As a kid in German schools I experienced incidents where teachers would scoff at my future prospects because of my Anglo-Ukrainian background and struggle to adjust to German grammar (I moved at 11). But I instinctively felt it would be off for me to use the #MeTwo hashtag
Partly I think this is about surname and class. Despite a lot of crap from teachers who told me I would never make it because I "did not understand Germany", my middle class parents had time, capital and combination of British arrogance and Ukrainian ferocity to bully them back
But reading through the #MeTwo hashtags I noticed that people of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian or Romanian backgrounds were far less involved than people from various other diaspora milieus. Even though in the 1990s East Europeans were heavily targeted in an anti-migrant backlash
I was left wondering about how experiences of Right wing xenophobia might have differed between East European communities and other diaspora groups.

Thinking to how we responded to neo-Nazi bullshit when I was a kid, maybe our advantage was that we could bang on about the war
Whenever I had to deal with a teenage German neo-Nazi skinhead or Scheitelnazi waffling on about Aryan superiority my stock response was "f*** you, if you're so superior why did you lose to us".

Worked equally well in a Ukrainian or a British context.
And this wasn't an unusual tactic. Russian or Ukrainian diaspora friends would regularly politely or not so politely mention Stalingrad or Kursk when faced with prejudice from Germans. Polish diaspora friends would point out to how Poland had survived despite every German effort
For many of East European backgrounds, it was the Germans who were the pack of losers. Prejudice could be countered and indignities softened by a reminder that they had lost and "we" had won.

A tactic that people from many other diaspora communities simply didn't have available.

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More from @APHClarkson

Sep 30, 2018
A multi-tier model will still have different balances of rights and responsibilities and an asymmetry of power between tiers. A core with France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands will always have the power to dominate the rest and fuel incentives to get in the inner tier
With Eurozone states, almost all of which are involved in PESCO, the EU already has a core tier, with a second tier EU members outside the Euro and a third tier in EEA/Efta/DCFTA relationships with the EU. Multi-speed Europe already exists and the UK is unwilling to join any tier
To drag Macedonia, with its particular dilemmas in relation to Albania, Greece and Bulgaria, into UK debates over multi-speed Europe misses what the core of the problem with this referendum is. Greece has veto power to block Macedonian accession into any European integration tier
Read 4 tweets
Sep 29, 2018
Raab at one blow dismisses the concerns of Irish and Northern Irish people as the machinations of a "foreign hand". In a long tradition of English politicians denying Irish and Northern Irish people agency
There will no doubt be some UK commentators that will blame the EU for the radicalisation of parts of the English political establishment instead of demanding that English politicians finally take responsibility for their actions over the past 25 years
Rather than fostering a sense of national emancipation, all Brexit has done is reinforce a deeply entrenched tendency in British political culture to avoid taking responsibility by blaming the EU for all ills while at the same time demanding it sort Britain's problems out for it
Read 4 tweets
Sep 14, 2018
If the EU hadn't forced the sufficient progress issue we would be in the same impasse we are now. The problem lies in UK internal paralysis, not EU27 attempts to manage it.
The EU should have been much tougher about nailing the UK down on the details of the Irish border backstop earlier. The problem hasn't been that the EU has been too tough. The problem is that the EU has given the UK too much leeway to waste time
By this point it's pretty evident that whenever the EU signals an off ramp for the UK to ease off its red lines the UK government misreads it as a fundamental concession and drifts back into rhetoric based on a misreading of Britain's geopolitical position.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 12, 2018
WTF is "SuperCanada"? Does it have more superpowers than Captain Canada?
de.scribd.com/document/38842…
In effect the final deal the ERG thinks the UK can get if a UK government is tough enough in the EU would provide all the benefits of EU membership without any of the obligations. The ERG MPs haven't moved on from 24 June 2016
Enda Kenny klaxon
Read 17 tweets
Sep 8, 2018
The head of pro-Chemnitz, an organisation that played a key role in fuelling anti-migrant tension in Chemnitz, is a local lawyer that also founded a cultural club for Russians and Russian-Germans called Kulturverein Tolstoi in 2014. Interesting timing
swr.de/report/der-flu…
Here the link to Kulturverein Tolstoi e.V.
kulturverein-tolstoi.de/?Presse
The fascinating thing is that the German journalists struggle with a worldview they think is laced with contradictions. But in the context of East European Far Right ideologies or Duginist Eurasianism the positions Martin Kohlmann takes fit right in.
swr.de/report/der-flu…
Read 6 tweets
Aug 19, 2018
A No Deal scenario where the UK government gives up controlling what and who is coming in and out of its borders with the EU and that may well end up even struggling to control what is being shipped in from non-EU countries risks becoming a platform for various smuggling scams
Effectively declaring that your country is wide open to anything and anyone coming in and out and hoping for the best is not a viable strategy. The EU will impose checks anyway to avoid a repeat of the kind of border scams that proliferated in the Balkans in the 1990s.
The UK government expects reciprocity from the EU in a No Deal scenario when it comes to stepping back from border checks while dropping out of all shared oversight mechanisms that enable the EU to ensure that the UK is not becoming a platform for smuggling
Read 5 tweets

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