Chapter 6 focusses on the different forms of cross-ideological alliances between Islamist and leftist movements that were made to oppose the authoritarian regime. Far from romanticising those experiences into the clichéd concept of good opponents all coming together to fight the authoritarian regime, the chapter demonstrates instead how building cross-ideological alliances provoked ruptures and crystallised dissension within the constellations of actors themselves. It also shows how specific organisations and actors, mobilised on several scenes, came to play different roles in those alliances. The chapter goes on to demonstrate how each constellation of actors also maintained its own spaces of sociability and its own networks. Long-distance activism entailed other forms of activities that were turned towards group members in order to maintain activist groups despite their members’ new political lives in exile. Both Islamists and leftists worked to preserve their communities and to ensure the continuity of activism, albeit in different ways.

Chapter 4 explores the nature of anti-Ben Ali politics from afar. It focusses on the field of homeland politics by investigating the modalities, frames and repertoires of action used by activists who fought the authoritarian regime. The chapter highlights the ambivalent logic underlying the use of human rights, which became the main frame of contention for the various actors. For pro-regime actors, the human rights frame was paradoxically a way of legitimising the regime abroad; for Islamists, the activation of a discourse on human rights appeared as a way of circumventing the distrust to which they were habitually subjected in France; and for leftists, human rights stood as a rallying point, because fighting the Ben Ali regime during this period meant embracing the Islamists as a matter of necessity, as they were main victims of repression. The chapter goes on to investigate two further lines of cleavage that are crucial to the full understanding of long-distance Tunisian opposition politics. These lines offer a framework that determined means of action in terms of relationships with the Islamists and the degree of rupture with the Tunisian authoritarian regime.

This concluding chapter looks back at the main findings that emerged from this research and shows how they explain the transformation of long-distance Tunisian politics in the aftermath of the 2011 Revolution. It asks how the anti- and pro-regime struggles evolved following the demise of the central purpose of these struggles and the movements they inspired, and looks at the ways in which boundaries were redefined through different fields of action and the growth of new divisions. The emergence of new actors, the political reconversion of those who had shifted to Tunisian-centred politics, new rules of the game and the various possibilities of return to Tunisia each played a role in redefining the modalities of long-distance Tunisian politics. However, decades of activism had regulated the practice of activists from afar and reinforced the informal rules of the trans-state space of mobilisation. The 2011 Revolution simultaneously represented a decisive rupture and a continuity, reshaping and continuing to reshape the dynamics of the trans-state space of mobilisation.

Chapter 2 redraws the genealogies and characteristics of the different players involved in long-distance Tunisian activism. These various constellations of actors were pro-regime, Islamist, leftist and trans-ideological, and they created political parties, associations or other movements within which to conduct their politics in the trans-state space of mobilisation. This space represented a political and relational battleground on which the position of each actor played a role. The chapter shows how Tunisian activists were able to politically survive despite distance from the homeland, and the extent to which they were able to adapt to new configurations to continue their activism. The organisation of long-distance Tunisian politics assumed a specific and complex configuration in the French environment, so it cannot be considered as a simple replication of Tunisian politics.

For the thousands of children and teenagers who returned to Turkey with their parents during the mass exodus of 1984, the very concept of “return” was fraught. For many children, leaving West Germany in the 1980s was not a return or a remigration, but rather an immigration to a new country as emigrants from West Germany. The struggle of these archetypical “return children” was especially pronounced because they bore the burden of another label: “Almancı children,” or “Germanized children.” These children had particular difficulties reintegrating into the Turkish school system, and both the Turkish and West German media regularly emphasized the “liberal,” “democratic” education in Germany in contrast to an allegedly “authoritarian” education in Turkey. Although West German policymakers were initially relieved to export the burden of integrating these children to Turkey, they soon developed sympathy. Though twisted in the service of racism, this sympathy for the children’s plight compelled a rare relaxation of West German immigration policy. In 1989, just five years after kicking them out, Kohl’s government permitted the children to return once again – this time, not to their parents’ homeland but to the one that many considered their own: Germany.

This chapter addresses the nexus between racism and return migration in the early 1980s, which marked the peak of anti-Turkish racism. As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers debated passing a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks and violate their human rights. During this “racial reckoning,” West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey grappled with the nature of racism itself. Although West Germans silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was an explosion of public discourse about those terms. Ordinary Germans, moreover, wrote to their president expressing their concerns about migration, revealing both biological and cultural racism. The simultaneous rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) is crucial for understanding this racial reckoning. While many Germans warned against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly continuity to Nazism, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust offered Germans a way to dismiss anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkish migrants fought against this structural and everyday racism with various methods of activism. Turks at home, including the government and media following the 1980 military coup, viewed these debates with self-interest, lambasting German racism in the context of the 1983 remigration law.

Migration destabilized family life, gender, and sexuality. Whereas most Turkish guest workers traveled alone during the formal recruitment period (1961–1973), West Germany’s subsequent policy of family reunification sparked the increased migration of spouses and children. This chapter shows that, although migrants developed strategies to maintain connections to home, separation anxieties and fears of abandonment loomed. The departure of able-bodied young workers strained local economies, upended gender roles, and separated loved ones, sparking tensions at home: were guest workers sending enough money home, communicating enough, and remaining faithful to spouses? In Germany, reports about sex between male guest workers and German women fueled Orientalist tropes about “foreigners,” perpetuated stereotypes about Turkish men’s propensity toward violence, and stoked fears about the transgression of national and racial borders. Women left behind worried that their husbands would commit adultery while abroad. Guest workers’ children were viewed simultaneously as victims and threats: some stayed behind in Turkey, others were brought to Germany, and thousands of “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder) repeatedly moved back and forth between the two countries with their bags perpetually packed. As physical estrangement evolved into emotional estrangement, the perceived abandonment of the family came to represent the abandonment of the nation.

The book begins in the Turkish beach town of Şarköy, home to a community of first- and second-generation return migrants who were interviewed for this book. These returnees are just some of the millions of people who have journeyed back and forth between Turkey and Germany for over 60 years. The introduction lays out the book’s four core arguments, which together reveal that Turkish-German migration history is far more dynamic than typically told. First, return migration was not an illusion or unrealized dream but rather a core component of all migrants’ lives, and migration was not a one-directional event but rather a transnational process of reciprocal exchange that fundamentally reshaped both countries’ politics, societies, economies, and cultures. Second, migration introduced new ambivalence into European identities: although Germans assailed Turks’ alleged inability to integrate, they had integrated enough to be criticized in Turkey as “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Third, examining West German efforts to “kick out” the Turks in the 1980s exposes the reality of racism in the liberal, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, including Muslims and Turks in European history expands our idea of what “Europe” is and who “Europeans” are.

Challenging the myth of non-return, this chapter shows that, by the 1970s, many guest workers did want to return to Turkey. But instead of support, they encountered opposition from the Turkish government. In the 1970s, the link between return migration and financial investments dominated bilateral discussions between Turkey and West Germany. After the Oil Crisis, West Germany devised bilateral policies to promote remigration. Turkey, then mired in unemployment, hyperinflation, and debt, actively resisted those efforts. The Turkish government realized that guest workers played a significant role in mitigating the country’s economic crisis. To repay its foreign debt, Turkey needed guest workers’ remittance payments in high-performing Deutschmarks. If guest workers returned to Turkey, then that stream would dry up. Turkish officials thus strove to prevent mass return migration at all costs – even when it contradicted guest workers’ interests. These tensions also manifested in Turkey’s charging of exorbitant fees for citizens abroad who sought exemptions from mandatory military service, prompting young migrants to create an activist organization that critiqued this policy. The knowledge that they were unwanted in both countries widened the rift between the migrants and their home country, which disparaged them as “Germanized” yet relied on them as “remittance machines.”