Migrants of nostalgia: identity and social uncertainty of transnational repatriates in Post-Communist Lithuania

Immediately after Lithuania regained independence in 1991 there were increased attempts of the diasporas ‘to come back home’. Expatriates, hyphenated Americans of Lithuanian background, ethnic tourists from America in search of their ‘links’, and other returnees were faced by the ‘transitional’ dilemmas of the post-communist Lithuanian realities. Returnees settled in Lithuania, but how much did they identify themselves with native Lithuanians, became “one of us”. Were they and are they migrants of nostalgia rather than returnees? The aim of the article is to delineate the profile of the nostalgia-based-model of Lithuanian national identity, shared by Lithuanian transmigrants, in particular, those expatriate refuges and their offspring, who, at the end of World War II, fled the Communist regime and moved to the West. Most of these political émigrés developed a strong moral imperative ‘to be of use to Lithuania’ which crystallised into a missionary-like identity ‘to come back to Lithuania when it will be free of Communism’, a complex of identity strategies developed in the diaspora and transplanted in the home country. The problems of in-placement, the re-rooting and re-homing of the transnational, up-rooted and displaced Lithuanian migrants, are the focus of this chapter: the transnational model of Lithuanian identity, transplanted to foreign soil and brought back by the Lithuanian transmigrants. Key questions to be answered are: what is brought back to Lithuania by the returnees in terms of social capital and heritage; what are the shapes of identity among transmigrants in a transitional society; how identities that are brought back from the country of domicile are challenged?[...]Vytauto Didžiojo universiteta