ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 examines integration and identity for Nicholaos as an immigrant in working-class Northern Britain in the early 1950s. In his narrative telling, Nicholaos returns to a comparative motif speaking of his life in Famagusta and ‘freedom’ and his working life in the North East of England as ‘slavery’. I use this motif within the framework of ontological security theory in international relations. I build on existing theorising of a performative ontological security that resides in fluid and hybrid identities as they manifest in everyday life, and which permits a conceptualisation of ontological security in IR that circumvents the role of national identity. The connection between ontological security and everyday experience is clear, in that ontological security can be found in a sense of comfort and certainty in the routines and practices of everyday life, thus locating security in the everyday. In this chapter I combine this focus on everyday life with a point of contention with what Giddens described as a ‘futural sense’ of social life that permits the formation of stable expectations. While it can be argued that every migration story disrupts the futural sense of social life by the person migrating, I pay particular attention to the role a bourgeois, Western capitalist notion of the future that relies on stability, property and pension plans plays in the motif of freedom and slavery in Nicholaos’ memoir. I argue that the importance of a futural sense of social life led to an ontological insecurity whereby identity was ultimately disrupted as it was rewritten by both the state in the form of conscription, and by subsequent social pressure.
