Paper short abstract:

In this paper I show how "Europe" and "modernity" creates class distinctions among Polish EU civil servants in Brussels.

Paper long abstract:

In the world of EU bureaucracy notions of "Europe" and ideas about "modernity" are both intertwined tools of power that are strategically applied by people from old member states in order to marginalize those coming from new member states. Being "European" in EU bureaucracy is a matter of taste, that is "a match-maker; it marries colours and also people, who make 'well-matched couples' initially in regard to taste" (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 239). However, such "Europe" and "modernity" becomes also visible in the struggle, among subalterns, to become "modern" and "white European" (Buchowski 2006, Fanon 1991) and thus generates (class) divisions among Poles in the EU-apparatus. In this paper I show how this "modernity" permeates the imaginations of Poles working in EU institutions and creates tensions, making them either perform "practices of deserving" in order to expel or dilute their own, nationally constructed, stereotypically marked and "un-modern" habitual representation or making them super sensitive about their national representation. Both these practices rest on taste, an implicit mechanism of division-making in everyday life, creating classes of those "European" and those "not-really-European" Poles. In an environment where national networks are crucial, these allegedly "Europeanizing" practices in fact reinforce subordinate position within the bureaucratic apparatus in twofold way: by revealing "undistanced" and thus in local terms "non-European" attitude towards national representation and by jeopardizing collective national action within EU bureaucracy.