Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

Polish (im)migrants in Berlin 179
their fellow-nationals burdened with trudna polskosc, their support for Poland’s
membership of the European Union has been unequivocal. For these ‘cosmopolitans’,
as one of my respondents put it, ‘the border [between Poland and
Germany/Western Europe] does not exist anymore, and, therefore, the nationality
issue has lost much of its importance’. 25
At the same time, however, they live (rather than cultivate) their Polishness
by using the Polish language and by ‘naturally’ observing Polish customs at home
and with their Polish friends. Fluent in the German language and engaged
in daily professional and social relations with Germans, they also participate in
German society and culture. For these immigrants, for that matter, the features
noted earlier of the German culture-in-action resentfully admired by the trudna
polskosc group, are also part of their own outlooks and practices. 26
A distinction drawn by the Polish sociologist, Stanislaw Ossowski (1967; see also
Anderson 1983), between the ideological Vaterland, or the imagined community of
the encompassing Patria, and the Heimat, or the local homeland of people’s daily
activities, may be useful to interpret these apparently contradictory commitments.
While the circumstances of immigrants’ situations have attenuated the significance
of the national Vaterland, replacing it with a commitment to the imagined community
of Europe, their daily activities sustain the relevance of their two Heimats although
their attachments to them differ in depth and the emotional hold.
Several superimposed factors responsible for these immigrants’ multi-level
identities have better prepared them to facilitate not only their own integration into
the German society but also, indirectly, the inclusion of their home-country into a
‘larger Europe’. Their professions facilitate formal participation in the German
society, a form of integration these immigrants promote themselves by participating
or even founding bi-national professional organisations, such as Berpol or the
Polish–German Club of Businessmen and Industrialists or the Polish–German Club
of Engineers. These organisations sponsor well-publicised bi-national events in the
city such as the prestigious annual ball organised by the Berpol and attended by
prominent German Berliners and diplomats from the Polish Embassy (Polacy w
Berlinie 1996; Kurier Berlinski-Polonica 1997–2001). Immigrants’ fluency in German
obviously facilitates these activities. Their professional activities and resulting social
relations with native Germans mean that Polish immigrants in this group are less
exposed to anti-Polish prejudice and discrimination than are their fellow-nationals
in the trudna polskosc group.
At the same time, the proximity of the border makes frequent travel to Poland a
weekly or even daily routine and the absence of a border becomes an experiential
reality. As we talked about these back-and-forth movements, one of my respondents
informed me that his wife ‘just went to dinner to her friends’ in Poznan. It’s a few
hours by car [and] she will be back [in Berlin] tomorrow morning’. Another
informant was about to leave for Szczecin because he had ‘theatre tickets there
for tonight and tomorrow some business to attend’. Many immigrants in this group
have apartments in Poland, usually in its western regions that are geographically
closest to Berlin. 27 Kazimierz Woycicki (2000) whose research quoted earlier
revealed that Polish immigrants have dual national identities, conducted his study