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Austerity Diasporas: Brexit, Portugal and Looking to the Future

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With the following post Lisa Rodan completes the four-part series on “Austerity Diasporas”, which is related to her ongoing PhD research onthe experience of Portuguese migrants affected by the 2008 crash and ensuing austerity. The first post focussed on social changes in Portugal leading up to the 2011 austerity measures. In the second post, Lisa described how migration has shaped Portuguese history up to today. Part three dealt with the experience of Portuguese migrants in London under austerity. Finally, in part four, Lisa discusses the predictions of her research participants for life after Brexit.

The Brexit vote gave an unexpected jump-start to my PhD fieldwork. I had just begun identifying potential respondents for a year-long anthropological examination of how the 2011 austerity measures around Southern Europe had affected the outlook, identity and long-term social imagination of millennial Portuguese migrants in London. They were a group that would eventually become defined within my research by their access to higher education during the more prosperous 1990s.

After the initial shock that it had actually happened, the attitude amongst many of my interlocutors was defiant. “What are they going to do, chuck us all out?” said Mariana, 26, a nurse, “The economy would collapse. They can’t do without us.” Jose, 32, an engineer, was not worried either. “For people like me, there are always lots of opportunities. If they are so short-sighted to make us leave, I’ll go to Germany. But they won’t. I don’t know about outside of London but here at least I know we’ll be OK.”

Not everyone felt as confident though, and the feelings of betrayal caused by the vote were often expressed with resentment and suspicion. Olivia, a 34-year-old waitress who trained as a teacher in Portugal, grimly welcomed Brexit as a, “Necessary evil to keep out those who come for benefits, layabouts… unlike us who have come here to work and contribute.” Her words were echoed by those who resented the harsh living conditions they were exposed to in London. They framed Brexit as a necessary change to a status quo which enabled exploitation of people like them. For Guilherme, 32, an ambitious potential businessman who was feeling burnt-out after two years of working in various catering businesses, “Politics is a sham,” and he welcomed a shake-up of the whole system.  “I came here to work hard and make something of myself,” he told me bitterly, “and am treated worse than a dog. There are too many people here and something has to change.” Marco, a 39 year-old teaching assistant, is determined to stay until he gets the experience that will allow him to establish himself in a permanent teaching career but is resentful of the decision for symbolic reasons. “Portugal is Britain’s oldest ally, right? And I come here, the Spanish, the Italians, we respect the culture, we have a common, western culture. Why is it us they want to stop coming? Me, I never asked for benefits in my life, there’s something wrong, isn’t there? Rather than asking us all to leave, they should stop the benefits, make the people work!”

Over the course of my fieldwork these initial reactions to Brexit became part of a wider reflection from my respondents on plans for the future. Many started to increasingly refer to Portugal as no longer a ‘country in crisis’ but rather somewhere with potential. Returning home was presented as a ‘lifestyle choice’ and a chance for a ‘good life’ with frequent references to accepting and adapting to a new way of being. “People are a bit humbler now” says Andreia, 35, a former pharmacist turned medical student in Porto. “People’s expectations of how things ‘should’ be done are different, it’s no longer go to university, get a job, have a family. People have changed their mentality and learned to adapt to the way things are now. Especially those whose degrees saturated the labour market, like me.”

Part of this ‘learning to adapt’ is harnessing new sources of income generation which will enable a ‘good life’ in Portugal. The intertwined pillars of the post-crisis world in the Portuguese context, from my respondents’ point of view, are digitalisation of careers and tourism. These are dominated

by educated members of the millennial generation and a global outlook achieved through their experience abroad. Ines, 33, a nurse, plans to go back to Portugal but not to work in healthcare. “Long-term I want to change, something with tourism. That’s where the future is. The hospital I worked before, noooo, never. Terrible place! My idea is I’d like to get a two bed flat and rent one bed out on Airbnb. But I have to figure out how.” Like many of my respondents, she had multiple success stories of people who had done just that and achieved the perfect balance of a salary that enabled a global lifestyle and local images of a ‘good life’ represented by the weather, food, and cultural and family connections of Portugal. A friend of a friend, she told me, had quit his prestigious banking job in London four years earlier and moved back to Porto with his wife and baby. He now had a business running food tours, supplemented by freelance financial consultancy. “You see? That’s the dream!”

Who is able to access this dream depends as much on professional and educational capital as on the changing nature of working practices. The digitalisation of a transnational ‘gig economy’ in Portugal has its roots in a generation who consider themselves ‘European’ as well as ‘Portuguese’. They have experience abroad and are now returning wielding their bilingualism and globally recognised skill sets, which allow them to stand out from the crowd. Within such experiences and imaginations are a whole spectrum of potential success stories, ranging from teaching Portuguese via skype, to online jewellery business and international brand consultancy.

The Portuguese cultural imagination has long honoured the trait of ‘making do’ via the concept of ‘desenrascanço’– which loosely translates as “the act of disentangling yourself from a difficult situation using available means.” The Portugueseness of such responses to its’ local crisis is nevertheless embedded in a post-austerity global political economy where reduced state services have placed the onus on the individual to engage in work which can be simultaneously empowering and precarious. Offering digital services allows freedom of movement whilst at the same time removing long-term stability. Whether this diversion of domestic work practices in Portugal will exacerbate existing inequality amongst those who had the opportunity to leave and are now returning and those who had no choice but to stay remains to be seen.

Lisa Rodan is a third year PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent where she is working with three colleagues on an ESRC funded project entitled Household Survival in Crisis: Austerity and Relatedness in Greece and Portugal.

 

Austerity Diasporas: Portuguese-British Identity

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Lisa Rodan continues our “Austerity Diasporas” series, with a third post related to her ongoing PhD research into the experiences of Portuguese migrants affected by the 2008 crash and ensuing austerity. The first post focused on social changes leading up to the 2011 Austerity measures. In the second post, Lisa described the influence of migration on Portuguese culture and history, sharing some of the main messages emerging from her fieldwork with migrants in the UK. This post focuses on some of the challenges of living in London, and its impact upon migrant’s identities.

Sitting in the parents’ room of the paediatric intensive care ward at Kings College Hospital in south London, I was only dimly aware of the irony that my first week of fieldwork on Portuguese migrants in London had been indefinitely postponed whilst a Portuguese surgeon operated on my son’s spine. I had left my baby with a Jamaican nurse, Irish anaesthetist, Indian plastic surgeon and Portuguese and Lebanese neurosurgeons and gone upstairs to wait whilst Nigerian cleaners tidied up around me and a small family of anxious looking Ecuadorians murmured amongst themselves. One of the cleaners brought cups of water over for both me and the trembling woman opposite and squeezed our hands. Any differences in our backgrounds, languages and histories seemed suspended far above the more relevant shared experience of why we were all in that small room on that muggy summer’s day.

The normality of this multicultural existence became an overarching theme throughout my subsequent year of fieldwork (which went ahead as planned thanks to Dr José and his colleagues). The Portuguese graduates of the EU generation, arriving with degrees and career aspirations, inhabited multinational, multi-ethnic and multilingual workplaces, house-shares and friendship groups. Their lives were different in many ways from earlier generations of Portuguese migrants to London who had created what one new arrival described to me as “my grandmother’s village trapped in time”.

That is not to say there is a lack of common experiences and references between the university- educated, cosmopolitan millennials and the long-established Portuguese communities of Stockwell, who socialise in Portuguese cafes and shop in Portuguese supermarkets. Many of the former group also have family within the latter community. Yet by virtue of their educational attainments and a certain value-set formed out of the relative prosperity of Portugal in the 1990s have made a conscious decision to pursue the career opportunities which are the most seductive element of London living. The desire to use their educations to achieve recognition of their professional skills as well as a certain quality of life they once hoped for back home is still a possibility in London.

The price is high: loneliness and struggle are constant demons. Everyone knows somebody who ‘couldn’t hack it’ and went home. But for those who are still here, whether they are part of the initial wave of post-austerity refugees who have managed to carve out a niche in their chosen sector, or newer arrivals for whom London remains a land of opportunities, there is a certain pride in having learned how to handle the pace of life- they have become Londoners.

Becoming a ‘Londoner’ in this sense doesn’t mean becoming less Portuguese- the importance of seeking out spaces of ‘Portugueseness’ is an essential part of their lives. Many frame it as a need to escape the ‘coldness’ of the English character. This perception is worthy of a blog post in itself. For now, perhaps things can be more easily understood by looking at it as a longing for familiar cultural references. Regular meetups with Portuguese friends (the majority made since arriving in London or via old acquaintances and friends of friends pulled together by Facebook) are regularly set up and the Little Portugal enclave in Stockwell plays a major role. Even those who describe it as a ‘different world’ from their own occasionally pop in, whether for enormous group feasting in the restaurants or to watch the Portuguese national team play a big match. Nevertheless, a frequent refrain is the realisation of a feeling that one is increasingly more at home within the Portuguese expat community than in Stockwell or with the Portuguese back home who make them realise how English they have become.

It would be an injustice to suggest that life for educated Portuguese migrants does not have the difficulties of London life in general. Struggles with finding affordable housing, housemate conflicts and unscrupulous and exploitative agencies and employers are part of parcel of life here, especially for those who arrived with nothing more than their degree certificate and were attempting to work up to the job of their dreams via the counters of the chain coffee shops of central London. Those who were determined to stay in their area of study often ended up disillusioned by the challenge in finding a job which in Portugal would be have been beneath their skill-set.

As any parent knows, life completely changes with a new addition to the family. For new Portuguese parents, as for any new parent across London, comes the realisation that, whatever your story and hopes for the future, the arrival of a baby restricts access to many of the extra-curricular parts of the city that make the frantic lifestyle worth it and seem to throw conceptions of what exactly a ‘good life’ consists of into a new light. The lack of grandparents and family nearby suddenly is thrown into sharp focus and longings to go back increase. Taking the international experience gained in the hectic London career bubble and channelling it into a life of digital nomadism is a dream expressed by many people I met, especially those with young children.

Throughout my fieldwork the initial impact of Brexit lingered like an uninvited guest. It didn’t change anyone’s short-term plans but, like most Londoners, the overwhelming feeling was that of wait and see and have a plan B. After all, who was more aware of the importance EU citizens to the capital than those who have propped up the city’s economy? Be that as it may, the risk of whatever the fall-out might be can only add to the burnout already felt by many existing in the relentless consumerist cycle of working and living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Nevertheless, many of my Portuguese colleagues have made a life here no less than any other Londoner of diverse and varied background, especially those who have partnered up with people from other nationalities. Some may return but many are planning to stay and weather the storm.

Lisa Rodan is a third year PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent where she is working with three colleagues on an ESRC funded project entitled Household Survival in Crisis: Austerity and Relatedness in Greece and Portugal.

For the past 12 months Lisa has been carrying out ethnographic interviews with university educated, Portuguese people in their 20s, 30s and early 40s in London, supplemented by time spent in Portugal where she has been lucky to meet some of their families. In a series of posts Lisa will share her initial analysis of some key themes arising from her fieldwork data, which she began to collect in June 2016 just after the Brexit vote. These encounters have ranged from one-off interviews to valued friendships and time spent with each other’s families. The content of the series will be a very close reading of fieldwork notes in their raw form. Lisa welcomes any input and suggestions from interested parties.

Portugal and austerity: what European model?

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In today’s blog post, Roberto Falanga and Simone Tulumello describe the trajectory of Portuguese austerity politics, from the post-crash bailout. Portugal is often held up as an example of anti-austerity politics, especially by the left in other countries. Roberto and Simone argue while it is correct that the left coalition is reverting austerity policies, it does so under contradictory conditions that call for a broader rethinking of the European model if the approach taken until now is to be sustainable.

The Memorandum of Understanding for the 3-year economic adjustment programme in Portugal was signed in May 2011 under the supervision of the International Monetary Fund, European Commission, and European Central Bank (the so-called Troika). The bailout package of 78€ million provided to the country was agreed by the three mainstream parties – the majority made up of the Social Democratic and Popular parties, and the Socialist party in the minority – to consolidate domestic finances and improve international competitiveness against the increasing vulnerability of the country to the effects of the global crisis.

Preceded by preliminary rounds of austerity (the Programmes of Stability and Growth, Programas de Estabilidade e Crescimento) imposed by the European Union to the socialist government led by José Socrates, the intervention of the Troika between 2011 and 2014 imposed significant pro-cyclical fiscal consolidation measures (like in Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, and Spain, where similar Memoranda were signed in the same period). At the local level, for instance, fiscal retrenchment entailed a reduction of administrative units, state grants (about 60% of local revenue), municipal staff, municipally-owned enterprises, while decreasing local debt and enhancing new mechanisms for risk management control, reporting and monitoring (Teles, 2016).

Against the negative effects of the austerity measures on social, economic and political life (economic recession, increasing unemployment, impoverishment of large sectors of civil society, emigration of young and high-skill generation, private housing speculation, etc.), protests and social mobilisation erupted in the peak of the crisis between 2011 and 2012. Labour unions and political parties at the end of the left spectrum tended to support movements (e.g. ‘Indignados’, ‘Que se lixe a Troika’, etc.) and civic networks (e.g. the ‘Congresso Democrático das Alternativas’ composed of people from trade unions, left-wing parties, academics and social movements). In this period, public interest over large payroll tax increases – and more broadly austerity measures – grew and key institutional actors like the Constitutional Court directly challenged the government and pushed the suspension of austerity measures, like Labour Code amendments.

Portuguese mobilisation spread after decades of low participation in political life and within a global scenario in motion, with the ‘Arab Spring’ and the Spanish occupations in Madrid rising interest and concern worldwide. This notwithstanding, when compared to countries like Spain and Greece, protests, occupations and strikes in Portugal attracted less public than expected and did not produce new ‘anti-system’ groups. According to Caldas (2012), this was due to an increasing alienation from politics and representatives, perceived as corrupt and dishonest, which exacerbated historical trends of disaffection with political institutions and representatives (De Sousa et al., 2014). Moury and Standring (2017) explain that alienation of grassroots movements and self-organised groups was the result of the government attitude against social partners and professional bodies, placed before austerity as a fait accompli.

The reasons behind the growing mistrust towards the political class, as well as towards protests at occasion perceived as controlled by labour unions and political parties (Observatory for the Quality of Democracy report 2012), should be searched in the way the adjustment programme was implemented. Disaffection in civil society was coupled by discontent among business sectors (for instance, due to the rise of the valued added tax), and within party ranks of both government coalition and opposition. The major mainstream party at the opposition, the Socialist party, decided to stop supporting the government in 2012 by voting against amendments to the 2012 budget and the 2013 budget, in a time when pools on voting intentions gave it an edge over the centre-right coalition (De Giorgi et al., 2015).

Despite the attempts to persuade society on the need of austerity through the TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’) rhetoric and blame shifting communication strategy on previous administrations (Fonseca and Ferreira, 2015), confidence on government dropped-off. Alienation from the political sphere reached the highest abstention rates since 1979 in the 2013 local elections (47.4 %; preceded by 41.9% in 2011 and followed by 44.1% of abstention in 2015 in legislative elections). Noticeably, abstention resulted positively associated to lower socioeconomic resources and educational skills, furthering the exclusion of the most vulnerable groups from public decision (OECD, 2015).

It is worth noting that the blurring borders between institutional and non-institutional spheres have always characterised political life in the country. If compared to neighbouring countries social mobilisation was weaker, this may have been compensated by easier transfer of ideas and instances between movements and parties, as the same actors often played multiple roles. As a result, in contrast to the growth of anti-system groups, like in Spain and Greece, political parties tended to incorporate social claims, taking ahead political strategies that eventually prepared the field for the ‘Geringonça’ to be in power from 2015.

The term Geringonça means something with an unstable structure (and few chances to be durable in time), and is informally used to describe the coalition between the Socialist, the Communist, and the Left Block parties that is currently governing the country. The coalition, emerged from the initial impasse for the formation of the national government after the legislative elections in 2015, has a peculiar character: the left-wing parties do not take part in the government, but form, together with the governing Socialist party, the parliamentary majority. This situation has brought the parliament back into the core of political action, in that every governmental proposal needs to go through the negotiation with the Communist and Left Block parties – and in some cases with the centre-right parties, in the name of ‘large agreements’ and ‘stability’.

Amid the deep recessionary effects of the austerity policies, the dismantling of the welfare regime, the crisis of corporatist traditions and the interruption of secular trends of greater equality and inclusion, the new majority declared its intention to reverse the austerity agenda implemented between 2011 and 2014 – though with significant contradictions. The priority has been restoring the purchasing power of workers and civil servants – for instance, by reversing the tax increases and the extension of the work week from 35 to 40 hours put in place by the previous government. Though some economists and experts have been criticising these measures,[1] 2016 and 2017 have seen a fast economic growth, giving the government the possibility to keep up with the expansionary agenda as well as maintaining good financial fundamentals.[2]

However, some fundamental contradictions persist. On the one hand, the economic growth is based on exportations and, expressively, the boom of tourism, and doubts persist on its sustainability in the long run. On the other hand, amid the Socialist will to not break up with European conditionality, the investment in purchasing power has meant that virtually no action has been put in place so far to revert the dismantling of the welfare state of the previous years – the national health system, housing policy and public transport are possibly the fields where austerity hit the hardest. While ongoing discussions for the 2018 budget seem to signal a renewed attention to the welfare state, particularly in the field of health[3] and housing (a ‘New Generation of Housing Policies is ongoing public discussion), it seems to us that the potential for consolidating a different path to development lies exactly in the engagement with the contradictions we highlighted, which is quite unlikely in absence of a more general rethinking of European institutions and mainstreams.

While many in Europe are pointing at Portugal as the evidence that the austerity (and neoliberal) hegemony may start their path to decline, we believe Portuguese successes and contradictions point toward the need for a deeper questioning of the European model of development.

Roberto Falanga and Simone Tulumello, are Postdoctoral Research Fellows, at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa

[1] The Post-Programme of Surveillance initiated in May 2014 in order to monitor economic, fiscal and financial policies in Portugal stress spread weakness in labour market, public administration, and judicial system inter alia. The programme also critically observes the reverse of some previous reforms, as the return to the 35 hours working week in civil service; the increase of public employment via new hiring policies; the reduction of VAT for food at restaurants; backtracking in reforming state-owned enterprises and concessions negatively affecting the capacity to attract foreign direct investment.

[2] The Ministry of Finances, Mario Centeno, has even been included among the potential leaders of the Eurogroup.

[3] See http://expresso.sapo.pt/sociedade/2017-10-14-Orcamento-para-a-saude-aumenta-44.

Austerity Diasporas – Portugal and Migration

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Lisa Rodan continues our “Austerity Diasporas” series, with a second post related to her ongoing PhD research into the experiences of Portuguese migrants affected by the 2008 crash and ensuing austerity. The first post focused on social changes leading up to the 2011 Austerity measures. In this post, Lisa describes the influence of migration on Portuguese culture and history, sharing some of the main messages emerging from her fieldwork with migrants in the UK.

Mass migration is a concept that has shaped Portugal since the 15th century. The cultural sentiment of saudade for that which is missing or lost echoes within literature, discourse and the very soul of the Portuguese. According to any Portuguese you will ever meet, saudade is untranslatable to those whose country has not been shaped by chronic partings and longings to return.

So what’s different now? Throughout my research, my respondents have all been quick to point out the answer. Of the 110,000 Portuguese who left their homeland in 2013, a third now had degrees. Graduate migration was double what it was 10 years earlier. According to Joana, 35, a molecular biologist who did her PhD in Spain before moving to London where she has just had her first child, this was a structural problem born during the golden years of early EU membership – “that explosion of university education was short-sighted,” she says, “the labour market couldn’t cope with all the graduates. For me, I love my country but what would I do there? There is nothing for me there professionally.”

“The middle class is dead” says the father of another of my respondents. A 60-year old doctor with two jobs and three children studying and working abroad, in his opinion it all started going wrong with the Euro. “This is no longer a localised crisis, where you can just migrate and establish new communities, it’s a global one and where is it felt most? In the same countries who only a generation ago were welcomed into the European ‘family’ with open arms.”

Levels of cynicism vary according to the individuals behind those statistics. Carrying values inherited from post-EU prosperity, they don’t talk of ‘migration’, which is associated with rural, uneducated movement, but ‘adventure’, ‘opportunities’ and ‘choice’. In some cases, historical class divisions are noticeable- about a quarter of my respondents claim “no-one had migrated before”. Further probing revealed they meant “no-one like me”. These are the descendants of factory owners, landowners or the long-standing urban middle classes. In other words, a section of Portuguese society that had generally left travelling abroad for work to poorer country folk. For most of my respondents however, migration is a vibrant part of their family history. Many have parents or grandparents who had travelled to work in French hotels or Swiss construction sites, often commuting between there and their families back in the villages of (mainly) northern Portugal.

Regardless of family background, what the current generation have in common is the expectation of a standard of living based on the model their parents were able to provide for them growing up. Plentiful opportunities for work, eating out, travel. “Not luxurious, but a good life” is the common refrain. The Erasmus university exchange scheme is often mentioned as a rite of passage, following a childhood of holidays around Europe. “We are children of the EU” says Nuno, 32, an architect with an Italian wife, “it feels more natural to make a life here in London than anywhere else.” He presents the crisis as a positive thing, facilitating his decision to leave.  Susana, 34, a nurse, agrees. “I didn’t have to come, I had a job. I just wanted a better one! One where I could grow, start my life. It’s not like it was in my father’s day, he had no education and had to leave just to find work so he could support us.”

Dancing around claims “it’s not about work” however, professional success is the narrative that dominates and is interwoven with frustration at the lack of opportunities to progress and have a comparative standard of living back home. Despite initially being firm to differentiate their experience of migration as distinct from earlier generations, as I got to know my respondents I began to note a continuity of experiences. Many people referred me to a cultural concept known as desenrascar– another of those enigmatic Portuguese expressions which is variously described as ‘getting by’, ‘making do’ or ‘hustling’. Nearly three quarters of the people I spoke to had parents who had worked outside of Portugal at some point in their lives. Of these, many of them were also the children of retornados– the name given to the three quarters of a million Portuguese who were repatriated from Portugal’s African colonies after her empire crumbled in the 1970s. “Angola, Mozambique…those countries were all part of Portugal at the time,” they tell me, “so it wasn’t really migration. It was just going somewhere else in Portugal to try your luck.” Even Joana with her PhD and criticism of Portugal’s unrealistic expectations of the 1990s later tells me about her family’s route from Guinea-Bissau and her siblings now scattered around the world, adding “that’s just the way it is in my family, you are expected to migrate…it’s more unusual if you don’t!”

I did not meet a single person who came to the UK without knowing of someone already here. Sometimes a distant cousin or a long-lost childhood friend, reunited through Facebook, but in several cases a close family member. The social, financial or practical support of existing communities in both London and Portugal established a form of transnational movement equally, or perhaps even more, connected to each other than at any time in the past. Digital communications, a product of the same raging technological progress that crippled economies and crushed social systems have enabled deeper continuities with home and more extensive local networks in the latest chapter in a long history of movement out of a periphery country towards the global centres of power.

Lisa Rodan is a third year PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent where she is working with three colleagues on an ESRC funded project entitled Household Survival in Crisis: Austerity and Relatedness in Greece and Portugal.

For the past 12 months Lisa has been carrying out ethnographic interviews with university educated, Portuguese people in their 20s, 30s and early 40s in London, supplemented by time spent in Portugal where she has been lucky to meet some of their families. In a series of posts Lisa will share her initial analysis of some key themes arising from her fieldwork data, which she began to collect in June 2016 just after the Brexit vote. These encounters have ranged from one-off interviews to valued friendships and time spent with each other’s families. The content of the series will be a very close reading of  fieldwork notes in their raw form. Lisa welcomes any input and suggestions from interested parties.

Austerity Diasporas – Households in Crisis: Austerity, Migration and Family in Portuguese London

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In today’s post Lisa Rodan introduces a series of publications on her ongoing PhD research into how Portuguese migrants understand their lives and experiences in relation to the political and social changes wrought by the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity measures that followed. For the past 12 months Lisa has been carrying out ethnographic interviews with university educated, Portuguese people in their 20s, 30s and early 40s in London, supplemented by time spent in Portugal where she has been lucky to meet some of their families. In a series of posts Lisa will share her initial analysis of some key themes arising from her fieldwork data, which she began to collect in June 2016 just after the Brexit vote. These encounters have ranged from one-off interviews to valued friendships and time spent with each other’s families. The content of the series will be a very close reading of  fieldwork notes in their raw form. Lisa welcomes any input and suggestions from interested parties.

Today’s blog, the first in a four-part series, will focus on social changes in Portugal leading up to the 2011 austerity measures. I will continue next month by reviewing how migration has shaped Portuguese history and what makes this latest wave different. Part three will look at London and how Portuguese migrants exist within it as a changing, global city in a time of European-wide austerity. Finally, I will discuss predictions for life after Brexit and how my research participants view recent positive changes in Portugal in terms of their own futures.

The following blog post is the first in the series on austerity and family – on the theme of “the changing role of the family / state in Portugal”.

“Things were going well, there was so much to do in Portugal, people were positive about their lives, their futures and then the crisis happened.” Carlos, 45

Carlos, 45, Lisbon, teacher turned IT consultant. Cecilia, 26, Vila Real, nurse. Sofia, 35, Porto, scientist[1]. Different worlds and stories but there is one thing they can all agree on- that they are a product of a ‘golden age’ of social and economic expansion in Portugal throughout the 1980s and 90s that no longer exists. These are the children of Europe, making their way in a very different world from the one their parents aspired to on their behalf. This was a world defined by prosperity, with education- via a proliferation of new universities all over the country- at its centre. The graduates of this expanded educational system form the backbone of a new middle class who found themselves with no place in the Portugal during the first decade of the 21st century.

Changing expectations is the key concept here. Values had transformed from the days of the Salazar dictatorship (1926-1974), and in the years following Portugal’s 1986 admission to the EU. Education was the key to an exciting new world where, for the first time, a ‘good life’ was accessible within Portugal, as long as one worked and studied hard for it. A long tradition of migration in search of a better standard of living, albeit through low paying jobs, was being turned on its head in favour of a prosperous future at home.

This new middle class, many of them the children of migrants who had returned to Portugal during the ‘golden years’, saw their expectations for a life different to that of their parents diminish before their eyes when austerity measures crippled the Portuguese economy in 2011. The industries worst hit were represented by thousands of unemployed graduates in nursing, teaching and construction- graduates who would now join the traditionally less educated migrant groups in seeking their fortune elsewhere.

The older ones I’ve spoken to are still angry. They remember what life was like before, although their anger has significantly diminished in the six years since the hardest repercussions of austerity were felt. However, it is the under 40s who have crossed my path more, and they define their experience as fleeing the prospect rather than experience of unemployment or stagnant careers. Expectations have once again changed in the ten years following the financial crash and again and again I am confronted by stoicism, a confidence in their ability as Europeans to find a way around the challenges of Brexit, but most of all a hope for the future rooted in trust in the same educational capital that prompted them to seek a world away from family and friends back home.

These graduates in their 20s and 30s encompass the values of a generation raised with Erasmus exchanges, travel opportunities and an affinity for the English language that, they explain, contrasts them to their parents, whose clinging to job security above all else is alien to what they have been brought up to believe. Nevertheless, the two sets of values are inexorably linked, not just through the obvious affective family bonds but through ongoing support networks. These networks are both financial, allowing young people to undertake internships, language classes or simply the space to save and figure out what to do next, and emotional, communication technology offering an opportunity for transnational connectivity in a way hitherto unexperienced by previous generations of migrants.

But what are the main differences between the EU generation in London and their parents, the children of the dictatorship? The former overwhelmingly present their experience as providing hope, meaning and pride through success (or the potential to succeed) in a career which is both internationally transferable and offers recognition of the individual’s talents. The irony at work here is the root of such hopes in the earlier prosperity wrought by neoliberal expansion which could only temporarily mask the inability of the economic and political framework of periphery countries to support the excesses of global finance and failures of the monetary union. What we are seeing now are the social repercussions of expectations of access to global consumerist comforts and existential fulfilment without the need to migrate. For many, this is now only attainable through planning a future outside Portugal.

Those Portuguese who recall pre-EU days defined by lack of both consumerism and the welfare state claim the younger generation don’t know the truth of how hard life can be and undervalue security. Those who have migrated and remained abroad describe their home country lovingly but as being devoid of opportunities befitting their qualifications and experience- a country mired in a system based on nepotism that undermined ‘EU values’ of efficiency, prosperity and merit. The young people I have spoken to refer to a favours system based on pre-revolution mentalities where contacts, rather than ability, are the key to getting ahead and have led to a country stuck in the past, where aspirational and intelligent young people migrate, leaving the same old names in charge.

Lisa Rodan is a third year PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent where she is working with three colleagues on an ESRC funded project entitled Household Survival in Crisis: Austerity and Relatedness in Greece and Portugal.

[1] All names have been changed