When (In)security travels: Europeanization and migration in Poland

ABSTRACT

This article investigates in what way the enlargement of the European Union and EU conditionality have brought about a change in the way state institutions and bureaucracies define, reproduce and deal with security issues. It is based on the assumption that the definition of an extraordinary threat for internal security by terrorists, migrants and organized crime, and their presentation as an existential threat for societal peace, follows the logic of securitization as a practice that is both discursive and institutionalized in practical actions. Since the new member states had to submit to a homogenizing process of Europeanization in the realm of Justice and Home Affairs, they also had to internalize the EU-15's concept of the ‘threatening other’. Hegemonic imaginations of (in)security thus ‘travel’ from the centre to the periphery and are translated and adapted, thus inspiring a socialization process and creating a tension which bureaucrats have to reconcile in their everyday work.

KEYWORDS:

• Poland
• travelling security
• securitization
• anthropology of bureaucracy
• migration policies
• Europeanization

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the conferences ‘The Governance of Asylum and Migration in the European Union’, University of Salford, 26–27 January 2012, and at ‘The New Public Good: Affects and Techniques of flexible Bureaucracies’, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 23–24 March 2012. I am indebted to Marta Kindler, Nils Zurawski, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments and advices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This article is part of a larger ongoing project on the anthropology of security and the question of how imaginations of (in)security are implemented, translated, mediated and transmitted in Poland and Austria within a European framework (see, e.g. Schwell, 2012, 2014, 2015).