Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork among work migrants in Denmark, the paper explores how Eastern European labourers in their venture to achieve stability and steadiness at family level deploy the fluidity and temporariness at market level as well as cross-border opportunities supported at political level

Paper long abstract:

With the post-Cold War era new opportunities for transnational living arose across Europe, while state policies allowed for increased work migration.

The paper builds on ethnographic inquiries among Ukrainian and Polish migrants in Denmark, working mainly within agriculture and construction. Seen from the perspective of the work migrants, the paper – on the basis of a Hegelian conceptual framework – discusses the dialectic between temporariness and endurance within three alternate but mutually connected modes of inter-human relationship: the ‘interminable’ bonds connected to the family, the contractually based relations at the market, and the ties of recognition institutionalized in the state.

The paper argues that these three forms of relationship are all required, and thus all key to comprehending basic stipulations of transnational living. However, seen in practice terms, they play out highly differently when the migrants organize means and ends in a temporariness-endurance nexus:

An overall aim almost univocally is to create stable settlement and enduring FAMILY ties (on highly difficult terms marked by periods of separation). In this endeavour, the MARKET becomes an instrument that can be productively utilized in a flexible way because of its terminable contract relations (which, notably, also can lead to periods of severe precarity). Finally, the politically established rights to switch work venues within different states provides important opportunities, but still the work migrants, despite their transnational and dynamic practice, ultimately rely on stable STATE recognition; the inquiries reveals that this recognition is challenged due to re-emergence of more protectionist and nationalist policies.