Polish EU Officials in Brussels: Living on Europlanet

This doctoral dissertation explores the issues of adaptation and integration of the Polish EU officials in Brussels, as well as of their evolving identification.

The present work partly builds upon my previous study of this group of highly skilled migrants. While drawing on the Eriksen’s (2007) complexity approach to the social and cultural integration, I analyse attitudes, elements of daily life and socializing patterns of the researched group to find out, inter alia, whether they make or belong to any community, what their attachments are and how they draw and are subject to boundaries. I also verify if they are, as some scholars suggested, becoming an embryo of a future, supranational European nation: to what extent they remain Polish, what Polishness actually means in their case, and whether they are developing any European identification. If so, how can the latter co-exist with the ethnic one?

To this effect, I adopted the emic perspective: I let my research participants speak; I noted their experiences, confessions and reflections. Studying EU officials is not easy – the research presented many challenges characteristic for the anthropological study of elites. Thus, despite my “quasi-insider” position, I needed to rely more on the interviews, questionnaires and informal accounts than on traditional anthropological participant observation.

The researched group constitutes a separate category, in-between immigrants and expatriates. Despite their potential long-term settlement, they tend to limit their social activity to other EU officials and expatriates. Contrary to previous research findings in this field, they are rather inclusive – their social circles comprise representatives of various nationalities, not only compatriots. However, they hardly socialise with Belgians. In fact, it may be argued that they construct boundaries separating them from the local population. This may be related to the legacy of real or imaginary stereotypes they feel they are prey of, but also a symbolic act of adherence to the category of EU officials. Overall, they do not seem interested neither in the integration with the larger society nor with other Poles, but rather with a larger community of EU officials. In the same time, although they adapt easily to the functioning in the multinational Brussels and in the Belgian “reality”, culturally they remain Polish and maintain strong transnational links with the home country.

As to the identification patterns, my research participants remain attached to the Polish culture and language. They also see their Polishness as an important aspect of their European identification, in addition to their professional identification and the attachment to the common interest, developed in the process of engrenage in the EU institutions.