Walls, Borders, Boundaries by Marc Silberman & Karen E. Till & Janet Ward

Author:Marc Silberman & Karen E. Till & Janet Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Moving Borders and Competing Civilizing Missions

Germany, Poland, and Ukraine in the Context of the EU’s Eastern Enlargement

STEFFI MARUNG

What happens when a frontier moves, especially if that border is the cultural and, for many, civilizational frontier of a supranational entity such as the European Union? How do people and states make sense of political orders when boundaries shift, affiliations change, and new memberships become possible? After the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, the EU integrated a number of states that had long been hidden behind the effective political and psychological border of the Iron Curtain. As a consequence of this eastern enlargement, the citizens of the East Central European states gained access to the European Union and its transnational pledge of welfare and security, freedom of mobility, and nascent common foreign policy. EU enlargement not only resulted in the redefinition of membership and affiliation for the new EU citizens; it also initiated the transfer of Western values, norms, and social models to the East and introduced categories of backwardness and progress, as well as notions of modernization and imagined power relations among the EU and candidate countries. The new openness put both the EU and future member countries under pressure to develop coherent interpretations for defining Europe.

Looking at the EU’s new eastern borders raises questions about how political spaces and the political and economic opportunities linked to them were renegotiated. The moving frontier was associated with changes in understandings of the political relationships between Western and Eastern Europe. The Polish case offers a revealing example of how official efforts were made to validate changing citizenship affiliations and at the same time to develop coping strategies for cultural and social changes before and after EU enlargement. This chapter focuses on the distinct spatial representations evoked by Polish politicians, on the one hand to transcend the nation-state as the political point of reference and on the other to help stabilize it. These representations I tentatively describe as a “civilizing mission à la polonaise,” since here historical interpretations (stemming from a pre-national Polish past) were adapted to define the new place of Poland in a changing Europe.1 The distinctiveness of this civilizing mission has three dimensions. First, it implies recourse to a notion of former “greatness” that simultaneously bolsters an argument for the current claim to leadership in the region. Second, it emphasizes Poland’s special bridging position between “East” and “West,” asserting that it plays an important role in transferring Western values to its eastern neighbors. Third, this claim is simultaneously based on and substantiates Poland’s “Europeanness.” The civilizing mission envisions a political space beyond Polish national boundaries—in Europe, East Central Europe, and its eastern borderland. Polish political actors used regional affiliations in the East together with an idealized understanding of Western Europe to strengthen the national position in the EU. Traditional Polish discourse on European and eastern-oriented policy represented important sources in the quest for a new positioning toward the West following the Cold War confrontation, and the shared history of Poland and its eastern neighbors was of vital importance to this goal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.