In my sample of life narratives, the academics had experienced internationalization in the specific context of transition from state socialism into a market economy, leading to a new type of society, based on new capitalist/entrepreneurial/individualistic principles. One important marker of the transition itself, as a differentiation of life patterns, was a directly felt sense of discrediting the past as harmful to individual lives and to life chances of the interviewees.
For instance, for Sergei, an older interviewee in my sample, who completed his doctoral study under socialism in Russia before taking an opportunity to redo his entire doctoral education in the US (in a new discipline), the socialist period is clearly understood as an era of repression of individualism and of entrepreneurialism. His future Western re-orientation is signalled in the interview by a discussion of some Western cultural influences on his youth and the state system’s repression of certain types of interests, marking the first important narrative of individualisation- that of wishing to go ‘against the grain’ of limited ‘safe’ life choices and considering taking more risky decisions:
So I was born in the Soviet Union, right? So in the Soviet Union there was not business and I mean, mostly, I came from this intelligentsia, you know the word ‘intelligentsia’, and that was a tradition to go down that path because people, there was no business, there were no other opportunities, that was a socialist state, and I had, during my school I had many things, I was interested in. I liked music, you know rock and blues, but at that time
there wasn’t any, it was pretty much underground so my parents and I agreed that it was a very risky way to go. (Sergei)
Moreover, the story of the early lives preceding and also explaining the desire for international experiences is in some cases a story of the assertion of individual freedom despite a limiting social context, sometimes presented as a kind of void of opportunity. For some of the older interviewees, the beginning of 1989 is understood as a systemic and, at the same time, a personal life change. This is well illustrated by Gabriel, who couches the systemic changes of 1989 in explicit terms as a revolution, and by Julius, who sees them as a liberation movement:
When I finished the university it was just two years before the change, before the revolutionary changes, the systemic changes. (Gabriel)
I actually just enrolled at the university like many thousands of Georgians and at that time it was faculty of history, so there was no political science, nothing, because it was 1989 and Soviet Union still was there and then, this time was very revolutionary for Georgia because national liberation movement started, people got involved, you know in politics and against communist regime and all this stuff just started. (Julius)
It is already visible that the story of the internationalised self in the transition period is a story of overcoming a lack or absence of adequate life choices often perceived as lack of personal and political freedom as well as a limited scope of intellectual development options. This narrative is strengthened when the negative and limiting influence of the state with its strict controlling effect on career in education is mentioned. For instance, these academics who graduated before 1989 in Eastern Europe and in the early 1990 in the former Soviet Union,
had to start their working lives in a compulsory placement in a school or high school for a period of two years as teachers. Anastasia, a Russian historian and Gabriel, a Romanian sociologist, illustrate this point:
So I have graduated from the university, and for two years I have taught, I worked in a school, an ordinary city school for two years. (Anastasia)
And although my professor would have liked to have me joining the university, that was not possible at that time because no appointments were made to university those years. So I had, I had to go and teach in a secondary school somewhere. I still, I was lucky not to be sent to a rural village, as the majority of my colleagues, but to a smaller, to a small city. (Gabriel)
In general, it is very clear that these narratives construct a story of individualisation, that is, of differentiation of the individual life story from the typical life story. Nothing points out to this discursive construction as well as one internationalised academic comparing his unusual choices of an alternative education: from a private high school, through an internationally- oriented, new undergraduate university to a foreign PhD program; as contrasted with the perceived ‘normal’ strategy of his contemporaries. In this interview, the Belorussian system is understood as still working today very much like in the communist times in the rest of the region:
Well, the state education system, it really works in this way that, this it really channels very well, it is effective in this way that it really can channel people’s biographies, careers. Like, there is for instance a law that if you were not paying for your education you need to work for two years at the place where the state will decide you should work. […] And so that means that very often, it’s like first people are thinking ‘OK how to get
people start thinking, ‘OK, what to do?, who to bribe?, et cetera, so as not to go to this two years [placement]. So it means, yeah, it’s just an example, in this perspective people are really limited in their decisions about what they choose, about their choices. So they always have this perspective. (Emil)
It appears that at its very core, the appeal behind internationalisation in the transition context is a desire to break away from the mould, to experience some kind of alternative personal and professional identity formation, based on newer values that are associated with the post- socialist reality. Individual academic lives therefore bear witness to the process of social change in terms of reorientation of values and new aspirations for personal development. This is a key narrative of the formation of an alternative, internationalised self which is in many ways similar to my own personal story. It clearly shows the workings of individualisation, not so much in terms of the particular actions taken, but rather in terms of their later narrative evaluation in the life story.