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- Herausgeber: ibidem
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The figure of the Polish plumber or builder has long been a well-established icon of the British national imagination, uncovering the UK's collective unease with immigration from Central and Eastern Europe. But despite the powerful impact the UK's second largest language group has had on their host country's culture and populist politics, very little is known about its members. This painstakingly researched book offers a wide perspective on Polish migrants in the UK, taking into account the interactions between Poles and British society through discursive actions, policies, family connections, transnational networks, and political engagement of the diaspora. Borne out of a decade of ethnographic studies among various communities of Polish nationals living in London, Micha? P. Garapich documents the changes that affect both Polish migrants and British society. Arguing that neither group can be fully understood in isolation, it explores the complexity of Polish ethnicity and offers an insight into the inner tensions and struggles within what the public and scholars often assume to be a uniform and homogeneous category. From Polish financial sector workers to the Polish homeless population, this groundbreaking book offers an ethnographic, street-level account of cultural and social determinants of Polish migration and how Polish migrants redefine and reconstruct their understanding of class and ethnicity on a daily basis.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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ibidemPress, Stuttgart
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the financial support of various funding bodies and institutions. Specifically, I would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for funding one of the studies this book is based on (RES-000-22-1294). I wish to thank the Grabowski Memorial Fund, Polish Aid Foundation Trust, and Mr Erazm Pruszyński for their assistance in completing the task of writing this book. I am also very grateful for the support generously provided by the Southlands Methodists Trust at University of Roehampton. I want to thank my colleagues at the Department of Social Sciences at University of Roehampton who supported me throughout these years, in particular Dr Stephen Driver, Dr Michele Lamb, and Prof. Steven Groarke. Prof. John Eade from the same department has been far more than a colleague throughout these years,and his friendship was crucial for my own development. Thank you, John.
The assistance, advice, and patience from theibidem-Verlageditors, Max Jakob Horstmannand Valerie Langealso deserve my gratitude.
I wish to also thank my wife, Katarzyna Depta-Garapich, who endured with great resolve and understanding the sometimes annoying fact of having an anthropologist as a husband.
Last but nottheleast,I want to thank the hundreds of migrants I spoke to for their time and patience.
Dr Michał P. Garapich
Preface
In the early morning of the 6th of June 2003,a long queue began to form in front of the Polish Embassy on Great Portland Street in central London. In the course of the day, this queue grew larger and larger forcing people to wait up to three hours to be let into the building. In total, that day and the following 7th of June, nearly 7,000 Polish citizens turned up. These people, from various generations and cohorts of Poleswhomade London their home, came to central London to decide on one of the most important historical turning points their country was about to make. They were casting their votes in a referendum over the accession of Poland into the European Union (EU). In many ways, the result of that small-scale ballot among Poles living in London at that time was predictable—around 90% voted ‘yes’.In Poland,over 77% of the voters endorsed entry into the EU.
The clear enthusiasm, which the London-based Poles showed over the future of Poland in Europe, was a sign of things to come. The then Labour government’s decision—made in early 2003—to open the British labour market toPolishnationals was well known and widely discussed among Poles—both in Poland and in their various communities abroad. In fact, during the propaganda war before the referendum, the right to freedom of movement and employment was presented by the Polish EU-enthusiasts as the biggest benefit for Polish citizens from joining the EU. For Poles living in London, many of whom were working in breach of the immigration law, overstaying their visas or simply working in grey economy, it was a matter of deciding over their future as residents of the UK, it was an affirmation of their right to live, work, and settle in the UK. For many of these migrants, turning out to cast a vote was a political act that would enable them to regularise their immigration status. If anyone is looking for an example of how individuals in their modest way shape the grand schemes of international politics, one needsto look no further.Many Poles casting the vote that day ‘voted themselves in’therebylegitimising flows and subsequent settlement into the UK.
As we now know,the results of the referendum came to have profound consequences for Europe, but especially for Britain,triggeringamassive migration wave and changing its demographics, neighbourhoods, and debates about immigration, society, the economy, and Britain’s place in Europe. It has prepared the ground for what the British press has called the biggest migration wave since the arrival of the French Huguenots in the late 17th century. Almost exactly a decade later, the British national census showed that the number of Poles hasincreased tenfoldever since—from a little above 50,000 to over halfamillion. However, the sensationalist headlines, so cherished by the media, mask some deeper layers of meanings and unanswered questions. Who are we exactly talking about? Who are these Poleswho,among other Eastern and Central Europeans,populate London and other towns and villages of the UK and,despite the economic downturn and recession of the last couple of years defy simplistic economic formulas,do not go back to Poland but remain in Britain? Were these migrations so new or were they simply another chapter in a long history of transnational connections woven between Poland and the UK for decades? And how do these people think, act, and negotiate their place, belonging, and life in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent world? How do they articulate their migration experience, their interaction withtheBritish population, and what, in general, do they make of their new home? It is clear that these questions are ultimately questions about the future of Britain itself, since these people will become or already are friends, workmates, relatives, clients, costumers, neighbours, and passers-by in numerous British cities.
This book seeks to answer some of these questions from a classical anthropological perspective by looking from a bottom-up perspective of the everyday meaning-making of various social actors and look at what people do, why they do it, how they interpret the social world around them, and how their actions areembedded in the complex interplay between culture, economy, power, dominant narratives of the states, and ultimately, citizenship in an increasingly fluid, interconnected world. As social anthropologist(as Clifford Geertz famouslyobserved), I see human beings as constructing and being constructed by webs of meanings, actions, and structures they have spun themselves and that relationship constituting social life. In that way, the 7,000 people who turned out to vote that June morning in 2003 in London could be regarded as a symbolicavant-gardeof today’s migrant population, a taste of things to come,and confirmation oftheindividual’s power. They established the foundations for the massive influx of Polish migrants into Britain after Poland joined the EU in 2004. These foundations were not just created by the economic environment, labour market gaps, or migratory networks so crucial in assisting further flows—they were also shaped by a particular migration culture into which Poles are socialised, a specific domain of notions, symbols, and narratives that refer to human mobility in Polish society. In agrande dureeperspective, then, how Poles act, make meaning of,and position themselves in the new Europe, and especially in such a global city as London, rest to a large extent on their own cultural resources and traditions, which were marked by huge past migratory movements, becoming an essential part of their grand dominant narratives, as well as local stories of resilience, survival, and resistance in the face of historic turmoil, economic calamities, wars, or shifting geographies of power in the post-Cold War world.
The main core of this book’s argument is that it is impossible to understand Polish migration to the UK and, in particular, London, without digging deeper into these meaning-making practices, which are also crucial for our understanding of particular features of London’s current multicultural politics. This isn’t simply to restate the banal that in order to understand the present we need to look at the past, but also how past is being reproduced, selectively revived, and embedded in social practice. To illustrate this, let’s look at another small ethnographic detail in the life ofLondon’s Poles: four years after that summer in 2003, many of those Poles who were queuing to cast their votes in the above-mentioned referendum were present at a special reception for ‘the Polish community’ hosted by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. The reception was viewed widely as an attempt by the Mayor to secure votes from that ethnic group, for his reelection the year after. During the reception, a second-generation Polish community leader made a speech in which he highlighted the continuity of Polish presence in the UK dating from the Second World War. He spoke about the role of Polish pilots in the Battle for Britain and linked this to the role of Poles in contemporary multicultural Britain. As he said, Poles were a ‘model for other ethnic minorities’ in terms of integration and successful peaceful cohabitation.
At face value, there is nothing special about the speech;in general, atheme probably similar to other statements by ethnic leaders of otherminorities ofLondon. But the speech can be also read as an attempt to boost one’s group standing in front of political powersourcesby alluding to other ‘ethnic minorities’,which for some reason are constructed as more problematic for the establishment. The symbol of the pilot, the defender,is very important here, as it falls against the backdrop of London still in a trauma after the 2005 terrorist attacks and the ongoing debates over fundamentalist Islam and perceived lack of integration some British Muslims demonstrate. Yet, on the other hand, the most fascinating thing was that this person was creating a uniform and homogeneous notion of a Polish ‘community’that is,in fact, composed of very diverse groups, networks, and individuals. Between these two democratic rituals—voting for EU enlargement in 2003 by a vast number of, among others, undocumented migrant workers and for the Mayor of London in 2008 as EU citizens—lies a fascinating story of the interaction between cultural traditions, narratives, and agents operating in a transnational social field where crucial aspects of social identities, such as class and ethnicity, are being reconstructed in 21st-century London. Polish migrants, asEU citizens, have the right to vote in local elections,and their rapid rise from a marginal, secondary, largely undocumented, illegal labour force into a group of potential political actors shaping London politics is a reminderofhow quickly things change institutionallyin response to both political events as well as human agency. The2011census shows that there are almost 600,000 Poles in England and Wales, with over 100,000 registered to vote in London alone. Things do change fast in today’s Europe.
These experiences are metaphorically captured by the notion of London’s Polish borders which are, in fact, social and cultural boundaries stretching to other localities, states,andregions. The human experience that connects rural families in north-east Poland, the mountaineers of the Tatras,the middle-class youth of Krakow with affluent migrants cashing in on London’s property boom,or Polish war veterans is a complex and contingent set of social relations that are transnational in nature and dynamic in their development. I do not know what the long-term outcomes of these migrations will be in 10 or 20 years’ time. By bringing together data from research carried out between 2003 and 2014, I seek to explain human behaviour, actions, and meaning-making practices involved in transnational mobility across the EU. By bringing human experience to the forefront, I will challenge some common misconceptions about such prominent notions as social class, ethnicity, nation, and community. Migrating Poles do offer quite a few surprises for scholars,and this book will share them.
Chapter 1Settingthe conceptual scene:migrations, nation-states, and anthropology of class and ethnicity
More than a decade ago, in 2004, Poland and seven other Central and East European former Communist bloc countries joined the EU, symbolically ending the period of division brought to the continent by the Cold War. Among numerous consequences of this great historical moment has been the unprecedented increase in migration flows between the Eastern and Central Europe and the West. Heldbackby the emigration-and immigration-restrictive regimes for over half a century, societies of the eastern part of Europe seemed to indulge in this newly gained freedom—freedom to move and settle anywhere in the Union. Polish nationals makeupthe vast majority of these flows,and Britain became the main destination country—the 2011 Census confirming that Polish-born make up the second largest minority in the UK.[1]
Freedom of movement was something for which Polish politicians fought for during pre-accession negotiations and which the general Polish public regarded as the main benefitinjoining the EU. The implementation of one of the EU’s fundamental freedoms and rights—the right to move, work, and settle in any of the Member States—was seen as the ultimate unification of the once divided continent. But the principle of solidarity clashed with national egoism and the continental division reemerged in the form of labour market access restrictions for citizens of the new accession states. Although the EU encouraged the Member States to open their labour markets without any limits to newcomers, in 2004 only Britain, Ireland, and Sweden agreed to do so. Other countries were more concerned about the rapid and massive influx of migrant workers and its impact on their welfare states and economies—highlighting the uneasy position of the nation-states in the face of globalisation and increased freedom of movement. The ‘Polish plumber’ became a key symbolic figure during the French referendum on the European constitution in 2004, which involved anxious deliberations about globalisation and the extent to which national economic and social structures should change, adapt, and negotiate the dominant forces of modernity. Although the restrictions were temporary andby2011all Member States hadlifted barriers to the labour market, the initial constraints had important consequences for migration processes as the refusal of most Member States to allow free entry to these new EU citizens diverted migration flows tothefew states which did not impose any limits. As scholars today agree, this state of affairswas largely responsible forthewaves of migrants from accession states, mainly Poland,[2]heading towards the UK. And by all means, this influx was substantial. In 2011, the Office of National Statisticsput the figure of Polish nationals residing in England and Wales at 570,000,[3]an almost tenfold increase from the last census in the UK in 2001 which put the figure of Polish born at 60,000. If wecombineseasonal and temporary migrants, who moved between Poland and Britainbetween 2004 and 2012, some estimates put the numbers of Poles working at some point in the UK at well over a million. Although there is some indication that the flow has slowed down during the economic downturn,[4]in 2014,it rose again. In result, it is widely agreed that EU enlargement created the biggest demographic change in Europe since the devastationand flux at the end of the Second World War,[5]and Britain has been at the centre of that movement.[6]Within few years,this movement created one of the largest minorities in the UK–Polish nationals. The impact on the economy, welfare,andsociety in general has been positive, but it is clear that the pace of these flows, lead some sections of British society to rethink the whole idea of membership in the EU. It can be said that,indirectly and partially, the massive movement from Poland to the UK resulted in the rise of anti-immigrant parties like the United Kingdom Independence Party and in increased pressure on British political class to call for an in–out EU referendum. After the conservative win in 2015 parliamentary elections, David Cameron’s majority conservative government voted for a referendum on EU membership as early as in 2016. Although migration from Poland was not the sole reason, it is clear that it contributed to this huge historical decision.
This book is about people behind this process.
Although many features of this recent influx are similar to previous chapters in Britain’s long history of migration, there are striking differences. First, the favourable legal status warrants new forms of mobility:thus, many are circular, short-term migrants taking advantage of the freedom of movement within the EU, cheap travel, and new communication opportunities. They are able to come and go between Poland and Britain, and many have become long-distance commuters rather than typical migrants with the intention of staying for a long time. These storks—as I call them—are a fascinating example ofasuccessful combination of both particular migration culture that developed in Poland throughout generations of mobility and the use of modern means of communication, transport,and networks creation. Secondly, they are more widely dispersed across the country. Although inthis book I will focus on London, the highest number of Polish migrants is found in East Anglia,and London accounts for only around 20% of post-accession flows. But the focus on numbers of migrants involved seems to miss the role played by individual actors in developing and constructing various transnational fields between two societies and how they find their way through the two social and cultural settings they chose to operate in. In other words, the policy-oriented overemphasis on numbers omits the complex process of migrants’ agency shaped by their understandings of the changing world around them— in terms of making sense of their own lives and migration trajectory as well as understanding wider socio-economic constraints—modernity, capitalist labour market, ethnic pluralism, and globalisation.
This book seeks to identify and unpack the complex interplay between Polish migrants’ social and cultural resources, which they employ to pursue their individual and family goals—meaning-making, symbols, narratives, myth creation,andagency—and different nation-state ideologies, hegemonies of control, structures, and cultures of representation—both in the UK as well in Poland. Drawing on structuration theory[7]and also on an actor-centred anthropological analysis proposed by Anthony P. Cohen,[8]I argue that people are far from being passive actors in the social world and the sum of individual actions and culturally meaningful practices hasan impact on the structures around them. This book is a detailed account about how this happens on the ground and how transnational social fields merge two societies together and in what ways social classandethnic boundaries emerging between Poland and London are in this new context reformulated, negotiated, and contested.
My theoretical position followed here is based on the classical notion of an anthropological enquiry as a search for the meaning of people’s actions, practices, discursive performances, and agency. As Nicholas notes, anthropology seeks to find‘order in the chaos of many people, doing many things with many meanings’,[9]and so the analysis that follows will go beyond mere numbers and economic forces. This approach views collective categories, such as culture, society, ethnicity, group, symbols,anddiscourse,as part of the process of socially constructing reality,[10]in which individuals are active and conscious creators rather than passive receivers and reproducers of culture, which means culture, and here I focus on particular migration culture, is in constant shift, change, and adaptation. Here, meaning-making refers to the ways in which people make sense of the world simultaneously being shaped by constraining cultural meanings and reproducing them by action, performance, and negotiation. As Anthony P. Cohen points out:
Society may well be greater than the sum of its parts, the excess including the means by which to compel the actions of its members. But as an intelligible entity, it cannot be conceptualised apart from individuals who compose it, alone and in their relationships. So far as they are concerned, it is what they perceive it to be, and their actions are motivated by their perceptions of it. Theories of society which ignore these perceptions would therefore seem to be partial at best, vacuous at worst.[11]
Keepingwith Clifford Geertz’s famous definition of culture as a ‘web of meanings’ spun by humans themselves,[12]the purpose of this book is to explore and explain individuals’ perceptions, attitudes, and meaning-making practices, which are contingent on their own social and cultural backgrounds, conceptualisation of history and modernity,as well as the realities of 21st-century London. Thus, writing about Polish migrants in London needs toincorporate both what people bring with themandwhat local conditions allow for certain meanings, norms, actions to emerge, and be socially significant in a new setting. In other words, migrants arrive equipped with particular cultural resources constructed collectively but which ones will prove to be useful and will be used depends on a multiple factors in the country of destination. The combination of both sets of conditions results in unique types of social and cultural outcomes.
Globalisation, transnationalism, and nation-states
The central question of modernisation theory has focused on the ways in which global flows of not only people but also capital, goods, information, and images escaped nation-state controls. The collapse of the Iron Curtain in Europe and socialist regimes appeared to herald the victory ofWestern capitalism, leading some to hail the ‘end of history’[13]and welcome the onset of a borderless world. Globalisation was used as a term by this ‘hyperglobalist’ interpretation to describe this process of postnationalism.[14]
Yet, it is also evident to many commentators that national boundaries and state institutions still remained key actors in the global migration process. Saskia Sassen,[15]for example,pointed out that globalisation developed through opaque dealings that both weaken and strengthen the national idea. In this complex interaction, financial markets played a crucial role through their promotion of global economic flows in both the ‘global cities’ where they were located and the networksthatlinked them. The concentration of economic resources and power in particular cities (London, New York, Tokyo, etc.) was accompanied by the exploitation of those at the lower end of the labour market, turningcentres of economic power into central nodes of transnational flows—whether these will be globetrotting highly paid bankers, traders,andexecutives or cleaners, domestic workers,and low-paid clerkswhomost oftenaremigrants themselves.
But as critics of ‘hyperglobalism’ pointed out, it was far too soon to celebrate the ‘end of history’ and the demise of the nation-state. The idea of ‘post-nationalism’ has been widely criticised both by political scientists[16]and anthropologists,[17]specialising in the field of nationalism, for lacking depth and historical understanding. Anthony Smith maintains that post-national approaches present‘a lack of historical depth to so many of the analyses under this broad heading, in a field that demands such depth’.[18]The overall salience and domination of identity politics and strategic essentialism in current national and international politics is potent evidence that we are far from the demise of the nation-state and its ability to set the conceptual and institutional agenda of the modern world.
Despite the sometimes romantic celebration of a modern, fluid, mobile, cosmopolitan, and plural world,where apparently people are free to move and reinvent themselves, the reality is that the ability to move freely is still strongly restricted and structured reflecting the global relations of power and dominance—the ongoing migration crisis on the Mediterraneanbeingone ofthemany tragic outcomes of that inequality. States continue to control global flows through immigration controls, access to welfare state, increasingly restrictive asylum policies, and capital relocation. These policies are not static, however, and often change due to political conditions and the accumulated actions of thousands of migrants. This is where the limits of the state and the structures of dominance become most evident and the power of thousands ofindividual households’ and migrants’ decisions may shape these very structures.
Although quite a few theoretical attempts to reinsert the power of the individual have been made, there is still a significant gap in actual detailed ethnographic accounts of how this happens. As an example, developed further in next chapter, I invite the reader to look at the decades before the EU enlargement in 2004 when Poles had a highly restricted access to British labour market. The structural conditions, it seems, were highly unfavourable for migrations, both in terms of access and patterns of settlement, as well as structures of opportunities. However, individuals, groups, and networks were far from accepting this status quo, subordinating to institutional regimes of entry control—on the contrary, they took action in order to better themselves and fulfil their culturally specific aspirations despite structural exclusions put in place by British immigration and labour restrictions. As we shall see in this book, a vastnumberof migrants from Poland prior to the EU enlargement came as ‘visitors’, ‘tourists’,and‘visiting relatives’ violating immigration restrictionsen masse—with previous cohorts, extending up to the Second World War refugees, travel agents, ethnic press, and British employers, complicit in these activities. As I will show, this movement has directly led to opening up the UK labour market, hence giving individual migrants a rare victory over state control. So global flows were shaped by power structures and social inequalities specific to particular nations, even though these structures and inequalities were, in turn, influenced by these flows—whether clandestine or not. What is vital, however, as we will continuously witness in the accounts presented in this book, is that individuals’ ability to resist and by-pass these regulations have strongly contributed to the development of migration networks, which facilitated chain migration processes and better employment opportunities, which in turn led to the massive post-2004 inflows. In other words, opening of the labour market in the UK was not just a top-down process instigated by political process, labour shortages, or decisions of political actors in officesin Brussels, London, or Warsaw. The door was pushed open as well, by hundreds of thousands of clandestine or semi-clandestine migrants continuously testing the strength of structural boundaries since the early1990s.
The interaction between global flows, national legal structures, and the sum of individual actions, which often resist, contest, and by-pass legal barriers can be most usefully understood as a transnational process underpinning all migration movements across the world. People’s ability to move where they like is still influenced by national border controls and internal institutions,but their movement, whether officially sanctioned or not, creates (real or imagined) spaces across and between national borders, further stimulating flows of peoples, ideas, and goods. These spaces can be analysed by employing the social field perspective and the distinction made by Glick Schiller and Levitt between national and transnational social fields demonstrating how we can conceptualiseand render empirically useful the role of state borders without falling into methodological nationalism—an illusionary perspective that society and social process are somewhat contained within the administrative borders of the nation-state. According to them,we should see a social field
…asa set of multiple interlocking networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed.Social fields are multidimensional, encompassing structured interactions of differing forms, depth, and breadth that are differentiated in social theory by the terms organization, institution, and social movement. National boundaries are not necessarily contiguous with the boundaries of social fields. National social fields are those that stay within national boundaries while transnational social fields connect actors through direct and indirect relations across borders. Neither domain is privileged in our analysis. Ascertaining the relative importance of nationally restricted and transnational social fields should be a question of empirical analysis.[19]
The problem about how to empirically delineate both fields is a methodological one. From the perspective of interpretative anthropological enquiry,it is through peoples’ actions and meaning-making practices that borders and boundaries are being recreated and remade. When we look more closely at how national discourses, ascribed identities,are constructed and human actions navigate through these, we can see that transnational social fields are a fundamental characteristic of how nation-states are produced, sustained, and remade to adapt to a new environment. In other words, transnational movements and nationalism or nation-state discourses are mutually dependent and connected—at the same time offering people comfortable space for individual manoeuvre and contestation. As Michael Peter Smith notes, the dynamic functional relationship between transnational processes and nationalism is still one that needs to be better explained[20]as transnationalism is inherently embedded into the conceptual framework of the nation-states—with its ideologies, symbols, legal structures, and the fundamental role played by borders—real, hard, or those produced through symbols, myths, rituals, and meaning-making practices.
This book, through looking at the case of Polish migration in the last decade, analyses how nation-states are made and remade transnationally through evolving, contradictory development of particular migration culture. Individual social actors may contest and negotiate these fields through their daily practices,and this has some very specific consequences for nation-building in Poland and the UK and, in a way, makes this process of nation-building happen,at the same time shaping British debates and problems around diversity, multiculturalism, and new forms of racism, and recently abouttheUK presence in the European project. However, at the very same time, individual actors are able to skilfully manoeuvre through diverse cultural and social environments in order to occupy privileged positions in each society, resisting social and economic constraints in both. This is donethrough a renegotiation of individuals’ perceptions of class and ethnicity,and one of the arguments of this book is that we cannot fully grasp one without the other. Social class and ethnicity are interwoven into the fabric of modern global cities,and both represent dimensions of social relationsthatcharacterisemodern polyethnic diverse societies.
Scholars note that transnational social fields can be understood not only spatially but also over time. Moreover, if we link the definition proposed by Glick Schiller and Levitt to Bourdieu’s understandings of social field as a space of power struggle and competition for resources, we can understand how different hegemonic social constructs are reformulated and used within these fields. People operate across transnational fields,but they influence and are influenced by specific national histories, cultures, and social groups. Gupta and Ferguson see the ways in which people make sense of movement and belonging as a political processpar excellence:
The idea that space is made meaningful is, of course, a familiar one to anthropologists …. The more urgent task would seem to be to politicize this uncontestable observation. With meaning-making understood as practice, how are spatial meanings established? Who has the power to make places of spaces? Who contests this? What is at stake?[21]
It is not a coincidence that social anthropologists were able to make transnationalism one of the most frequently used concepts in contemporary migration studies.[22]Their ethnographic fieldwork focuses on people’s self-definitions, perceptions, and meaning-creations in making sense of the world and they have a keen eye for the dynamics and relations between what people say and what they do in everyday life. A particular target for those working on transnationalism has been what they call ‘methodological nationalism’—an analytical perspective which takes the nation-state as the natural and undisputable framework for conceptualising migrationin social sciences.[23]This perspective reproduces a fictional perception of a neat world divided into ‘states’, ‘cultures’,and‘societies’,omitting the crucial aspect of relationships between these entities, the whole sphere of border-crossing, hybridity, multiple identities, and less-than clear categories that social actors use in their everyday life.
Methodological nationalism is indisputably an outcome of how societies, cultures, and territories were conceptually contained in a post-Wesphalian political order. It belongs to the domain of a philosophical normative discourse that Western philosophy has taken for granted and,as Isaiah Berlin notes, did not give much intellectual attention until very late.[24]Transnationalism highlights not only the limitations of focusing only on what is happening within nation-state boundaries, artificially ‘cutting off’ analytically every aspect of the social life crossing the administrative boundary. Moreover, those contributing to the study of transnationalism have revealed the limitations of concentrating just on economic flows across national borders. In an increasingly interconnected world,the global links and flows of capital, ideas, and images are coupled and replicated by the very real and intimate physical movements of people, groups, and families. This shift of scope to the social actor and away from economic and social structures not only reminded scholars that the world has always been transnationally connected but also posed a question about social sciences’ previous blindness—why haveweonly recently appreciated this history? Why have we only in recent decades recognised that the world has always been transnationally connected and constructed?
Here again,we find validation for specific anthropological enquiry as a close empirical examination of how individual actorsconstruct class and ethnic identity using their own culturally specific understanding of the changes they go through and social and economic forces they are faced with. It helps us to see the dynamic interaction between the dominant discourses and ideologies produced, orchestrated, and ritualised by the nation-state and how people respond to these in pursuit of their goals. In other words, meaning-making takes place in specific contexts and uses different tools available to different individuals. Anthropologically, these tools are empirically available for analysis—they are words, texts, deeds, interviews, actions, symbols, rituals, norms, and values ofagiven group of people,and as a ‘web of meaning’,they inform, legitimise, validate, and make sense of people’s actions. As Geertz argues, in order to act, people need to interpret the world around them and grasping these interpretations brings us closer to understanding why people do things they do.
Transnationalism from below, ways of being,and belonging
Remaining faithful to Malinowski’s understanding of social anthropology as ‘seeing the world through the eyes of the native’, the transnational perspective foregrounds individual human agency and its ability to contest the structural constraints imposed by the modern nation-state, mobility-restricting regimes, capitalist order, and global power relations. In a situation where, due to human mobility, the volume of new interactions is rapidly increasing, we need to look at the ways in which people develop new meanings and innovative strategies for ‘playing out’ social class and ethnicity. As Smith points out in his study of ‘transnationalism from below’, research has to explore people’s experience of crossing‘political and cultural borders’and capture‘the emergent character of transnational social practices’through people’s narrativesas theydirectly engage with the dominant structures of power, discourses, and collective constraints.[25]
It is theoretically beneficial to link Smith’s exploration of transnational experience with Glick Schiller’s distinction between ‘ways of being’ and ‘ways of belonging’. ‘Ways of being’ refer to social relations and practices, whereas ‘ways of belonging’ involve identity categories generated by the ‘institutions, organisations, and experiences’, which operate within social fields and people’s conscious connections with a particular group. Individuals‘can be embedded in a social field but not identify with any label or cultural politics associated with that field. They have the potential to act or identify at a particular time because they live within the social field but not all choose to do so’.[26]Social actors can be engaged in transnational ways ofbeingbut notbelongingor the other way round. Additionally, people who engage in transnational social relations and explicitly recognisethis, exhibit both transnational ways of being and belonging. As we shall see later in this book, for Polish migrants in London,the concept of social class and ethnicity and their perception of both stratification and ethnicity is closely associated with the extent to which they see their migration as away of beingorbelonging. At the same time, from a different anthropological perspective, differences between two ways of conceptualising these processes refer to inescapable tensions in social life born out of discrepancies between the normative ordering and actual life praxis. People prescribe some things but follow others and the tension between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ remains one of the cornerstones of myth constructions, representations, and cultural production.[27]Ethnographic method offers here a way forward—decoding the various discourses utilised by Polish migrants whilst directly observing them during their social interactions generatesdirectly verifiable data on what it means in practice tobelongorbein a transnational social field.
There is one crucial point to be made here. The non-economic aspects of migration are sometimes seen in public discourse as a process involving people moving from onecultureto anotherculture, and any problems that migration generates are regarded as cultural/ethnic ones. In her important article, Stolcke criticises this ‘culturalisation of migration’,which presents people as containers for specific cultural traits, naturalising and biologising culture,thus creating a new form of racism, shaped and entrenched by the anti-immigration backlash across contemporary Europe.[28]This culturalist version of methodological nationalism obscures the fact that modern transmigrants come from various social class, educational, and economic backgrounds. Putting them into one ‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’ box not only ignores the ways in which individuals use various strategies and cultural resources to resist them,but it also creates distinct units and boundaries, which reify groups and their cultural content.
There are numerous critiques of that theoretical fallacy,but it is through detailed ethnography of peoples’ actions and meanings they construct that reveals how individual strategies contest or use to their own advantageforthis reification of ethnicity, culture, class, or gender. The logical conclusion is that there is a clear need to place the discourse of social class at the centre of ethnic and nationalism studies. Indeed, there is ample evidence that the overemphasis on ethnicity and culture has obscured the relationship with how hierarchies and stratification is produced in the domain of the symbolic. As Bottomley notes:
One of the complexities of this area of study [immigration] is its inevitable association with political programs and debates, a field of struggle within which the role of the 'disinterested observer' is not readily available and hegemonic forms of knowledge not easily contested. In the US, for example, an emphasison ethnicity, race and, more recently, gender, has tended to subsume class as an analytical category.[29]
In similar tone, Stolcke argues, theculturalisation of migrationhas been a complex process linked with multicultural policiesand a popular understanding of migrants as ‘bearers’ of specific traits separating them from the majority. It is,nevertheless,crucial to ask why the notion of social class has not been treated as part the process of ‘cultural ordering’ in popular multicultural discourse. It is almost as though the notion of ethnicity, with its egalitarian overtones (rich or poor, everyone is English, Polish,orsomethingelse), has removed questions about social class, inequality, poverty, and social justice. It has certainly done so on the level of hegemonic public, state-centric discourse, but what about the one used on the everyday basis, one that assists social actors in orienting in the social world around them?
Ethnicity: dominant and demotic discourses
An anthropological approach towards Polish migration to Britain involves, therefore, understanding of the interplay between the two sets of discourses and practices. On the one hand, social actors are confronted with a dominant set of values, norms, and behaviours which are frequently assumed—through the production of nationalist ideologies, history textbooks, state-orchestrated rituals, symbols, everyday actions, etc.—to define the essence of a particular group, its representation,and the ‘outside’ face. On the other hand, they are continually required to adapt these norms and values to the new circumstances in which they find themselves—a demotic process, involving thousands of individual choices, modes of behaviour, strategies of interaction, and meaning-creation. Gerd Baumann in his study of a multicultural London suburb—Southall[30]—introduces this duality and the notions of dominant and demotic discourse to analyse how individuals and groups engage with the British model of multiculturalism, which on the policy level equates it with a mosaic of distinct, reified groups, and essentialistically treats cultures and ethnic groups as interchangeable concepts. He traces the various ways and strategiesthatgroups and individuals employ to maintain boundaries or transcend them in order to communicate with other groups, negotiate their position, diffuse conflicts, or form partnerships.
Baumann’s approach is rooted in the anthropological tradition of analysing human understanding of norms, values, perceptions, and how this understanding is implemented, applied, and made meaningful in real life. There is an inescapable tension between the two orders, mirroring the naturalistic fallacy—the tension between the world as ‘it should be’, prescribed in norms and values, and the practice of the ‘world as it is’; between the normative order—which in turn is explained in cultural terms—and real-life dynamics. This tension demonstrates the core problem involved in the popular notion of culture as a uniform set of variables rather than as a set of competing discourses, contested narratives, and complex meanings. Polish migrants in London come to Britain with their own dispositions, perceptions, sets of norms, and discursive practices, and to understand what they say and do, we need to examine the symbols, traits, notions, and implicit images that are evoked in Polish culture, whenever migration, boundary, foreignness, strangeness, home country, mobility,and settlement, notions of home and abroad are evoked. It is to this domain of symbolic actions that social actors refer when speaking about class or ethnicity, community or solidarity, animosity,and cooperation, and in a context of migration,it acquires new meanings through legitimising new practices of cultural production. On the other hand, these meanings are not random—they stem from along history of socially constructed transnational social fields, which is fundamental for grasping the process of nation-state and national identity formation in Polish society.
Inevitably, this perspective puts ethnicity at the centre of attention. Since Barth’s seminal work,[31]anthropological literature has been strongly influenced by an instrumentalistic and rational-goal-oriented perspective, which treats ethnicity as a form of social organisation and a political resource and a dynamically constructed mode of being and belonging.[32]However, if ethnicity is something that peopledorather thanhave, clearlyit can be ‘done’ in many different ways and with various different strengths depending on the context and type of social interaction. For example, as many studies have demonstrated,ethnicitycan be deliberately ‘shown off’ or, in poly-ethnic situations, individuals may seek to play it down.[33]Yet, as we shall see, the relational construction of ethnicity by Polish migrants is not shaped by solely participating in the British multiethnic environment; it also involves their own understandings and awareness of Polish dominant collective discourses concerning ethnicity, the nation, and the moral obligations which co-ethnics have to one another, and what it means to be Polish abroad.
In other words, when adopting Barth’s view of ethnicity as a strategically chosen way of boundary construction and differentiating one group from another, we must be aware that,in plural urban societies, ethnicity may also be a differentiating factor ‘within’ groups and that looking at what anthropologists may regard as performances of ethnicities, we see social class positioning and power relations within a particular social field of which ethnicity is just one part. As Jenkins emphasises:
In the practical accomplishment of identity, two mutually interdependent but theoretically distinct social processes are at work: internal definition and external definition. These operate differently in the individual, interactional and institutional orders. …. Identity is always the practical product of the interaction of ongoing processes of internal and external definition. One cannot be understood in isolation from the other.[34]
Following Jenkins’ argument, one must also recognisethat there may be many levels of ‘externality’ and from the perspective of an individual actor the boundary may be far from clear. For instance, Poles may define themselves in many different ways towards other Poles and this process of ‘othering’ towards what an external viewer may see as one ethnic group is crucially important for understanding how ethnicity obscures and hides certain power relations, hierarchies of what is ultimately cultural embodiment of social stratification. Throughout this book, many examples of these strategies are analysed,which people employ in order to reformulate their identities as they both engage with new significant others—other Poles, English, ethnic minorities, British Poles, etc.—and continually relate to Polish dominant discourses about migration, nation-state, the community, how ethnicity translates itself into particular norms and values in the everyday life,and consequently about the moral fundamentals of human relationships. What is crucial here is that these are constructed and used in a transnational context and the notion of the border—the boundary dividing ‘Poland’ and the ‘rest’—is fundamental for understanding the complex development of Polish national identity, history, tensions between localised traditions,and how individuals understand it and, consequently, act upon it. How that boundary is reproduced, and in what contexts,is vital for our understanding of the transnational social field, which links various locations in Poland and the global city of London, andwill be the main theme inChapter 2.
Class: objective and subjective dimensions across national borders
When we come to social class,the issue is also rather complicated. Class refers both to the objective features of social inequality and to subjective understandings of that inequality. As Diane Reay points out:
classis more than income … [it] is a rather complicated mixture of the material, the discursive, psychological predispositions and sociological dispositions being played out in interactions with each others in the social field.[35]
Like the anthropologist Michał Buchowski,[36]who has extensively written about social class in Poland, I contend that the process of class differentiating and structuring is deeply embedded in culture,and it is through this culturally contingent meaning-making that class manifests itself in the social world. The issue of class is further complicated by placing it in a transnational migration context, where again it is obscured by methodological nationalism where societies and economies areseen as separate, distinct, and nonoverlapping (as, for instance, in such widespread distinctions between internal and external markets, internal and international migration). People are moving between different classed discourses and hierarchies, shaped by two different national histories with different relations to modernity, capitalism, and state intervention—but how do they make sense of them and how do they redefine or contest them? And what are the consequences of their transnational position in the process of making sense of the world? Clearly, we need to appreciate both national and transnational contexts if we are to understand,for example,the situation of a Polish migrant, who lives in London for one year mainly to build a house in Poland or a Polish family that tries to make sense of the British class stratification as it plays out itself in London neighbourhoods, schools, and workplaces.
In a transnational context, then, the subjective perception of class informed by cultural meanings attached to social hierarchy, the symbols and values attached to work, labour market, capitalism, role of elites, power, and the markers of class becomes even more important for individual social actors trying to make sense of the world around them. In this book, I trace the cultural dimension of social class construction and show how it intersects with ethnicity, with dominant and demotic understandings of what it means to be a Pole abroad and the resulting construction of a Polish community in a specific time and place—21st-century London with its own problems and debates around multiculturalism, inequality, social justice, race, and diversity. My main argument in this book is that neither class nor ethnicity can be treated as separate, distinct characteristics of social actors operating in a transnational social field. Human reception of specific ideologies—bethey related to neo-liberalism, modern capitalist market, the nation-state, nationalism, or multiculturalism—are all closely interconnected in a way that to analytically separate them would remove the role of individual choices and freedom of manoeuvre in a complex modern world. This holistic approach is a logical extension of the central role we assign to individual actors’ agency in the transnational social fields.
People migrate from villages, towns of various sizes, and great cities. In this book, the focus will be on migration between Poland and London, one of the world’s global cities, and people’s reflections on their movement between these different worlds constitutes a kind of social commentary about the differences between the Polish villages, smaller and larger towns from which they came, and London’s social, cultural, and economic complexity. Although many had little attachment to London and its localities, they still had to take these places into consideration for jobs, accommodation, welfare services, and leisure. Engagement with place informed their ways of both behaving and belonging and shaped the development and significance of national and transnational fields outlinedearlier. Through this commentary social reality is produced and I argue that—true to the anthropological tradition of seeing culture as a web of meanings—Polish migrants shape actively the world around them using the best available resources:freedom of movement, EU citizenship, independence from the state and its political and economic constraints, and powerful possibilities made due to the existence of the transnational social field.
This book is thus about individuals and their networks living in a transnational world where,on the one hand, states (both at the level of institutions and the ideologies that underpin them) constantly seek to control their lives and, on the otherhand, individuals manage to use their own perception of transnational social field and their position to their own advantage contesting and questioning the encroachment of the state.
Data for this book and the problem of ‘waves’ of Poles
This monograph arose from numerous research projectswhich Icarried out in the decade between the years 2003 and 2013 and combined they offer a body of datathataremultidimensional and both qualitative and quantitative. The body of qualitative data draws on my doctoral dissertationthatdwelled on cultural and social determinants of constructions of Polish ethnic associations in London inthe1990s andthefirst decade of 21st century.[37]The thesis draws from data collected during a fieldwork phase, when I was a part-time reporter for the media outlet cateringtothe oldPolish diasporic associations, thePolish Daily,along with other research projects in the years 2005–2007.Working in the ethnic media during the build up to the large influx of Polish migrants,and observing the debates by older generations of Poles along with their British offspring,offeredmevaluable data about the dilemmas and conflicts between specific ethnic ideologies, class interests, and values. A number of publications borne out of that study dwell on the tensionsandpower relations between these groups.[38]Another body of qualitative data came from an Economic and Social Research Council-funded study[39]on Polish migrants in London,carried out between 2005 and 2006 during which I conducted 70 in-depth interviews with Poles both in London and in three locations in Poland along with extensive periods of participant observation. This study specifically looked at constructions of social class and ethnicity among Polish migrants in London. Data for this book come also from several small-scale studies commissioned by localauthoritiesin Londonwhowere increasingly intrigued bytheirbooming populations from Poland and other Accession States.[40]These, usually two to three monthslongethnographic enquiries were commissioned bythefollowing London Boroughs:Greenwich, Hammersmith and Fulham, Redbridge, and Lewisham. Although focusing on A8 migrants in general, in each of them,at least 50% of respondents were Polish.They involved usually a small survey of 100 Polishnationals, complemented by one ormore focus group discussions, in-depth interviews,or interviews with local community leaders. These studies mainly looked at migration strategies, patterns of mobility, and intentions of stay along with labour market outcomes and social networks. They also generated data on Poles’ perceptions of race, multiculturalism, and their own attitudes towards Polishness. The picture is also completed by data fromafew large-scale surveysthatI conducted among Polish migrants, not specifically in London. In 2006, I conducted a survey amongasample of505Polish migrants intheUK (commissioned by BBC Newsnight). In September 2007, ahead of elections in Poland, a large sample survey (1100 Poles across England, Scotland, and Ireland) was also carried out. Between 2009 and 2010,I also lead an ethnographic study on homeless Eastern European migrants living in London funded by the Methodist Southlands Trust.[41]Thirty in-depth interviews were carried out,mainly with Polish homeless migrants along with extensive participant observation undertaken over six months. Another strand of my research interests looked at Polish migrants’political participation and various forms of political activism. Ahead of the Mayoral elections in London, three focus groups with Polish residentswerecarried out in April 2012,exploring their political views and attitudes towards the democratic process in Britain.[42]In 2013, I took part in a study led by Warsaw-based think-tank, Instytut Spraw Publicznych, looking at various forms of social and political activism ofthePolishimmigrants, in particular looking at politicalparticipation and the internal diversity of Polish diaspora in the UK.[43]
All this, however, in itself would not be enough without a more subtle anthropological approach and immersion into the subject of this book. As an immigrant from Poland living in London since 2001, I was constantly a keen observer of issues concerning Polish migrantsinboth Poland and Britain—in public debates, discussions on websites,theethnic press, through participation in events, rituals, public meetings, masses, private gatherings, informal discussions, and so on. While quantitative data offer us important information about various aspects of Polish migration to the UK, in order to gain a more rounded view,a more subtle and multidimensional analysis is fundamental. From an ethnographic perspective, when explaining the social and cultural factors behind peoples’ attitudes, perception, cultural norms, or behaviour, Iconsiderthatdata from casual talk and gossiparejust as valid as a large survey. I strongly believe that datawhicharesometimes thrown into the non-scientific bin of just being ‘anecdotal’areequally valid. If we look beyond mere descriptions of Polish migrants’ life worlds and try to offer an explanation as to why a particular type of behaviour, norm, or discourse is prevalent over another, we must go deeper into the very meanings of individuals’ perceptions, attitudes, and actions. In essence,then, the textual data from the interviews will be frequently coupled with the notes from the field or my own descriptions of certain activities of Polish migrants.
There are clear limitations of this approach, mainly in terms of statistical representativeness and interpretative power;however,
