Constructing difference in postsocialist Britain: the role of historical memory in media narratives of German and Polish migrants

In this article, we bring media narratives of migration into connection with historical memory. Memories are utilised to draw boundaries between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. News media play an important role, implicating migration in a process of remembering and ‘forgetting’ in service of dominant identities and political agendas. Collective memories associated with both postcolonialism and postsocialism interlink in representing migration from Central and Eastern Europe. To demonstrate this, we compare narratives of German and Polish migration and history in UK newspapers. We find that Polish and German migrants are implicitly placed in different positions in the class, racial and cultural hierarchies underpinning the postsocialist and postcolonial conditions, yet largely ignore memories of migrants themselves. In narratives of German and Polish history, the UK press also reproduces ideas about eastern European ‘backwardness’ and western European ‘modernity’ in relation to the contemporary far-right. Historical transnational entanglements, such as the British role in postsocialist transition, or the existence of far-right movements in Britain, are largely ‘forgotten’. By employing both a postsocialist and postcolonial lens in the study of memory and migration, we can obtain a more nuanced understanding of the racial hierarchies in a simultaneously postsocialist and postcolonial Britain.