Border-Crossing and “Temporal Otherness” in the Greater Region SaarLorLux: Residential Migrants’ Experiences of Divergence

The paper deals with border crossing and experiences of ‘temporal otherness’ of residential migrants who move their home from Luxembourg to the German side of the river Moselle. Research on temporal borders is highly influenced by a particular spatio-political relation: the West creating its underdeveloped other and coping with this other by controlling border crossing, which in turn results in maintaining the idea of the other’s temporal remoteness. The Luxembourg-German border region offers a complement to this perspective; here one encounters migrants who move in the opposite temporal direction and appreciate certain forms of ‘being behind’ in their new place of residence.
These migrants are confronted not only with difference but with disparate developments. They must cope with divergences, i.e., with the fact that economic and socio-cultural conditions within their new socio-spatial universe, the cross-border region, have evolved in different directions. The paper argues that the analysis of migrants’ memories is elucidating with respect to the question of the moral legitimacy of moving and thus to the conception and everyday construction of cross border communities. It sheds light on the fact that borderland research by focusing on national difference and related conceptions of cross-border mobility and exchange tends to ignore borderlanders’ notions of (regional) unity and ensuing claims for convergence.