Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

176 Ewa Morawska
experienced some occupational skidding, but most of them subsequently adapted
quite well (the sooner they obtained official immigration status, the shorter was the
duration of this downslide). Businessmen, managers, and middle-level white-collar
employees comprised 40–5 per cent of the total Polish immigrant population in the
city in the mid-1990s. 14
This discussion focuses on this middle-class group because of the economic,
political, and cultural role they can be expected to play in forging links between
Poland and Germany, and as unofficial mediators in fostering Poland’s inclusion
into the European Union.
My interviews with Polish organisational leaders and members of the Polnischer
Sozialrat, and the content-analysis of the Polish-language press in Berlin suggest that
national orientations among Polish immigrants can be classified into two major
types. Trudna polskosc, or difficult Polishness, as one of the respondents described
it, is the identity ‘torn’ by contradictory, positive and negative emotions toward
one’s own (Polish) group and by equally opposing attitudes toward ‘others,’ here,
Germany/Germans and Europe/the European Union.
The other orientation represents a combination of post-nationalism and ‘implicit
multiculturalism’ thus far unexamined by (im)migration sociologists whereby the
significance of national identity is deliberately underplayed even though immigrants
live it, experience-near to use Hans Kohut’s term for unreflected-upon sentiments, in
their everyday activities. 15 This attitude is captured in a reply by a respondent to
my inquiries: ‘We go back and forth [between Germany and Poland] all the time.
We are Polish, we live and work here [in Germany], but it really does not matter
much any more’. 16 Both trudna polskosc and ‘it does not matter anymore’ orientations
are more complex than the categories of national identities among Polish
immigrants in Germany identified in the few existing sociological studies of this
problem: Krzysztof Krawat’s (1996) distinction between ‘national(istic) patriots’ 17
and ‘European pragmatists’, or Kazimierz Woycicki’s (2000) concept of cultivated
‘dual nationality’.
Trudna Polskosc
‘Difficult Polishness’ corresponds to the outcome of Polish immigrants’ experience
in Germany proposed in my original hypothesis, namely, the intensified combination
on both sides of the traditional defensive–offensive syndrome of Polish
nationalism containing, on the one hand, a resentful ‘civilizational inferiority’ visà-vis
West Europeans – here, Germans – and, on the other hand, a frustrated claim
to ‘spiritual superiority’. This type of nationalism seems most common among
the Polish immigrant intelligentsia, in particular, people employed or otherwise
engaged in Polish cultural organisations (newspapers, clubs, educational associations)
and events and among leaders representing the Polish group in legal and
political bodies of the German administration.
A configuration of factors (more complex than that identified in my original
hypothesis) generates this uncomfortable national identity. It is possible that the
humanistic education immigrants received in Poland, informed by the Romantic