Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

Polish identity 147
symbols becomes a device for establishing economic privileges, acquiring groupspecific
protection, promoting the acquisition of additional rights and the exemption
from common duties.
According to Offe, this phenomenon is connected with fundamental features of
the democratic political order. In constitutional democracies, says Offe, identity
conflicts used to be solved by granting group rights to some unjustly oppressed
structural minorities. Recently, however, not only has answering the question of the
basis on which the minority is a minority become more difficult, but we also observe
more and more often the intentional attempts to construct minorities on the basis
of some social identities in order to gain some additional social benefits. This is
facilitated by the fact that the contours of the ‘oppressed minority’ concept can be
easily blurred, as the vast majority of society – ‘everyone but [the] relatively welloff,
relatively young, able-bodied, heterosexual white male’ as Kymlicka (1995)
formulates it – can arguably be included, or in good conscience include him or
herself, into a giant rainbow-coalition of oppressed minorities. Hence, even if in
the contemporary world the significance of differences is decreasing in the cultural
dimension, it gains a new importance in the political one.
The hypothesis that, partly at least, we are dealing with the case of instrumental
use of identity in the answers to the questions about Poland’s integration into the
EU, can be supported by pointing to three facts. First, in public discourse, Polish
national identity is most often recalled in the context of the threat that integration
into the EU creates to the interests of specific social groups. It is argued that the
government should defend not simply peasants, steelworkers, or workers in sugar
factories, but Polish peasants, Polish steelworkers, Polish sugar-factory workers. A
given social group is presented in public discourse as a minority unjustly oppressed
within the European common market only because it is Polish. Second, the decline
in public support for the idea of Poland’s integration into the EU is accompanied
by an increase in support for the opinion that, hitherto, relations between Poland
and the EU have brought more benefits to the EU states (see Table 8.4). An unequal
share in benefits following from social cooperation is prototypical for the minority
argument. Third, when asked about their attitudes towards such a symbolic marker
of national identity as the passport, Poles turn out to be quite eager to replace the
passport of a citizen of the Polish Republic, with a passport of the European Union
citizen (see Table 8.5).
The instrumental use of national identity in the discourse concerning European
integration does not rule out the importance of this type of identity for Poles. Rather,
it calls for a change of perspective from which the issue is discussed. The problem
of European integration is usually analysed from the perspective of formal accession.
Therefore, questions most often asked in public opinion surveys are whether Poles
want to join the EU as quickly as possible or not. From such a perspective an
emphasis put by Poles on their national identity, national interests and national
values has to be regarded as one of the obstacles to effective integration.
However, one can argue that the process of integration – in the sense of the
opening-up of the economy and an intense flow of goods, capital, services, and also
increasing mobility of people – is already taking place. From this perspective the