Abstract
European activists from countries like Germany, Spain, France and Italy spend months travelling around the World, exploring and experiencing politically interested places and many times temporarily connecting themselves to local nods of transnational social movements. The continent of Latin America has become preferred destination for thousands of young political nomads - especially since 1960s when stronger ties between Latin-American and European social movement have been established.
The structurally privileged, historically accumulated and geopolitically powerful position of "their" nation states in the World-system enables them to be mobile, to derive benefits from process of globalization and, as I argue, while travelling to reflect and denaturalize their local grounding in Europe from global perspective. Furthermore, because of their background in middle class social space, I argue, their political imagination of concrete place is changed on the roads into political experience with transformative impact on their intimate personhood, future life trajectories and middle class habitus in general.
I demonstrate these processes on examples from my long term multi-sited fieldwork in Germany and "the Zapatista's Chiapas" in Mexico.