Bather’ is a common Geordie derivative for bathing costume. It was common in the 1950s for Cypriot villages to use a communal oven.

1

The global and local politics of everyday life in 1950s Famagusta

Everybody wanted to get the British out, everybody. There was not a single person I spoke to that wanted the British there.

In the preceding quote, Nicholaos confirms the unpopularity of British rule in Cyprus in the 1950s. This was a period of growing agitation against the British by the EOKA (Εθνική Οργάνωσις Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών – National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) organisation who were fighting a guerrilla war for enosis, or the unity of Cyprus with Greece. While many did not support EOKA’s violent tactics, the objective of freedom from British rule and union with Greece was broadly popular. As Nicholaos described, it was ‘the main thing’. Nevertheless, in his memoirs, Nicholaos also talks in depth about his close friendships with British military conscripts in Cyprus; indeed, many British people he met in Famagusta remained life-long friends. His descriptions of friendships paint a markedly different picture to the one provided in Colonial Reports on Famagusta, which claim that there was very little interaction amongst the British and Cypriot communities. This chapter acknowledges that disparity and produces an alternative, horizontal reading of British colonialism in Cyprus using Nicholaos’ ethnographic archive. In 1953 when Britain started to withdraw troops from Egypt in the years preluding the Suez Crisis, the island of Cyprus became the main station for British land troops in the Middle East. Nicholaos had left his hometown of Paphos and eventually found work in the market in Famagusta, a port town that had swelled with British servicemen stationed at the Dhekelia base. Converging forces of global geopolitics situated British troops on Cyprus, which impacted the everyday local life on the island, particularly in the town of Famagusta and the surrounding area. As the forces of geopolitics, empire, nationalism and class converge, Nicholaos found himself with sponsorship to travel to Britain, in pursuit of ‘a future’ that would call to question his experience of citizenship, identity and belonging. Drawing on Lionnet and Shih’s theory of minor transnationalism I explore the differences between vertical and horizontal transnationalisms in Cyprus. I access vertical transnationalism through the archive of monthly Colonial Reports for Famagusta, and juxtapose this with the horizontal transnationalism described in Nicholaos’ ethnographic archive of life in Famagusta. Through the juxtaposition

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Colonial migration; becoming transnational

of the official British colonial reports submitted to the British Colonial Office by the district commissioner each month, and the lived experience of Nicholaos, this chapter examines how global geopolitics, empire, nationalism and class relations converge on local life, producing transnational identity and experience in this case and revealing the local and everyday politics of relating, internationally. I frame this chapter in theories of everyday life, drawing most notably on the work of Cynthia Enloe in international relations and with some reference to the theory of Michel De Certeau. These two approaches to everyday life are not often brought together. The former works to break down the boundaries between private and public and to examine how international politics transcends these boundaries, both impacting and being made in the everyday, with recognition that to understand the significance of the everyday one has to collapse these boundaries (Enloe 2011). The latter looks at public spaces, points of common reference, and popular culture in order to locate the presence of everyday agency (tactics) within overarching frames of power. Naomi Schor (1992) argued that the feminist approach to the everyday is opposed to what she terms the ‘masculinist’ approach that positions the everyday in public spaces and spheres that are dominated by men. Schor’s research then reclaims the space of the street as a site where the public and private are blurred and rejects the position of the masculine ‘flaneur’ as the hero of the street. In this chapter, I draw from de Certeau but follow Schor in rejecting the public-private binary. Instead I focus on tactics that can be recognised as agency, as rewriting the systems and structures of power. Nevertheless, I do not limit study of these tactics to public spaces, but accept Enloe’s (2011) observation that to truly understand the politics of everyday life, one has to understand how the various parts of life overlap and blur into one another. In this way I examine tactics as they emerge in a personal memoir of everyday life, a memoir that focuses on private life and private relationships as much as, if not more so, than public. Enloe’s pioneering research in the 1980s looked to the people who were sidelined from international politics. As a feminist, she looked to the women who were simply not part of the frameworks through which international relations were studied, people who were inconsequential to the upper echelons of international relations. Enloe argued that only by including these people can we truly understand the nature of international relations in various forms, including political economy, diplomacy, foreign policy and conflict (Enloe 1989). Moreover, studying women for Enloe makes it clear that in order to truly understand the competing pressures on their lives it is necessary to break down the boundaries between public and private, which have traditionally been gendered domains (Enloe 2011). To understand the political significance of everyday life as a space that transcends public and private I draw on de Certeau’s ‘tactics’, which model a means of accessing agency that is performed in response to the structures and systems that saturate everyday life. As tactics used in the everyday can serve to confront, challenge and re-write the systems and structures of power, it is important to recognise these tactics equally as they operate within the private domain in the form of the home and in personal relationships, as well as in the street, in

Everyday life in 1950s Famagusta 25 public spaces and public institutions. Personal relationships are subject to power structures and are therefore sites in which tactics can be employed to rewrite these structures, assert agency and reclaim power. Shifts within personal relationships often have political effects. Personal relationships that transcended nationality, and yet were made and performed in colonial and national spaces and structures saturate Nicholaos’ memoirs. Nicholaos consistently uses the political tactics to assert agency in order to navigate his situation, drawing from political institutions such as nationalist organisations and politically affiliated organisations in Cyprus, and from the behemoth of the British colonial state, in order to map the path that led him to emigrate from Cyprus to the British Isles.

Minor transnationalism Nicholaos’ memories of his time in Famagusta are personal memories that mingle his experience of working life with his private relationships. In Famagusta, he found his place in the world and, despite the growing political strife on the island and the resulting strict governance of the British colonial authorities, he remembers it as a time of personal freedom. This is unsurprising, given that it was preceded by working conditions that resembled an indentured servitude in Limassol where he was committed as a 24-hour-worker for two years, and was followed by a form of conscription in Britain. Famagusta becomes an idyll in Nicholaos’ memory, yet it was one he left behind willingly, with no cataclysmic or traumatic event inspiring his travel. Nicholaos’ migration was not forced. It was inspired, but not driven by, economics. It was not political although it was brought about by political forces. Thus, to look at the circumstances in detail offers insight into the process and complexity of migration decisions. There is not an event in Nicholaos’ life that can be pinpointed as a trigger for migration such as in cases of war and conflict, persecutions, natural disaster and so on. When he left the insurgency against British rule in Cyprus was active but the political situation in Cyprus was stable. There was occasional violence, and notable political actions that were heavily oppressed by British rule, and indeed had been since the 1931 revolt. Nevertheless, the conflict against the British was not established until the latter half of the 1950s when violence escalated. Nicholaos left Cyprus in 1954. His emigration was not motivated by a desire to escape violence or poverty. The way Nicholaos’ decision to emigrate emerged out of the complexity of his everyday life, with no real isolated or identifiable trigger, offers an insight for migration studies. Research that seeks to pinpoint motivations for migration often lacks a holistic everyday viewpoint, and instead attempts to isolate contributing factors and to rationalise decision-making, traditionally with a particular emphasis on economic decision-making, although this focus has been both expanded and contested, a theme dealt with in more detail in Chapter 5. Nevertheless, there is no moment of rational cost-benefit analysis for Nicholaos in making his migration decision, even in retrospect as he narrates his memoir. Indeed, his migration decision cannot be extricated from his narrative of everyday life; migration happened in the context of the everyday, not as a special event or moment.

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I approach the question of the circumstances of Nicholaos’ decision to move to Britain through the framework of minor transnationalism. Lionnet and Shih’s collection of essays critique the conventional way of thinking about the world that establishes it on a vertical trajectory, with a dominant, power-holding culture at the top, and minorities at the bottom. We often separate the global and the local, with the apparently minor and inconsequential everyday life – and the everyday life of minority groups and cultures in particular – relegated to the local and the peripheral. Lionnet and Shih argue that the separation of the global and the local is a false binary and that the vertical ordering of the world reproduces the dominant power structure, ignoring and undermining what happens on the purported periphery. While much has been written about British colonialism and imperialism, decolonisation, the Suez crisis, British influence in the Middle East during the early years of the United Nations, and about the politics of Cyprus, little has been written about the everyday experiences of local people as they lived through these major political changes and upheavals. These peripheral experiences that happened in the setting of global political events offer unique insight into the relationship between the global and the local, and offer an alternative perspective on global politics that allows us to understand these power dynamics without reproducing them in analysis. Looking at political events through local experience allows for a horizontal rendering of the world in which local experiences are valued and the significance of minor interactions can be understood in a global political context.

Famagusta In order to capture the significance of Nicholaos’ everyday life in Famagusta, it’s useful to situate it in the context of the role and characteristics of the city both in terms of internal Cypriot politics and in terms of British colonial rule. Famagusta is a town on the East coast of Cyprus, currently located in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The town was one of the key places of interest to the British when they annexed Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. Lord Beaconsfield demanded Cyprus with the intention of establishing a naval base in Famagusta, the deepest port on the island, from which Britain could protect its interests in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt and India from growing Russian strength (Varnava 2015). This demand, however, was short-lived. When Britain occupied Egypt in 1882 the significance of Cyprus as a hub for British authority in the Middle East was left redundant (Holland 1998). Moreover, Cyprus proved to be a difficult location for the British. Water was scarce and sanitation was bad across the island; troops suffered from fever, heatstroke and malaria; internal and external communications were poor, and Famagusta harbour was clogged and rendered unusable in the early days of British rule on the island (Varnava 2015). It was only in the latter half of the 1890s that Britain invested in building infrastructure and improving sanitation and communications in Cyprus, largely as a result of the Colonial Secretary’s efforts to convince the treasury to invest in undeveloped parts of the British Empire, namely the Caribbean, tropical Africa, and Cyprus (Ibid, Kubicek

Everyday life in 1950s Famagusta 27 1965). Nevertheless, development projects in the early 1900s included improvements to the port and the building of a railway line between Famagusta and Lefkosia, both of which contributed to the subsequent increase in Famagusta’s population. During World War I Cyprus was a base for provisions, which sustained economic growth during the war due to a combination of increased exports from the island and remittances sent by the muleteer corps who were recruited in Cyprus. Famagusta was the hub of military and commercial operations given the activity of the port; hence, the town profited and grew during this period. Nevertheless, the island remained a relative backwater of the British Empire until the late 1940s (Varnava 2015; Holland 1998). In the latter half of the 1940s Famagusta experienced a period of growth. Between 1946 and 1948 the population increased substantially. Indeed, as early as February of 1946 the district commissioner of Famagusta reported that emigration to the UK was the only way to relieve the pressure created by a growing population and an acute lack of housing (District Commissioner of Famagusta 1945–1949a). Nevertheless, the economy grew. This was to some extent a result of increased military works; military grade roads were constructed and the port was developed to host British and American warships as well as growing numbers of commercial vessels. A camp was constructed to house Jewish would-be immigrants to Palestine, and to house German POWs from WWII who were brought to the area north of Famagusta in August 1946. The jobs created by the growing military presence demanded labour and for several months labour was scarce. By October 1946 unemployment was reported as completely absent (District Commissioner of Famagusta, Colonial Report for October 1946d). This led to migration towards Famagusta from rural areas, which consequently produced a demand for housing. The demand for housing created more building work in Famagusta and the nearby Varosha neighbourhood, standing just to the south of the old town and the port. Simultaneously, local villages lobbied the British for investment to improve local roads and sanitation, further creating jobs and developing local communications. This economic boom endured until the second half of 1948 at which point the rising food prices (attributed to the Jewish camps) combined with a bad cereal harvest led to recession. The recession was short-lived, and by the early 1950s the economy was once again flourishing. The newly established labour exchange brought workers from the surrounding villages into the town. The district commissioner’s report grew to include information on public health, hospital developments and a newly established tourism office (District Commissioner of Famagusta 1949–1951a, 1949–1951c) 1950 and January 1951). Politics in Cyprus in general and in Famagusta in particular remained relatively stable between 1931 and 1948. The uprising of 1931, during which the governor’s mansion was attacked and set alight had precipitated the suspension of the Cypriot legislative council and municipal elections, leaving Cyprus governance more or less entirely in the hands of the British. There was still notable opposition to British rule, yet the district commissioner reports for Famagusta downplayed the relevance of this opposition. Nevertheless, the main political divisions in Famagusta were intraethnic rather than interethnic (Katsourides 2013; Sant Cassia 1986).

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The leftist party AKEL (Ανορθωτικό Κόμμα Εργαζόμενου Λαού, or Progressive Party of Working People) emerged from the by-then defunct communist party in the 1940s and was the most active party in Famagusta. AKEL enjoyed the most support in the town, having won municipal elections held in 1943, led by mayor Adam Adamantos. The main political division was between the nationalists, who were conservative and supported enosis (the unification of Cyprus with Greece, the main Greek Cypriot political objective between 1930–1960), and the communists/leftists who largely supported self-governance (although this changed in the late 1940s when AKEL began to support the cause for enosis albeit with some reservations) and actively opposed British rule. AKEL sat between the two groups, as a leftist party that evolved from the communist party when it disbanded in 1941, yet with enough of a commitment to enosis to participate in talks with representatives of Greece during the forties and fifties. In Famagusta, during the latter half of the 1940s, demonstrations, strikes and political speeches were logged with some regularity by the British administration. These techniques were considered illegal political practice, as the British maintained restrictions on political freedoms at this time. Real political discord was not reported until the recession in the latter half of 1948, a time also marked by the end of the Greek Civil War, which solidified tension between left and right (Katsourides 2014). The tension built during the summer of 1948 and by autumn the respective sides were boycotting each other’s businesses and firing employees who were found to hold opposing views (Ibid, District Commissioner of Famagusta 1945–1949f ). At this point, any discord between the two ethnic groups was of no consequence to the British. The Turkish Cypriot community was rarely mentioned in British reports. The district commissioner logged concern that Greek nationalism was still being taught to schoolchildren by Greek teachers ‘of the Metaxas regime’ but the concern was drawn in relation to ensosis (which was not considered a great threat in 1940s Famagusta) rather than in relation to brewing ethnic conflict. Nevertheless in the early 1950s the British district commissioner’s monthly reports on Famagusta and the surrounding area started to pay more attention to the Turkish community. The commissioner began to submit two reports: a lengthy political report followed a week or two later by a commercial, legal, social and economic report. The political reports were habitually divided into five sections from 1950 onwards: General, Left, Right, Turkish Community and Miscellaneous. The attention devoted to the Turkish community tended to concentrate on Turkish Cypriot opposition to enosis, which while likely present at that time, was also in British interests to record, because it provided a reason for British opposition to enosis that was based in a claim for the right to self-determination. The focus on left and right Greek Cypriot politics also centred around enosis, in particular failed attempts to rally Greek and American support. While the left and right are positioned in the reports in opposition to each other, there is less attention to political discord and more to the lack of cooperation on enosis despite both sides being purportedly committed to the cause. The Cypriot left remained particularly active in Famagusta. AKEL continued to be the leading party in the 1950s with the majority of support and continued to agitate against the British and against

Everyday life in 1950s Famagusta 29 the US when opportunity arose, such as when a fleet of American war ships visited the port in August 1950 (District Commissioner of Famagusta 1949–1951a). Adamantos boycotted various British celebrations, such as the garden parties and other festivities held in celebration of the king’s birthday. Thus there was tension between local governance in Famagusta, which was leftist and opposed British rule, and the British authorities. Nevertheless, this tension was functional in the sense that the British continued to maintain relations with the leftist mayor, and the mayor boycotted events but did not launch an active campaign against the British. The political and economic climate in Famagusta in the 1950s saw the efforts for enosis fermenting but this was against a backdrop of general economic growth, low unemployment, and infrastructural development. This was the Famagusta to which Nicholaos arrived.

Everyday Famagusta Nicholaos arrived in Famagusta in the spring of 1950. He was immediately impressed; despite at that point having already lived in Paphos, Limassol and Lefkosia, Famagusta was by far the most modern and the busiest town he had encountered. He marks the difference as being driven by affluence. There were new buildings and wide streets. There were many British people, military personnel and a burgeoning tourist industry. Work proved easy to find. The first day he arrived he asked for work in an upmarket drapery and was hired immediately.

Figure 1.1 Nicholaos with his delivery bicycle

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Colonial migration; becoming transnational

Money flowed more liberally in Famagusta than in Limassol or Lefkosia: in Famagusta Nicholaos earned a weekly wage, rather than a monthly one, and he could supplement his income by working evenings in local cafes, earning tips for fetching alcohol from the licensed cabarets. Nicholaos describes what was for him an idyll in Famagusta. He recalls working hard in the drapery, and later in the market making deliveries through the day, then in the cafes in the evenings. When the shops closed during the siesta time, he would dash to the beach with his friends to swim. On his days off he explored the island by bicycle, and the coastline by boat, fishing. When he describes these activities, he is quick to emphasise that his friendship group included British people, generally men who were military conscripts, often from working-class backgrounds. He stresses that his friendships were equal, and that as far as he was aware it was very much the norm for Cypriots to mix with the British. Because there was nothing to divide us really . . . . English people, they used to be in our houses, we used to go to their houses, everybody had a friend. It was mixed completely, it was no problem. Just the language problem, the language, at the time not many spoke English. This contradicts historical accounts of Famagusta. Indeed, the district commissioner’s report for June 1948 states explicitly that there was little socialising between Cypriots and British in the town (District Commissioner of Famagusta 1945–1949e). Jan Asmussen (2015) attributes this to the British living separately from the locals, often in military accommodation, thus confining interaction to workplace settings. However, Nicholaos lived in a neighbourhood where these boundaries were not apparent and he made friends with several British people who became lifelong friends. Of course, Nicholaos was learning English from a priest in Famagusta. He had determined that it would be necessary to speak English if he wanted a secure job and wage and he was keen to continue his education. Nicholaos wanted to use and practice his spoken English. Yet, it’s important to acknowledge that his experience may have been different from that of people who did not speak any English or were not able to learn or indeed interested in learning. However, he makes a distinction between friendships and politics in his memory of Famagusta. Nicholaos talks about teasing his English friends, because it was widely known that Cypriots did not welcome the British presence on the island and this was something that came to the fore in Famagusta given the number of British troops. The teasing was done in fun, and equally the people he talked to would respond that without the British, Cyprus would be victim to Soviet interference and communism. In Famagusta, which was largely leftist, this was a promise rather than a threat. Particularly for Nicholaos, whose own politics were leftist, the idea of Soviet presence certainly seemed no more ominous than that of the British. In this way, Nicholaos positions the British as an occupying force rather than an embedded part of Cypriot identity. Cyprus was a British crown colony, but was not British in identity. Nevertheless, the relationship between the British in Cyprus and Cypriots was more complicated that can be accounted for from the

Everyday life in 1950s Famagusta 31 vertical perspective provided in the colonial reports. The relationship Nicholaos recounts between him and his friends is not a measured, careful interaction but is full of familiarity, jokes and teasing. Everyday transnationalism offers a challenge to the portrayal of the discontented left, led by Adamantos in Famagusta who opposed the British presence, and the Greek nationalist right-wing who attempted to work with the British while pressuring for enosis. The horizontal interactions were not within the purview of the colonial reports, yet the lived experience of these interactions offers an insight into horizontal relationships between British and Cypriots. In recounting his memoir, Nicholaos reminisced about the ways that the leftright divisions in Famagusta both infiltrated everyday life, but also were worked around and perhaps less important and less divisive in practical experience than they appear in historical analyses and colonial reports. Nevertheless this political schism was clearly at the foreground of his social interactions. For example, he was a member of the Nea Salamis athletic club, which was a leftist association. This is one of the places he spent time, playing table tennis with his friends. Yet, he also joined the nationalist Orthodox Christian Union of Youth because this organisation, through the priests, provided secondary education including English lessons to those who required it. Nicholaos had not been able to afford the payment to finish high school, so he received his education through the nationalist youth organisation. Returning to the quote extracted at the beginning of this chapter, as Nicholaos remembers, The priest used to teach but he used to shove in a little bit nationalism . . . . Of course, it was right wing . . . wasn’t making me very happy, because they were singing nationalist songs . . . I was inclined to go more on the other side. I was always going to OCHEN, just to learn, to get myself educated because I left school only thirteen years old. In practice then, the political division was present in Nicholaos’ day-to-day life, but was not all-consuming. De Certeau’s concept of ‘poaching’ as both a means of resistance and of inventing everyday life is instructive in understanding Nicholaos’ use of the nationalist organisation for education. The structure of OCHEN was designed to school the youth in Greek nationalism and the logic of enosis. Yet, Nicholaos used the organisation for education without becoming subject to the nationalist political messages. He took what would serve him from the organisation while rejecting the political power structure that formed it. He then acquired secondary education and language skills which he used in his everyday working and social life. The language skills allowed him to interact with the British and also opened commercial opportunities as he could make deliveries to the British base and assist people in everyday tasks (an example he remembers is helping someone to acquire an electrician), which increased his earning power. In this sense he ‘poached’ the education, which was useful to him, yet he resisted the nationalist power structure that was part of the conservative political agenda.

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Colonial migration; becoming transnational

The left-right division in Famagusta in the 1950s was of course situated in the global context of the early days of the Cold War. It was not isolated from international affairs even at the local level. This is noted in the Colonial reports that emphasise in particular the role of the conflict in Korea as ‘looming large’ in public discussion and strengthening the belief in the conflict between Russia and the West in Famagusta (District Commissioner of Famagusta 1949–1951a, 1949– 1951b). The reports also draw attention to the ‘Persian Oils’ dispute (which later became known as the Abadan Crisis), as overshadowing other political activity in Famagusta in June 1951 (District Commissioner of Famagusta 1949–1951d). Nicholaos remembers the Korean War being used as a means for the left to rally public support for their campaign against British colonialism. As he describes, the leftist leaders used to argue that the Soviet Union would bomb Cyprus, as a British crown colony, in the event of a war. He remembers that ‘in the early fifties, fifty-one, fifty-two people are taking sides, speeches are made.’ Nicholaos also makes particular reference to the ways in which international struggles and successes against colonialism fuelled anti-British sentiments in Famagusta. Indeed, the historical and political academic literature suggests that Cypriots were disillusioned with the British because of the stringent British rules governing and preventing Cypriot political activity, and because they saw other states – indeed states perceived as less ‘Western’ or progressive – being given (or taking) their independence (Holland 1998). Yet, this was not disentangled from enosis. As Nicholaos articulates. after the Mau Maus in Africa, and . . . India got independence, Cyprus wanted independence. Because they’d been promised it during the war because a lot of Cypriots joined the forces to fight with that idea that there’d be union with Greece. Here Nicholaos is offering an analytical perspective on vertical power relations but is doing so through the lens of minor identities and connections. Rather than analysing the politics of empire, war and decolonisation that brought about independence, he thinks about peoples, positioning Cypriots in common with Mau Maus and Indians who won, and deserved, their independence from British rule. For Nicholaos, everyday life was lived in the context of British colonialism, which he opposed, and the political environment of the Cold War, something that is illustrated in his memories of the Korean War, the Abadan Crisis and decolonisation in other parts of the world. Yet, the structure of British-occupied Famagusta created a space in which he could flourish, hence producing Nicholaos’ memory of an idyllic time. He used the opportunities presented by British presence for economic and educational benefit. These were not opportunities that were afforded to him directly by British rule: he had been unable to claim a high school education because his class position did not permit it. He could not afford the fees and his father did not support him in his efforts to pursue education; his father did not value education. Moreover, Nicholaos’ family did not hold an influential position in the church, which could often help open doors. Yet, he used the British

Everyday life in 1950s Famagusta 33 presence in other, indirect ways, navigating his everyday life. For example, as mentioned previously, Nicholaos learnt and became proficient in English. His English friends with access to the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes – the trading organisation of the British forces, or NAAFI – would buy cheap cigarettes that he would then sell for a profit he shared with his friends. The busy port brought commercial opportunity. He remembers selling sweet sujuk, a syrupy sweet, in the port to travellers aboard the boats that would dock there. These actions formed his everyday life, allowing him to save money, to access better education, to buy a bicycle to tour around the island, and to pool money with his friends to occasionally rent a boat and engine and fish in the nearby bays. Such methods can be thought of as tactics of everyday life, in which Nicholaos used the opportunities that were afforded to him by British presence on the island, while still opposing the political presence of the British and the means with which they ruled the island. He remained an active member of the leftist Nea Salamis athletic club, but this did not prevent him from poaching the opportunities and benefits of the British presence. The oppressive power structure became, for Nicholaos, a system that allowed his personal freedom (though certainly not his political freedom, a fact that would return to haunt him once he registered for his National Insurance number in the UK) as he was no longer tied to indentured working contracts.

Geopolitics, empire, and class What becomes evident in Nicholaos’ narrative of life in Famagusta is that the forces of international geopolitics, imperialism, and class are all entangled and power each other, and that these forces saturate everyday life, both private and public. Yet, the everyday perspective also offers new insight into the ways these forces are enmeshed. Geopolitics of course brought British troops to Famagusta, thus allowing for minor and horizontal interactions between British troops and local residents. These horizontal interactions were not limited to public space such as the marketplace and commercial dealings. They were also deeply personal, inviting lasting friendships as shall be further discussed later. Cyprus was strategically important as the only crown colony in the Middle East. Britain was unwilling meet Cypriot demands for independence when British Middle Eastern presence was becoming increasingly threatened, in particular by the rise of Nasser in Egypt in the early 1950s. The context of the Cold War, the Abadan crisis and the threat of Suez Canal nationalisation, and receding British power produced Cyprus as an important territory for Britain. Yet, following World War II, Cypriots expected Britain to facilitate enosis. Many Cypriots had fought during World War II on the understanding that these efforts would be rewarded (Holland 1998). However, Britain imposed tight restrictions, removed self-governance of municipalities, and heavily restricted political activities. For example, permission had to be sought for political speeches, demonstrations and marches into the 1950s. People who disobeyed these rules and engaged in political activities without the appropriate permissions were arrested and often given jail sentences. Opposition to the British was met with force; for example, the mayor of Lemesos and four city councillors

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were sentenced to indefinite detention when they renamed a street that had been named after a former British governor of Cyprus (Alecou 2016). The dissatisfaction Cypriots had in British rule had the effect of further fuelling the enthusiasm for enosis (Holland 1998). As the insurgent force of EOKA (Εθνική Οργάνωσις Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών or National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) drew more and more support in Famagusta throughout the 1950s, the British decided that the only thing to do to discourage the population from helping and supporting EOKA was the make them fear the British more than they allegedly feared the insurgent fighters, and so began a reign of terror (Asmussen 2015). Despite the eagerness for enosis, ethnic politics between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots had generally been of little consequence until the 1950s. Rather, most of the political divisions in Famagusta, indeed across the island, were held on the political spectrum between left and right. Class conflict is of course at the heart of the left-right divide. In describing his own affinity with the left, Nicholaos points out ‘I wasn’t going to go with the rich. I was always poor.’ In addition to the influence of his elder brother Dimitris, who was a trade union leader, he describes the event that marks in his mind the solidification of his own political affiliation: I became left when I was just a kid because my mother went and bought some rice. And it was all, mainly, gravel. I used to put it in a great big tray and pick the rice like that . . . . I was picking the rice out, not the gravel. I was doing that with the beans, with everything . . . . I bought an oke [1.27 kg] and I only got a handful. This led him to take more notice of the unions in the village where he grew up, remembering that they taught him that he should read books and he should not smoke, two pieces of advice that he continued to follow throughout his life. Once in Famagusta as an independent young man, he maintained his leftist affiliation, despite receiving education from the Orthodox youth organisation. In Nicholaos’ assessment, the British left themselves open to suffer from the nationalist narrative on enosis by failing to fund secondary education for all pupils. The church provided secondary education to those who sought it and could not afford to pay school fees. While Nicholaos poached his education without subscribing to nationalism, the influence of the church and the nationalist messages should not be underestimated. Greek nationalism fuelled the armed struggle for enosis in the mid-to-late 1950s, and the Church taught Greek nationalism and pro-enosis messages. Enosis was widely supported both on the left and right; in Nicholaos’ words, it was ‘the main thing’ and this was reflected in the AKEL’s shift in the late 1940s to support the aim of enosis, although AKEL’s campaigns were always couched in an anti-British message. Indeed, the main difference between the nationalist campaign for enosis and the leftist campaign was that the nationalists intended to work within the framework of Anglo-Hellenic treaty agreements and so attempted to negotiate peacefully for enosis, while the left was more openly hostile to colonialism.

Everyday life in 1950s Famagusta 35 Nevertheless, what is more revealing about the everyday politics of class that emerges through Nicholaos’ everyday life account is the role of social interactions, something that is denied in the Colonial Reports, as detailed earlier (District Commissioner of Famagusta 1945–1949e). Nicholaos became close friends with the Scorers who offered him an affidavit of support so he was able to immigrate to Britain. In addition he had multiple close friendships with British people in Famagusta. They tended to be young, working-class conscripts, people he describes as ‘no different’ from himself and his Cypriot friends. He positions these friendships in the context of his recognition of the tensions between the British and the Cypriots: Everybody wanted to get the British out, everybody. There was not a single person I spoke to that wanted the British there . . . . If there was any fights it was always a Cypriot to blame, not a soldier . . . the cabarets used to get a lot English people arrested . . . any friction with the locals, . . . it was because the British soldiers . . . were all highly thought by the government. If for instance there was a fight, no matter what, the locals were to blame. And you know, especially in the cabaret, they’re fighting over girls and you get an English lad drunk, and his mates start fighting. . . . And they waiters start [to] fight back or something, or the waiters will close the place. And the waiters go to jail, they [the British soldiers] go scot free. Despite these tensions, Nicholaos separated the British people he was friends with from British policy in Cyprus, meaning he could dislike the British presence and still maintain friendships. For example, he talks about his friendship with a conscript batman from Stoke: There was nothing to divide us . . . . We used to go all over the place, sleeping rough sometimes on the weekends when he wasn’t on duty. [We] never thought of killing us or killing him. In fact, if anyone picked on him, you’d have to deal with us. If any one of his lot picked on us, he was on our side . . . . I would have loved to see that happen, on our side, definitely, he was . . . . And we were on his side. In addition to reflecting on his personal friendships, Nicholaos describes social and commercial interactions between British and Cypriots as being a normal, unremarkable part of everyday life. Yet, this to some degree is fuelled by class politics: the British people he found he had connections with were working-class British conscripts. On the other hand, he recalls being exposed to – and horrified by – the class system of the British military. He recalls being unable to understand why some British people did not interact with others and receiving the simple explanation from the woman he questioned that a sergeant did not socialise with conscript servicemen. While political forces are evident in Nicholaos’ friendships with British people, what the narrative reveals is the mess of everyday life, the ways in which it avoids categorisation or separation into discrete analytical units

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or explanatory variables. Nicholaos discusses his friendships in the context of the politics of the British presence in Famagusta; indeed, this intersperses the narrative. Taken as a whole, in this section of his narrative, Nicholaos begins by mentioning some English friends by name, and talks about how he teased them about Cypriots disliking the British presence in Cyprus. He then moves to talk about how the locals and the British were intermingled in his neighbourhood, the restrictive British governance of the island, and the preference shown to British soldiers by the police. He then returns to the subject of his personal friendships and how he would pass the time, and then closes with a reflection on how the British were good clients because they were comparatively affluent. In the arc of telling Nicholaos does not distinguish between public life in political or commercial interaction and private life in friendship. They instead intermingle completely as this is how he experienced it. As Enloe observes, the boundaries between public and private do not exist in everyday experiences, but analytically they often serve to silence, disguise or undermine the experiences of women and minorities in the study of politics. The horizontal transnationalism that can be accessed through everyday life reveals a different world from that of the Colonial Reports that is not structured by some of the hierarchical tropes of British governance that positions Cypriot politics as problems to be solved, and the Cypriot people as decidedly distinct and different from the British. The value of this approach in terms of its ability to access a different rendering of political relationships that can enrich insight and analysis by remaining separate from the vertical accounts of conventional history and political analysis is clear in the insight available from Nicholaos: the world he paints is a different world than that of the Colonial Reports, one that existed vividly for him, and one that is evidenced through both his migration to the British Isles with the guarantorship of the Scorers, and his lifelong friendships that outlasted the British colonial presence in Cyprus. Without the ability to build connections and friendships with working-class Britons, the course of Nicholaos’ life would have been very different. He had no family or acquaintances residing in the UK who could help him immigrate; indeed, emigration from Cyprus had not occurred to him until the idea was suggested by Dorothy Scorer. Nicholaos had different experiences from his British friends; nevertheless, he found commonalities across ethnic and political divisions. These minor and horizontal international interactions informed his migration decision, which was not directly influenced by macro political forces. The commonalities Nicholaos found with working-class Britons in Cyprus in the early 1950s is illustrative of the plural and fungible nature of identity. The facets of identity that were shared, namely working-class identity and youth, were prioritised over cultural, ethnic and political differences, permitting horizontal connections such as those described by Lionnet and Shih (2005). The friendship that Nicholaos had on that basis created a context in which Dorothy Scorer could suggest to him that there was no ‘future’ in Famagusta and Alan Scorer could ask his parents to become guarantors for Nicholaos’ immigration to the British Isles. Nevertheless, his emigration happened in a broader context in which the migration of Cypriots to the

Everyday life in 1950s Famagusta 37

Figure 1.2 Nicholaos (standing, right) with some friends in Famagusta

UK was favourable, at least to the district commissioner of Famagusta, who commented as early as the spring of 1946 that he could not foresee the overcrowding and lack of accommodation in the city being resolved without emigration (District Commissioner of Famagusta, 1945–1949b and April, May 1945–1949c). Nicholaos remembered that, to him, huge numbers of people seemed to be leaving, not just towards Britain, but also to Australia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia. The politics of empire then made migration a favourable concept: territory was plentiful and migration, while neither uncomplicated nor free from the politics of race, culture and class, did not yet carry the same political charge that it has since developed, although of course the politics of migration into the British Isles were often contentious. Seeing other people leave Cyprus also was suggestive of the benefits of emigration, thus the broader political context impacted upon Nicholaos’ individual migration decision. Of course, it must be noted that, in the context of emigration in the British Empire, and particularly migration in the direction of the British Isles, the politics of race were not absent. Indeed, it cannot be overlooked that while working class similarities could allow for cross-cutting experiences and friendships at the local level in Famagusta, in the macro context of the British Empire racial differentiation became a tool used to both appease the sufferance of the British working class and to oppress racialized others (Balibar 1999; Shilliam 2010). These themes are variously explored in subsequent chapters.

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Everyday life and colonial politics in Famagusta There are not many recorded accounts of Famagusta in the early 1950s. It became of note in the mid-to-late 1950s because of its role in the EOKA struggle for enosis that culminated in Cypriot independence from Britain. Yet, the early years of the 1950s are significant as politics are growing more contentious. The leftist mayor Adam Adamantos’ relations with the British district commissioner became increasingly strained, and the city grew both economically and demographically. Famagusta became the thriving commercial and tourist hub that it remained until the 1974 division of the island, and the period of growth in the early 1950s was a significant part of that development. Because Famagusta was home to British soldiers, the Dhekelia base, and the transit camps that Cypriot mercenary soldiers would travel through, it was a bustling city. The port brought tourists and visiting military personnel as well as imports for the island. This was the context into which Nicholaos arrived in 1950. When Nicholaos describes his everyday life in Famagusta, he merges politics, work, and leisure time, illustrating them as inextricable. The British presence in Famagusta is a lynchpin of his experiences there, and of his decision to emigrate from Cyprus, but this is driven specifically by his personal friendships. Yet, those friendships would not have happened without the British presence. Equally, the divisive politics of the Cold War, the Korean War, the Abadan oil crisis, and decolonisation processes elsewhere all feature in Nicholaos’ narrative as linked to his thought processes and experiences both political and personal. Class politics, even more specifically, British class politics also drive Nicholaos’ experiences. The divisive nature of the British class system that alienated working-class conscript servicemen from career military personnel with rank and class status created a scenario in which friendships flourished and became central to life in Famagusta. These circumstances then produced a scenario in which Nicholaos, a working-class Cypriot from a peasant background, could find a guarantor and emigrate to the UK. The confluence of geopolitics, empire and class are manifest in Nicholaos’ narrative. In his memoir, he does not separate or categorise these things in his description of his life in Famagusta and the circumstances that led to his migration. Each element surges and recedes at different points in his narration. They are intertwined in Nicholaos’ experiences. Ultimately, looking at this memoir illustrates that everyday life cannot be separated from macro political forces, yet macro political forces alone are insufficient to explain political (and personal) outcomes.

Bibliography Alecou, Alexios. 2016. Communism and Nationalism in Postwar Cyprus, 1945–1955. New York: Springer. Asmussen, Jan. 2015. “Bertram John Weston and the Emergency in Famagusta (1955– 1959).” In City of Empires: Ottoman and British Famagusta, edited by Michael J.K. Walsh. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Balibar, Etienne. 1999. “Class Racism.” In Race, Identity and Citizenship: A Reader, edited by Rodolfo D. Torres and Louis F. Miron. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Everyday life in 1950s Famagusta 39 District Commissioner of Famagusta. 1945–1949a. ‘January 1946’ Cyprus: Monthly Reports from Commissioner, Famagusta, The National Archives. FCO 141/2767. ———. 1945–1949b. ‘March 1946’. Cyprus: Monthly Reports from Commissioner, Famagusta, The National Archives. FCO 141/2767. ———. 1945–1949c. ‘May 1946.’ Cyprus: Monthly Reports from Commissioner, Famagusta, The National Archives. FCO 141/2767. ———. 1945–1949d. ‘October 1946’ Cyprus: Monthly Reports from Commissioner, Famagusta, The National Archives. FCO 141/2767. ———. 1945–1949e.‘July 1948’. Cyprus: Monthly Reports from Commissioner, Famagusta, The National Archives. FCO 141/2767. ———. 1945–1949f. ‘October 1948’. Cyprus: Monthly Reports from Commissioner, Famagusta, The National Archives. FCO 141/2767. ———. 1949–1951a. ‘June 1950’. Cyprus: Monthly Reports from Commissioner, Famagusta, The National Archives. FCO 141/2768. ———. 1949–1951b. ‘August 1951’ Cyprus: Monthly Reports from Commissioner, Famagusta, The National Archives. FCO 141/2768. ———. 1949–1951c. ‘January 1951’. Cyprus: Monthly Reports from Commissioner, Famagusta, The National Archives. FCO 141/2768. ———. 1949–1951d. ‘June 1951’. Cyprus: Monthly Reports from Commissioner, Famagusta, The National Archives. FCO 141/2768. Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2011. “The Mundane Matters.” International Political Sociology 5 (4): 447–50. Holland, Robert. 1998. Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Katsourides, Yiannos. 2013. “Nationalism, Anti-Colonialism and the Crystallisation of Greek Cypriot Nationalist Party Politics.” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 51 (4): 503–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/14662043.2013.838371. Katsourides, Yiannos. 2014. “The National Question in Cyprus and the Cypriot Communist Left in the Era of British Colonialism (1922–1959).” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 16 (4): 474–501. https://doi.org/10.1080/19448953.2014.940765. Kubicek, Robert. 1965. “Joseph Chamberlain, the Treasury and Imperial Development 1895–1903.” Report of the Annual Meeting, the Canadian Historical Society 44 (1): 105–16. https://doi.org/10.7202/300638ar. Lionnet, Francoise, and Shumei Shih, eds. 2005. Minor Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sant Cassia, P. 1986. “Religion, Politics and Ethnicity in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571–1878).” European Journal of Sociology 27 (1): 3–28. Schor, Naomi. 1992. “Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900.” Critical Inquiry 18: 188–245. Shilliam, Robbie, ed. 2010. International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity. London: Routledge. Varnava, Andrekos. 2015. “Famagusta During the Great War: From Backwater to Bustling.” In City of Empires: Ottoman and British Famagusta. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Excerpt 2 Improvise to survive

In Limassol I worked for one pound a month. In Famagusta, I was getting a wage a week. And I could get two jobs. I was working in the market through the day and during the night I could go and get a job in a restaurant. I say a restaurant, it was really for the rich and the young, the spoiled ones. When they wanted any drinks I would go and get the drinks from cabarets and so on because they had a licence for drinks. It was very expensive, very. So say, like present day footballers, them days it was the people who used to work in offices and the like. They were the posh, they were the top notches. Used to send a young laddy to go in the back doors of the cabaret, buy them a bottle of brandy, and take it to them. And of course, you know, these people were always very generous, they would drop a couple of shillings for you, which was good money in them days. And I was trusted. So I was doing that most nights. And other jobs I was doing, I’d kill some birds because some of them, that’s all they wanted, barbecuing chickens, pigeons and whatever, I’d be helping in the kitchen with the lady, or I’d be in the front serving some drinks or whatever. In other words, I was everything just to find something to exist. And it was easy. In the morning I’d go to my job. Then, people were a lot happier, I had loads of friends. In the afternoon, in the summer there used to always be two hours, and for some places four hours, break. And so we all used to gather to go to the beach. We used to swim to the rock, the camel we used to call it, and generally we were so happy and so competitive, in a nice way. On the night time, I went to work, or if I hadn’t to work I used to go to the open cinemas, or go walking up and down the main street, Anexartesias, always talking with people and of course flirting and whatever. It was very, very rare to see crime, there was no crime. The only police you would see would be on the crossroads, directing traffic and so on. Of course I was a member of the Salamis Club, the football club, where I used to go and play table tennis with my mates and so on. That was really, really fun. You’d get in that temper because you couldn’t get your service and, you know. And I was mad about our football team, New Salamis they said at the time, because it had just started so they said ‘new’. I used to put the odd bet on for a galzoza, like a Coca-Cola. And it was very enjoyable, we never used to get into fights or anything like that. I liked it. I loved it. I was my happiest. The friends I had. At the weekend we used to go down to the harbour, go fishing, get our little boat and go out. We had a little boat that was ten pounds. Actually

Improvise to survive 41 I’m not sure if it was ten pounds for the boat and three pounds for the engine or vice versa, three pounds for the boat and ten pounds for the engine. But the boat was just a little one. We used to tie a couple of lines on and go all the way to what they call the Fig Tree. Well, today, it’s Agia Napa, in those days it was nothing, just a little island. When we got a little bit affluent, we used to go up the Pan Handle, to the villages with our bikes. You know, you can go on your bike, you stop in one little cove. We used to sometimes make a passage for the water to get into the little cove and catch fish by hand. You know, when I went back later, I couldn’t see a fish. Things change. You used to get octopus on the rocks, just with a cane, but not now. At that time, in the early fifties, things were so cheap. I had the best time of my life, because what I was used to . . . I got used to different things. I found a house for Dorothy and Alan to rent just beside the beach. A lovely little house, Cypriot-owned. Everyone was asking how they got that house. At the time there was a rush to find a house. The Army quarter had not enough, and many Cypriots were letting their houses. The majority of families were British mixed with the locals. We were friends. I could talk to them. I was playing football with Alan and so on. Because they were just the same age as me, they weren’t old. Dorothy was eighteen years old and Alan was about twenty, twenty-one. Dorothy said to me, why don’t you go to England? She said, you speak good English now you know you could go to school, could do this, could do that. And what everybody said about England, there was one kid who said to me, ‘my mother makes fifteen pound a week’! I was getting three pound a month, in them days! I said to Dorothy, ‘I don’t mind, I’d go for a few years, save a bit of money and just come back again.’ I had a great life where I was, I had no money but it was a great life. I was fit and strong, I had a good feed, I used to dance, I’d get girlfriends and things like that, I was quite popular. Dorothy said to me, ‘if you have a future here, what do you do?’ And when her mother wrote to me I went and got a passport. So I don’t know how I found the ten shillings to pay for it, but I was working and I paid. I remember I got a big, black British passport. The boat was an Italian boat called the Capitolio. There were tourists on it, there were a few Germans on it. The sailors were Italian and the food was cheap. It was just after the war so everything was terrible in Italy. At the time it was even poorer than we were and we had nothing. So, it was eighteen quid to go to Venice, and five pounds to go to Newcastle from Venice. I spent about two weeks in Venice. When we got to Venice, one of the Italians asked me ‘you going to England?’ I said ‘yeah.’ Well, patrioti, he used to call me compatriot even though he was Italian but, ‘patrioti can you take some things for the family? Off the boat?’ I had a British passport, so they wouldn’t stop me. So I carried this Italian’s bag. It was contraband. I don’t know what was in it. I never looked. Off the boat we jumped in the gondolas – most of them had all the little groups of friends. I knew some from Limassol and some from Famagusta. We didn’t know where to go, we went to St Mark’s Square. I got there, I just sat down with another two lads, one of them was a friend of mine, a Turkish laddy, and the other one we took under our wings, he was a young laddy, he was crying all the time. Fifteen

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year old, he was going to see his mother in London. He was the one who said his mother was making fifteen pound a week. Anyway, I was just staying on my feet and holding onto things for the Italian sailor because he told me he’d find me. So he found me and he gave me a watch. He got the things, he thanked me very much, we shook hands, and I got a watch. And that watch, I sold it for ten quid, eventually. So we stopped in Venice and I didn’t know where to go. We were lost. We had the tickets. At night time, two girls came and talked to us; they were laughing at us and teaching us Italian. I still remember it. By that time half the night was gone, we had nowhere to sleep. We were as tough as nails, we didn’t bother. It was nothing, no monkey business, but they took us to the house. The father was mending the wireless and he says to me ‘Cyprei, Cyprei? Me, boom boom boom boom’ He was telling me he dropped bombs in Cyprus during the war. I said ‘you coward, you dropped the bombs in the sea.’ We were in Venice for two weeks. When I got the train we finished up in Ostend, Belgium. We just followed everyone else there. From Ostend we got into Folkstone. They stamp your passport and you pass because you are British anyway. So I went to Victoria train station and I really felt lonely. It was raining, it was dark, it was horrible.

2

Colonial subjectivity, colonial immigration and national identity

They stamp your passport and you pass because you are British anyway.

Nicholaos embodies the contradictions and complexities at the heart of colonial citizenship. He was British in law but not in affect, or in social perceptions. This was meaningful in his life, particularly after arriving in Britain. He entered the UK and found work with ease. Yet, shortly after he registered for a national insurance number, Nicholaos was conscripted into the British army. He attempted to abscond and was detained. This is when he was offered the alternative opportunity to become a coalminer. He was sent to the coalmines from the army, as a British conscript; yet he was immediately met with opposition from the workers who would not accept his foreign body as British, despite the circumstances by which he had joined their profession, through military conscription or a direct act of citizenship. Thus, this chapter explores the concept of citizenship through Nicholaos’ active, affective and performative theorisation of citizenship in his migration narrative. The essentially contested concept of citizenship is, theoretically and practically, at the heart of international relations. The objects and subjects of study for IR are bound up in the concept of citizenship; how we understand citizenship, both its meaning and function, has implications for IR. For example, citizenship has conventionally been tied to the sovereign state. Historically, since the eighteenth century states have been the political territorial units that collectively compose the international sphere, at least in and emanating from Europe (Preuss et al. 2003). Citizenship represents the status of belonging to a state. Christian Joppke (2007) theorises three aspects to the conceptual definition of citizenship. These are a) status, b) rights and duties and c) identity. All of these are nominally linked to the unit of the state. The status is to hold state citizenship, which then awards one the rights associated with citizenship that the state owes to its citizens, such as security and in some cases social insurance. It also imposes the duties of civic participation such as paying taxes. Identity is more complex; it is tied more conventionally to nations and nationalism in terms of feeling or affect, yet the practice of citizenship is also an exercise of identity. To accept an unproblematised definition of citizenship is to accept the category of the state as the political unit and the hierarchies associated with state membership.

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Nevertheless, citizenship studies has focused on exploring where citizenship extends beyond the state or has transformed within the state, offering a conceptual understanding of participatory and practical citizenship, which explores active citizenship and flexible citizenship rather than accepting the limitations of citizenship as a legal status (for example, see Isin and Nielson 2008; Ong 1999). Work in citizenship studies has tended in recent years to emphasise a liberatory concept of citizenship whereby citizenship is claimed, performed and practiced by agents who, through their actions, extend, change, contest and rewrite the conceptual meaning of citizenship (for example, see Squire 2011; Nyers and Rygiel 2012; Isin and Nielson 2008). Indeed, as Engin Isin (2002) argued, citizenship studies must not assume a coherent and unified Western citizenship, but must recognise migrants, minorities and aliens who possess distinct experiences. By theorising citizenship through practice in this way, Isin (and the subjects of these distinct experiences) contest the conventional concept of citizenship. In this chapter I explore a historical variation of colonial and postcolonial citizenship as theorythrough-practice. I employ this as a means to understand the relationship between state, citizen, identity and security. I argue that citizenship is not always active or practical, nor is it always affective although it can be all of those things. Citizenship shifts with circumstance and is lived and felt in multiple guises. For the colonial, postcolonial and transnational citizen, citizenship is both everything and nothing. It is both instrumental and emotional. It is both identity and status even when these things do not coincide. Importantly, it is both imposed upon a person and agentially claimed, a coupling which is the main theme of this chapter. I trace the experiences of citizenship over time as it is lived by Nicholaos, the protagonist of this volume. As a colonial immigrant to Britain in the 1950s, Nicholaos acquired British citizenship when the 1948 British Nationality Act determined that all subjects of the British Isles and the colonies held citizenship, something that was inconsequential to him at the time. In different contexts throughout his life British citizenship takes on different meanings: as a Cypriot under British rule, as a colonial immigrant travelling towards the UK, and as an immigrant in the UK who is called for military service. He does not identify as British but he recognises, uses, claims and at times contests the rights and duties of British citizenship. Nicholaos’ experiences of citizenship are instructive of the complexity and nuance of citizenship as a status, and of colonial citizenship in particular. I ultimately argue that Western-centric narratives of citizenship and national identity are incomplete and obsolete in a transnational world even when they are being reinforced and reified by nationalist politics in Western states. It is not new forces of globalisation that are rendering these narratives of citizenship and national identity obsolete: they have only ever described a limited Western experience. In what follows I briefly discuss the significance of citizenship for international relations and what it means to be a citizen at an international level of analysis, discussing facets of the citizenship studies literature. I then move to look specifically at British colonial citizenship before focusing more closely on Nicholaos’ memoir. I draw from the narrative memoir three events when, in his narration, Nicholaos marked citizenship as being of importance in his life. These include

Colonial subjectivity and national identity 45 his experience as a Cypriot under British colonial rule, as a Cypriot travelling with a British passport, and as an immigrant into 1954 North East England. I conclude that citizenship in this context is instrumental but is also affective. Yet, the emotional ties are complex, the relationship between population and territory is experienced in a different way for migrants and diasporic citizens because it exists in a different way. The affective components of citizenship develop, shift and change over time, influenced by events and experiences in a way that leaves tension in the relationship between citizenship and identity.

Citizenship, nationality and identity Rather than rehearsing the literature deconstructing the various meanings of citizenship at the national level, I am interested in its international function; that is, what it means to hold citizenship for one’s position at the international level. In other words, I ask how citizenship functions as one moves between and among states, using citizenship as a form of internationally recognised identity and personal documentation. The content of citizenship, by which I mean what citizenship contains in a domestic environment and what the associated rights and duties look like, is thus only briefly referred to in this study, where it is relevant for understanding the international dynamics of citizenship. Citizenship is relevant at the international level in the sense that it is a form of international recognition. It designates people with homes, rights, duties and protections that can be understood by other individuals, states, institutions and organisations as they move through the world. The concepts of citizenship, nationality and identity overlap and intersect. Preuss et al. (2003) argue that nationality reflects a passive submission while citizenship is active participation. Nationality is simply a legal concept defining legal membership while citizenship is not legal but is rooted in political culture and defines the rights, duties, benefits and burdens of being a member of a political community. In other words, one has to be a citizen actively, while nationality is innate and determined without participation. While this is consistent with a citizenship that is based in practice, it perhaps overlooks the significance of the affective or emotional aspect of nationality. The idea of nationality as the passive legal concept and citizenship as an active cultural participation to some degree contradicts literature on nations and nationalism which is more frequently cited as emotive and linked specifically to territory and to a sense of belonging to a self-defined people (Anderson 1983; Barrington 1997). Nationalism has of course been most frequently studied in zones of contestation: national, ethnic and territorial conflict zones (Smith 2000; Gans 2003; Barrington 2006) where both the emotional commitment and the actions undertaken on the part of the national group are of most importance. At the state level, perhaps nationality trumps citizenship in terms of affective belonging; however, it is citizenship that is recognised as an international legal designation for movement between states. For example, an individual might be a national of Pakistan but acquire British citizenship through naturalization. The British passport that this citizen can then carry permits her to move across

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international borders as a British citizen. Her Pakistani nationality is overwritten by the legal designation of her British citizenship. Nevertheless, citizenship and nationality are not separate entities. Hannah Arendt’s ([1951]1972) observation of ‘the conquest of the state by the nation’ notes how the nation took ownership of the state, requiring the complete assimilation of minorities and producing states of exception and rightlessness for those who were not nationals and therefore could not be full citizens (Isin and Turner 2007). Ethnic, religious, racial and cultural designations of purportedly innate nations that are self-determined political units and that distribute citizenship based on innate belonging are exclusive, and as a means of organising the world produce disenfranchised others, non-citizens who do not possess the right to have rights. The complete co-option of the legal status of citizenship by the emotive force of nationalism can be seen in the naming of the process one must undertake to obtain citizenship, so called naturalization. By naturalizing, one adopts the identity of the nation as innate to their being. Given the way nationality and citizenship overlap, it is necessary to devote further attention to the role of identity in citizenship theory. There are two potential approaches to excavate the relationship between identity and citizenship. The first is to examine how identity is produced and performed through citizenship, probing the means by which the state links (national) identity and citizenship. The second is to explore how citizenship is felt by the holder. The former has been extensively discussed in the literature. For example, the link between education and citizenship (and also the rise of citizenship education) has been thoroughly documented and discussed (Bryant 2004; Moss 2009; Steffes 2012; Spring 1976; Wegner 2014; Zimmerman 2005). Whether citizenship education inculcates in students their civic duty or teaches a lesson in docility (Wegner 2014), it establishes a sense of belonging to the polity. Furthermore, public performances of citizenship further solidify the emotive aspect of citizenship (Joppke 2007). These include naturalisation ceremonies that require a declaration of loyalty to a symbol of the nation (for example, in the UK it is the Queen to whom one must express loyalty; in the US it is the flag). Performances of citizenship also include national memorialisation, such as parades and national silences on Remembrance Day or to mark moments of national suffering such as the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US. Indeed the literature on memory and national identity is well-developed in IR (see Edkins 2003; Steele 2008; Auchter 2014). Joppke (2007) suggests that the trend for public performance of citizenship is part of a pattern that includes the three aspects of citizenship as status, rights and identity. He argues that citizenship has transformed as a status, preferring territory or jus solis membership over blood or jus sanguinis membership. This has then produced diverse, civic and multicultural nations. Joppke argues that when nations are diversified rights shift from positive to negative, as the conventional social citizenship becomes untenable as national bodies are based on tolerance rather than solidarity. In other words, without solidarity amongst a like population, people are unwilling to sustain a big state providing social services. While this thesis reflects a general trend away from social safety nets in some Western countries, it is a short term view that might measure population diversification against social welfare in the most

Colonial subjectivity and national identity 47 recent three decades. Other intervening factors such as neoliberal economics might better explain the rolling back of the big state in a way that coincides with increased labour mobility in particular, but does not indicate a causal relationship with increased diversity. Nevertheless, as states become more diverse, membership no longer connotes identity, but this corresponds with worries about national unity, linking the politics of migration and citizenship with security. The result is the restricting of access to the territory of particular states and therefore to jus solis membership. A paradox is then produced in the identity-citizenship link whereby universal rights make identity universalistic, but the role of states and citizenship is to contain people and render them legible in an international sphere, therefore they must be exclusive. In this way identity remains tied to citizenship, but the way that identity is felt and practiced in the everyday is unclear. Of course, postcolonial, aboriginal, minority and diasporic identities complicate the identity-citizenship-nation link. This is the particular problem that troubled Arendt (1972 [1951]) as she identified the co-option of the state by the nation: minorities were stripped of their citizenship rights, or never acquired them in the first place. This has been addressed in considerations of multicultural citizenships (Kymlicka 1995) and in Isin and Wood’s (1999) defence of the term ‘diasporic citizenship’. Multicultural citizenship is a liberal model of access to a democratic polity, which is ‘open in principal to anyone, regardless of race or colour, who is willing to learn the language and history of the society and participate in its social and political institutions’ (Kymlicka 1995: 23). Nevertheless, this requires assimilation at least in the form of language and it assumes a pre-existing polity with a language and a history to be acknowledged and protected. It does little to recognise historical minority rights; for example, in Western liberal nations history relies on a patriarchal model of white, male citizens such as the myth of the American ‘founding fathers’. This constitutes a power dynamic that disregards women and people of colour and their contributions to the nation and the places in which those contributions were oppressed. In their critique of Kymlicka, Isin and Woods recognise this liberal imperialist bias, and propose an alternative understanding of ‘diasporic citizenship’, a term coined by Michel Laguerre (1997), ‘as a process whereby [many] cultures practice citizenship in a radical sense’ (Isin and Woods: 48). A diasporic citizenship permits belonging to a state while holding and practicing different cultural behaviours and affiliations. This is radical because it shifts the meaning of citizenship broadly as a concept, and narrowly in terms of how it is understood in discrete situations; for example, a diasporic citizenship produces the designations of black British or British Asian as distinct and recognised British identities. Isin and Woods draw from the work of Paul Gilroy, in particular Black Atlantic (1993), whereby diasporic cultural forms indicate identities that are not fragmented, but rather are alternative whole identities that are formed by particular cultural experiences, a different way of being in the world from that of the dominant culture of the nation state. Thus, the question of citizenship is not one that indicates a single and complete identity but a means of participating in a fluid political and cultural community identity.

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The question of how identity is felt and practiced in the everyday is perhaps more complex to unpack. This is a theme of Aiwha Ong’s theorisation of ‘flexible citizenship’, which proves instructive for understanding both the way identity is implicit in citizenship and the way identity and citizenship are non-cohesive, with particular emphasis on diasporic, transnational, subaltern and postcolonial identities. Ong writes ‘the multiple passport holder is an apt contemporary figure; he or she embodies the split between state-imposed identity and personal identity caused by political upheavals, migration, and changing global markets’ (Ong 1999: 2). Ong is largely focused on contemporary transnationality driven by a globalising world, but lingers on the uncertainty of postcolonial identity that leads to this apt contemporary figure who collects citizenships as a means of protecting her position in the world, further linking security to the politics of migration and citizenship. Political upheavals make state-imposed identities unstable. Fluctuating and fluid identities allow people to feel belonging to more than one place, and the form or sense of belonging may change over time. State-imposed citizenship identity becomes in this context more instrumental than affective, producing a distinct citizenship as experienced by the postcolonial, transnational or diasporic figure. Citizenship is not divorced from identity but neither is identity exhausted in citizenship. Citizenship might be an instrumental means to an end, a way of accessing protection from the uncertainty of shifting borders and shifting humans. Collecting citizenships is not only a result of privilege but is also a result of insecurity. The impetus to collect citizenships is attached to the lived reality that one’s self-held identity can be called to question and placed under threat. Thus, state endorsement becomes a means of protection. Here, it is worth drawing from Mbembe to highlight the absolute sovereignty of colonialism, whereby democratic citizenship was not held, but subjecthood was imposed (Mbembe 2003). In this way, colonial subjects were not citizens with rights, but were dehumanised bodies subject to the power of the state. An instrumental citizenship to some extent reclaims or confronts that power. Non-state based identities, postcolonial, transnational, diasporic and migrant identities have been historically excluded from the myth of national collective citizenship associated with the French and American revolutions. Colonial experiences with citizenship have been characterised by violent exclusions. Thus to assume a singular model of citizenship in theory or law necessarily perpetuates those exclusions. Ong argues instead that flexible citizenship is something that has emerged as a response to and respite from the uncertainties of modernity. In colonial terms flexible citizenship is not just about the agent manipulating her identity as a means of ascertaining her position. Citizenships and citizen subject positions themselves are slippery, shifting and changing both in law as they are formed and reformed, but also in the context of place (in the world) and (territorial) space. Ong’s model of citizenship as flexible, instrumental and protective can be expanded to account for and to better understand colonial genealogies of citizenship in which affective and instrumentalist forms of citizenship can be simultaneously held with distinct attachments. The following section will examine in more detail the context of British colonial and imperial subjecthood and citizenship.

Colonial subjectivity and national identity 49

British imperial subjecthood and citizenship British citizenship is often noted as exceptional in the citizenship literature where the conventional narratives are determined by attention to both the French and American revolutions, which emancipated the individual and placed political authority in the demos. While designating different forms of citizenship, the American and French models both espoused the rule of law, democracy and freedom, with France emphasising an inclusionary ethos of solidarity and the US prioritising individual liberties and negative rights. Britain, on the other hand, has been more deeply associated with subjecthood rather than citizenship because of the longevity of the position of the monarch, whereby fealty to the sovereign was key to British allegiance (Everson 2003). This distinguishes British citizenship, in its historical development, from American or French citizenship because rather than being based upon a feeling of allegiance to other members of a national family (‘the people’), British citizenship was instead based on the individual relationship of allegiance to the monarch. Furthermore, the nature of empire and the position of the monarch as the figurehead of empire necessarily disrupts the citizen-territory nexus because the territory over which the monarch exercises her rule extends expansively and incorporates multiple nationalities, ethnic groups, religions, races and cultures that cannot easily be simplified into a code of national belonging (Spry Rush and Reed 2014). The question of the citizenship and subjecthood status of colonial subjects is one of interest to theorists of British citizenship. As Hindess (2005), Stoler (2002) and Balibar (1999) have traced and argued, the British Empire and the differential subjecthoods within it created a space of differentiation. The existence of colonial subjects outside of the British Isles allowed British citizens who were native to the British Isles to elevate their own comparative position in the hierarchy of the nation. For example, the white working classes could consider themselves superior to racialized colonial others. Indeed, as Shilliam (2018) argues, the creation of the white working class category relies on a racialized hierarchy that is constituted against colonial others. Natives of the British Isles could think of themselves as fully belonging to Britain by denying the rights of colonial others (Spry Rush and Reed 2014). This was produced by a value-laden cultural citizenship including respectability, formal education, Christian morality and domesticity (Ibid). Spry Rush and Reed turn attention to the distinction between how white natives of the British Isles understood British imperial citizenship and how people native to other British colonies conceived of British imperial citizenship. Colonial subjects developed their own vision of British citizenship, as Spry Rush and Reed note: By advocating an inclusive, colour-blind conception of citizenship for all ‘civilized’ subjects of the British Crown, African, Asian, and West Indian intellectuals and activists constituted their own understandings of imperial citizenship. Their ideas were based on their encounters with the British liberal-humanitarian tradition in missionary and English language schools, as well as works of British history, political theory, and literature. Even as

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In this way, British citizenship offered promise to colonial subjects, while at the same time denying their full inclusion. Intellectuals and activists lobbied for full inclusion while colonial subjects practiced the duties of full inclusion throughout World War I and II – meaning specifically that they fought as part of the British military forces. Ultimately, practicing the full duties of citizenship during the war effort created persuasive bargaining chips for independence that were used by several polities to successfully lobby for decolonisation in the late 1940s and beyond. Decolonisation, however, required legal practices defining citizenship that could distribute rights and duties, particularly to ‘displaced’ colonial subjects. This caused particular consternation in parliament as fealty to the sovereign was key to British citizenship, and British crown colonies nominally relied on the relationship with the monarch. Indeed, as Everson 2003) discusses, British nationality was based not on a sense of identity within a body politic, but on an expansive jus solis determination. Everson describes this as ‘nation-neutral’ in the sense that any person who happened to be born in the monarch’s dominions was considered a British subject. Thus, this distribution of subjecthood and citizenship had to be unpicked as decolonisation was put in practice or risk undermining the legal definition of British citizenship as it was understood. As Everson notes, the thenLord Chancellor William Jowitt argued for defining colonial subjects as citizens, suggesting that ‘citizenship gives no rights or privileges whatsoever’ and ‘if you are mindful to discriminate, you can discriminate whether you call them subjects or whether you call them citizens’ (Everson 2003: 78). Citizenship in the view of the Lord Chancellor then did not denote special rights and privileges. Thus, the 1948 British Nationality Act defined two types of British citizenship: citizens of Independent Commonwealth Countries and citizens of the UK and Colonies. The distinction was designed to clarify where allegiance to the monarch designated rights and duties. Of course, for many independent commonwealth countries the monarch remained the head of state, permitting the notion of monarchical allegiance to endure. In this way, citizenship remained tied to the monarch rather than being defined by a collective ‘people’. The years between the 1948 British Nationality Act and the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act proved to be a period of immigration to Britain from colonial and former colonial territories. Indeed, the 1962 Act was designed to limit immigration from these territories, followed by the 1968 Act which limited immigration specifically by race (Spencer 1997; Spry Rush and Reed 2014). While between 1948 and 1963 in law Commonwealth immigrants and colonial subjects enjoyed the same rights as natives of the British Isles, in practice there was serious discrimination at play in the UK and abroad as a result of racial hierarchy that remained relevant in British identity. For example,

Colonial subjectivity and national identity 51 the unofficial “colour bar” prevented them [non-white British citizens] from finding work commensurate with their qualifications, limited their access to housing and educational opportunities, and, in some cases, led to violence, most notably in a series of white attacks on blacks living in Nottingham and London’s Notting Hill in 1958. (Spry Rush and Reed, citing Phillips and Phillips 1998) Attending to this type of discrimination illustrates that the way citizenship is felt, lived and experienced differs from legal citizenship status. Here I return to the case of Nicholaos, the protagonist of this volume. Engaging the way he felt, lived and experienced British colonial citizenship in his life, with close attention to the years surrounding his migration to the UK, offers a means of theorising citizenship through practice.

Living colonial, transnational and postcolonial citizenship In Nicholaos’ narratives there are three main phases in which he discusses citizenship in his life as a young adult. These are as a Cypriot under British rule, as a Cypriot travelling, and as an immigrant in the UK. In what follows I’ll discuss these phases of citizenship to offer a theorization of imperial citizenship as practice, both outside and inside the territorial British Isles. Living under British colonial rule Ottoman comparisons and early life Nicholaos was born in 1934. This was after twelve years of Cyprus having status as a British crown colony and after fifty-six years of British administration in Cyprus following Britain leasing the island from the Ottoman Empire in 1978. Yet, Nicholaos emphasizes in his narrative the difference between Cyprus under the British Empire and Cyprus under the Ottoman Empire through his memories of his grandmother who lived to the age of 97 and experienced life under the Ottomans, under British lease, and as a crown colony. That this features in his narrative is telling of the Cypriot experience. Of course, the ethnic tension on the island that culminated in the 1974 Turkish invasion/intervention means that the Ottoman past remains an important part of the Cypriot identity narrative for all Cypriots. Cypriot national identity is bound up in the history of the island, and as will be discussed below, the rejection of the Ottoman past formed an important part of the Greek Cypriot identity that was forged through the British colonial experience and the Greek education system (Bryant 2004). The main difference between Cyprus as governed by the Ottoman Empire, and Cyprus as governed by the British that Nicholaos prioritizes in his narrative is that of education, or lack of it under the Ottomans, and the provision of free primary education under the British. He says his grandmother told him that life was a lot better under the ‘marmalade eaters’ as she called the British because people could go to school and they were not afraid. Under the Ottomans, according to Nicholaos’ memories of his grandmother’s

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stories, people were afraid to traverse the island, staying within their villages and local areas. The particular understanding of the Ottomans as oppressors, while the British take the complex role that brought liberalism without liberation is of course subject to discourses of power in history and national identity formation. The history of the Modern Greek state and its narrative of ‘ελευθερία’ or freedom from the Ottomans strongly influenced Greek Cypriot education. Such a narrative positions the Ottomans as oppressors and emphasises illiberal aspects of Ottoman rule in Greece (Clogg 2002; Bryant 2004). Despite the Ottoman Empire enduring over 400 years of rule in Cyprus, Ottoman history is downplayed in Greek Cypriot historical narratives, in favour of connection to the Byzantine and Ancient Greek pasts, thus demonstrating the power of narratives that demonise Ottoman rule and deny its influence over the culture of the island. In Nicholaos’ words: when the British annexed Cyprus and they introduced a 6-year education, from six till twelve, that was that. And that went right through to just before the second world war, in the thirties, because people started to get a little bit nationalist, and that’s what my grandma was saying . . . they started with the union with Greece, and the Greeks started moving, and sending professors and schools. Nicholaos portrays the introduction of accessible education as something positive, yet links it with the growing (Greek) nationalism in the 1930s. Rebecca Bryant (2004) explored this link in Cyprus where the education system catered to the separate ethnic groups on the island, and thus was one of the contributing factors in establishing the ethnic division along Greek and Turkish national lines (rather than establishing Muslim and Orthodox Cypriots for example). In Nicholaos’ narrative British national identity holds little meaning during his early life, and is certainly not something he possessed, despite being born in a British colony. The British are present as authorities (such as inspecting the village school), but are not a meaningful part of his childhood experience. Instead, the most important themes that arise in Nicholaos’ narrative are distinguishing Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire, and linking education with Greek nationalism. The British are compared with the Ottomans as a foreign power ruling the island. It is worth noting that the negative associations with Ottoman rule in Cyprus for Greek Cypriots – at least, in Nicholaos’ experience – are lived physically and bodily, as well as being imagined and reproduced through historical narratives. For example, Nicholaos has a physical scar on his body. His mother scarred all of her five sons, doing so because her mother instructed her to do so as had been the tradition passed down in the family. The reason for this tradition, which Nicholaos states was common, was that mothers feared that their sons could be taken in service to the Ottoman state, a practice known as devshirme. The act of taking sons to raise in service to the Ottoman state was not practiced in the Ottoman Empire beyond the seventeenth century. Yet, the fear of this continued to live on and the tradition of giving sons identical scars continued into the early days of British rule

Colonial subjectivity and national identity 53 as a means of allowing brothers to identify each other. The belief was not based in practical reality yet remained real as a fear or an ontological insecurity with physical, bodily effects. In this way, change under British rule was slow to manifest in the habitual cultural practices of the population. Ottoman rule remained an active part of Greek Cypriot experience even decades beyond it ending. The relevance of the comparison of the British to the Ottomans in Cyprus for understanding the experience of citizenship is first to emphasize that the lived experience of citizenship and belonging happens in the context of cultures and histories. Imperial and colonial citizenships are generally distinct from native national citizenships because colonial powers enter an already-existing social identity, culture and history and act upon that. Cyprus in particular is quite unusual because of its former status in the Ottoman Empire, its links to Greek national identity, and its relatively late shift to becoming a British crown colony after having first been British only by administrative lease. Studies of Cypriot national identity have generally focused on the development of separate Greek and Turkish identities (Bryant 2004) and it is generally assumed that, because Cyprus was consistently possessed by outside powers (Roman, Venetian, Byzantine, Ottoman and British) there was no collective Cypriot identity that preceded British rule. However, the Greek narrative of identity, which defines a people constituted through struggle, pre-existed British rule as Cyprus was a part of the geography of the Greek megali idea that dominated Greek politics between 1844 and 1922. British rule then had to compete with the Greek national consciousness. Thus, Greek Cypriots already had a sense of attachment (although one that might be distantly felt and rarely thought of for much of the population) to another existing state. Therefore, even once Britain designated Cyprus a crown colony, Britain was still positioned as an oppressing external power, and British policies in Cyprus did nothing to dispel this position, as discussed in the previous chapter. Nicholaos compares British rule to Ottoman rule without having lived under Ottoman rule, and this comparison is a means of articulating a Greek Cypriot identity. Famagusta When Nicholaos moved to Famagusta in 1950 he acquired a new experience of citizenship and belonging as he had closer encounters with British military personnel living in the city. In his narrative memoir he talks a lot about ‘the English’, differentiating himself from the English as a Cypriot, yet also finding means of identification and forming friendships with natives of the British Isles resident in Cyprus. He started to learn English in Famagusta because ‘if you didn’t speak English you couldn’t get a job.’ English was one of the official languages of Cyprus. Yet, it was not taught in the village school he attended as the single teacher was not competent in English. Nicholaos recounts only ‘scraping through’ English in his entry exam for high school, despite his high marks in other subjects. He points out that he had no access to the language because of his peasant background, recognising structural class disparities in Cyprus under British rule. In Famagusta, Nicholaos found English tuition, which then helped him with his

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work in the market and allowed him to build friendships with British service personnel resident in the town. Working in Famagusta, Nicholaos built relationships with British service personnel and this exposed him to the British class system. The entrenched class structure he encountered also contributed to the friendship he built with the Scorers, the young couple from the North East of England who ultimately provided guarantor for his immigration to the UK. As he recounts, the Scorers were the same age as him, they were young and his friendship with them was on an equal basis. They were friends who played football and wrestled; they were like him. One of the reasons Nicholaos identified with the Scorers was because they were rejected by other service personnel on the basis of class. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Nicholaos recounts how one British woman who was married to a sergeant consequently would not talk to Dorothy Scorer, whose husband was a conscript servicemen. He remembers being appalled by the rigidity of the British class system manifest in military rank, which suggested that his friends were not equal to their British counterparts. In Famagusta under the British between 1950 and 1954, Nicholaos was in a transnational world. The English language, indeed bilingualism, was important for work. Famagusta was swollen with British troops as a consequence of the political circumstances in Suez, and was housing immigrants in transit to Palestine, and German prisoners of war in camps. Nicholaos encountered and interacted with people from the British Isles in everyday life and was exposed to elements of British culture. Nevertheless, there is a strong sense of differentiation in his narrative memoirs. Nicholaos refers to ‘the English’ as a separate identity with a distinct culture from his own, even while finding points of identification. That he makes friends with the Scorers and other British conscripts service personnel is something he notes in his narrative, yet he states that social interactions between British and Cypriots were not unusual. The world of Famagusta in the early 1950s was transnational. Nicholaos starts to build a transnational identity as he finds points of identification with his British friends. He describes them as being ‘the same’ as him. Here the pluralism of experiential identity is foregrounded, yet Nicholaos’ national belonging remains distinctly separate from ‘the English’. Nicholaos does not discuss a citizenship identity in this context; yet, it is in this context that he then acquires his British passport which suggests citizenship remains instrumental and separate from identity.

On the move: Cypriot national, British citizen Nicholaos’ legal status as a British citizen took on more meaning for him when he lived in Famagusta and started to consider moving to the UK. Of course, in the 1950s immigration restrictions were largely absent and certainly did not resemble the bureaucratic behemoth of regulations and restrictions that exists today. Indeed, prior to the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act there were very few legislative immigration restrictions in the UK, and none that applied directly to colonial subjects or colonial citizens. This did not mean that immigration was

Colonial subjectivity and national identity 55 free-flowing. Immigration from British colonies and former colonies tended to be managed administratively. Rather than enacting laws to prevent immigration, the right to enter, reside and work in the UK was ideologically protected, in the sense that to change that right would be to change the principle of free movement for citizens of the British Empire. In other words, it was seen as part of the ideological ethos of the British Empire to allow colonial citizens entry into the UK. To prevent entry to the UK would suggest that the British Empire was neither cohesive not liberal (Spencer 1997). Thus, colonial subjects retained the right to enter, reside and work, but administrative regulations attempted to limit the types of migrants who could exercise this right. Limiting was largely tactical and performed through differentiating between Europeanness and non-Europeanness, constituting and normalising postcolonial hierarchical race relations, as is discussed by Barnor Hesse (2007) in a broader context. Regulations to prevent entry included measures akin to contemporary ‘offshoring’ of immigration controls. British colonial governments were actively encouraged to limit access to passports for particular people, notably people of colour and labourers (Spencer 1997). This initial off-shoring of restrictions was in fact piloted in Cyprus in the 1930s and later adopted in the Indian subcontinent and included a requirement for immigrants of ‘the poorer classes’ to include an affidavit of support from a resident of Britain indicating that the British resident would support them until they found work. A person seeking to move to the UK from a state of the British Empire would need an endorsement on their passport. Without being in possession of such an endorsement, travel was difficult. Yet, on arrival in the UK entry was not prohibited even if the traveller lacked the necessary endorsement. Thus, the control was an off-shore control designed to limit travel rather than to restrict entry, but its effect nevertheless was to ultimately restrict entry to people who could secure the endorsement. This knowledge of course allowed travel agents and facilitators to profit through assisting passage to the UK, often in needlessly circuitous routes. For example, Spencer (1997) describes a journey carried out by a Punjabi Muslim in 1957 that involved a ‘pilgrimage passport’ allowing travel to the ‘Holy Places’, a four-day stay in Basra followed by a train ride to Baghdad where he stayed for six weeks. Here the pilgrimage passport was (deliberately) lost and so replaced with an international passport by the High Commissioner for Pakistan in Baghdad. This stay was followed by a fortnight in Syria before moving to Beirut and flying from there to London. The journey took over three months and was largely unnecessary as, after leaving Pakistan, entry to the UK would not have been prohibited at the point of access. For a person without the requisite connections, gaining the passport endorsement that would facilitate travel to the UK was difficult, hence immigration towards the UK was dominated by middle-class and educated people who were more likely to have connections with family members who had already migrated, as well as other acquaintances or colleagues. Nevertheless, entry to the UK was permitted and possible for people from working-class backgrounds as long as they had a guarantor endorsement. Nicholaos was from, as he describes it, a peasant background. Yet, in Famagusta he met British servicemen through his job in

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the marketplace, and this led to sponsorship for travel to the UK. His status as a holder of citizenship of the ‘UK and Colonies’ as per the 1948 British Nationality Act provided the legal right to live and work in the British Isles. The idea of going to Britain was not one Nicholaos had harboured. It was planted in his mind during a conversation with Dorothy. As Nicholaos remembers, Dorothy told him ‘there is no future here [in Cyprus],’ asking ‘what will you do?’ She told him she would sponsor him to go to Britain to work. Perhaps part of her motivation reflects the idea that the British Empire created a space in which workingclass British citizens could feel superior and reinforce their sense of belonging to the homeland in distinction to the locals elsewhere, in this case in Cyprus. That is not to suggest that Dorothy and Nicholaos’ friendship was not genuine, but to include a complexity to understand hierarchical subjecthood that offers insight into universal ideals: for example, Dorothy’s rejection of the possibility of a future in Cyprus reveals an assumption about British superiority that shaped her understanding of Nicholaos’ prospects. On an individual basis she wanted the best for her friend; however, ‘the best’ was defined by British cultural superiority. Cyprus did not offer sufficient opportunity for Nicholaos to develop the sort of life that would incorporate economic security and bourgeois aspiration to allow him to realise the identity as an equal that Dorothy attributed to him. He could live in Famagusta and enjoy his day-to-day existence, but for him to have ‘a future’ as Dorothy suggested, he would need to access the resources of the British Isles. These resources were not just to build an abstract future, but were also economic. Nicholaos remembers a friend telling him that his mother in England earned £15 per week, which Nicholaos compared to his own income of about £3 per month, earnings he described as ‘elite’ for someone in his circumstances. In his memoir, Nicholaos portrays these conversations as being persuasive to him, encouraging him to seek a British passport. Part of his motivation also came from his subject position as a peasant without a high school education who therefore was not ‘good enough’ to obtain a passport and go to the UK. It was not unheard of for someone of Nicholaos’ background to migrate to the UK with sponsorship from family members who have already made the move; however, it was unusual for a Cypriot to receive sponsorship to travel from a native of the British Isles on national service. He describes going to the District Commission in Famagusta to have the government official tell him ‘not you, you’re not going’, a reaction he attributed to his social standing as a peasant. In part, his determination to make the trip sprung from the opposition he faced in accessing permission to travel. Here the duality of citizenship being both forced through the colonial occupation and agentially claimed is clear. Nicholaos had to apply for a passport as a travel document; in doing so he claimed his British identity and the right to live and work in the British Isles. The journey Nicholaos’ description of his journey to the UK is by far the most detailed part of his memoir. His description of the journey involves a growing awareness, as he is juxtaposed with others, of his identity, both as a Cypriot and as an individual.

Colonial subjectivity and national identity 57 Coming into closer contact with people other than British and Cypriots was formative of his identity. For example, on disembarking from the ‘Capitolio’ in Italy, Nicholaos experienced an advantage of British citizenship – that he was not questioned at the border, which allowed him to transport contraband items for Italian friends he had made on the boat. Nevertheless, on arrival to London Victoria he was surrounded by Cypriots, yet felt incredibly lonely as it threw into relief the distance he had travelled from his home and his family. Nicholaos references nationality throughout his recounting of his journey to the UK. He consistently narrates exchanges with Greeks, Italians and Cypriots as addressing each other as patrioti, compatriot. This blurs national identity with a broader Greek or even southern European sense of commonality. On the other hand, Nicholaos describes that the Germans ‘kept to themselves’ while everyone else was all mixed up on the boat. Two encounters with Italians prove instructive to the concepts of national identity and citizenship. The first is with the Italian sailor who asked Nicholaos to bring what he describes at one point in his memoir as ‘contraband’ into Italy. Nicholaos notes that the Italian sailor spoke ‘better Greek than I did’ and remembers the Italian explained his request by telling Nicholaos that, because he was travelling to England, he would not be stopped by the authorities on disembarkment. Nicholaos said he agreed without it crossing his mind to ask what was in the package or to be careful. Here, he experienced an advantage of being a British citizen travelling to the UK. He entered Italy without question and returned the parcel to the Italian. He recognises this experience of being indicative of the privileges of British citizenship. Nevertheless, citizenship remains instrumental here rather than identity-based. In his narrative memoir Nicholaos juxtaposes this recounting of disembarking the boat with his memory of becoming aware of being outside of Cyprus for the first time. He describes being hungrier than he had ever been in his life, and then realising that watermelons were considerably more expensive in Italy than in Cyprus, which he describes as creating a feeling of disappointment and regret at leaving Famagusta. A second encounter with an Italian family reinforces the Cypriot identity that Nicholaos emphasizes in his narrative description of the journey towards Britain. He and his friend, who he describes as ‘a Turkish lad’ befriended two Italian sisters and they went to their home. The father of the girls asked where Nicholaos was from and he replied Cyprus. The father told Nicholaos that he had bombed Cyprus during the war. Nicholaos remembers being angered by this, calling the man a ‘coward’ who had dropped the bombs in the sea. The defence of his homeland illustrates an emotional connection with a Cypriot identity that is specifically related to territory. Nicholaos realises an emotional connection to Cyprus only after leaving and the connection is generated through international encounters and interactions that are formative of a Cypriot identity that exists in opposition to other identities, yet exists simultaneously with an instrumental British identity such as that which permitted him to transport the package for the Italian sailor. In this way, Nicholaos’ identity is neither simply Cypriot not British but is fluid and produced by circumstance and context.

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Nicholaos’ instrumental British identity is connected to possession of a British passport. He describes his passport several times in his narrative memoir, the ‘big black British passport’, which cost 10 shillings. He cannot remember how he raised the money to pay for it, but he does remember that everyone he knew wanted to pitch in and help him travel to England. It was an adventure and a way to earn money. Access to a British passport allowed him to travel to England to seek the ‘future’ that Dorothy talked about. On arriving in Britain Nicholaos recalls showing his passport at Folkestone in Kent ‘They stamp your passport and you pass because you are British anyway.’ This is the only point in his narrative that Nicholaos describes himself as British. However, the identity is legal rather than emotional and he immediately followed this description with a recollection of how he felt disembarking from the train at Victoria station: ‘I really felt lonely. It was raining, it was dark, it was horrible. Everyone was running, ah, you know their relations getting them away so there were lots of Cypriots. . . . And I felt so tired.’ Most of the people travelling with Nicholaos were sponsored by family members who they were joining in London. He describes an alienating situation in a physical environment that felt utterly unfamiliar, raining and dark despite it being August, yet he was surrounded by Cypriots who were collecting their relatives, which emphasized his sense of isolation. To be Cypriot in Britain was a different experience to being Cypriot in Cyprus.

Foreigner and citizen in Britain There is one event in Nicholaos’ life shortly after arriving in Britain that is particularly meaningful for theorizing the complexity of British colonial citizenship. As a British citizen residing in the British Isles Nicholaos was eligible to be called for national service. Within three months of receiving his national insurance card, he was called up for the army. In his narrative memoir, he describes a strong reaction to the news, saying ‘I’m not going in your army.’ He subsequently moved away from the North East, going south to evade the military. Of course, as he reflects in his memoir, unlike in Cyprus, everything in Britain was organised centrally and the authorities ultimately called him for a medical assessment for the military. During that assessment it emerged that he spoke both Greek and some Turkish, so the possibility of him being sent to Cyprus was raised, as the British military was actively fighting Greek Cypriot insurgents. The bloke next to me, he says “eh, you going to go to Cyprus. You joined the British army, to fight for us. Might have to go and fight for your own people.” I says to him “you know, I mind my own business so mind your effing business.” And that didn’t go very well. He stood up. He sat down again. . . . I says “I’m not going back” [to Cyprus]. So a sergeant says “send the foreigner to Newcastle.” That’s where they were recruiting for national service, compulsory for two years. “Why don’t you go in the mines? Temporary” he says. In the mines anytime you go, you go at midnight, and they’ll have you. Because they were so short [of workers]. They had a million and a half miners at the time because everything was

Colonial subjectivity and national identity 59 on coal. The trains, electricity, everything. So they wanted miners. I went, Sunday morning. The contradictions and complexities of British colonial citizenship are evident in this excerpt. He reacted to conscription by refusing to fight for an army he does not feel an affinity with. He holds British citizenship but the affective content of his citizenship is not British. Another conscript in the recruiting office suggests he might be more interested in fighting should he ‘go and fight for [his]own people’, differentiating Nicholaos from British citizens as having other loyalties. The sergeant responsible for processing Nicholaos’ conscription describes him as a ‘foreigner’ despite the context of their meeting, which was of course the physical enactment of a duty of citizenship. Nicholaos is positioned at the heart of the complexity of citizenship, required to perform the duty of his legal citizenship with the threat of having to do so in direct opposition to his cultural national identity. He is acknowledged as a foreigner in the recruiting office of the military because of his bodily signs of foreignness, while being required by law to act as a member of the nation state. By performing his civic duty in the mines rather than in the army, he fulfils the demands of British citizenship while still protecting his ethnic and cultural identity as a Greek Cypriot. In these actions, again he agentially claims his British and simultaneously his Cypriot identities. This practice reflects in action Ong’s flexible citizenship. While for Ong, flexible citizenship is represented by the accumulation of nationalities as a means of insuring one’s place in the world, Nicholaos practices citizenship in a flexible way as a means of insuring his place in the world. He manages to maintain his legal citizenship identity, doing so in a

Figure 2.1 Nicholaos (back, centre) with his mining shift

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way that does not compromise his affective Cypriot identity. He can be simultaneously both things. His citizenship is flexible through acts, rather than through legal documents. When Nicholaos started working in the mines the other men on his shift complained at his inclusion and launched a strike because they were being forced to share their shift with a ‘foreigner’. However, as Nicholaos remembers it, the strike was unsuccessful because the union and the mayor were unable to move him onto a shift deemed appropriate for foreigners (in his memoir, Nicholaos designates it the ‘Polish’ shift) because he had come to the mines from the military. As he was a military conscript, he must by definition be a British citizen. If he was not a British citizen, he would not have been conscripted. Therefore he had the right to work on the shift with other British citizens. Nevertheless, Nicholaos remembers the miners pointing out that he spoke differently and he looked different. His body belied his legal citizenship. Although his position in the mine was protected by his citizenship, he was penalised and ostracised for some time by the miners. Nicholaos was legally a citizen who was required to perform the legal duties of citizenship, even when other citizens objected to his participation.

Citizenship identity If practice is theory, what does Nicholaos’ experience theorize of citizenship? Elements of Joppke’s (2007) three aspects of citizenship all come to the fore in different circumstances. Citizenship is a legal status, it allowed Nicholaos to travel. He was travelling with a legal British citizenship yet he foregrounds his Cypriot identity during the journey in his narrative memoir. The legal British identity emerges at points of interaction with authorities (such as crossing borders) and in an instrumental way; for example, allowing him to do a favour for an Italian friend. Yet an affective and emotional identity as a British citizen is largely absent. His affective ties remain with his Cypriot identity. The third aspect of Joppke’s theorisation, rights and duties, becomes most important for Nicholaos when he is expected to perform the ultimate duty of citizenship in the form of military service. He rejects this specific act of citizenship, yet does not reject the duty itself, as he performs an alternative duty through mining. Nicholaos’ identity and experience of citizenship is not instructive as a diasporic citizenship understood in the way discussed by Laguerre (1997) and by Isin and Wood (1999) because Nicholaos did not belong to a diaspora community that allowed him to participate regularly in a shared identity. He did not know any other Greek or Cypriot families in the North East. His experience was one of integration, but also one of continued difference and othering. It was one of simultaneously experiencing two identities that are lived together, that form one unique identity and experience. Thus, I argue in this chapter that Nicholaos’ experience can be understood as the practice of an affective theory of citizenship and identity, through offering insight into how citizenship is felt, produced, made and constructed in everyday life. As a British colonial citizen Nicholaos does not identify as British. Yet, when he acquires a guarantor and applies to travel, he recounts feeling defensive of his

Colonial subjectivity and national identity 61 right to travel to the UK. He was conscious of his peasant background and his lack of formal educational qualifications as he was unable to finish high school. He had no parents to help him, provide money, or sign paperwork as his mother had died and he was estranged from his father at the time. Nevertheless, his status as a British colonial citizen afforded him the right to travel and that was a right he protected defensively. Thus, his citizenship identity included recognition of British citizenship, in the sense of status. In reference to his British passport, Nicholaos indicates an instrumental recognition of British citizenship: it afforded him the opportunity to travel, and it allowed him to navigate borders (such as disembarking from the boat in Italy) with ease and without some of the risks faced by others. The most complex moment of experiencing citizenship in Nicholaos’ memoir is that of conscription, swiftly followed by the objection to his inclusion on the mining shift. Nicholaos was called to perform a duty of citizenship that conflicted with his identity. He was willing to perform the duty of citizenship, but not in the military form initially demanded of him. When he went to the coalmines as an alternative, he was ostracised and the workers complained that he should be on the ‘foreign’ shift. Yet, the bosses could not move his shift because the job was designated to him as an army conscript, which secured his credentials as a citizen rather than a foreigner. Here, the complexity of colonial citizenship comes to the fore: it carries the rights and duties of native citizenship, as designated in the 1948 British Nationality Act, yet it does not carry the intrinsic recognition of belonging that is felt by the community or the individual. Nicholaos is protective of the ideal of British citizenship based on legal equality and protects his legal rights (and finds them protected in law). Nevertheless, this proves to conflict with the perceptions of his rights as understood by the miners with whom he shares a shift. Thus, citizenship is instrumental and a legal status, and those aspects of citizenship are protected. Yet, it is also affective; the identity of the citizenship holder is also subject to the expectations of the citizenship community. Colonial citizenship protected (some) rights, but evidenced by the racism and xenophobia that emerged in the UK particularly between the 1948 British Nationality Act and the 1962 Commonwealth Citizens Act, it also challenged the assumptions of the implicit and explicit hierarchies of Imperial Britain. While the legal status could be protected, the way that the holder of that status experienced it, and the reactions of people with whom the holder came into contact, was not protected. Nicholaos was defensive of his rights as a British citizen, yet was also aware that he was ostracised and was of course aware when racism and xenophobia were directed towards him. His rejection of these aspects of British identity impacted his lived experience of citizenship; that is, he did not want to identify with a Britain that was racist and that positioned him as a second class citizen. Yet this lack of a desire to identify also conflicted with his defensively held right to citizenship.

Conclusion Citizenship theorised as practice through the lived experience of a colonial immigrant to the British Isles reveals a complexity to citizenship where tension lies

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in identity. Citizenship is instrumental, such as Ong’s flexible citizenship. It is also affective, but the ties between citizenship and nation are not simple for diasporic, hybrid and transnational identities. These identities conventionally disrupt the way affective ties between population (nation) and territory are understood because the simple relationship between population, territory and state cannot exist. Moreover, an immigrant without a diaspora does not have an alternative public sphere and community; thus identity cannot rely on a distinct yet common way of being in the world that a diasporic citizen might live. Nicholaos’ journey theorises an affective citizenship that morphs and changes. It interacts with experience and circumstance. It is not a simple relationship with territory and population. Thus the nexus that constitutes the categories through which we understand international relations and international identities becomes a place of tension.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Arendt, Hannah. 1972. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Auchter, Jessica. 2014. The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations. London: Routledge. Balibar, Etienne. 1999. “Class Racism.” In Race, Identity and Citizenship: A Reader, edited by Rodolfo D. Torres and Louis F. Miron. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Barrington, Lowell. 1997. “‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism’: The Misuse of Key Concepts in Political Science.” PS Political Science and Politics 30 (4): 712–16. ———, ed. 2006. After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bryant, Rebecca. 2004. Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus. London: IB Tauris & Co Ltd. Clogg, Richard. 2002. A Concise History of Greece. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Edkins, Jenny. 2003. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Everson, Michelle. 2003. “‘Subjects’, or ‘Citizens of Erewhon’? Law and Non-Law in the Development of a ‘British Citizenship.’” Citizenship Studies 7 (1): 57–83. https://doi. org/10.1080/1262102032000048729. Gans, Chaim. 2003. The Limits of Nationalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Helland, Leonardo Figueroa, and Stefan Borg. 2014. “The Lure of State Failure: A Critique of State Failure in World Politics.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16 (6): 877–97. Hesse, Barnor. 2007. “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (4): 643–63. Hindess, Barry. 2005. “Citizenship and Empire.” In Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, edited by Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Colonial subjectivity and national identity 63 Isin, Engin. 2002. Bring Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Isin, Engin, and Greg M. Nielson, eds. 2008. Acts of Citizenship. London, UK: Zed Books. Isin, Engin, and Bryan S. Turner. 2007. “Investigating Citizenship: An Agenda for Citizenship Studies.” Citizenship Studies 11 (1): 5–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621020601099773. Isin, Engin, and Patricia Wood. 1999. Citizenship and Identity. London: Sage. Joppke, Christian. 2007. “Transformation of Citizenship: Status, Rights, Identity.” Citizenship Studies 11 (1): 37–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621020601099831. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laguerre, Michel. 1997. Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America. London: Palgrave. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Moss, H. 2009. Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nyers, Peter, and Kim Rygiel. 2012. Citizenship, Migrant Activism, and the Politics of Movement. London: Routledge. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Phillips, M., and T. Phillips. 1998. Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain. London: Harper Collins. Preuss, Ulrich K., Michelle Everson, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, and Edwige Lefebvre. 2003. “Traditions of Citizenship in the European Union.” Citizenship Studies 7 (1): 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1080.1362102032000048675. Shilliam, Robbie. 2018. Race and the Underserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing. Smith, Anthony D. 2000. The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press and Historical Society of Israel. Spencer, Ian R.G. 1997. British Immigration Policy since 1939: The Making of MultiRacial Britain. London: Routledge. Spring, J. 1976. The Sorting Machine: National Education Policy since 1945. New York: McKay. Spry Rush, Anne, and Charles V. Reed. 2014. “Imperial Citizenship in a British World Form.” In Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, edited by Engin Isin and Peter Nyers. London: Routledge. Squire, Vicki. 2011. The Contested Politics of Mobility. London: Routledge. Steele, Brent J. 2008. Ontological Security in International Relations: Self Identity and the IR State. London: Routledge. Steffes, Tracy L. 2012. School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wegner, Kathryn L. 2014. “Can There Be a Global Historiography of Citizenship?” In Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, edited by Engin Isin and Peter Nyers. London: Routledge. Zimmerman, J. 2005. Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Excerpt 3 Going down the pit

At Victoria station, I was with one laddie, he was crying. He said ‘my mother isn’t here’ so I told him to stick with me and he’d be all right. His mother came and she took me with her, took the two of us. And she gave me good advice. Never eat bread and olives by itself. Make sure you eat butter because this country’s very cold. And in the morning she took me to the station for the North, King’s Cross. And she said ‘when you get there, get a taxi. It’s the only way to find the place.’ I was left with less than ten bob. And the taxi was eight shilling and a half. Eight and a half. So, I got one and a half shillings back. There was nobody there in Mrs Scorer’s in Burn Terrace so I went down to the shipyards because I knew that Mrs Scorer’s husband was working in the shipyards. So I went down the bank. I found a man there and he said ‘Hey Geordie.’ I said ‘hi,’ but I didn’t speak because I knew that foreigners, specially blacks, they used to hate them. Labour were shouting not to penalise the Pakistanis and the Indians: when they had elections they had it on the buses, blaming labour that they were letting blacks in. ‘If you want a nigger neighbour, vote labour’ was the slogan. Enoch Powell, he used to be really terrible for the foreigners. Of course, I was reading these things and listening to these things. I was left wing. So I never opened my mouth. The man said to me ‘you look like a strong lad. Do you fancy a job?’ I says ‘oh, yeah, yeah,’ I shook my head [indicating yes]. So I got a job. When Scorer got back to the house, they found an aluminium bag there with some clothes. They didn’t know whose it was, who it belonged to. I was working. I stopped there for 24 hours and I was pulling all the grit out of the boat. My hands were bleeding, but I wouldn’t give up. And of course when I finished he said ‘I’ve got another job, will you come again? Where do you live?’ I told him 32 Burn Terrace. I wouldn’t tell him my name. And he took me back home, he fed me. He gave me eight and a half quid. He said ‘this money, you’ll not get for about a week and a half anywhere else. But, you work well.’ I cheated well was what he meant, because he said, ‘look, you understand English? Right. If you see the police, put the grit from the boat get it out you know and empty it. If there’s not many around, put it overboard.’ Well in no time you know we cleaned the boats.

Going down the pit 65 They usually take two or three days to clean, they cleaned it in 24 hours and that’s why I earned good money. So I went there the next day and so on. *** I mixed with the community. I used to go and get grapes from Brody’s. There were girls there laughing at me, at the way I was talking. One of the girls says to me ‘you cannit be my boyfriend if you don’t smoke’.1 So I went I got twenty cigarettes when we were going out. I thought it’ll cost me a fortune, twenty cigarettes like that. She says ‘if you’ve got no tabs you’re no good to me’.2 That’s the way she said it. Tabs! And a girl used to be a ‘tart.’ They’d say to me ‘have you got a tart yet?’ I’d say ‘no I haven’t got a tart.’ ‘Well it’s no good being your tart because if you don’t smoke, you’ve got no tabs.’ So I got some cigarettes and I pulled one out, and I didn’t light it. And I put it on a tree then later, on my way back, I picked it up. So I had a packet of cigarettes for a few weeks showing the girls I wasn’t broke. Anyway, that’s the antics and I got mixed with the people then. I got a job in a hospital and I got my national insurance from the labour exchange behind Bewicke Road. I got my little card, and my national insurance and within three months I was called up for the army. I wouldn’t go, I told them I’m not going in your army. I went down south for a few weeks to get away and I was caught, I was arrested. I came back and I had my examination and they thought I could speak Turkish. The officer asked what languages do you speak? I looked at him ‘why?’ Everything was why. No matter what it was, it was why with me at the time. I was ready to fight. But I said ‘Greek’. ‘Hmm,’ he says ‘you know there’s brewing trouble in Cyprus. It might be useful.’ The Colonel called me in and said ‘I’ll get your references. And I’ll send you to Cyprus.’ I knew when I got outside there I would bugger off, I wouldn’t come back. I thought I’d get lost I didn’t realise England was so well organised. I thought it was just like Cyprus, just go down to the beach and vanish, nobody knows where you are. Anyway, the bloke next to me, he said ‘eh, you’re going to go to Cyprus. You joined the British army, to fight for us’, he says. ‘Might have to go and fight for your own people.’ I said to him ‘I mind my own business so mind your effing business.’ And that didn’t go very well. He stood up. He sat down again, fortunately, because he was huge. So I went back to somehow find a way out. A kind sergeant came through the door and advised me what to do. I said I’m not going back. He said ‘send the foreigner to Newcastle.’ They were recruiting for national service, compulsory for two years. He said ‘why don’t you go in the mines, temporary. Two years in the mines or two years in the factories. In the mines, anytime you go, you go, they’ll have you. Midnight, they’ll have you.’ They had a million and a half miners at the time because everything was on coal. The trains, the puffers, electricity, everything. So they wanted miners. So I went, Sunday morning and that was that. I didn’t go to the army but they got me eventually. Down the pit. It was slavery. Had to work three shifts and they needed the miners. I stayed down the pit six years. By the time I had six years you know I had three kids. So I stopped.3 I became a fully-fledged miner.

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Notes 1 ‘Cannit’ means cannot in the Geordie vernacular. 2 ‘Tabs’ means cigarettes in the Geordie vernacular. 3 ‘Stopped’ means ‘stayed’ in the Geordie vernacular.

3

Ontological security, affective environments and the future

When he reflects on his time in Famagusta, juxtaposed with life in the mines in the North East of England, Nicholaos repeatedly returns to the rhetoric and imagery of freedom and slavery. He uses these words to describe the contrast between his life in Famagusta and his life working in the coalmine in Wallsend. In this chapter I do not intend to take lightly the idea of slavery, rather I attend to the language that Nicholaos used when he narrated his experience. In this context, I consider how the shift in his life, social environment, futural expectations and identity produced circumstances that Nicholaos remembers experiencing as a form of enslavement. After his arrival in the North East Nicholaos made friends in the area, found work, and began a romantic relationship. However, things changed after he was conscripted for the army in 1955. He did not want to fight and initially attempted to abscond, but was detained briefly for evading conscription. He gave his reasons for objection and was permitted an alternative two-year position in the mines. Working in the mines revealed the problematic nature of his acceptance in to the community in Wallsend. Men who Nicholaos knew locally fought to avoid sharing a shift with a person they perceived as a ‘foreign worker’. Nicholaos had been acutely aware of racism from his arrival in Britain, but at that point he started to feel racism directed against him personally. Yet, being in possession of legal citizenship and his status as a conscripted worker allowed him to fight that racism. In this chapter I demonstrate that citizenship for Nicholaos was, in practice, a performative and a transitional practice. Nevertheless, performing a citizenship that erodes identity simultaneously eroded his sense of being in the world: his ontological security. He felt his existence as a form of slavery: the life he had imagined for himself was eroded by his daily reality in working life, in a physical job that compromised his bodily autonomy, and which he increasingly found he could not escape. The concepts of freedom and slavery are important in the narrative data, with Famagusta representing a freedom without a future and Wallsend representing slavery that was governed first by citizenship law, and then by the bourgeois ideal of a future. This can in part be explained by gaining familial responsibilities, yet Nicholaos’ experience is tied to immigration and the rupturing of identity. The concept of ontological security relies on a stable sense of futural expectations;

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however, in establishing a set of futural expectations that relied on a British liberal and bourgeois model (seeking a future in the UK, as advocated by Dorothy and discussed in previous chapters) ontological security is lost in a way of being in the world. This chapter then excavates the relationship between ontological security and identity, building on existing theorising of a performative ontological security that resides in fluid and hybrid identities as they manifest in everyday life, and which permits a conceptualisation of ontological security in IR that circumvents the role of national identity. The connection between ontological security and everyday experience is clear, in that ontological security can be found in a sense of comfort and certainty in the routines and practices of everyday life, thusly locating security in the everyday. In this chapter I combine my focus on Nicholaos’ everyday life with a point of contention with what Giddens (1984) described as a ‘futural sense’ of social life that permits the formation of stable expectations. After moving to Britain, Nicholaos ultimately secured his future, but he did so at the expense of his sense of freedom in the present. I draw excerpts from Nicholaos’ memoir to excavate the relationship between ontological and economic security in everyday life, with a particular focus on the idea of living with a futural sense of social life.

Ontological security and local everyday life I turn in this chapter to ontological security as a vehicle through which to understand the links between everyday life, the relationship between citizenship and identity, and the immigrant experience. I begin with the premise that identity is not a simple linear narrative, but is made as it is performed and as it enters into relational and structural contexts (Butler 2005). Thus identity is not fixed and static but depends on the context in which it is enacted. Ontological security theory in international relations conventionally (or at least in the extent to which there is a conventional body of work on ontological security in international relations) has conceptualised security as being invested in the existence of a narrative national identity, the narrative making and reproducing national identity, with identitybased security seeking offering insight into state behaviour (Steele 2005, 2008). Kinnvall (2004) notably explored this process with regard to non-state based identity narratives, arguing that groups strive to produce a stable identity narrative that can exist in opposition to national identity. In this way, identity remains performative: it is performed in the narrative through national events, or events that continue to make and reproduce the identity of the collective in question. Yet, this does not permit the individual’s penchant to participate in multiple collective identities, or to foreground one identity over another at any given time. Indeed, Kinnvall argues that one collective identity will be constituted at the expense of others (2004). Nevertheless, work in sociology has explored ontological security as it is based in co-existing identities (Nunn et al. 2016). This alternative capturing of ontological security theory for international relations is explored by Stuart Croft (2012), for whom identity is something that is contextual and shifts and

Ontological security, affective environments 69 changes in different settings, yet is bound up in, both produces and is produced by state policies. How the state interacts with identity when identity is conceptualised as both fluid and hybrid is something that becomes particularly important in everyday experiences that challenge or resist the confines of state-based politics where identities held by individuals do not coincide with those ascribed to them by the state; for example, experiences of undocumented migration, experiences of colonial and postcolonial identities, and experiences of diaspora or transnational identities. Drawing on Nunn et al., Croft, and Ty Solomon’s (2016) research on affective environments, I have further explored fluid and changing intersectional identities elsewhere (Innes 2017), arguing that affective environments provide the resources for performing identity and it is in these affective contexts one experiences ontological security in everyday life. I build on that argument in this essay, examining how geopolitical and colonial contexts produce affective environments which are lived and understood as freedom and slavery in Nicholaos’ narrative memoir. The environment of freedom does not offer a defined future, while the environment of slavery offers stable future expectations. This dialectic of no future-freedom/ future-slavery in turn offers insight into how the future – at least, how the idea of the future as it intervenes in Nicholaos’ memoir – is bound to the liberal-bourgeois model of identity and of life lived with a sense of certainty along a linear trajectory. Pursuit of this type of ‘future’ for Nicholaos disrupted his sense of self, his sense of stable expectations in everyday life, and his particular way of being in the world. In Giddens’ work on ontological security, the concept of the future is embedded in the routinization of social life that permits stable expectations of what is coming both in the day-to-day sense, but also over the duration of the course of life of the individual and over the long durée of the stable existence of institutions. Of course, migration disrupts both the short and long-term expectations of the individual. Nevertheless, for Nicholaos the concept of building a stable economic future was introduced to him and, in part, motivated his migration. He prioritised longer-term future expectations at the expense of short-term routines and familiarity, perhaps the story of many migrants. Nicholaos is very clear that he never envisioned staying in the UK for more than three or four years. Yet he did not anticipate the entrapment of a bourgeois economic future and it was in that entrapment that he lost his way of being in the world. New routines and expectations of social encounters could be built, but only with a sense of caution that pervaded his social interactions in the context of xenophobia and anti-immigrantism that he observed in broad public discourse, and that he encountered. Furthermore, in the context of his working life, in a physical job, Nicholaos’ sense of personal bodily autonomy in the world could not be rebuilt, hence the dialectic of freedom and slavery. Loss of the autonomy of his body to the mines produced an affective environment of slavery, which he experienced in contrast to the bodily freedom he remembered from life in Famagusta. He lost his agency to manage both his dayto-day life and his idea of the future. It is in this context that he uses the language of freedom and slavery in his narrative memoir.

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Famagusta – a futureless freedom? As discussed in some detail in Chapter 1, two main forces of global politics had led to the increase of British troops in Famagusta in 1954. The first was the strength of Nasser in Egypt and his negotiation of the removal of British troops from the Suez Canal in 1953. On withdrawal from Suez, Britain moved troops to Famagusta. Famagusta was the deepest port in Cyprus and Britain identified the port as a possible new headquarters for land troops in the Middle East (Johnson 2000). This was ultimately short-lived as during the military deployments of the Suez crisis of 1956, the port of Famagusta proved too shallow and the main Anglo-French invasion force deployed from Malta (Ibid). Nevertheless, the increase in British troops in Famagusta in 1953–1954 swelled the local economy. Secondly, at this time the insurgency in Cyprus against British colonial rule was growing and Famagusta was one of the main seats of the insurgency (Asmussen 2015). Britain had suspended the Cypriot constitutional administration in 1931 following an uprising and ruled Cyprus with unusually oppressive governance. This is conventionally recognised as being largely due to the confluence of two forces: one was the expectation on the part of many Cypriots that when Cyprus became a crown colony Britain as an ally would facilitate union with Greece (Holland 1998; Johnson 2000). Thus, Cypriots who sought union with Greece became increasingly frustrated with the endurance of British colonial rule (Ibid). The other was the strategic importance of Cyprus for Britain as the protectorate power over territory in the Middle East. Cyprus was the only British sovereign territory in the region, therefore Britain needed to maintain Cyprus as colonial property, yet was faced with increasing animosity from Cypriots (Johnson 2000). Thus, oppressive governance became the assured way to maintain power (Holland 1998). Nevertheless, everyday life in Famagusta for Nicholaos represented a time when he had, in his words, ‘all the freedom in the world.’ He did not have long term economic security but he had greater economic security than he had experienced in his life up until that point. He was earning, as he describes, a weekly wage rather than a monthly one. In Limassol, where he had previously worked, he was contracted to remain in the position as a 24-hour worker for two years. In Famagusta he had more autonomy. He was free to work in ad-hoc or opportunistic jobs as they arose in addition to his regular employment, such as fetching and serving drinks for café diners in the evenings, selling sweets made from grape molasses in the port, and providing errands and services to English people as required. He also found himself with free time, during which he would swim, hire a boat with friends to go fishing, or explore the panhandle area by bicycle. Nicholaos’ comparison between life in Famagusta and life before he moved there in Limassol, living in conditions similar to indentured working suggests why he remembers it with a strong association of feeling free. Given that he remembers life in Famagusta retrospectively, his opinions are formed in the context of what he experienced afterwards. Conscription to the British military followed by a loss of autonomy over his working life after he started work in the mines in the North

Ontological security, affective environments 71 East completes the association of Famagusta with an image of a sunny, joyful time of individual freedom. In Limassol I worked for one pound a month. There I was [in Famagusta] getting a wage a week. And also, I could get two jobs. I was working in the market through the day and during the night I could go and get a job in a restaurant. I say a restaurant. It was really, for the rich and the young, spoiled ones. When they wanted any drinks I would go and get the drinks, from cabarets and so on because they had a licence for drinks. ... I used to take things for the British, I used to have a lot of customers, like, I used to use my English, I remember, I used to help them with their different things, I helped one of them with his electricity . . . I had nothing else to do. Sometimes [I] used to get some sweets to sell and that, . . . made out of er, treacle? Something like that [likely to be grape molasses]. And they used to, people used to buy that so they’d get a drink of water really. So you had a barrow, used to bring a barrow . . . ‘you want a job?’ Aye, I’ll have a job . . . . ... Other jobs I was doing, I’d kill some birds you know because some of them that’s all they wanted, barbecuing chickens, pigeons and whatever. [I was] helping in the kitchen with the lady, or being in the front serving some drinks or whatever. In other words, I was everything, to find something to exist. And it was easy . . . . . ... Them days, you know you had all the freedom in the world. Nicholaos describes his existence as one filled with economic opportunities. He does not experience it as economic insecurity. Everyday life is made up of finding opportunities in which to earn money or a meal, and that is a way of being in the world. He describes this as easy. For Nicholaos that way of being represented freedom. He was not economically secure in a long term sense, yet he was ontologically secure. His daily life may not have had repetitive routines but the routines and rhythms of the market created an affective environment that he navigated comfortably. He excelled in this environment, as a charming young man who formed and maintained relationships with the diverse people of Famagusta in the 1950s. The presence of the British in Cyprus both made and unmade this freedom. The British troops and the traffic coming through the port provided economic opportunities, both for casual work such as selling sweets or cigarettes that his friends purchased duty free for him from the NAAFI, and for encounters with people who were comparatively wealthy, such as the patrons of cafes he would wait on for tips in the evenings. In Famagusta, for the first time in his experience, Nicholaos did not have to answer to anybody. He was distant from his family and he worked hours for a

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wage, rather than being answerable to a boss constantly. Thus, Famagusta represents a place of coming-of-age that is formative for his identity. Nicholaos’ time in Famagusta also followed situations of insecurity and uncertainty: for example, before he left Anavargos, Nicholaos had spent a summer working to save the money for high school. He spent several weeks away from home picking carobs and sleeping at the side of the road. However his relative took the money he made and gambled it, losing it all. Following that, after his two years working in Limassol as a teenager, he was then violently abused by his boss in Nicosia, against whom he retaliated and was arrested. Hence, when his life in Famagusta is juxtaposed with these forms of personal insecurity, Nicholaos feels his sense of security and personal autonomy in Famagusta more potently. While Nicholaos does not dwell in his memoir on his notion of the future while he was living in Famagusta, he is very clear in his narration that it was Dorothy Scorer who introduced the idea of emigration to him. His expectations of the future were not formed in a meaningful way in Famagusta. He joined OCHEN, the nationalist organisation, specifically because he wanted to complete his secondary education, thus indicating that he was not complacent about his future, he wanted to improve his position in life. He also spent time learning English privately, sharing the cost with a friend. Again, Nicholaos describes his desire to learn English as clearly linked to his opportunities for employment. Using English opened up opportunities to work with British clients, who had more money, and provided the possibility of working on the British base. He accompanied his boss to make deliveries from the market to the Dhekelia base and to the transit camps near to Famagusta. His boss did not speak English, so Nicholaos’ knowledge was useful. Nicholaos’ active futural expectations were short term, yet he was living in a social and cultural context of familiarity, despite Famagusta being far from the village of his birth, both in distance as it is located at the other side of the island, and in similarity as Famagusta was new, busy, diverse and sprawling. Nevertheless, passive futural expectations would be in the social and cultural context of Cyprus, which was the only place Nicholaos had known. Such dynamics become clear when Nicholaos describes an interaction with another Cypriot in Ostend, towards the end of his journey to the British Isles: I say, I’m going to Newcastle. ‘Newcastle? You’ll never see the sun at all!’ [he replies]. I say, what are you talking about? Newcastle is near the sea, you know I’ll be having a swim every day. He says ‘you what!? You’ll never go to the beach. I’m ganning to Manchester to get a boat. Manchester or Liverpool. I’m getting the boat and I’m not staying in England, it’s a horrible, it’s a . . . horrible hole. It’s a hole, nobody wants it. Nicholaos remembers that his impression had been that England would be the same as Cyprus; he had not considered the differences between the two places. Cyprus was all he had known, and he had not thought a lot about ways in which

Ontological security, affective environments 73 England would be different. He assumed that if he lived in a town close to the coast, he would be able to swim in the same way he did in Famagusta. When he arrived to Folkestone during the afternoon in August 1954 it was dark and raining. He recalls feeling lonely, saying ‘it was raining, it was dark, it was horrible.’ He describes the moment of leaving the train at Victoria Station in London, and being surrounded by Cypriots who were there to collect their relatives as being alienating. He had no one there to meet him, he was alone in a country that felt more foreign than he had imagined it would. The families around him were Cypriot and should have seemed familiar, but instead made him acutely aware of his difference from the other Cypriots who were travelling to the UK. He did not have a family to join, nor would he remain amongst the Cypriot community in London. Instead he was to head North, to find the residence of his guarantor whom he had yet to meet. The nature of migration itself is of course disruptive to ontological security. One moves from the familiar to the unfamiliar. One’s sense of ‘comfort’ in the everyday is disrupted on migration and needs to be rebuilt. The ease or difficulty of rebuilding that sense of comfort to re-establish ontological security depends on the context into which migration happens. Ontological security relies on social interactions; therefore, in places where there is hostility directed towards migrants and migration, the capacity to recreate a sense of comfort and a deeper ontological security in a way of being in the world is enervated (Noble 2005). Moreover, in cases of forced or unexpected migration, the loss of ontological security before

Figure 3.1 Nicholaos enjoying the beach at Whitley Bay

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migration is particularly pronounced (Richmond 1994) and the capacity to rebuild it depends upon, in addition to the level of discrimination faced, the capacity to continue living in one’s own identity in the sense of gaining paid employment and participating in society more generally (Hynes 2003). I suggest that identity is profoundly related to futural expectations that, even if nebulous, are situated within a social context. When one is extracted from that social context, futural expectations are disrupted and need to be reproduced in order to obtain a sense of ontological security. Nicholaos’ migration was not forced and he did not experience a disruption to his ontological security before moving. However, on arrival in England he finds himself alienated from his own identity. His way of being in the world that made sense in the social context of Famagusta could not be replicated. In order to re-establish ontological security, he must recreate his futural expectations. His ability to do this is then problematized by his conscription and work in the coalmines, which gave him a daily life and a future that he had never envisioned for himself and one that he did not want. He did not have agency to remake his future in a way that reasserted his own idea of himself, because of his conscription. The lack of agency compromised his ontological security and identity.

Tyne and wear – slave to a future trajectory? In his memories of Famagusta, Nicholaos recounts his friendships with British people as being on an equal basis. He uses words and phrases that emphasize similarity such as ‘the same’, ‘no difference’, ‘nothing to divide us’, ‘on our side’. Nevertheless, when he arrives in the UK, the way he feels different from British people is pronounced. He immediately became conscious of his racial and ethnic identity, and this particular consciousness impacted his way of being in the world. He speaks of his first encounter in Newcastle, which led to some casual work: He says to me ‘hi, Geordie.’ I say hi, I don’t speak because I knew the foreigners, specially blacks, [the British] used to hate them. Why, when they have elections and all that . . . they’re blaming Labour . . . getting blacks here [to Britain]. Because they [Labour] were shouting not to penalise the Pakistanis the Indians and all that . . . ‘if you want a darkie, a nigger neighbour, vote labour,’ and all the slogans, you know. They were very, and I mean, you might hear about . . . . Enoch, Enoch Powell he was a right . . . you know. And of course I was reading all these things, I was listening [to] all these things you know and I knew all about . . . . So I never opened my mouth. And he says to me ‘you look like a strong lad. Do you fancy a job?’ I says oh, yeah, yeah, I shook my head. So I got a job. Nicholaos was acutely aware that racism was likely to be directed towards him as a Cypriot. This then impacted how he acted in relation to others. He was cautious, reluctant to speak until he was sure of his position. He was successful in finding work, which allowed some economic security. He worked casually immediately

Ontological security, affective environments 75 from arrival, accepting a job before he had even met his host. Once he established himself in Wallsend, he took a job working at a hospital some fifteen miles away. He cycled to work through the week and returned to his residency at Burn Terrace during the weekend. This security was to be short-lived as it precipitated his acquisition of a national insurance number, and his consequent conscription. Moreover, because of his awareness of the social climate of racism and antiimmigrantism, Nicholaos was not secure in his way of being in the world. He was conscious that his accent and appearance might provoke hostility, thus he modified how he interacted with people. Nicholaos was in an environment with no other Cypriots, indeed with very few other foreigners. He remembers an Algerian man who married a British woman, with whom he occasionally talked, although he describes him as ‘young, but . . . more mature than me.’ The guarantee for Nicholaos’ immigration that was given to him by the Scorers meant that he moved to a white, working-class neighbourhood. Howden was an industrial area to the East of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and directly north of the river Tyne. The housing estate was flanked by shipyards on the river, coalmines, and other coal-dependent industries (Evening Chronicle 2013). The area was developed significantly after World War II as part of a drive to provide social housing and affordable housing for working families. The population was characterised by working-class Geordie families. This made Nicholaos’ immigration experience different from that of Cypriots who joined family members in London. Even today, the majority of Cypriots in the UK live in London and South East England, with no notable diaspora population in the North East. Thus, Nicholaos was positioned as an outsider and he looked visibly different from the typical resident of Howden. While he was aware of xenophobia and he was cautious in his social interactions, there are two main occasions in which he remembers xenophobia being directed against him specifically and acutely. These are when he began working in the mines, and when he was engaged to be married to Sylvia, who was local to the area. Racism was directed at Nicholaos acutely when he began working in the coalmine. He describes being ‘pushed down the mine’, again indicating a lack of agency. Such a career was not part of the ‘future’ he pursued, yet shortly after arrival in the UK he acquired his National Insurance number and was then was conscripted into the military. He refused to fight and applied to work in the mine as a reserved occupation. Mining was classed as an essential job and there was a shortage of miners at the time. Therefore, in some circumstances coalmining could be substituted for military service. This had been a common practice between 1943 and 1948 during which time 10% of conscripts were recruited for the mines rather than the military. The practice had ended, yet Nicholaos was permitted to object to military service and take a position in the coalmine as an alternative. Nevertheless, while Nicholaos had friends among the locals in Wallsend, the miners at the Rising Sun Colliery threatened to strike for a week in protest of Nicholaos joining their shift: I had a load of bother in the mine, in the first one I started. The Wallsend lads, the Geordie boys, they reacted to me, because they had a shift ‘specially for

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As discussed in more detail in the previous chapter, Nicholaos was unwilling to fight in the British military. He was offered the position in the coalmines as an alternative and he was insistent about taking up the particular post offered to him, that is, the one on the regular shift as opposed to the ‘foreign’ shift. He held a British passport and had been offered the position as his duty as a British citizen; consequently, he fought for his right to work on the shift with the locals. Ultimately, Nicholaos won that battle because his citizenship protected his right to do so; yet he experienced people he knew locally going on strike in protest because they did not think he should have the right to work on their shift. While he fought for his position, the protests against his inclusion revealed a discrete racism that pervaded his social relationships. While he had friendships, when tested it became evident that despite friendship an underlying inequality remained, and positioned him as inferior to the locals despite the British citizenship he held. The caution with which Nicholaos approached social relationships was reinforced. He was aware of the racism, xenophobia and anti-immigrantism that remained part of his experience in Britain even when it was not overtly expressed. This impacted his way of being in the world in his professional life. He had to consider how people would react to him, and make judgements about how to behave in response to these reactions, rather than being able to approach social and professional interactions from a position of comfort. As Noble’s (2005) study of immigrant integration asserts, this then impacted Nicholaos’ capacity to build a deeper and ongoing sense of ontological security in the world. A tension remained in Nicholaos’ working life in the mines, at least for the initial months. He recalls taking the position in the mines and reasoning that the xenophobia expressed by the other workers did not matter; he recalls reasoning that he was there to work and so he worked all the hours that were available to him. As he describes, most people worked three shifts, and he would frequently work five. He was ‘willing to do jobs that the other lads didn’t want to do’ which ultimately gave him extra money. And eventually things settled down and became peaceful over time. Moreover, as time passed he was invited to undertake training. He went to college and continued to study. He ultimately progressed to a management role over the course of this thirty-year career. Despite his working life becoming easier over time in terms of his social relationships, Nicholaos reflects on how it felt, to him, like slavery. He was trapped in the mine by his conscription and his unwillingness to fight in the military. His two-year contract was changed to a six-year contract and he did not feel himself to be free to leave.

Ontological security, affective environments 77 Gone were the days in Cyprus when I used to be my own man. It was a slavery. Aye, when I was in Cyprus you know I used to go down the port, Famagusta . . . . Them days, you know you had all the freedom in the world. Not now. Down the pit. Eeh, it was slavery. [I] had to work three shifts and then of course, they change the rules again and instead of two years, they needed the miners, so they made it six years. Stayed down the pit six years. By the time I had six years you know I had three kids. So I stopped. [In the Geordie vernacular, stopped means ‘stayed’]. Nicholaos was effectively trapped by economic necessity and familial duty in a profession that contrasted the peasant lifestyle in Cyprus significantly, and contrasted his sense of freedom and personal autonomy that he had enjoyed in Famagusta. It was not a profession he had envisaged for himself. His use of the term ‘my own man’ reflects the sense that in Famagusta his freedom was characterised by his not having to answer to anyone; he had autonomy over his decisions, actions and body. In Britain he became answerable not just to his new family after he married and had children, but also prior to that, when he became answerable to the British government in the form of military conscription. In the North East of England, mining was tied in many ways to working-class identity, yet for a Cypriot immigrant it was far from the future he might have projected for himself before it was cast upon him. An identity as a coalminer was not one that Nicholaos had ever projected for himself, therefore acquiring this identity shifted his idea of himself and he became trapped in this new identity. He describes this economic entrapment as ‘slavery’. His way of being in the world was disrupted by his presence in the UK, where he navigated the government restrictions on his freedom and autonomy imposed through conscription and social restrictions on his ‘way of being’ such as racism and anti-immigrantism. When Nicholaos had children his conception of the future was replete with responsibility. He was not free to abandon the long-term economic security produced by his occupation. This of course is part of the experience of gaining adult responsibilities for everyone; yet, for Nicholaos the particular nature of his work – both physical and environmental in the sense that it was dark, dangerous and carried particular health implications – and the process by which he came to be working in a coalmine in the North East of England were acutely tied to his immigration and the subsequent terms of his British citizenship and conscription. To truly study the politics of everyday life, as Enloe (2011) argues, one needs to understand how different parts of life merge into one another, and for Nicholaos, like all people, his private life cannot be compartmentalised and separated from his working life. While the xenophobia he encountered at work settled down, he still encountered some discrimination from his work colleagues and friends when he began a romantic relationship with a local woman, Sylvia, who became his wife. He recalls that he used to ‘go out with’ local women without experiencing discrimination directly. Girls were interested in him because he was different. A story that has survived family folklore, told by Nicholaos and Sylvia, remembers girls sitting behind him on the bus, so they could touch his wiry curly hair that felt

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different from their own. Nevertheless, this functions as a form of ‘othering’, and xenophobia was still present and voiced in heated moments. Nicholaos describes one such moment: It was not any difficult, any more than another lad, to go out with a girl but, every other lad used to say to me ‘no English girl will go with you man.’ . . . At least one of them, his sister was after me, I was bragging about it, she was after me and he knew it. ‘God,’ he says, ‘nobody, no English girl would go out with you.’ ‘Why, I’m better looking than you. Why not?’ I says. ‘Because you’re a wog.’ While Nicholaos was self-possessed and confident, he remained wary of discrimination. Although he does not remember more than a handful of occasions during which xenophobic hate was directed at him acutely, he does recall numerous structural difficulties that can be explained by racism and xenophobia. For example, he recalls ‘asking for a house? Not a chance!’ He and Sylvia, after marrying, applied to the coal board for housing and their application was not approved. Nicholaos remembers that they were not turned down, but several other people who applied for housing afterwards received it when he did not. Nor was he approved for a mortgage despite having a healthy and regular income. Houses he and Sylvia were interested in buying abruptly became unavailable when they expressed their interest and recorded their Greek name as the return address on application letters, even after having anglicised the spelling. Nicholaos and Sylvia began married life living in one room they rented in an elderly neighbour’s house. When they were eventually offered a council flat, Nicholaos found that he was not approved for credit to buy furniture. These structural economic discriminations thus created unnecessary hardships. On the other hand, Nicholaos also remembers the positive aspects of his day-to-day life that overwrote his experiences of discrimination. He and Sylvia were a popular couple in the neighbourhood, with many friends. He was successful at work, making more money than average since he was willing to take difficult jobs other miners were less willing to do and to work extra shifts and long hours. He secured enough coal for himself, his mother-in-law and a neighbour each month, saving them money. He acquired his driving licence and bought a car. By economic measures, for a coalmining Northerner, he was comfortable and successful. Socially, he had a happy family and developed a good relationship with Sylvia’s mother and extended family. He recalls, after being turned down for credit by one furniture store, family and friends rallied around and boycotted the shop. While structural discrimination produced difficulties and he continued to practice caution in social interactions, he has positive memories of life in the close-knit mining community. Nevertheless, his life in Wallsend was a different reality from the one he had projected for himself as a young man in Famagusta and he could not find a way back to the life he had imagined, hence the juxtaposition of the terms ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ in his narrative account. It was an existence he found himself in, from which he could not extricate himself

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Figure 3.2 Nicholaos and Sylvia shortly after they met

and that required a re-writing of his identity. He lost agency over his everyday life and over the future that he could project for himself. Nicholaos believes that, early in his relationship with Sylvia, he overheard his mother-in-law (who he later got along with extremely well) complaining that she did not want any black babies running around, although this memory is strongly disputed by Sylvia. Nicholaos’ family life, which will be dealt with in more detail in Part 2, represents a rupture from the selfhood he experienced in Famagusta, and a permanent shift of identity, that required a rewriting and a rebuilding of ontological security in everyday life. He describes himself as becoming, after he was married, ‘fully acclimatized’ to British life, although, he remembers it took him a long time to learn to ‘enjoy eating boiled cabbage,’ a quintessential example of British food that contrasts his Mediterranean diet. Early in married life, Nicholaos and Sylvia both remember watching two pigeons in the garden. Nicholaos, when living in Famagusta, had made money killing poultry and game for the British who were unused to killing their own meat. He asked Sylvia if he should catch one – half joking – and she disputed his ability to do so, hence setting him a challenge. Nicholaos recalls ‘I whipped my coat off, and – whoops, caught one!’ As the story goes, Sylvia then baked the pigeon into a pie for them to eat, and the other half of the pigeon couple, the sad bereaved pigeon, continued to visit the garden glumly looking for her mate. Nicholaos, on recounting the story made

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it clear that he did not want the story to portray him as ‘a wild man’ who killed a pigeon because he did not know any better. He was well versed in the British social mores and perhaps more likely than most to abide by them given the caution he practiced because of his awareness of his foreignness. Nevertheless, the act of catching and killing a pigeon was a means of demonstrating his ongoing attachment to his life in Cyprus. It was ‘just to show my wife that I still had it in me, to survive in Cyprus.’ Thus, Nicholaos’ daily life shifted and changed. He lived in a completely new culture and with a completely new set of familial circumstances. He acquired a British family. In reasserting his Cypriotness in the act of killing the pigeon, he consciously performs a Cypriot identity and he describes doing so in order to reject the creeping sense of alienation from his self. He had lost his bodily autonomy in his work in the coalmines, and his sense of selfhood needed to be remade in the context of a xenophobic Britain, which he describes as ‘getting worse, not better’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His ability to catch and kill a pigeon was a mark of competence in Cyprus, where he would do this to make money from British people who were unable to catch and kill their own meat. In Britain, it was a way of asserting his identity and performing a Cypriot identity through an ability that set him apart from, and as better than, British who were incompetent in that regard. Nicholaos did not lose his attachment to his Cypriotness. He needed to demonstrate that he had not, in fact, changed. That he still ‘had it in [him], to survive in Cyprus’, illustrating the importance of continuity of identity to retain a secure selfhood. Nicholaos’ ‘slavery’ in the North East was produced primarily by economic need, but it was also produced by the circumstances that led him to leave Cyprus, the military build-up in Famagusta both as a result of the Suez withdrawal at the time and the rise of the Cypriot insurgency for enosis. Britain’s role as a protectorate power in the Middle East following World War II simultaneously solidified the importance of Cyprus as a British crown possession, and therefore produced the repressive strategy of colonial governance with suspended constitutional powers for the Cypriot administration discussed in previous chapters. Following that, the British domestic policy of conscription that was in place until 1960 produced Nicholaos’ new place in the world. These foreign policy, geopolitical and security concerns at the state level produced Nicholaos’ experience at the hyperlocal level of everyday life. Global insecurities produced an affective environment of ontological insecurity in everyday life.

Conclusion For Nicholaos, pursuit of ‘a future’ was ultimately alienating and eroded ontological security grounded in his everyday way of being in the world, although it produced long term economic security. In this case study, war and conflict shifts from being a force that disrupts ontological security to one that makes it in Famagusta. The routines in Nicholaos’ everyday life, marked particularly by his sense of autonomy and his sense that life was ‘easy’, were produced in the context of the Suez crisis and colonial governance. Yet, these forces also made the potential for disruption to his ontological security.

Ontological security, affective environments 81 The idea of pursuing ‘a future’ was raised by British citizens in Cyprus. They imported the idea that Britain was more secure than Cyprus because it was not in an unstable region, with a large military presence, and education and opportunity would theoretically be available, thus providing Nicholaos with the potential to build a desirable future. Nevertheless, in pursuit of a future Nicholaos lost his way of being in the world. The environment Nicholaos entered was, in his everyday experience and in his subjective experience, less secure that Famagusta. He lost his bodily autonomy through conscription despite his effort to evade conscription and preserve his freedom. His self-identity was reconstituted within the context of racist social relations. In acclimatizing to British mores and culture he lost his innate sense of self and had to act to maintain it, such as the example of the pigeon pie illustrates. The future Nicholaos pursued was a liberal teleological understanding of a futural sense of (economic) security. This does not account for the different experience of an immigrant that meant his projection of the future needed to be rewritten. His loss of autonomy through conscription changed his capacity to project his own future to some extent. Furthermore, the liberal teleological economic security that becomes central to Nicholaos’ experience in the North East devalues sources of security that were available to Nicholaos in Cyprus: for example, the security of identity and community are devalued in juxtaposition to economic security – both in the assumptions made by Dorothy (and Nicholaos) and then in the subsequent acts and decisions that kept Nicholaos and his family in Britain. In Nicholaos’ memoir, the forces of colonialism and global politics make the circumstances in which one form of security is devalued and another is prioritised. A contention between a futural sense of security and an everyday security is evident.

Bibliography Asmussen, Jan. 2015. “Bertram John Weston and the Emergency in Famagusta (1955– 1959).” In City of Empires: Ottoman and British Famagusta, edited by Michael J.K. Walsh. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Croft, Stuart. 2012. “Constructing Ontological Insecurity: The Insecuritization of British Muslims.” Contemporary Security Policy 33 (2): 219–35. Enloe, Cynthia. 2011. “The Mundane Matters.” International Political Sociology 5 (4): 447–50. Evening Chronicle. 2013. “Seven Interesting Facts about Howden & Percy Main.” Chronicle Live, February 22, 2013, sec. Local News. www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/ local-news/seven-interesting-facts-howdon-1342139. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holland, Robert. 1998. Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–1959. London: Clarendon Press. Hynes, Tricia. 2003. “The Issue of ‘Trust’ or ‘Mistrust’ in Research with Refugees: Choices, Caveats and Considerations for Researchers.” New Issues in Refugee Research. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Working Paper (No. 98). London: Middlesex University.

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Innes, Alexandria J. 2017. “Everyday Ontological Security: Emotion and Migration in British Soaps.” International Political Sociology 11: 380–97. Johnson, Edward. 2000. “Britain and the Cyprus Problem at the UN 1954–58.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28 (3): 113–30. Kinnvall, Catarina. 2004. “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security.” Political Psychology 25 (5): 741–67. Noble, Greg. 2005. “The Discomfort of Strangers: Racism, Incivility, and Ontological Security in a Relaxed and Comfortable Nation.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 26 (1–2): 107–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860500074128. Nunn, Caitlin, Celia McMichael, Sandra Gifford, and Ignacio Correa-Velez. 2016. “Mobility and Security: The Perceived Benefits of Citizenship for Resettled Young People from Refugee Backgrounds.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (3): 382–99. Richmond, Anthony H. 1994. Global Apartheid: Refugees, Racism and the New World Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solomon, Ty. 2017. “Ontological Security, Circulations of Affect, and the Arab Spring.” Journal of International Relations and Development Online First. https://doi.org/10. 1057/s41268-017-0089-x. Steele, Brent J. 2005. “Ontological Security and the Power of the Self: British Neutrality and the American Civil War.” Review of International Studies 31 (3): 519–40. ———. 2008. Ontological Security in International Relations: Self Identity and the IR State. London: Routledge.

Part II

Transnational family life

4

Theorising the transnational family in international relations

[T]hat’s the trouble with families like that. When you’ve got two families . . . it depends where you stay and where your kids are . . . . I think that’s the difficult bit. (Anna Love, Nicholaos and Sylvia’s youngest daughter)1

Nicholaos had moved to a white, working-class community, married, and started a family. He and Sylvia had three children, born in 1957 (Barbara), 1958 (Andreas) and 1959 (Anna). This chapter explores this transnational family and seeks to uncover the politics of everyday life that reside at the heart of transnational identity, through the unit of the family. Nicholaos’ family is interesting precisely because it is not embedded in a diasporic community of Cypriots. Thus the conventional rituals of everyday life that are understood to produce transnational identity, such as observing national celebrations of the homeland, buying specially-imported groceries, participating in rituals and religious ceremonies, or attending language classes or other clubs with the objective of preserving a sense of cultural belonging are not at the centre of transnational identity for Barbara, Andreas and Anna. They visited Cyprus regularly from the ages of twelve, eleven, and ten respectively. They each navigate their own relationship with the Cypriot ‘homeland’, both while growing up, and retrospectively as adults, while reflecting on how their parents worked to protect them from exposure to discrimination and xenophobia. Here, the mundanities of everyday life are posited as a form of management of identity happening within a transnational family, where belonging and identity are constantly navigated by family members.

The family in IR The family is one of the primary units of social organisation in the world: while family structures differ, the importance of the family is relevant across states and cultures. In western industrialised states, family units are extensively governed by state policy in the form of marriage, tax laws and financial planning, health and family planning, childbirth, child welfare, and education and schooling, and these are only the most obvious of the myriad ways family life is governed. This governance seeps outside of the state in the form of the politics of immigration,

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citizenship and transnationality and in particular in the governance of familybased immigration petitions that produce multiple places of belonging. International governance of the family simultaneously seeps inside the state, most notably in the form of international human rights legislation. Thus, it is not a stretch to make the case for the relevance of taking note of family life in the context of international relations. As Enloe (2010, citing Badran 1995) notes: Feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Huda Al Sha’arawi, Virginia Woolf, and Simone de Beauvoir argued – theorized – that the power relationships created and sustained within marriages and inside familial households were essential pillars holding up the patriarchal structures of states, nations, cultural institutions, economies, and international systems and, they contended, a lot of the beneficiaries of those patriarchal structures knew it. . . . Each of these writers was conscious of the international context in which she was noticing the workings of marriage and was developing her thoughts about the ways in which marriage is designed to sustain patriarchy; each concluded that the power dynamics she was exposing played a crucial role in determining the shape of international affairs, especially militarized relationships. (Enloe 2010: 322–23) It is clear that feminists have been interested in the workings of intimate relationships and the externalised effects of these workings, even when they have not been immediately obvious in the analysis of international relations. Feminists in international relations and beyond have found that intimate power relationships are externalised in public life and political life, thus articulating the importance of family life in public life, and belying the relevancy of maintaining a theoretical public/private separation. The family plays a role in the politics of producing the neoliberal individual, or the liberal citizen. Scholars have interrogated the extent to which family life is governed in this context. For example, the way the governance of family life calls to question national boundaries is evident in Turner’s (2017) study of internal colonisation. He focuses on social work and the ‘Prevent’ strategy in the UK, yet his historical insights into the racialized governance of intimacy and sexuality is telling for how governance exceeds national boundaries and the nation state, particularly in the context of the colonial world order. Turner asserts that modes of nineteenth-century governance that fixated on ‘the reproduction of the underclass’ were replete with fears of miscegenation, thus prompting the promotion of bourgeois family values and family planning (Turner 2017: 13). Colonial subjects transcend national boundaries and therefore the governing processes, which develops and produces liberal subjects and renders others ‘undevelopable’ must also transcend these boundaries. In this way, the governance of intimacy and private life, and the shaping of the bourgeois family, registers in the international sphere.

Theorising the transnational family 87 The governance of family life happens not just in national laws that can transcend national boundaries, but also in international law, as Linde (2014) argues. International human rights law that protects the rights of the child has played a role in shaping national laws in various countries, and in shaping the global conceptualisation of childhood itself. In this way, the protections afforded the child have diffused globally. Linde suggests that the remarkable shift from children conceptualised as the property of their fathers into sacralised citizens regardless of race, class and gender indicates profound changes in state and family structures. In this way, the family unit in the form of the parental-child relationship enters into international relations. Park (2014) on the other hand draws attention to what she terms ‘cultural racialisation’ in the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen minor who was detained in Guantanamo Bay by the US, and whose repatriation was not requested or aided by the Canadian government. Indeed, his family was vilified as an ‘Al-Qaeda family’ in the Canadian media. Thus, Park argues that race and culture do indeed continue to impede upon the national and international protections afforded the child. Implications of this cultural racialisation for Park are pronounced when it comes to citizenship, or what may be read as the political agency of the child. The cultural racialisation of the child either limits citizenship through a ‘logic of protectionism [pertaining to the ‘child’], or negates it through a logic of pure exclusion’ [pertaining to the racialized subject] (Park 2014: 44, citing Hage 2006). Nevertheless, both of these processes are relevant at the international level, illustrating the limitations of a global conceptualisation of childhood, the power of citizenship as a broker of inclusion, and the power of race and culture to differentiate subject positions. The family unit intervenes where the media demonization of Khadr’s ‘Al-Qaeda family’ arguably contributed to the logic by which Canada failed to request Khadr’s repatriation. Here, the impact of the family in the constitution of the individual is significant. The reality of the governance of (im)migration is perhaps the most obvious place where the governance of the intimate transcends international borders. D’Aoust’s (2013) account of the governmentality of marriage migration illustrates how the governance of intimacy and private lives seeps across international borders. She demonstrates that in recent years there has been a large increase in legislation pertaining to marriage migration, which serves to define the content of marriage and matrimonial relationships with a view to preventing immigration based on ‘sham’ marriages. While d’Aoust is primarily interested in how this management of the politics of love affects both processes and understandings of governmentality, it is clear that the management of love, intimacy and marriage in cases of immigration reproduce the logics of the racialized governance of intimacy that is identified by Turner (2017) within the state. Turner (2015) also illustrates how these practices function across British colonial territories, whereby in the early twentieth century it became common for women to join their husbands working abroad in the colonies as an instrumental policy to avoid interracial marriages and relationships, and to maintain the racial hierarchies at the core of the governing logic of the British Empire. As Stoler argues, these racial

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technologies of governance were not ‘a colonial reflex, fashioned to deal with the distant Other, but part of the very making of Europeans themselves,’ establishing standards of European identity that depended on racial membership, civility, ‘good breeding’, and a proper upbringing (Stoler 2002). D’Aoust indicates similar governance of marriage and intimacy operating upon incoming immigrants; for example, historically immigration applications by Indian men to join spouses in the UK have been denied on the basis that arranged marriages are not based on love relationships. Moreover, she cites a Ukrainian immigration official who determined that a prospective partner of an American man was likely earning her living through prostitution, which was indicated through her travel to Turkey (d’Aoust 2013). The connection between the governance of marriage migration and bourgeois family values is also excavated by Innes and Steele (2015), who argue that the 2012 spousal visa rules that include a minimum income requirement in the UK ‘reproduce the white British family unit with a male breadwinner and a subservient female homemaker’ (Innes and Steele 2015: 402). In this article, we demonstrate that the minimum income requirement is standardised in a way that reproduces the discriminatory biases against women, people of colour, low income professions and geographic area that are extant in contemporary Western society. These examples illustrate the reality that the content of marriage and of intimate relationships in Western states remains tied to and reproduces bourgeois family values. In this chapter, I delve into the experience of the transnational family in particular. I am interested in the transnational family specifically as a unit that by its nature transcends national boundaries. I argue that the transnational family unit disrupts and has the potential to expose state narratives of the blood-nation-territory connection, while also at times complicating these narratives as the transnational state of being produces overlapping and layered blood-nation-territory connections. Nevertheless, the existence of the transnational family and the identities of transnational family members through their very being undermine narratives of glory and national superiority that produce belonging at the national level, although their capacity to undermine and challenge these powerful narratives of nationalism is constantly inhibited by discrimination. Nevertheless, attending to the significance of the transnational family can therefore provide access to the politics of discrimination as they persist in national governance. The role of the nation must be reconfigured and re-understood for members of transnational families, particularly mixed-nationality families, to account for the ways in which those transnational family members are reconfiguring, reconceptualising and theorising the role of nation, identity and territory. In the following section I introduce literature on transnational families that has featured significantly in history, sociology and anthropology. I then place this in the context of Nicholaos’ family life. Drawing from interviews with Nicholaos’ three adult children, I consider how transnational family life complicates emotional connections to homeland, what the added complications are of second-generation and mixednationality identities, and how the emotional labour of international relations is undertaken by members of transnational families.

Theorising the transnational family 89

Being transnational In 1951 Oscar Handlin (2002) published The Uprooted, which would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1952. This book traces the experiences of the European immigrants who ‘built America’ and established the trope of the ‘epic narrative’ of overcoming adversity in the country of immigration to vindicate the decision to travel with upward mobility and success. While this proved a seminal work, it has long been discredited (Hammerton 2004, citing Bodnar 1985), yet as Hammerton acknowledges, the conventional narrative of the migrant journey characterised by hardship followed by vindication and success is one that has survived Handlin’s critics. The form and content of the migrant narrative itself can offer particular insight into the fragmented experience of being transnational. For example, anthropologist Andrew Walsh (2004) deconstructs the narrative of a Malagasy/French woman named Soa who was born into a transnational family in Madagascar, and later immigrated to France, thus double-layering her transnational experience. Using excerpts from her narrative of migration, he finds an ‘ironic stance’ in her selfhood that allows her at once to belong and to disassociate or to temper her own belonging to national and local communities. Soa’s experience of transnationalism is to produce dual selves for whom both belonging to and alienation from particular communities is a possibility. In Walsh’s account, the emphasis on irony suggests that, despite discrimination faced particularly in France, Soa’s identity allowed her to take control of her belonging and her alienation. She does not permit her communities to welcome her or to cast her out, but chooses whether to join or to disassociate according to her own narrative of self-awareness. This reading of a self-aware and self-written narrative positions the transnational subject as an agent who negotiates her own circumstances rather than a passive victim of discrimination and xenophobia. In the accounts discussed later from Nicholaos’ children, a similar awareness is apparent, although they each sense a form of protection from xenophobia being afforded them by decisions taken by their parents, perhaps compromising their agency to some extent, which they all reflect on in later life. Chamberlain and Leydesdorff (2004) argue that narrative memories are particularly revealing for transnational families, because of the quite unique experiences of these families especially when maintaining contact with family across borders or living a transient life across borders. The social or collective aspects of memory as identified by Halbwachs (1992) become important for the family to establish a sense of place and a sense of identity (Chamberlain and Leydesdorff 2004, see also Hammerton 2004 and Neyzi 2004). Research into contemporary transnational families has proliferated over recent years, in accordance with growing attention to migrant domestic workers and offshore workers disrupting the conventional family unit (Baldasser and Merla 2014; Silvey 2006; Hoang and Yeoh 2011). There is little work that documents the historic experiences of transnational families over time, or the particular phenomenon of growing up in a transnational family with a bi-national identity. Attending to the memories

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of growing up recounted by Nicholaos’ children allows for insight into the way they remember and characterise their experiences. They all emphasise that they did not think of themselves as being either Cypriot or British because reflection on self-identity was not something that formed an important part of their lives. However, they all mentioned that they were brought up to believe no one is better than anybody else. They have neither a conscious or continuous sense of belonging nor a sense of dislocation, but subscribe to a universal cosmopolitan ideal that they associate with their experience of transnationalism. Nevertheless, they each narrate experiences of times at which they adopt a sense of belonging to a national identity that will be explored further in the following.

The Cypriot experience There are large Cypriot diaspora communities in Greece, the UK, Canada, South Africa, Turkey, the United States and Australia, and smaller Cypriot diaspora communities elsewhere, thus the Cypriot transnational experience is wide and varied. It is worth briefly noting the complexity of the language of diaspora and transnationalism before embarking on this discussion. Diaspora has conventionally been thought of as a means of studying populations that are displaced from the homeland but maintain transnational ties, although the term is difficult to pin down, giving the constantly changing nature of diasporic and transnational populations, communities and identities (Hall 1990; Gilroy 1993; Clifford 1994). When referring to populations external to the homeland but with ongoing ties to the homeland, to be part of a diaspora does not necessarily require social interaction with other members of the diaspora so much as it requires interaction between diaspora and homeland. The Cypriot diaspora includes well-established diasporic communities, which produce their own sense of belonging and identity. For example, a second generation Cypriot born in London might identify as a British Cypriot, but separate that identity from a Cypriot identity. The diasporic community involves social ties and interactions amongst community members based on a shared identity that is tied to but not dependent on interaction with the homeland. The ways in which Cypriot diasporic communities define themselves make it difficult to quantify them. For example, in the UK in 2010 the National Office for Statistics estimated that there were 56,000 people born in Cyprus resident in the UK (Teerling 2015). Yet, the estimates for the Cypriot community range from 160,000 to more than 300,000, hence the community is inclusive of second and third generation Cypriots (Ibid, citing Anthias 1992; Constantinides 1977; Oakley 1979; Papapavlou and Pavlou 2001). Furthermore, when speaking of the Cypriot community, one might speak of the Greek Cypriot diasporic community, the Turkish Cypriot diasporic community, or simply the Cypriot diasporic community which involves members of both ethnic groups (Chatzipanagiotidou 2012). Cyprus has been characterised as a country of emigration since the 1920s because of the number of Cypriots migrating to the UK and elsewhere throughout

Theorising the transnational family 91 the British Empire from this time onwards; however, this replicates racialized histories of migration that neglect to incorporate colonial movements. Thus, assuming Cyprus to be predominantly a country of emigration neglects the British presence in Cyprus from the 1920s onwards. Instead, it pinpoints Cyprus’ shift to a country of immigration as coinciding with the growth in Eastern European and South Asian immigration to the island over the last two decades. The narrative of Cypriot emigration also tends not to take into account immigration to Northern Cyprus from Turkey that happened following the division of the island and shifted the demographics of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) with 17% of the Turkish Cypriot population having at least one non-Cypriot Turkish born parent, and 27% holding Turkish citizenship (although Turkish Cypriots often acquire Turkish citizenship for travel purposes as the TRNC lacks international recognition). Nevertheless, the British continue to form the biggest minority population on the island, comprising just less than 15% of the total population. While there was Cypriot immigration towards the UK as early as the 1920s, the highest numbers of incomers to the UK entered in the 1950s and 60s (Oakley 1980). This mirrors the pattern of most British colonial immigrant populations, with immigration to Britain surging between the 1948 Nationality Act and the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Furthermore, the ongoing struggle with EOKA in Cyprus and the political uncertainty in Cyprus that immediately followed independence in 1960 encouraged further emigration from the island. The shift in the identity of the Cypriot community, from successful economic immigrants and entrepreneurs to refugees, indicates a further complication in the social identity and collective memory of the diasporic community (Innes 2017). Collective memories performed through ceremonies, cultural practices, the construction of monuments and the circulation of other symbols form a means of producing and maintaining a collective identity (Edkins 2003; Innes 2017). Halbwachs (1992) conceptualised memory as a collective process, and Edkins (2003) and Steele (2008) have developed the role of memory in national identity formation and reproduction. I argued in former work that transnational and diasporic identities disrupt the conventional understanding of the collective reproduction of national identity because they offer a rewriting of that identity to encompass identities that are hybrid or plural (Innes 2017). While collective identity narratives invoke memory to reproduce the identity over time, transnational identities must reform and remake themselves to reflect changing relationships with the homeland and the changing composition of the diaspora community. For example, Garip (2016) provides an analysis of four different waves of Mexican immigration to the US over time. The changing characteristics of Mexican immigration mean that the diaspora in the US takes on different characteristics over time. Furthermore, as immigrants have children, the children have a new relationship with the homeland, which they may or may not visit but to which they nevertheless continue to feel a sense of belonging, and the hostland, which feels like home although it may be a home in which they suffer discrimination and xenophobia.

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Chatzipanagiotidou (2012) emphasises the diversity of the Cypriot diasporic experience in her ethnographic study. She finds that there are some political antagonisms, and some efforts to remain united across ethnicity and religion. She finds that there are differences amongst first generation and amongst second generation immigrants, drawing on Brah (1996) who argues that the diasporic experience is made in everyday life and involves a multiplicity of experiences. Chatzipanagiotidou underlines the variation in relationship with the homeland amongst second generation, some of whom have spent large portions of their childhood in Cyprus, others of whom have never been but are embedded in a Cypriot community in London. Conventionally, when talking about different generations of immigrants, one talks of the first generation who undertakes the act of moving from one country to another, their children who comprise the second generation, and their grandchildren who are the third, and so on. Yet, a first-generation immigrant in the 1920s will have had a very different experience from that of a first-generation immigrant in the 1990s, thus making generations a difficult category from which to generalise. Instead, scholars have looked at the events that have provoked the formation of diaspora communities as a better vehicle through which to understand them (Budryte 2013; Innes 2017). For Cypriot immigrants in particular, 1974 represents a specific moment of trauma that disrupts the identity narrative and remakes it in a different way to encompass those exiled – either in 1974 or by the subsequent division of the island that meant people who had immigrated previously and were already resident in the UK when the 1974 division of the island happened could no longer return to their home villages. In fact, the two biggest Cypriot organisations in the UK National Federation of Cypriots in the UK and Lobby for Cyprus were both formed after 1974 and both state as a core organisational objective to reunite the divided island. It is clear that the trauma of 1974 influenced the identity of the diaspora community as a whole, even those members whose arrival predated the division of the island. Nevertheless, it is impossible to generalise about the diasporic experience as so much diversity is encompassed within it. Turning to Nicholaos and his family, it is important to acknowledge the unique circumstances they experienced. As discussed earlier, Nicholaos was not part of the Cypriot community in the UK. His immigration had been guaranteed by a British couple from the North East, and he moved directly to this white, working-class community where he remained throughout his time in the UK. While he then guaranteed the immigration of a niece in 1969 who subsequently joined other relatives in London, Nicholaos himself never moved into a community of Cypriots. Yet, the family was a transnational and diasporic family in two senses. The first was that Nicholaos and Sylvia were of different nationalities and both nationalities influenced their way of life. The second was that they maintained ties with friends and family in Cyprus, particularly from the early 1970s onwards, when they made their first family visit to Cyprus. In what follows I turn to the reflections of Nicholaos’ three adult children on their experiences of growing up in a transnational family in the 1960s and 1970s. I examine the implications of transnational family life in this context for theorising the politics of national identity and belonging.

Theorising the transnational family 93

Cypriot Geordies: transnational family life The interviews with Barbara, Andreas and Anna were each taken in private, in a setting that was comfortable to both the interview participant and the interviewer. These recorded reflections have also been enriched by preceding and subsequent conversations. Barbara is the eldest, born in October 1957, followed by Andreas in October 1958 and Anna in September 1959. Sylvia was 20 and Nicholaos was 25 when their youngest child was born. Sylvia is the eldest child of a large, extended North Eastern mining family, and her youngest sibling was born only twenty-one months before her first child. Despite initial reservations due to Nicholaos being a foreigner, both Nicholaos and Sylvia remember that Sylvia’s mother Katie (Kathleen) doted on the Haralampous children. Barbara, Andreas and Anna all remember a happy childhood. Several themes emerged that were common to each of the three interviews. All three interview participants were asked to reflect on their experiences of growing up in a transnational family in the North East of England during the 1960s and 1970s. In reflecting on their family life, Barbara, Andreas and Anna all considered their relationship with the Greek language (none of the siblings speaks Greek fluently), their past or future desires to move to Cyprus permanently, and their encounters with discrimination; indeed, each of the siblings independently expressed the thought that they were in some way protected or buffered from direct discrimination or xenophobia. Both Barbara and Andreas talked in some detail about their feelings surrounding the 1974 invasion/intervention in Cyprus

Figure 4.1 The Haralampous family circa 1961

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by Turkey. Both Anna and Andreas reflected at some length on visiting Cyprus and spending time with their family members. In what follows I’ll offer some discussion of these themes and offer analysis as to how they demonstrate a practical re-theorising of the blood-nation-territory connection that is lived by transnational families. Growing up transnationally Barbara, Andreas and Anna tend to refer to themselves, or their Cypriot identity, as Greek rather than Cypriot. This reflects the politics of the 1950s. When Nicholaos moved to the UK he would refer to himself as Greek rather than Cypriot as there was news coverage of the Cypriot conflict with British occupying forces in the Cypriot struggle for independence. Nicholaos wanted to avoid controversy, and as a Greek Cypriot the obvious way to do this was to describe himself as Greek. While the attachment that Barbara, Andreas and Anna describe refers to Cyprus (indeed, they did not visit Greece or have a relationship with Greece while growing up, although they have each visited since), they refer to Greek rather than Cypriot identity throughout the interviews. All three siblings remarked on how growing up in a transnational family was not something they thought about much, because it was normality. As Anna described: Early-early we knew that we were half and half, you know you thought, right I’m half English, I’m half. You didn’t know . . . what Greek was, you knew you were Greek but not what it was about . . . but as you got older, I suppose you understood a little bit more, you . . . you didn’t sort of understand that in a way that you were different, you knew there was something and that your dad . . . came from a different place to your mam, but I never . . . . . . sort of thought that I was any different, do you know what I mean? I didn’t think of my dad, ohh my dad’s different to my mam, because he was a different nationality. Anna expresses that nationality as a concept did not hold a strong meaning in her everyday life. She was aware that she was half Cypriot but she did not dwell on this making her different. Andreas similarly said that he was ‘indistinguishable from anybody who was, er, pure Geordie growing up in Newcastle’ and the meaning he attached to Cypriot identity in his early life was characterised by following international sporting competitions such as the Olympics and the World Cup. Barbara speaks in more general terms, saying ‘I’ve never really felt like I’m from any country’ and attributes her lack of national identity to growing up in a transnational family, saying ‘we were brought up to think nobody was better than anybody else.’ The latter, Barbara applies to both social hierarchy and national identity, clarifying that she was brought up to tolerate other people’s views and to believe that people had to earn respect rather than simply being attributed respect because of their social position. In her view, this stemmed from her father ‘being

Theorising the transnational family 95 Greek’. This contrasts, to some degree, with accounts of people who grew up embedded in a diaspora community, where preserving national identity is often foregrounded in day-to-day life (Chatzipanagiotidou 2012; Teerling 2015). Barbara and Anna do not recount conscious cultural practices, yet the everydayness of being transnational is lived in everyday life. For example, they each dwell on the idea of freedom and contrast their experiences with that of their peers, and in the case of Andreas, with that of his sisters. Anna recounted her experience as a teenager: [her father] used to pick us up and take us, pick us up from everywhere, you didn’t go out, you had a different outlook to other people, we used to get taken to a party but we would get taken there, we would be picked up . . . . I just felt no, you didn’t do that sort of thing [going to nightclubs] because that was sort of . . . they [her parents] were more protective I think. She remembered that she did not have the same freedoms her friends and peers had, although she clarified that this idea was based on her perception, and it is difficult to know for sure how other families acted. Andreas pointed out that he ‘had more freedom either in Cyprus or at home than my sisters ever had.’ Anna also indicated the gendered lifestyle in which Andreas did not have to participate in household chores, saying ‘before he went to university he didn’t do anything, didn’t do ironing’ but she acknowledged that this was not necessarily a result of living in a transnational household, but of an awareness of ‘what was classed as right and wrong.’ Barbara focused on the family-oriented nature of her upbringing; she did not describe a lack of freedom but rather a focus on obligation to her family and living ‘a much more family oriented way of life’ than her friends and peers. Andreas did reflect on some more overt cultural practices that were not lived as conscious cultural practices that could be considered a performance of national identity in his childhood, yet can be understood as more overt examples of Cypriotness in everyday life: For example, Andreas describes: sort of little things like, like food we would eat. I mean to have a salad with oil and vinegar on was unheard of in Newcastle in the 1970s. You know, salad was what the . . . sort of whole tomato and scrap of lettuce at the side of a plate, not the nice sort of proper Greek salad all mixed up . . . we occasionally went to erm, Greek Orthodox church services that they used to have in Newcastle and they were a bit strange, you know with the priest with his shaker full of incense at the front . . . when I was sort of 6, 7, 8 maybe, and you know Easter you’d get a red egg. Because the Easter services were the big ones that I think we’d be dragged along to. So you’d get a red egg. Specific cultural practices then were part of everyday life but were not embedded in a way that reproduced a significant national identity or a feeling of cultural belonging. These practices were normal for the family, but not externalised into

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a sense of national identity. It is significant that they were not shared cultural practices within the context of a Cypriot community because they lived in a white working-class mining community in North Tyneside. There was no permanent Greek Orthodox Church, but Greek Orthodox services provided in the city centre of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in an Anglican church. Nevertheless, none of the three siblings recalled socialising at the church or having any contact with other Greek or Cypriot families, indicating that the social aspect of national identity was missing in their experience and hence contributed to the fact that holding a conceptual national identity was not an important part of their experiences. The practice of a transnational identity instead saw the incorporation of aspects of Cypriotness into everyday life in a way that was banal and unremarkable in the doing, but evident upon reflection. Greek language None of the siblings speak Greek fluently. A tale told frequently in family folklore and recounted by both Nicholaos and Barbara explains this: until the age of three, Barbara understood and spoke Greek. When the family were on holiday in Scarborough some children with whom she had been playing overheard her asking her father for some stafili (grapes) and laughed at her. She recoiled under the attention and didn’t speak Greek again, so over time Nicholaos stopped speaking Greek to her. A shared language is considered one of the facets that produce and reproduce a shared national identity. Indeed, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities lists language as one of the elements through which nations are socially constructed (Anderson 1983). Growing up in a transnational family that was not part of the diaspora community and instead embedded in a white working-class community of course made preserving the use of Greek language difficult. Nevertheless, Barbara, Andreas and Anna all regret the fact that they do not speak the language. Yet, they all remain connected to the Cypriot part of their identity and the regret they articulate is associated with lacking a skill rather than reflecting something more fundamental in their connection to Cyprus. For example, Anna articulates: I wish I could speak it, I wish we had been bilingual and spoke fluent, but, erm, . . . I don’t think it would have made any difference, I think when you’re young you don’t realise things like that. But as you got older you obviously, you want to, you want to have been able to speak the language. Anna has spent the most time in Cyprus of the three siblings, spending part of every year in Paphos since her first visit at the age of ten. She reflects that people always speak to her in Greek when she is in Cyprus, and she wishes she could reply. This is a common experience of Cypriots who were brought up in the UK, even those who grew up within a Greek diaspora community (Teerling 2015). In part, this language discrepancy is due to the longevity of the Cypriot diaspora and the fluid nature of language. Many people who left Cyprus in the 1950s speak a colloquial form of the language (sometimes referred to as ‘village’ Greek) and

Theorising the transnational family 97 have passed on the colloquialisms and antiquated phrases to their children, which marks them as ‘British Cypriots’ when in Cyprus. In other cases people speak Greek at home but do not have a wide range of vocabulary, or lack reading and writing skills in a way that limits broad use of the Greek language in a variety of situations. Thus, it is common for Cypriots born or raised outside of the island to share the same feelings that Anna expressed. Barbara also reflects on her lack of language skills. She described her efforts to learn the language proving difficult, because ‘when we used to sit and listen [to her father] for hours, we would switch off.’ Andreas similarly reflects that he only cared about learning the language after having visited Cyprus for the first time. He described his efforts to learn under the instruction of Nicholaos, although he found his father’s teaching style difficult: I did have a couple of goes of learning myself. But on top of school work and no real . . . teacher to encourage, it’s quite hard. You know, it’s the sort of thing you have a book that would set it out in lessons to learn . . . and I would try to follow that, try to get [his father] to help. But he wasn’t interested in following the lessons. He wanted to move at 300 miles an hour and teach other things . . . if we’d done maybe a lesson a week we would have got through the book in a year and it could have been really good but . . . it, it didn’t work. The lack of language produced a source of frustration for Andreas, who describes a desire to move to Greece temporarily and immerse himself in Greek language when he retires, in order to fulfil his ambition to speak and understand the language fluently. While the lack of Greek language skills might potentially inhibit a sense of national identity, it plays into a transnational Cypriot identity shared by British Cypriots who struggle with the language. For Andreas the lack of Greek language is expressed as a personal failing rather than a missing attribute of his identity. He continues to want to acquire the language to fulfil his frustrated ambitions. Barbara associated her lack of the language to the familiarity of hearing it, and to the experience of being exposed to a language that she does not understand as part of the banal and the everyday. The lack of the language perhaps holds the most meaning for Anna who spends the most time in Cyprus. The lack of Greek language is meaningful when it works in opposition to the recognition of her sense of belonging in Cyprus by local Cypriots, who can then mark her as a British Cypriot. This is not necessarily a desirable identity because Anna did not grow up within a British Cypriot community. Her experience of Cyprus has been predominantly local to the island, thus she occupies a space that is somewhere between a native Cypriot identity and a British Cypriot diasporic identity. Moving to Cyprus Barbara, Andreas and Anna have all considered relocation, or consider it for the future, but none of them have made the move from the UK to Cyprus, or have any concrete plans to do so. Indeed, Barbara and Anna both still live within two

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miles of Burn Terrace, Nicholaos’ first address in the UK. Anna generally divides her time between the UK and Cyprus, spending one or two months of the year in Paphos. Barbara visits less frequently but still quite regularly. Nevertheless, the potential of moving to Cyprus has remained a constant in their lives. Barbara described how she considered moving to Cyprus when she was offered a job in Lefkosia in the late 1980s: I was offered a job here and . . . [my children] would have been about four or five. And, one of the doctors at work used to do a lot of work [in] Cyprus. He was a kidney doctor and they needed somebody to set up the histology lab here and because . . . because [my father] was Greek [Cypriot] I could do it, because at the time civil servants, at the time . . . you had to hold the nationality to do it. And [my husband] really, really wanted to. And we looked into it. But it would have meant I would have been the main one working and I didn’t want to do that. Barbara decided not to make the move because she did not want to be a full-time working mother. Her parents were living in Cyprus at the time, but they were in Paphos which, before the construction of the motorway in 1996, was several hours drive away from Lefkosia. Nevertheless, she considered the opportunity and thirty years later still occasionally questions whether she made the right decision. Anna described considering moving to Cyprus ‘all the time’ but never having had the right moment to do so. She says she has not ruled it out but expresses the difficulty of living in a family that has cross-national ties: ‘when you’ve got [indicated towards grandson] all the family, and that’s the trouble with families like that. When you’ve got two families . . . it depends where you stay and where your kids are, you know. I think that’s the difficult bit.’ In this way, the decision Nicholaos made to travel to the North East of England from Famagusta in 1954 reproduces itself in decisions made by Barbara and Anna who feel a desire to ‘return’ to live on the island and yet are embedded in their daily lives in the North East and their various familial and work obligations. Thus the transnational ‘pull’ is reproduced in second generation immigrants but is complicated by the duality and hybridity of identity and belonging, even when national identity and national belonging is not conceptually important in their lives. The transnational identity is made not in ties to territory but in ties to family and ties to the lived experience of daily life. There is not an overarching narrative of nation-blood-territory, but there are pragmatic lived experiences making identity and making decisions. Andreas has perhaps had a more complex relationship with the notion of ‘return’ to Cyprus. He recounted travelling to Cyprus to spend time with his cousins in his youth, both as part of family holidays and several times without his parents. He built close relationships with extended family members in Cyprus, describing that ‘it was different because I went on my own. And so I was staying with, erm, different aunts and uncles, but you know, just meeting up with cousins and going out, and getting lifts off their parents or going swimming and getting buses.’ As an adult he did not visit Cyprus as frequently as his sisters, yet the legacy of

Theorising the transnational family 99 Nicholaos’ immigration remained an important part of his life. In the 1980s he lived in the Netherlands and in the 1990s he lived in the US. He reflected on these decisions: ‘I think when I went to Holland I was . . . I was emulating my Dad. You know, in a way. It was an opportunity to work abroad. . . . Having said that, I would recommend it to anybody.’ While Anna and Barbara both recount the difficulties of living with family ties in both places, Andreas associates living abroad with very positive experiences. This impacts his position that he ‘would like to spend a year living in, actually living in Greece, because if I’m honest I love Greece, I love it more than Cyprus, and I could, I would like to go and try immerse myself and learn the language.’ Andreas’ university education at Imperial College London and subsequent successful career enabled him the opportunity to live abroad on semi-permanent and non-permanent bases. Thus, he expressed his attitude to living abroad differently from that of his sisters who did not approach it with the same sense of flexibility. This different approach can be attributed to gendered and classed differences. Despite coming from the same working-class background, Anna and Barbara did not receive a traditional university education, and as women remained tied to family obligations. Indeed, Barbara’s role as a mother and her desire to be present for her children prevented her from pursuing the available career opportunity in Cyprus in the 1980s. Anna’s position as mother and grandmother continues to prevent the ‘right time’ to move to Cyprus from appearing. Andreas experienced a different subject position as an educated white male. He moved to the Netherlands before he was married when his university education afforded him the opportunity to work abroad. He was seconded to the US for almost two years later in his career. His masculine and professional subject position did not raise the same familial obligations that his sisters experienced and that capacity to remain more detached is reflected in his consideration of a nonpermanent move after retirement. Greekness and conflict I noted previously that all of the siblings refer to being ‘Greek’ rather than Cypriot, something attributed to Nicholaos’ reluctance to mark himself as Cypriot when in Britain during the conflict between Britain and Cyprus in the struggle for independence. Nevertheless that sense of Greek identity can also be associated with the importance of the 1974 invasion/intervention in Cyprus at a formative stage in Barbara, Andreas and Anna’s relationship with Cyprus. The family visited Cyprus twice before the invasion/intervention and visited again in 1975 almost one year after the military action that divided the island in two parts. Barbara recalled: When we came back we had to fly to Athens and get on these tiny little planes with propellers and when we landed there was just soldiers with guns. And when we drove, you couldn’t land at Nicosia. We landed . . . I don’t know where we landed . . . . And then when we were driving to Paphos, or if you went out anywhere, quite often there was road blocks, soldiers and they would like look in the cars and things and I didn’t like it . . . . It was awful

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The memory of military presence and the reality of refugee camps affected Barbara’s perception of the conflict. Anna did not remember the details in the same way that Barbara did, but remembered that they did not travel around the island in the same way they had done previously: We didn’t venture and [her father] would tell us the tales about . . . different members of the family, about what they had done during the invasion, but not, erm, I can’t remember . . . . I remember being at our uncle George’s and neighbours coming and they were going over [to the North] because they were Turkish Cypriot, and they didn’t want to. I remember that. The conflict did not impact Barbara and Anna directly but was closely linked to their relationships with family in Cyprus. As Cathy Caruth argues, witnesses to trauma are subjects of trauma in that they still experience trauma, albeit not firsthand (Caruth 1995). While the family were not present in Cyprus at the time of the active conflict, they witnessed it in roadblocks, the presence of troops in the streets, the form of the anxiety it caused Nicholaos, the efforts to connect with family and friends in Cyprus, and the information passed to them about what had happened to various family members. Trauma often shapes national and diasporic identity narratives in the sense that state actions in the event of trauma might contradict the way a state or a collective sees itself in the world. It also offers a rupture and opportunity for re-shaping national or collective identity (Edkins 2003; Steele 2008; Innes and Steele 2013). For diaspora communities, in cases where the trauma led to the migration that was formative of the community, then the way that trauma was and is memorialised by the community is formative of and reproduces community identity (Innes 2017). The Cypriot diaspora in the UK predated the conflict, but this conflict changed the nature of the diaspora, which shifted from being characterised by voluntary migrants who had travelled to the UK for work or education, to refugees who could not return to their homes, even in cases where they had left those homes before the invasion when return was still possible (Ibid). Nicholaos was originally from the Paphos area and could return. Yet, the trauma of the invasion/intervention and the subsequent division of the island marked and changed the relationship with Cyprus, which became more consciously political. This perhaps contributed to the siblings’ habit of referring to a Greek identity rather than a Cypriot one, as a means of distancing Cypriot identity from Turkish identity. In foregrounding military conflict, the gendering of experience again comes to the fore. Andreas experienced the conflict in a more direct and bodily way than his sisters. This was largely because, as a male of military age with a Cypriot name, he was subject to be recruited for military service. His experience echoes Nicholaos’ conscription in the UK, although Andreas was not recruited directly or arrested. He describes his experience:

Theorising the transnational family 101 [T]he Turkish invasion [was] in 1974, so I was 15, going on 16 when that happened. I was actually due erm, I was going to go to Cyprus on my own that year. I had tickets and money changed and the invasion was something like 7th of August. And . . . I got very angry about that, about the invasion and all of that. If anything, that pushed me more towards wanting to claim that sort of Cypriotness. Although, when I went the next year and really sort of found out where national service. . . . It was when I, when I tried to leave the country, I was actually, I was held at gunpoint whilst my uncle was arguing in Greek that I couldn’t understand, that you know, I, I was English. And I actually had to walk across the tarmac carrying my suitcase to the aircraft because it had left, to get on it. It was very last minute that I managed to get on the flight back to England . . . . I say held at gunpoint, there was a guy, a soldier in the room, who was probably 6 months older than me. He was obviously told not to talk to me, and in the other half of the room my uncle and this immigration official were arguing and then I was told in English that the next time I come I had to make sure to get an exit visa from Nicosia. And just as a point of interest, when I did go to get an exit visa, they said ‘no, he’s English he doesn’t need an exit visa, he’ll only give it to his cousin’, so I never could get one . . . . But that, Turkish invasion in 74, that made a big impression. And today I still won’t buy sultanas packed in Turkey or, I don’t buy Jacobs cream crackers because Jacobs is now a Turkish company. And lots of things, I’m quite, quite careful. Andreas’ experience blurs the line between nationality and transnationality. The invasion, as he refers to it, makes him feel more Cypriot; he recalls wanting to claim the identity because of the anger he felt about the political situation. Yet, that Cypriotness does not reflect the romanticised version of a blood-nation-territory connection in which he is willing to take up arms for his country. He fights, or an uncle fights on his behalf, to preserve his British identity and therefore protection from the two-year military service required of Cypriot men. He was permitted to leave the country but told in future he would need an exit visa to demonstrate his exemption from national service. This led to a further complication in which he was judged as not needing an exit visa to leave the island because he is English, which foregrounds his British nationality and citizenship. Yet, his Cypriot identity and blood connection to Cyprus was simultaneously acknowledged with the statement ‘he’ll only give it to his cousin.’ Thus, Andreas walks the line between Cypriot and British in the way his father did when he was conscripted to the British military in the 1950s. In this example, Andreas lives his transnational identity explicitly. Xenophobia and discrimination Nicholaos was very conscious of discrimination and xenophobia in his narrative memoir, thus in interview I asked Barbara, Andreas and Anna about their own experiences. None of them could remember an occasion on which they’d been subject to anything they would describe as conscious discrimination. Yet, they

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all felt that this was because they had been in some way protected from it by their parents. Barbara raised the issue spontaneously when reflecting on her friendships with other people from transnational background. She recalls ‘I think the Indian friends I had, had suffered quite a lot of abuse and things that we just didn’t.’ While she found points of identification with others from transnational backgrounds, she found her experience to have been markedly different from theirs in that sense. Anna described having ‘a constant feeling of protection’ afforded her by the efforts of her parents and brother, the same efforts that to some degree restricted freedoms as a teenager. She also observed in a conversation preceding the interview that the first time she visited Cyprus she was aware that she was surrounded by people who look like her. Anna has inherited her father’s complexion, which makes her visible in the predominantly white, working-class community in which she still lives. She discussed the complexity of being asked where she is from, which happens to her frequently in her profession working with high school students, and the challenges of formulating an accurate answer. She responds to the question ‘I’m from here, Wallsend’, only to be asked on various occasions ‘but where are you really from?’ This is a difficult question to answer without narrating the complexities of her transnational identity. Andreas talked about discrimination in more detail. He did not experience any active discrimination or xenophobia, but reflected as an adult that one of the main ways he was protected from that discrimination now produces a sense of discomfort. He pinpointed that one of the ways his parents attempted to protect him from discrimination was to ensure that at school he was known as Andrew rather than Andreas, despite Andreas being his given name. He asks: [W]hy was I brought up denying what my own name was? . . . I do find that a bit odd . . . and I don’t know if that’s because there was a perception that if I was called Andreas erm . . . you know, there might be more, er, racism or whatever about it. But you know we only, we had one black family in the school when I was at school and so having a Greek name definitely stood out. It wasn’t as if there was a lot of, you know, it wasn’t as if there was a lot of different races around. So I don’t, I don’t actually remember it, but I do, I mean there is, there’s a couple of things . . . . I don’t think I really suffered from my peers. What I don’t know is from others. But the name thing is the one that bothers me . . . it didn’t bother me at the time, but it bothers me looking back. Andreas acknowledged the reality of growing up in a white working-class community while being different and attributed the use of the name Andrew to being a means of avoiding xenophobia. Nicholaos also anglicised the spelling of the surname he and his family used in the UK from ‘Charalambous’ to ‘Haralampous,’ to reflect phonetic pronunciation. In this context, the siblings, Andreas in particular, were subject to processes of assimilation in Wallsend. Despite being born and raised in Wallsend, the everyday embedded nature of transnational identity meant that they practiced assimilation in a community that was not at all foreign to them. These processes of assimilation were part of the banal everyday of living

Theorising the transnational family 103 in a transnational family. Yet, they can be understood as alienating on reflection as they deny the agency to determine the components of one’s own transnational identity.

Conclusion To grow up in a transnational family in a white working-class community was everyday life for Barbara, Andreas and Anna, thus it was normal, not notable. However, the family unit is a key site in which identity is formed and reproduced, and indeed where national identity is made and remade. The particular ways in which this family practiced a transnational identity were embedded in the rituals and practices of family life, such as in the food they ate and in the management of social encounters. They were not regularly practiced in formal rituals, ceremonies or community events. The more stark reality of having a transnational identity was lived in the form of visits to family in Cyprus and the development of a relationship with the language, and with the pull of belonging in more than one place. The trauma of the 1974 invasion/intervention in Cyprus provides a moment at which the attachment to Greek Cypriot identity becomes less banal and more overt for the siblings as they describe their individual feelings. An interesting facet of this particular experience is the absence of what they recall as overt experiences of discrimination and xenophobia directed at them, aside from Barbara’s experience as a three year old, which propelled the fact that they grew up without knowledge of Greek language. Even this example is not told as a xenophobic encounter, but rather something that produced selfconsciousness. Indeed, the lack of overt experiences of xenophobia means that neither identity they hold is challenged in an active way, allowing both identities to coexist. Hence, Barbara, Andreas and Anna did not describe national identity as a concept as holding significant meaning. Apart from the moment at which Andreas navigated national service they were not asked to declare a nationality. Even for Andreas, his uncle navigated the question and he remained a bystander in the negotiation of his nationality and corresponding responsibilities. Identity in this sense is not linked to a strong blood-nation-territory connection, but is produced, navigated, negotiated and practiced in lived experience. This practice in a sense theorises the nation and national belonging in a banal way that replicates lived experience more closely than narratives of blood and glory. Examining family dynamics in this way demonstrates the ways in which transnational identity is lived and made in everyday life and saturates the family. Narratives of the nation state and national belonging then in the same way are made within the family unit. Transnational families by necessity challenge and deconstruct those narratives.

Note 1 It is relevant to note that Nicholaos’ children are my mother (Barbara), uncle (Andreas) and aunt (Anna). Yet, I have removed familial references from this for the ease of the reader in understanding to whom Barbara, Andreas and Anna refer when speaking.

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For example, if Anna referred to Nicholaos as ‘your granda’, I removed the personal association in the text. If Barbara referred to ‘you and Anna’ meaning myself and my sister, I replaced this reference with ‘her daughters’. This is not intended to disregard the relevancy of the relationships to the data, but is intended to facilitate the reader’s understanding.

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Theorising the transnational family 105 Hammerton, James. 2004. “The Quest for Family and the Mobility of Modernity in Narratives of Postwar British Emigration.” Global Networks 4 (3): 271–84. Handlin, Oscar. 2002. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hoang, Lan Anh, and Brenda S.A. Yeoh. 2011. “Breadwinning Wives and ‘Left-Behind’ Husbands: Men and Masculinities in the Vietnamese Transnational Family.” Gender and Society 25 (6): 717–39. Innes, Alexandria J. 2017. “Mobile Diasporas, Postcolonial Identities: The Green Line in Cyprus.” Postcolonial Studies 20 (3): 353–69. Innes, Alexandria J., and Brent J. Steele. 2013. “Memory, Trauma and Ontological Security.” In Memory and Trauma in International Relations, edited by Erica Resende and Dovile Budryte. London: Routledge. Linde, Robin. 2014. “The Globalization of Childhood: The International Diffusion of Norms and Law against the Child Death Penalty.” European Journal of International Relations 20 (2): 544–68. Neyzi, Leyla. 2004. “Fragmented in Space: The Oral History Narrative of an Arab Christian from Antioch, Turkey.” Global Networks 4 (3): 285–97. Oakley, R. 1979. “Family, Kinship, and Patronage: The Cypriot Migration to Britain.” In Minority Families in Britain: Support and Stress, edited by V.S. Khan, 13–34. London: MacMillan. Papapavlou, A., and P. Pavlou. 2001. “The Interplay of Language Use and Language Maintenance and the Cultural Identity of Greek Cypriots in the UK.” Journal of Applied Linguistics 11 (1): 92–113. Park, Augustine S.J. 2014. “Constituting Omar Khadr: Cultural Racism, Childhood, and Citizenship.” International Political Sociology 8: 43–62. Silvey, Rachel. 2006. “Geographies and Gender and Migration: Spatializing Social Difference.” International Migration Review 40 (1): 64–81. Steele, Brent J. 2008. Ontological Security in International Relations: Self Identity and the IR State. London: Routledge. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Teerling, Janine. 2015. The “Return” of British-Born Cypriots to Cyprus. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. Turner, Joe. 2015. “The Family Migration Visa in the History of Marriage Restrictions: Postcolonial Relations and the UK Border.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 17 (4): 623–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-856X.12059. ———. 2017. “Internal Colonisation: The Intimate Circulations of Empire, Race and Liberal Government.” European Journal of International Relations Online First. https://doi. org/10.1177/1354066117734904. Walsh, Andrew. 2004. “Soa’s Version: Ironic Form and Content in the Self-Account of a Transnational Metisse Narrator.” Global Networks 4 (3): 259–70.

5

Transnational citizenship From Wallsend to Paphos, a feminist narrative of migration

I’d always said I could go, I would go, and I didn’t like to disappoint.

In 1986 Nicholaos and his wife Sylvia decided to move to Cyprus: a return for Nicholaos and an outward migration for Sylvia. This final chapter examines their move back to Cyprus. I consider their move in the context of literature that examines family migration trends, return migration and international retirement migration. Nicholaos and Sylvia moved to Cyprus when the mines closed in the 1980s, following several years of industrial action. Their decision to move was taken by them with the support of their children, and thus can be relevant to the context of family migration. Nicholaos retired from his profession of three decades; he considered working once in Cyprus, but eventually decided against it other than helping out family and volunteering. Sylvia did not seek work in Cyprus due to the different working conditions, but this somewhat enforced retirement impacted her experience and is something she regrets to some extent. Nicholaos and Sylvia were meaningfully younger than typical retirement migrants when they moved. Hence, none of the literatures considered here fully captures the experience of Nicholaos and Sylvia when they moved to Cyprus, yet elements of each of them are relevant for understanding the implications of this part of their story for a theorisation and understanding of transnational citizenship and transnational family life. In 1985 when mines across the UK were closed following ongoing lengthy industrial action, it became clear that Nicholaos would not be returning to the coalface. His children were adults, both of his daughters were married and his son had finished his university degree and was pursuing his already-successful career. Nicholaos no longer had a job to keep him in the UK. Cypriot politics were more stable than they had been in decades. For Nicholaos, this was the first real opportunity where return to Cyprus was a possible outcome: for him the time was right to return. However, migration was not something that he was free to pursue without basing his decision within the context of his family. While his children were adults, they were still a close family unit and he participated in the secondary care of his two granddaughters. Sylvia’s parents were still living and she equally

Transnational citizenship 107 was reluctant to leave her daughters and granddaughters. Nevertheless, they came to the decision to leave. Because the decision to leave appears relatively simple for Nicholaos, but more complex for Sylvia, this chapter will be dominated by Sylvia’s perspective. Typically, research on migration decisions has found that the decisions tend to be dominated by men, and driven by career interests and earning power, which produces a ‘trailing spouse’ effect (Boyle et al. 2008; Cooke 2001). To foreground the female experience of migration then offers a means of contestation to masculinedominated economic models, and offers an opportunity to more thoroughly excavate the everyday experience of making such a decision from a female perspective. Sylvia became a transnational citizen by virtue of marrying a person non-native to her home country. She wilfully acquired transnational identity, unlike her children who were born with such identity. She provides the puzzle to the migration decision that led Nicholaos back to Paphos. In Wallsend, Sylvia was embedded in her extended family, living less than a mile from her parents with her daughters both close by. She often spent time with her granddaughters. She had a successful career, managing a shop. In Cyprus, she was separated from her family and the structure of the local economy meant that she was unable to work. It would be easy to assume that Sylvia was a ‘trailing spouse’ who was simply complying with the wishes of her husband; yet, this is not the story she tells, nor does such an assumption reflect the complexity at the heart of any migration decision that takes place in the context of family life. In what follows I situate Sylvia’s experience of migration to Cyprus in the context of the family migration literature. I examine the everyday life of family migration as a means of accessing the emotional or affective aspects of migration decision-making. The return element also allows insight into transnationalism in the context of migration that reverses the normal pattern of south to north, or poor to wealthy country, further contesting simplified accounts of economic migration. I begin by describing everyday family life in the North East from Sylvia’s perspective, encompassing her experiences in her early married life, with reference in particular to her experiences of ‘minor transnationalism.’ I situate Sylvia’s narrative in the context of working-class feminism. I consider the identity shift that was necessary for Sylvia to ‘become transnational.’ I then move to the decision taken by Nicholaos and Sylvia to move to Cyprus in 1985. Following that, I trace Sylvia’s experiences and feelings about the move. I pursue two main objectives in this chapter. This first is to offer a reading of family migration that revolves around the female perspective in order to provide an alternative to the literature that is dominated by masculine decision-makers and rational choices, and to place that literature in the context of transnational international relations. My second objective is to situate this alternative reading of family migration as a narrative of working-class feminism. Furthermore, I seek to argue that an understanding of migration that is drawn from the context of everyday life suggests an immense complexity that runs counter to conventional narratives of push-pull migration decisions and

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economic motivations, which have provoked sensational media and, all too often, hostility towards migrants.

Becoming transnational Sylvia was the eldest of seven children, born on Bewicke Street in Willington Quay in 1938. Her father, William (known as Bill), who suffered from a chronic lung illness, worked as a caretaker for the local parks. Her mother, Cathleen (known as Katie), did not work until after she had raised her children but later worked as a home help. Her paternal grandfather (Alexander, married to DaisyLee) was a ‘holder-up’ for the welders in the shipyards, and her maternal grandfather (Thomas, married to Catherine) was a coalminer. The family did not have a lot of money, but was close, and in Sylvia’s experience, was dominated by women. Sylvia spent a lot of time with her grandmother and her youngest aunts who lived a short distance away: her aunts were only seven and nine years old when she was born. She does not remember the war because she was too young, but she does remember playing in the then-disused air raid shelters near her house. There was a big green connecting the neighbourhood houses, where she remembers playing cricket in the summer and enjoying a huge bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night each year. She describes her parents as ‘homebirds’ who did not go out a lot; they could not afford luxuries but created a warm family-oriented environment. Sylvia recalls her mother did almost everything to take care of the family, although Sylvia helped with the care of her younger siblings. She left school at fifteen and immediately began working in the grocery shop where she later met Nicholaos: He came to live in the street where the store was. The store was on the corner and he lived in the street. And, erm, he used to walk along the street so we used to watch him. Obviously, because he was different . . . . You know. I mean he was working so . . . when he started working at the mental hospital he was away and then he used to come back on the weekends, things like that. Sylvia and her friend Margaret decided to send Nicholaos a Valentine’s Day card between them and this turned out to be Nicholaos’ and Sylvia’s first introduction, which led them to begin ‘courting.’ After several months, Nicholaos asked Sylvia to marry him. Sylvia says when they first became engaged her parents did not understand. She describes it as ‘hard for them’, although eventually Nicholaos had a good relationship with both her parents. Sylvia and Nicholaos both recall hardship at the beginning of their relationship, but each insists that it was more difficult for the other. Both Nicholaos and Sylvia recall minor incidents of personally targeted racism and xenophobia – for example a co-worker told Nicholaos that no British girl would have a relationship with him because he was ‘a wog’. There was tension between Sylvia and her parents when she and Nicholaos first began their relationship. Nicholaos recalls his mother-in-law telling her daughter that she wouldn’t have ‘any black babies running around.’ Sylvia denies that her

Transnational citizenship 109 mother ever said this. While she remembers her parents taking some time to get used to the idea of her relationship with Nicholaos, she does not remember her mother saying anything explicitly racist. Despite her new exposure to xenophobia and discrimination, and despite the disapproval of her parents, Sylvia was steadfast in her decision to marry. It took some time for her parents to accept Nicholaos into the family, yet they did. This attests to Sylvia’s ability to assert agency, and navigate her choices while remaining a committed part of her family unit. When Sylvia and Nicholaos married, Sylvia encountered new and intersectional forms of discrimination and systemic biases operating against her. The process of becoming transnational means that Sylvia’s relationship with her

Figure 5.1 Nicholaos and Sylvia on their wedding day

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community shifted. She became marked as a person who had married a foreigner, rather than another uncomplicated daughter. In a larger structure, as a workingclass Northern woman Sylvia was already subject to systemic biases. For example, she did not have the opportunity to undertake higher or further education. Sylvia recalls that, on the day she was due to sit her ‘eleven-plus exam’ to qualify for grammar school, she had chicken pox and was unable to take the exam. She had always excelled in school and was confident that she would have passed the exam quite easily. Nevertheless, she missed it and neither the resources nor the will was available to permit her to retake it at another time. It was not considered important enough for a girl of her background to receive a grammar-school education, regardless of her abilities, for the necessary re-sit arrangements to be made. Hence, Sylvia left school at fifteen to work in a grocery store. While her family was close, this also gave her particular responsibilities in her role as the eldest daughter. She was earning money to contribute to the family, and she was available to help with her five younger siblings. When Sylvia married Nicholaos she faced additional forms of systemic discrimination. She was a woman who had married a foreign man, a bearer of a foreign name, and she experienced new concerns for her children. She had three children almost immediately after marrying, with eleven months between each one. Mothering gave her new insight into how her children might experience the world with a foreign name and with the disadvantages associated with being binational. For every difficulty Sylvia might have faced as a working-class white woman, she had to face additional difficulties as part of a transnational marriage. However, she also acquired an intersectional transnationality, not just through marriage but also through her children and in her role as a mother. Her attachment and concern for Barbara, Andreas and Anna meant that she was aware of her identity in a new way. Through the process of becoming a wife and mother and through the associated experiences in her local community, and in the experiences of mothering transnationally, Sylvia herself became transnational. Sylvia’s experiences, following her marriage, were produced through intersecting forms of classism, sexism and xenophobia, which are difficult to extricate and together produced a unique experience of the world (see Crenshaw 1991 for more on intersectionality).

Working class, northern feminists Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune (2013) found that the single biggest predictor of describing oneself as a feminist was higher education. In their book Reclaiming the F Word they seek to define, in accessible language, an inclusive feminism rather than a divisive one, in order to address the exclusion of working-class women and less educated women. Yet, in the ‘Take Action’ advice boxes at the end of each chapter, they include advice such as ‘if you normally wear make-up every day, try not doing so. Let boys wear pink’ (Aune and Redfern 2013: 47); or, ‘when you hear a woman called a “slut”, or claim men are uncontrollably ruled by their penis, point out the double standard’ (Ibid: 75); or ‘encourage men to expand their options beyond “breadwinner,” as fathers or homemakers’ (Ibid: 136); and

Transnational citizenship 111 ‘diversify your consumption . . . reject lazy stereotypes you hear about men and women in everyday life’ (Ibid: 203). While this is not bad advice, it does suggest a program of behaviour for potential feminists. It suggests that individuals need to monitor and change their behaviour in order to fall in line with feminist ideals. A particular history of white, cis, middle-class, Western feminism undergirds this way of thinking: much of the history of feminism has been about education as the route to liberation. First wave feminism focused on equality of opportunity and brought about important shifts in what was legally accessible for woman: even after full female suffrage was established there were plenty of areas in which women were discriminated against. For example, until 1967 in the UK it was still a criminal offense to be a ‘common scold’, an identity that could only be held by an angry woman. Abortion was legalised in 1967, the Equal Pay Act was not passed until 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act that made it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of gender was passed in 1975, and, quite shockingly, marital rape only became illegal in 1991. The achievements of the liberal feminist movement and the consequent legislation to protect women and preserve equality in law can be attributed to people who struggled and sacrificed to access that equality for women. Nevertheless, as a female academic and a Northern woman from a workingclass background, I am familiar with the practice of modifying one’s behaviour in order to ‘fit in’, to comply with norms and social mores, and to consciously and unconsciously attempt to reproduce behaviour that is recognisable to a particular in-group. While the advice given by Redfern and Aune encourages people to reject gender norms and stereotyping, it also produces a new model of behaviour for potential feminists to emulate and adopt. What is missing is an organic model of behaviour, a way of identifying a feminism that already exists within workingclass communities and amongst working-class women. To claim that working-class women are absent from feminist movements is to put definitive boundaries on what constitutes feminism. Yet, working-class women are often reluctant to describe themselves as feminists, or do not identify with feminist movements, at least if media reports are to be believed (see Amara 2012; Smarsh 2017). In this section, I consider Sylvia’s personal history as a feminist narrative. She claimed agency and asserted her decisions, at times in adverse circumstances, such as marrying Nicholaos despite her parents’ discomfort. Yet, she remained rooted in her relationships, community and responsibilities, and emotionally attached to the ties of these commitments. To consider Sylvia’s narrative a feminist narrative is to offer an organic model of behaviour for working-class feminism, rather than a directive to change or modify behaviour. Because class is not understood as an ‘immutable characteristic’, the exclusion of working-class identities from feminist discourses tends to be obscured (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983). Furthermore, working-class women are often absent or obscured in academia more generally. For example, Reay (1997) makes a convincing argument for the contradictory position of the female academic from a working-class background as springing directly from the ‘equal opportunities’ rhetoric that has reconceived the world as a meritocracy without recognising or shifting major structural inequalities. In that sense the female academic from a

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working-class background, who becomes middle class through her education and academic success, thus endorses the meritocracy and associated right wing rhetoric through her very being, while ‘retaining insider knowledge of class inequality’ (Reay 1997: 21). The contradictory position of the working-class female academic is further exacerbated by the necessary changes in behaviour to become successful and maintain success in academia. For example, ‘survival in middleclass contexts for working-class women often requires developing a decorum and reserve that fits in with middle-class standards of female sexuality’ (Ibid, citing Walkerdine 1995). This description by Reay, while written in the 1990s, reflects closely my own experience as a working-class woman entering academia in the mid-2000s. Both consciously and unconsciously, I modified my (Geordie) accent, the way I dressed, my behaviour and demeanour in order to fit into a social space that was unlike the social space in which I had grown up. Part of the reason behind this was my own discomfort in being different from most people I encountered and wanting to demonstrate I was good enough. Part of it was from comments and exclamations directed my way on hearing me speak in my Geordie accent, or regarding the way I dressed. For example, in my undergraduate degree programme people would imitate my accent in a way that was probably goodnatured but I read as mocking. I modified my behaviour both to avoid my own discomfort, but also as this helped me become successful in academia, something that might be true in any highly skilled employment. If this pattern is replicated in the way Reay observes, then working-class female voices are erased from academic contexts. This then explains to some extent why there is little for workingclass women to identify with in academic feminist discourses. Recalling then the arguments made by ‘third wave’ feminists, to appreciate the relevance of class identity for feminism it is necessary to recognise that sex or gender is one facet of identity that is not ultimately the defining characteristic. To briefly rehearse this branch of feminist research, bell hooks articulated that the feminist project is about ending oppressive relationships of domination, and therefore race and class oppressions are part of the feminist struggle (hooks 1984). hooks established the need to delve deeper than the assumption that sex is the defining characteristic of oppression in her observation that analogies drawn between the situation of women and the situation of blacks ‘implies that all women are White and all Blacks are men’ (hooks 1981). Modelling Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1991) theorisation of intersectionality, feminist and class narratives often work in tandem to ensure the continued subordination and exclusion of working-class women, in a similar way that feminist and race narratives work in tandem to ensure the continued subordination and exclusion of black women (Ibid). As Crenshaw argued, plural identities can hide interlocking forms of oppression (Crenshaw 1991). Much of the third wave has focused on race, ethnicity, religion and regional identities in order to address some of the discriminations at the heart of feminism. Indeed, ethnic and racial minority identities often intersect with working-class identities in Western, white-majority states. Feminists have made huge strides in inclusivity to these ends. Nevertheless, I argue here that there are few opportunities for feminists to offer a working-class feminist role model, or a

Transnational citizenship 113 narrative of working-class feminism that can function as a space through which working-class women and men can identify and see themselves in feminism. In this sense, feminism lacks empathy through requiring working-class women to abandon the dominant patriarchal social behaviours in favour of adopting feminist social behaviours without recognising, endorsing or modelling a potential working-class contribution to those feminist social behaviours. The media articles referenced earlier document the struggles of working-class women who literally do not have time to participate in active political feminist movements, or even the time to care about them, or who do not have access to the types of support networks that would allow them to do so, such as flexible working conditions, working hours that coincide with nursery opening hours, a living wage, and so on (Amara 2012; Smarsh 2017). Working women have historically worked in gendered domains, for unequal pay. However, Ferree (1980) observed that the conventional idea that working-class women have socially conservative attitudes and that can explain their lack of participation in the feminist movement was reversed by studies that ‘uncover’ striking strength and non-conformist attitudes amongst working-class women (Ferree 1980: 173–4). It is clear that there is scope to locate strong women within working class everyday life. Indeed, the stereotypical trope of the strong, Northern woman exists in countless examples and variations in popular culture. For example, in Coronation Street, strong, mouthy working-class women are exemplified in characters such as Elsie Tanner, Audrey Roberts, Vera Duckworth, Bet Lynch and Janice Battersby. The stereotype of the ne’er-do-well husband and authoritative wife appear in various guises, such as the Andy Capp cartoons, or the variation of the hen-pecked husband and strong wife in comedy renditions such as in Keeping up Appearances or the characters of Wally and Nora Batty in Last of the Summer Wine. This narrative always places the strong Northern woman (and her henpecked or good-for-nothing husband) as the butt of a joke, and thus reinforces ideals of masculine strength. Yet, the stereotype is based in an identity of female strength that has the potential to be reclaimed. Narratives of working class female strength already exist amongst working-class women, in popular culture and in national discourses. Yet, they have not been articulated for feminism, which valorises particular attributes as strength, such as academic success, career progression, leadership, emotional maturity, emotional sensitivity and reflective thinking while overlooking – and through overlooking, actively undermining – others.

Sylvia: organic working-class feminism The main subject matter of this volume so far has focused on Nicholoas. Nicholaos’ story can be romanticised into the typical male-hero-immigrant narrative. He rejected his peasant background, overcame adversity and overcame the barriers of class and ethnicity, he migrated towards the unknown and joined a community and assimilated into that community (and the particular community – coalminers – is often romanticised as both humble and noble). He was self-made and successful. He was a good, committed, husband, father and provider. However,

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to juxtapose Sylvia’s story highlights the lack of an accessible hero narrative available to women. Sylvia overcame adversity in her relationship with Nicholaos, challenging the barriers of ethnicity and nationalism. Indeed she challenged these barriers through her own agency and choice rather than circumstance. With Nicholaos, she raised three children to value and appreciate their Cypriot roots equally with their British roots despite doing so outside of the influence of a Cypriot community. She worked full time, and rose to a position of relative authority in her profession. She then willingly left behind her community, family and work to migrate to Cyprus. She was a good wife, mother and provider. Yet society does not value the contributions of working-class women in the same way as so many of the contributions are underwritten as basic expectations – such as raising a family – and so this particular hero narrative does not exist. Sylvia would not describe herself as a feminist. Yet, her story is a feminist story. It is the story of a strong woman who made her own decisions and choices and is unapologetic for the fact that some of those decisions are emotionally embedded in her relationships, family and community. She did not eschew the things she valued nor did she change her identity. She does not vocally challenge gender norms in her everyday life (in fact, she is more likely to reinforce them). However, her actions are those of a woman who navigated her constraints with purpose, established preferences and made active choices. She challenged gender norms and expectations in her behaviour. Her perspective and her narrative provides access to a working-class feminism that already exists, which recognises societal and community-based constraints, yet permits attachment to family and community relationships. Sylvia’s narrative both offers empathy to and provides an example for working-class feminists. As cited earlier, Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1983) argued that class is not immutable in the same way gender and ethnicity are, and therefore is analytically different. Class mobility is possible. Yet, identity as a social construction is produced by social interactions and the social environments in which we reside. One can transcend one’s class by behaving differently and consequently transcending or changing one’s identity. One cannot change race or ethnicity through changing behaviour, yet race and ethnicity are also socially constructed categories; they are constructed in a way that emphasizes visibility. Access to middle class decorum and comportment offer possibilities to enter conversations that can also transcend race and ethnicity: this is the intersectional nature of identity. While class is a different marker, and is not always a visible marker in the same way race and ethnicity often are, it is still a marker of difference. Sylvia, a white working-class woman, was perceived differently within her extant social environment when she married a Cypriot man. She became transnational and her identity shifted in a meaningful way without her moving outside of her local environment. When she moved to Cyprus, her identity again shifted because her social environment changed. In studies of transnationalism, the banal experiences of working-class people are given little attention. Conventionally, in the West these are perhaps the people least likely to live transnational lives. Of course diaspora studies and migration

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Figure 5.2 Sylvia at work

studies look at the impact of incoming ethnic and diasporic communities. Migration studies in international relations often focuses on forced migration and the movement of those who migrate in desperate need. While this brings voices to the fore that do not belong to elites or academics, these experiences are still different and separate from everyday working-class life. Work in sociology has examined the effects of immigration on white working-class communities (Rumford 2013; Skey 2010). Yet, the insights of this research generally remain at the macro level, rather than the micro experiences of the everyday that might consider how a transnational relationship plays out, and how a transnational family lives across cultures in everyday life. Sylvia became transnational when she married Nicholaos. Consequently, her identity changed. She shifted from being an uncomplicated member of the white working-class community and the eldest daughter of a large

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family into being the wife of a foreigner, the mother of transnational children, and the bearer of a foreign name. It is significant that Sylvia did this through her own volition (in as much as we have agency in general): Nicholaos was marked as an other, and so could not avoid racism and xenophobia. Sylvia could have refused to embark upon a relationship in order to protect herself from the adversity that would come with it; yet, she instead accepted the adversity because it was her preference and desire to be in the relationship.

Systemic racism and bias in Newcastle Both Nicholaos and Sylvia recounted systemic racism that made life, and in particular the task of establishing a home and family when they were first married, more difficult. Indeed, they both talked about this as the main way they experienced racism, rather than facing direct racism or xenophobia within their social relationships and community. Sylvia describes: you find it’s more official people. You know, people in housing offices and things like that. Or when we used to send stamped-addressed-envelopes in with something when we applied. Because we applied when we were trying to go to Scarborough for a holiday, we used to put a stamped addressed envelope [in the application to bed and breakfast accommodation]. There was only one answer we got and we did go, for a week to Scarborough. . . . But most of them didn’t [reply]. When you sent for houses you just didn’t get answers. I mean, looking back now, we were a little bit put out . . . of course seeing a foreign name. Sylvia attributes the lack of replies to applications for permanent and holiday accommodation to the Greek surname. She compares her experience to those of a Greek woman married to an English man and concludes that such a couple would not have had a problem because they did not have to worry about having a Greek name. Nicholaos attributes some of their difficulties to people believing he was black because of his appearance; he understood the discrimination they experienced as racist discrimination. When they first married, Nicholaos and Sylvia rented a single room from an older woman. She was receptive to them because Nicholaos provided coal for her from his job in the coalmine. Nicholaos and Sylvia applied to the coal board for a house and found that they received no reply. The coal board would not directly refuse them a house based on their foreign name or ethnicity and so the application simply languished, unfulfilled. They noted that other people applied later than they did and were provided with housing before Nicholaos and Sylvia had received any response. They had a similar experience when applying for a mortgage and attempting to buy a property. They were unable to get a mortgage in their married name, and when they attempted to view houses for sale, they found that people did not want to sell property to a foreigner. These systemic problems were not overt in nature, but instead amounted to small but insurmountable frustrations: applications languished with no explanation, and

Transnational citizenship 117 therefore no possibility to appeal a negative decision or to pinpoint discrimination. Nicholaos and Sylvia eventually managed to get a flat from the council. However, Sylvia does not consider all their difficulties to be a result of Nicholaos’ ethnicity. She points out that ‘if you’re from a poor background, people don’t want to help you out.’ In her view, being from a working-class background multiplied their difficulties.

Moving to Cyprus I’d always said I could go, I would go, and I didn’t like to disappoint, but I didn’t really want to go and give up the house, I loved the house and everything. But I’d promised to go and so I went.

Sylvia says simply that she had always promised Nicholaos that she would move to Cyprus in the future, if they had the opportunity. When that opportunity arose, she did not renege on the promise. Their migration can be considered family migration according to the conventional definition, which encompasses married and co-habiting couples, with or without children. It can also fall into the broader definition that includes migration decision-making within extended families. In the latter context, it might only be one person who moves (such as for work) yet the migration affects the whole family, thus the decision is taken by the family, or with the family dynamic in mind, or is shaped by characteristics, beliefs or ideology of a family, rather than by an individual (Bushin 2009; Cooke 2008a, 2008b; Mulder 2007). Nicholaos and Sylvia consulted their children and talked to them about the decision before they moved. Anna was newly married and fully supported her parents. Barbara was concerned that there would be a potential negative effect on her children (my sister and me) who were close to their grandparents, but she also supported her parents’ decision. Andreas was already living abroad in the Netherlands at the time, and their decision to move did not have a big impact on his life. The conventional literature on family migration has been housed in economics, thus it comes as no surprise that economic decision-making has been dominant in understanding why families make the decision to migrate. The traditional literature understands the decision as a purely cost-benefit analysis, which produces a ‘trailing spouse’ effect that disadvantages women simply because men are the breadwinners, whereas more recent literature positions the disadvantages to women more firmly in the structural context, finding that gender inequality in various forms produces biases that disadvantage women and these might be aggravated by migration (Cooke 2008b). For example, women often take the role in the family as primary caregiver. This produces structural disadvantage in terms of employment, given that it often slows down career progress. The wage gap between men and women continues to be salient. Women of childbearing age might be subject to unconscious bias in hiring processes. Thus the effect of the trailing spouse – or more accurately the trailing wife – phenomenon is not the result of migration,

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but is the result of a combination of gender inequalities. However, assuming the cost-benefit analysis does not necessarily reflect family decision-making processes, as the cost-benefit analysis model tends to assume either that the chief breadwinner is also the chief decision-maker, or that economic gain is the motivation for migration. More recent research has indicated that this is not always the case; indeed, Cooke (2008a) demonstrates the impact of gender-role ideology on migration decision-making. Bushin (2009) traces the impact of children’s agency on migration decision-making. And Mulder (2007) situates the migration decision within a broader family context involving extended families, siblings, and community factors. Hence, families are likely to take into account the effect of migration on all family members. Thus, a woman in the traditional role of caregiver will be likely to prioritise the needs of children in considering a migration decision. Safri and Graham (2010, citing Parrenas 2005) argue that women in transnational families are more likely than men to take on the emotional labour surrounding the migration. This involves both the emotional labour of ensuring children are emotionally supported during the move and transition period, but also the emotional labour of assuring the continuity of ties with family at home. This is of course time-consuming and shifts the role of the woman embedded in a family: in a conventional close family setting a woman will have a family support network to assist with secondary childcare and other tasks, whereas in a transnational family, a woman who has moved away lacks the assistance of family, and also has to perform the duties of family maintenance (such as phone-calls, correspondence and arranging visits), an additional form of undervalued labour. Scholars have explored various ways to account for the family in migration decision-making, to avoid prioritising the breadwinner as the decision-maker and the potential economic gains as the sole explanatory factor. For example, Lundberg and Pollack (2003) find that couples are not making unitary decisions when deciding to migrate, but instead are making bargaining decisions. In the case of migration, which is considered a big, life-altering decision in the same vein as the decision to have a child or to retire, the bargaining positions are based upon projected future trajectories. Of course, these amount to cost-benefit analyses, but are able to include non-pecuniary goods such as lifestyle, job satisfaction, closeness of relatives, weather, and so on. The literature on family migration has been less able, overall, to include emotion as a factor in the migration decision. This is largely due to the literature being based upon economic decision-making, because emotion is difficult to conceptualise and quantify. A recent study by Saar (2018) moves beyond economic and rational-choice based dynamics to include the idea of return migration as a process related to self-identity, and therefore incorporating emotion and a sense of self into the structure of the decision. Indeed, literature that examines return migration (as opposed to outward migration) tends to be more interested in emotion, insofar as it looks at return migration to be driven by a sense of attachment and belonging to the ‘homeland’ that could not be captured in the country of migration (Saar 2018; Werner et al. 2017). Return migration also captures the non-pecuniary goods associated with return, or situates a female partner as an

Transnational citizenship 119 equal or more important decision-maker in the sense that return migration tends to happen when a person or a couple is ready to start a family, in order to benefit from familial support networks. For example, Konzett-Smoliner’s (2016) study of Austrian return migration included some insight into the experiences of transnational families whereby one partner was a returning Austrian, and one was from the country of migration. While the authors document the additional stresses of migration provoked by mixed-nationality families, they highlight the need for additional research in this area as there is very little work overall on the experiences of mixed-nationality return migrants. Nicholaos’ and Sylvia’s experiences and their personal characteristics at the time of their move to Paphos do not coincide neatly with any of the literatures on family migration, return migration or indeed retirement migration. They were not making an economic decision. While they found they could afford to move to Cyprus, they would not necessarily be better off or enjoy more income or a higher standard of living (this would of course need to be determined by a defined measure of living standard, and it is worth noting that amenities available in Cyprus in the 1980s were very different from those in the UK). They were not returning in order to benefit from familial support in bearing a family; their children were all independent adults. Nor can they be characterised as retirement migrants: they were considerably younger than typical retirement migrants, who tend to be in their mid-to-late 60s (King et al. 1998) and neither of them went to Cyprus with the plan to retire completely from working life. The emotional aspect to the decision is what dominates in Sylvia’s narrative as she expresses how they decided to move, and how she experienced the move. Sylvia was not necessarily enthusiastic about the idea, but she had promised that she would move to Cyprus should they get the opportunity. Nicholaos was emotionally attached to the idea of return to the island. Sylvia was making the decision to move as a partner in a marriage rather than as an isolated individual. Her decision was based on her emotional commitment to Nicholaos, but, she explains, remained her own decision insofar as any decision can be individualised for a person in a committed relationship. As Sylvia recounts, she had always promised she would move to Cyprus, and she ‘didn’t like to disappoint.’ This perspective could be understood to reflect a subordinate position; she sacrificed her own desires to the needs of her husband. However, it can also be read as an empathetic position. Sylvia understood and empathised with Nicholaos’ desire to return and wanted to afford him that opportunity. They had lived together in the UK for almost thirty years; she could empathise with Nicholaos’ need to see what life would be like for them in Cyprus. Reading affect into migration decisions has the capacity to shift the ‘trailing spouse’ narrative. An emotional decision in this context was not a rational calculation of what would permit pecuniary advantage, nor can it be simply read as a bargaining decision based on potential future trajectories of two isolated individuals. Rather, it was the result of a lifetime of affective negotiations lived in the context of marriage and family. Nicholaos and Sylvia’s children were supportive of their decision to move. Family holidays and visits meant that they all had a positive relationship with

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Cyprus, they knew their family members there and they did not try to prevent Sylvia and Nicholaos from leaving. The decision was at the same time both lifechanging and banal: they were not heading into the unknown, but into a known environment, where they had strong family ties. In this sense, return migration differs from outward migration: although it produces new and often unexpected stresses and anxieties, particularly in the experience of mixed-nationality families (Konzett-Smoliner 2016), having one partner there who is familiar with the language, culture and bureaucracy of a country alleviates some of the typical stresses of settlement in a country to which both partners are foreign. On the other hand, return migration in mixed nationality couples can radically shift the balance of power in a relationship. One partner suddenly takes on responsibility for the administrative aspects of settling in a new place, and the foreign partner is outside of his or her comfort zone and is often less successful in seeking employment and accessing social networks (Ibid, 2016). Of course, the decision to move to Cyprus for Nicholaos and Sylvia was not a move into the unknown, it was a move to the familiar, for both of them and for their immediate family members. Nevertheless, it represented a shift in the normal balance of family life.

Settling in Cyprus On moving to Cyprus, Nicholaos and Sylvia were cautious. As Sylvia explains, ‘we had known people who had lost everything’ when the island was divided in 1974. On their first two family trips to Cyprus before the division, Nicholaos and Sylvia had stayed with Nicholaos’ friend Andreas and his wife in Famagusta. Andreas lost his home when the island was divided. The twelve years that had passed since the division of the island had not provided the stability and certainty that would have allowed Nicholaos and Sylvia to feel comfortable buying property. In 1983, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, the northern part of the island, declared itself an independent state although it was not afforded recognition by the international community. This claim to political independence was very recent at the time of Nicholaos’ and Sylvia’s migration, and underlined their sense of political volatility despite the situation having stabilised. Instead of buying property, Nicholaos and Sylvia rented a house in Paphos that was large enough to host their children and grandchildren. One of the difficulties that Nicholaos and Sylvia had encountered in their early married life in the north east of England was with buying furniture. It was common for people to buy furniture on credit, yet Nicholaos and Sylvia could not secure credit, an issue they both attributed to Nicholaos’ ethnicity and their Greek name. The question of purchasing furniture arose again in Cyprus when they were seeking to furnish their home; however, it was not access to credit that they lacked as had been the case in Britain. Instead it was a lack of access to a variety of consumer choice, or a fashionable style of furnishings, and that lack provoked feelings of discomfort for Sylvia. Sylvia describes the furniture on offer in Cyprus when she moved there in the 1980s as ‘big, old and dark.’ She did not feel at home and this was one of the things that stood out as foreign to her. She wanted to buy

Transnational citizenship 121 modern, light-coloured, bright furniture but that was impossible. She describes this as one of the main examples in which she found life in Cyprus to be ‘a totally different way of life’ from that in Wallsend. Another major difference for Sylvia involved her working life. Sylvia had worked for almost twenty years, culminating in managing a shop in the UK before she and Nicholaos moved to Cyprus. Yet, once there she did not look for work because there were not suitable opportunities available. You know, if they’d had the big shops and things that they have now I would have gotten a job, but I couldn’t work because there was nothing . . . anybody working in a shop used to work till one, especially in the summer, and they would have from one till four off, and open again till about nine or ten o’clock at night, for six days a week, and they got a pittance in pay, they paid them very little. It just wasn’t worth it, you know. The small amount of money that she would have earned for working long hours did not seem financially worth the time she would have to sacrifice, particularly given that she and Nicholaos could live comfortably from the pension he received from his years as a coalminer, as there was a large difference in the cost of living between Cyprus and the UK. Nevertheless, this presented some difficulties in terms of adjustment. Sylvia had worked all her life from the age of fifteen with the exception of the ten years during which her three children were small and needed care. She had a full and busy life combining work and her family. When she moved to Cyprus she suddenly found herself having to redefine her time, as she no longer worked. While Nicholaos’ family were nearby, there was a language and cultural barrier that prevented her from being absorbed into a central familial role. However, Sylvia assessed the circumstances that she experienced in Cyprus as easier than those of Nicholaos when he moved to the UK, because she did not have to deal with the racism he had encountered. Sylvia attributes this to the ongoing presence of the British in Cyprus and in doing so, her perspective reflects the same separation between people and politics that Nicholaos had noted three decades earlier in Famagusta. Sylvia describes: there was a lot of English there and they’d been there all the time. The majority of people had nothing against them, you know. It’s the same everywhere, you always find an odd one who, you know. But . . . everybody just more or less accepted things. She did not feel directly ostracised from the Cypriot community because of her Britishness, and there was a British community. Yet, Sylvia remained somewhere in the space between the British and the Cypriot communities, which perhaps contributed to the ambivalence of her experience. Nicholaos had been forced to assimilate in the UK. There was no community of Cypriots in the North East, and there were very few non-British people. He did not actively look for a Cypriot community, which would have involved moving his family to a different city. The

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family remained where they were settled in the North East, occasionally attending the Greek Orthodox church services held in the Anglican cathedral once per month, but with no real ongoing contact with a Greek community. In Cyprus, as the wife of a Greek Cypriot, and being from a working-class background, Sylvia was in a position that was markedly different from the majority of British people she would come across. While this changed over time as Cyprus became a more popular destination for tourism and retirement migration, as well as the shift when Cyprus officially joined the EU in 2004, initially most of the British people Sylvia knew were of a military background. They differentiated themselves from the ‘locals’, which meant differentiating themselves from Sylvia’s husband and family. While Nicholaos and Sylvia developed a circle of friends, the relationship was not necessarily always an equal one because they had very different backgrounds and life experiences. The continuous presence of the British in Cyprus over time meant that many British people continued to affect a colonial mentality, positioning Britain (and themselves) as superior to Cyprus and Cypriots. Thus, belonging to a Cypriot family, Sylvia did not fully fit in socially and culturally with the British residents in Cyprus. On the other hand, she was not Cypriot nor did she feel confident speaking Greek; hence, she did not fully fit in with her Cypriot family. This was a difficult position of difference to occupy, and one that solidified her transnational identity and her sense of attachment and detachment to both places simultaneously. Sylvia’s experience of identity in some ways reflects Soa’s, the Malagasy/ French woman discussed in the previous chapter (Walsh 2004). Sylvia interacts

Figure 5.3 Sylvia (left) and Giota, the wife of Nicholaos’ nephew, by the communal ovens in Anavargos

Transnational citizenship 123 with and belongs to multiple groups and so navigates her identity and sense of belonging as they relate to these groups. Thus, she has a fluid identity but also one where she has the capacity to assert agency over her identity. She can emphasize belonging in certain settings. She can also differentiate herself and create distance from groups and behaviours if they do not coincide with her own understanding of her identity. Thus, she assumes agency over her transnational identity, interacting with both her Cypriot family and the British community. Yet, retaining agency also involves retaining a distance from the communities. She can interact with both, but simultaneously belongs fully to neither, hence producing a sense of isolation. On the other hand, Sylvia retains an empowering ability to enter both groups. She has a stronger claim to belonging in Cyprus than other British residents, and family available to offer support in various ways. Simultaneously, she can seamlessly participate in British community events. Sylvia then can adopt an agency over her identity based on its duality and allow it to work in her favour. Finally, Sylvia’s role as the family matriarch meant that she acquired the emotional labour of maintaining family ties with her children, grandchildren and extended family members who remained in the UK. She did not struggle to maintain close bonds with her daughters and her grandchildren. The working-class identity of the family meant that Nicholaos and Sylvia continued to be called upon to provide childcare for their grandchildren during the school holidays when parents were working. This meant that the familial bonds were established and maintained as Nicholaos and Sylvia remained secondary care givers despite the distance. Nevertheless, in order for this system to function, the female family members – in particular Sylvia and her daughters – worked to ensure an unbroken relationship and a strong bond between Nicholaos and Sylvia and their grandchildren. This labour took the practical form of weekly phone calls and frequent letters and postcards in addition to twice-yearly visits, but also the less tangible form of thinking about the relationships and ties and the emotional investment of remaining a close family despite physical distance.

Conclusion Sylvia and Nicholaos’ choice to live in Cyprus fully cemented the transnational nature of the family. Barbara, Andreas and Anna were converted from second generation Cypriots to first, in the sense of the strength of ties they developed to Cyprus, the home of their parents. Barbara and Anna’s children in particular grew up in Cyprus from early childhood, developing a relationship with the country through long summers spent with their grandparents (myself included). Sylvia’s decision to endorse the move to Cyprus was instrumental in permitting this sustained positive relationship. Sylvia’s experiences offer insight into a shift to a transnational identity through marriage and a basis for agency in transnational identity. They also offer a narrative of an unconventional working-class transnationalism, and a narrative of working-class female strength. The everyday transnationalism shows how a transnational identity can be acquired through minor and banal experiences, and offers

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insight into systemic racism and xenophobia, and also systemic gender inequalities that valorise female identity as inferior to male identity. Sylvia’s working-class identity was formative of her experiences. She was embedded in a working-class community in the North East and the nature of this community as close-knit, white and working class meant her experience of it and relationship with it transformed when she married. On moving to Cyprus her social class position shaped her experience with other British people in Cyprus who were often (although not entirely) characterised as military and middle class. As a woman, Sylvia adopted the emotional labour of maintaining ties with family and friends who were in Britain, maintaining the close family bonds with her children. While Sylvia did not become fully assimilated into the Cypriot community or the British community resident in Cyprus, she inhabited a transnational space, between Cyprus and the UK, and she reproduced that as a space for her family to reside.

Bibliography Amara, Pavan. 2012. “How Feminism Excludes Working Class Women.” New Statesman, March 25, 2012. https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/03/ class-women-feminism-books. Anthias, Floya, and Nira Yuval-Davis. 1983. “Contextualizing Feminism: Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions.” Feminist Review 15: 62–75. Aune, Kristin, and Catherine Redfern. 2013. Reclaiming the F Word: Feminism Today. London: Zed Books. Boyle, Paul J., Hill Kulu, Thomas Cooke, Vernon Gayle, and Clara H. Mulder. 2008. “Moving and Union Dissolution.” Demography 45 (1): 209–22. Bushin, Naomi. 2009. “Researching Family Migration Decision-Making: A Children-inFamilies Approach.” Population, Space and Place 15 (5): 429–43. Cooke, Thomas J. 2001. “‘Trailing Wife’ or ‘Trailing Mother’? The Effect of Parental Status on the Relationship between Family Migration and the Labor-Market Participation of Married Women.” Environment and Planning A 33: 419–30. ———. 2008a. “Gender Role Beliefs and Family Migration.” Population, Space and Place 14 (3): 163–75. ———. 2008b. “Migration in a Family Way.” Population, Space and Place 14 (4): 255–65. Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99. Dean, Jonathan. 2009. “Who’s Afraid of Third Wave Feminism? On the Uses of the ‘Third Wave’ in British Feminist Politics.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 11 (3): 334–52. Ferree, Myra Marx. 1980. “Working Class Feminism: A Consideration of the Consequences of Employment.” The Sociological Quarterly 21 (2): 173–84. hooks, bell. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman? Boston, MA: South End Press. ———. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press. King, Russell, Anthony M. Warnes, and Allan M. Williams. 1998. “International Retirement Migration in Europe.” International Journal of Population Geography 4: 91–111. Konzett-Smoliner, Stefanie. 2016. “Return Migration as a ‘Family Project’: Exploring the Relationship between Family Life and the Readjustment Experiences of Highly Skilled Austrians.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (7): 1094–114.

Transnational citizenship 125 Lundberg, Shelly, and Robert A. Pollack. 2003. “Efficiency in Marriage.” Review of Economics of the Household 1: 153–67. Mulder, Clara H. 2007. “The Family Context and Residential Choice: A Challenge for New Research.” Populations, Space and Place 13 (4): 265–78. Orr, Catherine M. 1997. “Charting the Currents of the Third Wave.” Hypatia 12 (3): 22–45. Parrenas, Rachel Salazar. 2005. “Long Distance Intimacy: Class, Gender, and Intergenerational Relations between Mothers and Children in Filipino Transnational Families.” Global Networks 5 (4): 317–36. Reay, Diane. 1997. “The Double-Bind of the ‘Working-Class’ Feminist Academic: The Success of Failure or the Failure of Success?” In Class Matters: “Working Class” Women’s Perspectives on Social Class, edited by Paul Mahony and Christine Zmroczek. London: Taylor & Francis. Rumford, Chris. 2013. The Globalization of Strangeness. London: Palgrave. Saar, Maarja. 2018. “To Return or Not to Return? The Importance of Identity Negotiations for Return Migration.” Social Identities 24 (1): 120–33. Safri, Maliha, and Julie Graham. 2010. “The Global Household: Toward a Feminist Postcapitalist International Political Economy.” Signs 36 (1): 99–125. Skey, Michael. 2010. “‘A Sense of Where You Belong in the World’: National Belonging, Ontological Security and the Status of the Ethnic Majority in England.” Nations and Nationalism 16 (4): 715–33. Smarsh, Sarah. 2017. “Working-Class Women Are Too Busy for Gender Theory – but They’re Still Feminists.” The Guardian, June 25, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2017/jun/25/feminism-working-class-women-gender-theory-dolly-parton#img-1. Walkerdine, Valerie. 1995. “Subject to Change without Notice: Psychology, Postmodernity and the Popular.” In Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, edited by Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift. London: Routledge. Walsh, Andrew. 2004. “Soa’s Version: Ironic Form and Content in the Self-Account of a Transnational Metisse Narrator.” Global Networks 4 (3): 259–70. Werner, Cynthia Ann, Celia Emmelhainz, and Holly Barcus. 2017. “Privileged Exclusion in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan: Ethnic Return Migration, Citizenship, and the Politics of (Not) Belonging.” Europe-Asia Studies 69 (10): 1557–83. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2006. “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (3): 193–209.

Conclusion

In 2012 Theresa May, as Home Secretary for the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government in the UK, began to lay the foundations of the ‘hostile immigration environment’. The policy was intended to make it as difficult as possible for people to live in the UK without leave to remain. The deterrent measures that form the core of the policy include things such as introducing additional checks to prevent people without leave to remain from accessing bank accounts or driving licences, from using the NHS or from renting accommodation. It introduced criminal penalties to landlords who provided rental accommodation to people without the correct documentation of their immigration status, and it penalised employers who did not complete the extensive checks required to demonstrate that their employees had the correct status to permit them to work in the UK. While there is plenty to critique in terms of the impact of this policy – particularly the impact on vulnerable persons such as asylum seekers and trafficked persons – one of the problems that emerged was the unintended consequences of this policy for colonial era immigrants to the UK: people who had entered with leave to remain but did not have a record of that entry and their legal status. This became known in the press in early 2018 as the ‘Windrush scandal.’ Several cases were uncovered of retirement-age colonial-era immigrants to the UK who had been suddenly told they did not have leave to remain in the UK, who were facing deportation or had been removed from the UK, had had state benefits stopped and life-saving healthcare treatment denied, had been evicted from their residencies and told they were not eligible to work in their jobs, despite having lived, worked and paid taxes in the UK for decades (for a timeline, see Rawlinson 2018). A former Home Office staffer asserted in April of 2018 that the Home Office had destroyed the landing cards recording the arrival dates in the UK of thousands of colonial era immigrants, despite this database of arrivals being in use by caseworkers as a means of verifying status (Gentleman 2018). People whose immigration status was under question were conventionally asked to provide four documents per year to demonstrate the longevity of their stay in the UK in order to acquire verified leave to remain, yet many people had not saved documents and could not produce the relevant paperwork, leaving them victim to the Home Office’s hostile environment and threatened with or subject to removal from the UK to countries they had often not seen since childhood. The Windrush scandal demonstrates the government’s

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ultimate indifference to the citizenship rights of colonial era immigrants, and unwillingness to recognise that colonial era policies offered citizenship and legal leave to remain to incoming families from British colonial territories. The Windrush scandal affected overwhelmingly Caribbean immigrants. These are people who often had similar citizenship experiences to Nicholaos, but who have been discarded in the contemporary political climate of immigration. This book does not tell their stories, but juxtaposing the Windrush scandal with Nicholaos’ story demonstrates the contested and complex nature of British colonial citizenship, and, importantly the continued relevancy of race in immigration politics. Over time, Cypriot immigration has been ‘whitewashed’. During the 1950s Nicholaos was raced, by his in-laws who he remembers overhearing commenting on ‘black babies’, by his co-workers who called him a ‘wog’, by the white, working-class community in which he was visibly different. Nevertheless, in today’s environment of data collection he is ‘white, European’. Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004 and shifted from a conflict-torn former colony into a European member state. Cypriot immigrants then all gained the right, as EEA members, to live and work in Britain, hence removing any Cypriot British resident from what would later become the threat of the hostile immigration environment – at least until Britain formally exits the EU and the EEA. Nevertheless, Nicholaos remembers clearly the racial politics of the 1950s and, following the Brexit referendum in 2016, experienced once again targeted xenophobia. In his everyday life in the UK his formerly raced body comes back to haunt him in the form of anti-immigrantism and racism. For example, we can return to the anecdote recounted in the introduction in which Nicholaos was forced to move seats in a café in Newcastle city centre, after being told he had ‘no right’ to live in the UK. Despite holding a bank account with the same branch for five decades and being a British citizen, he was asked to demonstrate his right to reside in the UK by the bank, under threat of having his account frozen and access to his finances removed. And when he is routinely asked demographic survey questions at healthcare appointments, he feels he is being targeted (while these questions are routine, they recall for Nicholaos his experiences of racism in the past and he feels they are asking where he is from in an attempt to uncover his ineligibility to use the NHS). One might argue in this way that Brexit represents a return to the racial politics of the past. Yet, attending to the racial politics of Brexit and Windrush provides the opportunity to examine the continuity of racial politics – the politics that meant Caribbean Windrush immigrants were targeted by the hostile environment while Cypriots were protected – from the 1950s to the present. Brexit has perhaps undone some of the protections afforded white European ‘others’ but anti-immigrantism, hostility, racism and xenophobia have been continuously present in British politics and everyday life over time and gave rise to the hostile environment. In recent years open hostility to immigration has flourished as it has been endorsed by targeted Conservative policies that are hostile to immigrants by design. The central endeavour of this book was to tell a story of international politics in everyday life. It was a personal story, and one of the benefits of this was that the personal nature of the story made everyday life accessible. The five substantive

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chapters of this book pursued discrete contributions to literatures in international relations in everyday life, citizenship studies, ontological security theory, the transnational family in international relations, and feminist interventions in international relations and migration studies. They are united by the thread of the story running through the chapters, and by the commitment to centring on a narrative of everyday life and the use of memoir as method in international relations, drawing attention to how international relations are experienced. Chapter 1 established the relevancy of the hyperlocal in reshaping our understandings of international geopolitics. While much has been written on the Suez crisis, the geopolitical impacts of decolonisation, and anticolonial struggle, situating a study within an experiential narrative adds a dimension that includes the voices of individuals. Nicholaos’ experiences living in Famagusta shaped his onwards journey to Britain. The politics of empire, class and ethnicity intertwine and cannot be logically separated, nor do they produce only the divisive policies we might expect. Rather commonalities are found and used as a way to navigate and negotiate restrictions, rules and structural disadvantages. Nicholaos asserts agency within the confines of the structures of colonial governance, and socioeconomic and racial politics to navigate his experiences in Famagusta and to embark upon his immigration journey to the British Isles. Chapter 2 offered a practical, experiential and instrumental theorisation of citizenship that is lived rather than legally or theoretically determined. The puzzle of citizenship in the context of Nicholaos’ narrative relies on the difference between affective, legal, and perceived citizenship. The various elements to citizenship surged and retracted at different times for Nicholaos, which illustrates that citizenship is a fluid concept, not just for theorists, but in practice. This fluidity is produced by the tension whereby citizenship is instrumental but is also underscored by affective ties. These affective ties are complex for people with nonstate-based identities or colonial, hybrid, diasporic and transnational identities. By foregrounding an experiential and practical citizenship we observe it as a fluid and lived concept rather than a fixed legal or theoretical concept. Here, perhaps, we can see a key tie to the experiences of the Windrush generation in the UK in which the lived experience of citizenship and belonging outweighed to such an extent the legal concept that the necessity of a legal citizenship only became apparent when it was made absent by the hostile environment. This highlights the necessity of recognising that a single fixed theoretical or legal definition of citizenship must by its nature perpetuate colonial exclusions, as the historical significance of citizenship takes on radically different experiential meaning for the colonial citizen versus the Westphalian or Enlightenment citizen. Chapter 3 explored the contradictions between the need to a futural sense of social life for ontological security, and Nicholaos’ lived experience, which ultimately illustrates that the futural sense of security is located within a Western bourgeois model and produced a form of ontological insecurity in the context of Nicholaos’ migration. The main tension that emerges in this context is one between a futural sense of security and an everyday security. The former relied on a bourgeois sense of economic certainty in the future while the latter was

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characterised by having a place in the world and a sense of short term expectations in the rhythms and patterns of daily life. Here tensions in theorisations of ontological security in international relations emerge, whereby the subjective and experiential nature of identity at the heart of ontological security is apparent. When Nicholaos is denied the agency to realise his own identity by conscription and by his experience of immigration, he loses his sense of self and therefore his sense of ontological security. He experiences this loss of selfhood as a form of slavery where his bodily agency is compromised. The importance of bodily autonomy and agency is made apparent in his narrative contrasts between the freedom he experienced in Famagusta, which he remembers as an idyll, and the experience of slavery he constructs in the coalmines of northeast England. Chapter 4 focused on transnational family life. The family is a key site in which identity is made and reproduced, and is a significant space in which national identity is maintained. However, transnational families have different experiences that can call to question the dominance of national identity in international relations. As transnational family life becomes more common, the means for maintaining and reproducing national identity within a family unit are diminished, thus leaving a space in which alternative identities flourish. The family has not been widely theorised in international relations, so this chapter offers an opening and demonstrates a need for further research in this area. The implications of transnational family life in particular for families of mixed immigration status is apparent in the familial experiences of the Windrush generation, where families have both been called upon to protect each other from the threat of destitution and have been torn apart by deportations. This is an area that calls for further research in international politics as transnational families and families of mixed immigration status proliferate. Finally, Chapter 5 looked to return migration and family migration and was centred around the perspective of Sylvia, who became transnational through marriage, and a migrant when she moved with Nicholaos to Cyprus in her forties. The chapter highlights the lack of narratives of working-class women in feminism and in international studies generally. Sylvia’s life narrative of transnationalism and migration demonstrates a strong female voice that is not diminished. Her experience of transnationalism is outside of the conventions of studies of transnationalism as it was acquired through marriage and later solidified in migration that was simultaneously return migration and outward, new migration. Thus, this chapter worked to open up the study of transnationalism and provide a perspective on diverse ways of being transnational as well as offering an argument for the need to model a feminism that is already familiar to working-class identities. The narrative thread of this book moved through geographic space and chronological time. It begins in Famagusta, in colonial Cyprus pre-independence (Chapter 1) and follows Nicholaos on his journey to the UK (Chapter 2), through his transition from a worker in the Famagusta market to the mines of North East England (Chapter 3), to his family life raising transnational children in the white, working-class North Eastern community (Chapter 4), to his return migration to Paphos with his wife (Chapter 5). In following a life history and situating that

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life history in theories and literatures of international relations, migration studies and citizenship studies, the book provides a model of the relevance of everyday life in international relations generally. It is not just this life that is relevant, but international relations both trickle into everyday life and are made in everyday life. Thus, the central endeavour of the book was to tell a story of everyday life but to demonstrate that story’s relevancy for international relations and to position the individual protagonist, a boy from Paphos, as an actor and a theorist of international relations. In doing so, the overarching objective is to challenge the conventional international relations reader and make such a reader less able to accept the conventional ideas of social science, migration, transnationalism and colonialism in international relations. This volume intended to link everyday experience with colonial, geopolitical and macro-level politics, providing a reality that can stretch, test and renegotiate some of the conventions of international relations, migration studies and citizenship studies. The window on an individual reality, through the methods of life narrative and memoir blurs the boundaries between conventional styles in IR – this volume uses narrative analysis and narrative voice. In accessing narrative the study inserts bodily affects into the processes of migration and citizenship. The memoir communicates emotions in the messy contexts of everyday life, rather than attempting to extract emotion into analytically separate categories. Thus, this volume attempted to demonstrate some of the various ways international relations manifest over a lifetime, across generations, and in family and community dynamics. It provides access to the intricacies of making international relations in everyday life. This volume is of course limited in its scope. It provides a particular history and a particular narrative of migration. It is a unique story that does not intend to depict generalizable experiences, but instead to contribute to the study of everyday life in international relations by bringing together de Certeau’s tactics with feminism’s breaking down of established public-private boundaries and attentiveness to the way that all parts of life are interconnected and overlapping. While the book began with an insight into geopolitics, it ended with the nuances of marriage and family life. There are various ways these studies can and ought to be extended. Ontological security theory in international relations is a growing research paradigm, and work in ontological security offers access to a potential emphasis on everyday life and identity that can offer a perspective on lived dynamics of international security, particularly in the contexts of transnationalism, diaspora experiences, and migration. Furthermore, the literature on return migration is limited and rarely includes the affective and emotional dynamics of marriage and family, something which has a huge impact on migrant experiences and reintegration into home countries (Konzett-Smoliner 2016). This literature resides primarily in economics, yet is implicated in international relations through migration studies, development studies and citizenship studies. There is little work overall on the affective dimensions of colonial citizenship, despite this being something that has been variously studied from a legal perspective. At a time when colonial era citizens are finding themselves issued with removal orders in the UK, or finding that they have not been adequately documented and so are unable to access care

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Figure 6.1 Nicholaos today

in their retirement, it is vital we have a better understanding of what it means to be a colonial citizen in order to underscore national responsibilities. The appalling treatment of the Windrush generation in Britain that gathered media attention in 2018, and the consequent climb-down of the UK Home Office in rhetoric if not yet in action, just represents a small taste of the dynamics of colonial citizenship, and what that means in the context of entrenched structures of racism and oppression. Work in transnationalism has transformed our understandings of citizenship as instrumental, but the complex dynamics of transnational families with different

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citizenships, immigration statuses and affective ties provides scope for further research. Finally, this book is built around a life-narrative memoir and so it would be remiss not to complete the story. Nicholaos and Sylvia lived happily in Paphos until 2013 when they returned to the UK because ageing and decreased mobility was making it difficult for them to be as self-sufficient as they would have liked. Several of their grandchildren spent temporary periods living in Cyprus, working in the tourist industry and studying. Nicholaos and Sylvia returned to live close by to their daughters, in the same neighbourhood to which Nicholaos has migrated in 1954, and in which Sylvia had grown up. They continue to live there, although they spend the summers in Cyprus accompanied by various members of their large family.

Bibliography Gentleman, Amelia. 2018. “Home Office Destroyed Windrush Landing Cared, Says ExStaffer.” The Guardian, April 17, 2018. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/17/ home-office-destroyed-windrush-landing-cards-says-ex-staffer. Konzett-Smoliner, Stefanie. 2016. “Return Migration as a ‘Family Project’: Exploring the Relationship between Family Life and the Readjustment Experiences of Highly Skilled Austrians.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (7): 1094–1114. Rawlinson, Kevin. 2018. “Windrush-Era Citizens Row: Timeline of Key Events.” The Guardian, April 16, 2018. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/16/windrush-eracitizens-row-timeline-of-key-events.

Postscript Citizenship, subjecthood, identity

This volume has traced the theme of postcolonial and transnational citizenship and belonging through the experiences of a Cypriot immigrant. While everyday experience can provide a theoretical reading of a practice of citizenship, the concept is saturated with power, specifically state power – and that has only been a minor theme in Nicholaos’ story. However, the significance of the relationship between state sovereign power and citizenship has come to the fore in recent politics, in particular in the populism surrounding Brexit and the anti-immigrantism and hostile environment at the heart of the Windrush scandal. Attending to postcolonial modes of citizenship, such as Windrush foregrounds, can be revealing of the nexus between state power and citizenship. Recalling Mbembe, as I discuss in Chapter 2, in colonial territories the subjecthood that is clearly imposed over colonial populations can serve to highlight the absolute sovereignty of colonialism, in which colonial subjects were not citizens with rights, but dehumanised bodies subject to the power of the state. As this volume was being finalised, the figure of Shamima Begum was prominent in the media. This young woman had left the UK as a fifteen-year-old child; she fell victim to the online reach of extremists, and left for Syria to become a so-called ‘jihadi bride’. Shortly before this manuscript was submitted Shamima Begum made a case from a refugee camp to be permitted to return to the UK. In the four years that has passed since she left the country, she had given birth to two children, both of whom had died before their second birthdays. At the time of her request she was nine months pregnant with a third child, and she feared for that child’s ability to survive the conditions in which she was living. She said that she just wanted to live quietly, with her child, in the UK. Home Secretary Sajid Javid decided to make an example of Begum, and ruled that she was no longer to be recognised as a British citizen. This carried the implication that the British government did not have to recognise its duty to her unborn child. Begum had no other citizenship. She was born in the UK to Bangladeshi parents but herself had no affiliation to Bangladesh. The latter country made it clear she was not entitled to citizenship of Bangladesh. Meanwhile, Begum’s baby was born and her family began proceedings to enable the baby to be brought to the UK. The Home Office ruled this was a case for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and it was acknowledged that it would be ‘politically difficult’ to bring the baby to its inherited home, according to a BBC report. While these efforts were being negotiated,

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the baby died of pneumonia, an illness that may have been prevented had Begum and her child been permitted to return to the UK. The utter disregard of the UK Home Office for the life of a young woman who admittedly had committed the most serious of crimes by joining a foreign terrorist organisation, yet had done so as a minor and a British citizen, and the utter disregard for her newborn infant, demonstrates that colonial modes of subjecthood are still practiced in the UK. Begum was a British citizen. There was nothing to divide her from any other British citizen apart from her ethnic heritage. Britain claims to be a tolerant and diverse country, but the Home Office essentially ruled that Begum was not British enough to be protected. She had a (distant) claim to belonging to another country through her parents, and through this belonging – that did not exist in law, immigration status, or practice – Britain decided to abdicate responsibility. The qualifier of British enough derives directly from her race and ethnicity. It was argued that she had an affiliation beyond that of her status as a British citizen because of her parents’ identities. It was argued that her transgression outweighed her British identity, despite the fact that she was groomed online and, as a fifteen year old, cannot be held fully and independently responsible for her actions. In the case of Begum we see state-held identities being called to question, even by one of the institutions that distributes them. That Begum could be stripped of her citizenship by the Home Office (although, the legality of this is still under question at the time of writing) demonstrates the instability and insecurity of state-held identities. One of the supposedly most secure and privileged citizenships in the world, for some people who hold it, is always already insecure. This insecurity is produced by the racist and colonial mentalities in which colonised subjects existed as dehumanised bodies always subject to the sovereign authority of the state as theorised by Mbembe and cited in Chapter 2 of this volume. Begum is not a democratic citizen who participates in a relationship of responsibility and accountability to the state. Rather than being held to account for her actions, she was simply cast out, becoming an almost cartoonish example of a homo sacer. Despite living her entire life as a British citizen, despite being born at the turn of the twenty-first century decades beyond the existence of a British Empire, and despite being victim to powerful grooming from which the state failed to protect her, Begum is a subject and her subjecthood is illustrative of the ongoing subjecthood of anyone with a postcolonial, transnational, diasporic or hybrid identity. In this context, not even a state-based identity can offer protection. Here the insecurity of identity and the need to call sovereignty to question is clear. Without doing so, we continue to perpetuate colonial and imperial politics. While citizenship, as Ong writes, might be flexible, instrumental and protective, some people enjoy less protection than others because true citizenship is still denied along racial, ethnic and gendered lines. Identity is not divorced from citizenship but citizenship cannot represent an all-encompassing identity because the state still ultimately owns that identity and reserves the privilege of removing it. For postcolonial citizens, and those with hybrid, transnational and diasporic identities, there is no innate or legal citizenship, only a subjecthood that continues to reveal the entrenched racism, xenophobia and inequality in Britain.

Index

affect 7, 43, 45, 58, 60, 67, 69, 71, 80 agency 24–5, 69, 74, 75, 79, 89, 103, 109, 111, 114, 123, 129 Brexit 11, 127 British Nationality Act 1948 6, 44, 50, 56, 61 citizenship 12–13, 43–51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59–62, 86, 87, 91, 97, 101, 106, 127, 128, 133; 134; affective 13, 45, 59, 60, 61, 62, 128, 130; colonial 43, 44, 51, 53, 58–9, 61, 127, 130–1; flexible 48, 59, 62; instrumental 44, 48, 54, 57–8, 60, 61, 128, 131, 134 coalmines 3, 6, 61, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 116, 129 Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 50, 54, 91 conscription 13, 25, 43, 59, 61, 67, 70, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 129 Cypriot 2–3, 19, 21, 30, 38, 41, 44, 51, 53, 54, 56–7, 58, 70, 72–3, 75, 77, 80, 85, 90–2, 94–6, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 106, 114, 121–2, 127; diaspora 3, 90, 96, 100; experience 51, 53, 90; identity 30, 51, 53, 57, 60, 80, 90, 94, 97, 100, 101, 103; immigration to Britain 91, 127; relationship with British 33–6 Cyprus conflict 1974 38, 51, 92, 93, 99, 101, 103, 120 decolonisation 12, 26, 32, 38, 50, 128 Dhekelia 2, 12, 23, 38, 72 diaspora 3, 7, 60, 62, 69, 75, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 100, 114, 130 discrimination 6, 10, 50, 51, 74, 77, 88, 89, 91, 93, 101, 102, 103, 109, 110, 111, 112, 116, 117

emigration 25, 27, 36–7, 72, 90–1 emotion 6–7, 57, 58, 60, 88, 107, 111, 113, 114, 118, 119, 123, 124, 130 Enloe, Cynthia 4–5, 24, 36, 77, 86 EOKA 23, 34, 38, 91 everyday life 4–8, 12, 13, 14, 24, 25, 26, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 54, 60, 68, 69, 70, 71, 77, 79, 80, 85, 92, 94, 95, 96, 103, 107, 111, 113, 114, 115, 127–8, 130 Famagusta 2, 4, 12, 13, 21, 23, 25, 26–9, 29–32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 67, 70, 71–3, 74, 77, 78, 80, 98, 120, 121, 128, 129; economy 27, 70; everyday life 29–33; history 26–9; politics 27–9, 31–2, 34–7 family 3, 4, 13, 14, 79, 85–6, 87, 88, 93, 103, 106, 120, 129; migration 106, 107, 117, 118, 119, 129 feminism 4, 5, 7, 107, 110–13, 114, 129, 130 freedom 13, 23, 25, 28, 33, 49, 52, 67, 68, 69, 70–1, 77, 78, 81, 95, 102, 129 gender 5, 24, 87, 95, 99, 100, 111–14, 117–18, 124, 134 geopolitics 4, 6, 12, 23, 24, 33, 38, 128, 130 Geordie 64, 74, 75, 77, 93, 94, 112 Greek Orthodox Church 95, 96, 122 hostile environment 126, 127, 128, 133 identity 4, 5–8, 10, 12, 13, 23, 24, 30, 36, 43, 44, 45–8, 59, 51–4, 56, 57–8, 59, 60–1, 67, 68–9, 74, 77, 79, 80, 85, 88–90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 107, 110, 112–14, 122–3, 124, 129, 139, 134; class 36, 77, 112, 123, 124; national 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 44, 46, 51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 68, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95–6,

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97, 103, 129; self-identity 81, 90, 118; transnational 4, 10, 13, 24, 54, 85, 96, 98, 101, 102, 103, 107, 122, 123 immigration 4, 5, 11, 36, 50, 54–5, 67, 75, 77, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 99, 115, 126–7, 128, 129, 132, 134 language 7, 12, 30, 31, 47, 49, 53, 54, 65, 67, 69, 85, 90, 93, 96–7, 99, 103, 120, 121; English 2, 30, 31, 33, 49, 53, 54, 64, 71, 72; Greek 57, 58, 65, 93, 96–7, 101, 103, 122 Mbembe, Achille 48, 133, 134 memoir 4, 8–9, 11, 12, 13, 23, 24, 25, 31, 38, 44, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 68, 69, 72, 81, 101, 128, 130, 132 memory 8–9, 11, 25, 30, 31, 46, 57, 79, 89, 91, 100 migration 4, 8–9, 10, 13, 25, 27, 36–7, 38, 43, 47, 48, 51, 69, 73–4, 87, 88, 89, 91, 100, 106–7, 114, 115, 117–20, 122, 128, 129; decision-making 25, 36, 37, 107, 117–18, 119; family 106, 107, 117, 118, 119, 129; return migration 106, 118–20, 129, 130 military service 3, 4, 44, 60, 75, 100, 101 minor transnationalism 12, 23, 25, 26, 107

narrative 4, 6, 7, 8–11, 12, 13, 25, 33, 34, 35–6, 38, 43, 44, 49, 51–2, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60, 67, 68, 69, 78, 88, 89, 91, 92, 98, 100, 101, 103, 107, 111, 112–13, 114, 119, 123, 128, 129, 130, 132 OCHEN 2, 31, 34, 72 ontological security 13, 67–9, 73, 74, 76, 79, 80, 128, 129, 130 Paphos 1, 20, 29, 96, 98, 99, 100, 107, 119, 120, 129, 130, 132 Suez Crisis 2, 23, 26, 70, 80, 128 systemic racism 116, 124 tell-ability 8, 11 transnationalism 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 23, 31, 36, 89, 90, 107, 114, 123, 129, 130, 131 Turkish Cypriot 28, 34, 90, 91, 100 Wallsend 2, 3, 67, 75–6, 78, 102, 107, 121 Windrush 126–7, 128, 129, 131, 133 xenophobia 11, 13, 61, 69, 75, 76, 77, 78, 85, 89, 91, 93, 101, 102, 103, 108, 109, 110, 116, 124, 127, 134