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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic material and 65 semi-structured interviews with (return) migrants and their descendants in rural Austria and Poland, this paper examines the emergence as well as migrantisation of anti-cosmopolitan narratives, that are also used to justify the choice to live in rural regions.

Paper long abstract

While rural areas are often studied as sites of nativist friction, our paper examines how (return) migrants residing in these “places that don’t matter” envision diverse metropolitan areas they have left behind, or never lived in. Drawing on case studies from the Horizon project “Premium_EU”, our research addresses urban-rural polarisation by examining the migrantisation of anti-urban narratives. Most notably, our interlocutors - migrants from Turkey in rural Austria and Polish returnees from Western EU countries - often describe Western metropolises as dystopian, dangerous, and overly diverse, using this critique to justify their choice to live in rural regions. Hereby, the following question guides our argumentation: How do migrants in remote areas in Poland and Austria make sense of metropolitan centers and what role do anti-diversity narratives play in rural place-making and belonging?

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and 65 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with (return) migrants and their descendants, we first trace the emergence of anti-diversity narratives within a rightwing populist context in Austria and Poland. We then relate these narratives to the biographies and migratory experiences of our participants, examining how they adopt nativist-coded distinctions between a (homogenous) rural area and a (diverse) Western metropolis. By comparing our fieldwork in the Global West (Austria) and the Global East (Poland), we challenge the dichotomy between cosmopolitanism and nativism. Ultimately, our aim is to contribute to the exploration of multipolar politics in rural areas by showing how belonging and non-belonging are negotiated through the rejection of urban cosmopolitanism in European peripheral regions.