Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

10 National identities of
Polish (im)migrants in
Berlin
Four varieties, their correlates and
implications
Ewa Morawska
Introduction
An examination of the impact of international migration on the national identities
of travellers, specifically recent Polish (im)migrants to Berlin in Germany, is timely
for two reasons. Sociologically, because the issues of (im)migrants’ assimilation into
receiver societies on the one hand, and, on the other, their ‘transnationalism’ or
sustained economic, social, political, and symbolic (identificational) engagements
in sender countries have recently become the dominant problem agenda of
international migration research. But the forms of these identificational engagements
have, thus far, been investigated very little (see Smith and Guarnizo 1998;
Vertovec and Cohen 1999).
Such an investigation is also relevant politically because the success of the pending
accession of Poland to the European Union depends, at least partly, on the ‘contents’
of national and civic identities and the world orientations of that country’s residents.
A long history of subjugation to alien states and the romantic concepts of the
Polish nation as an innocent martyr-carrier of spiritual values, heroically resisting
oppression (including Soviet rule, commonly perceived as the continuation of
foreign impositions) have made Polish nationalism an embodiment of the ethnicparticularistic
rather than civic-universalist type, informed by exclusionary us–them
symbolic distinctions whereby the nation (us Poles) was counterposed to the state
(them–alien oppressors). 1
If such nation-against-state intransigence was appreciated in the West during the
Cold War as supportive of freedom and democracy, it is now viewed as one of the
hindrances to Poland’s democratic transition (see Liebich 1999; Morawska 2001a).
The impact on the transformation of these national identities and orientations of
large Polish diasporas in the West (including Germany) that maintain active contact
with their home societies and of the continuous back-and-forth movement of
migrants between their hometowns and Western receiver countries since the 1990s
is certainly worth consideration.
This paper is based on a preliminary study conducted in the summer of 2001 in
Berlin, the residence of the largest proportion of 1980s–1990s Polish (im)migrants
(see Janusz 1995; Stach 1998; Wolff-Poweska and Schultz 2000; Kaczmarczyk