EU-Space and the Euroclass: Modernity, Nationality and Lifestyle among Eurocrats in Brussels 9783839439746

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Paweł Michał Lewicki EU-Space and the Euroclass

Culture and Social Practice

Paweł Michał Lewicki is assistant professor at the Chair for Comparative Central European Studies of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). His main research interests are “Europe” and cultural processes of Europeanization from postcolonial and (post)imperial perspective. Currently he analyses these issues in relation to trajectories of migrants from Central and Easter Europe to Berlin and Stockholm, who are HIV-positive.

Paweł Michał Lewicki

EU-Space and the Euroclass Modernity, Nationality and Lifestyle among Eurocrats in Brussels

Die vorliegende Arbeit wurde vom Dekan der Philosophischen Fakultät I, Prof. Dr. Michael Seadle, im Rahmen eines Promotionsverfahrens als Dissertation anerkannt und am 28. Juli 2014 an der Philosophischen Fakultät I der HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin verteidigt. Gefördert von der NaFöG-Kommission des Landes Berlin und vom Svenska Institutet.

Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kaschuba, Prof. Dr. Michał Buchowski.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2017 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Paweł Michał Lewicki; Location: Brussels; Year: 2011; © Paweł Michał Lewicki Proofread by Thomas Anessi, Basia Kwiatkowska Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3974-2 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3974-6

Table of Content Acknowledgements | 7 Introduction | 9 I. EU-space in Brussels: places, people, power | 15 Going to Brussels, entering EU-space | 15 Positionality | 18 EU-space | 23 Making it to the other side: Ixelles/Elsene | 25 Fractured ethnographies: where is our field and when do we do fieldwork research? | 32 Places and hierarchies | 35 Etterbeek and both Woluwes | 41 The European District | 44 What is EU-space? | 68 II. Struggles in EU-space over prestige and power | 83

Stakes in Struggles | 83 Who is efficient? | 98 Networks | 112 Performing the Eurostyle | 140 III. The Eurostyle of the Euroclass | 155 Europe: the language of reason, democracy, legality, civility and particular ethics | 160 EU-Bodies | 194 The Eurostyle of the Euroclass and the European doxa of the North-West | 232 IV. Polish EU Brussels | 241

Divisions | 243 Reproduction | 256

Practices of deserving | 277 Polish Europeans in EU-Space | 283 Who is Polish and who is modern and European in EU-space? | 300 Outlook | 311 Glossary | 313 Bibliography | 317

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my supervisor Wolfgang Kaschuba for his advice and remarks and for making this dissertation project possible. I would like to thank my cosupervisors Michał Buchowski for his help and comments and Max Liljefors for his support during my stay in Lund. I am also thankful to Stefan Beck, Susanne Lundin, Zofia Sokolewicz and Antoni Sułek for their support. For their precious comments, advice and inspiration I would like to thank Orvar Löfgren, Elka DrążkiewiczGrodzicka, Mikołaj Lewicki, Peter Bengtsen, Tom O’Dell, Michael Westrich, Regina Römhild and Andrea Meza Torres. For their support and presence during different stages of the process, I would like to thank Anika Keinz, Jonny Berg, Basia Kwiatkowska, Emilia Sułek, my parents, Ella Johansson, Talin Bahçivanoğlu, Jérôme Roland, my Dutch-British and my Polish friends in Brussels, and das Kolloquium Migration und soziokulturelle Heterogenität at the EuropaUniversität Viadrina. I would like to thank all my interviewees and people in Brussels who were willing to share their thoughts and views with me. For thoughtprovoking interpretations of Chopin’s music I am grateful to Rafał Blechacz. Finally, for their financial support, I would like to thank the Berlin Funding for Graduates (NaFöG Kommission), the Swedish Institute (Svenska Institutet), the FAZIT-Foundation (FAZIT-Stiftung), Jonsered Foundation (Jonseredsstiftelsen) and Kungliga Gustav Adolfs Akademien för Svensk Folkkultur (the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture) and the Chair of Comparative Central European Studies of the Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder).

Introduction

This book should probably start with a story about my family. It should probably start with my grandmother’s stories of World War II in Warsaw and about postwar scarcity. Or it should start with my parents’ stories about the horseback riding rallies they coorganized in the sixties and seventies together with young intellectuals and the artistic bohemians of Wrocław. These rallies, on the one hand, reproduced images from American Western movies that for them represented freedom and the availability of clear ethical choices; on the other hand, they definitely and distinctly referenced the tradition of the Polish gentry’s horseback riding culture and its adoration by the Polish intelligentsia. These holidays stood for independence and entrepreneurialism (as opposed to the state organized, mass “employees’ holidays”, in Polish: wczasy pracownicze), for traditional male and female gender roles (as opposed to “unnatural” gender roles imposed by the “oppressive” communist state [see Keinz, 2008]) and an affinity with the values of what in Poland is broadly known as “the West”1. My parents still meet with their old “horse friends” in summer and dress up “for fun” in the costumery of American Western movies. These meetings still have a distinctive feel, but they have lost their political significance and are more social and recreational in character than those in the sixties and seventies, when imitating the Polish gentry’s customs in times of ubiquitous “equality” had a social, cultural and political meaning. This book should start with accounts of my parents’ journeys to the West, about their grape harvesting in France in the eighties when they drove their small Maluch

1

This term “the West” describes countries that stood beyond the “iron curtain” (looking from its eastern side!): democratic and wealthy. I do not aim to essentialize “the West” in this book, but rather show its cultural power. Thus, I use it within the frames of postcolonial theory that shows how some countries, particularly of Western Europe, developed in the course of colonization a powerful cultural discourse that is distributed around the World and that undergoes constant and various mutation in order to legitimize cultural domination and economic exploitation.

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(Polish: toddler/little one – referring to the Fiat 126p, a small car, more or less equivalent to GDR’s Trabant – a car for the masses) across Europe to work for hard currency, and telling stories back home about cultivated France and the wonderful people they had met. In fact, at that time this practice was quite common among my parents’ friends. This grape harvesting gave them the opportunity to earn additional money without losing face – most of all towards themselves because grape harvesting was associated not with hard work in agriculture, but with wine, a beverage that has a distinctive status. When they returned to Poland after these journeys they told stories about encounters with “capitalist reality” and other experiences they had had in the West as visitors or labour migrants – all positive, spreading the aura of a “better world”. They brought home Western items: wine, French cheese, household utensils, clothes, and cans of French pâté, all of which evoked certain imaginations. For many Poles at that time and today, the West was and still is a “better place”, a place of clear and “normal” social and economic relations, civilized manners and developed technology. These accounts of their travels, similar to stories told by millions of Poles when they returned home from the West, stories told about “civility”, “normality”, stories and imaginations that came with commodities and consumer goods – it was all a narrative about the West, about a “promised land”, where everything was just better. This book, hence, begins with imaginations about a better, “Western life” millions of Poles and those in other socialist countries shared (and still share) about the West (see also Vonderau, 2010). In most Polish households, the West was and is a better option than the East. In fact the West was the opposite of the East. The Round Table negotiations in 1989 that led to democratization and a market economy in Poland were seen, at least in the house in which I grew up, as a return to “normalcy” (see also Keinz, 2008). For many people in Poland at that time, it was a new beginning, a new opening offering the perspective of a bright future in their country. It was an opportunity to finally become like those in the West, to enjoy a life similar to theirs2. The West has always been a fable among the Polish intelligentsia and intellectuals; it was and is an abstract aim, a target and a guarantee of being “civilized” and “modern”. After 1989 this became tangible in economical statistics, in articles of the left-liberal Gazeta Wyborcza praising the number of kilometres of newly-built highways in Poland, in new, Western lifestyles and consumption patterns, and in particular pedagogy about who and what is 2

I remember my father at the beginning of 1990s, while driving our small Maluch around Warsaw, saying, while pointing at concrete housing blocks, that in 20 years we would witness their demolition. By that he meant that he gave us – that he gave Poland – 20 years to become “normal”, to reach a stage when people would no longer be living in these “cages” (a common description for flats in housing blocks), thus able to determine their future, “free” and wealthy. Needless to say: these blocks are still standing.

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civilized and modern. These discourses translate into everyday conversations e.g. at a dinner table or party, simultaneously creating class distinctions. For many others, 1989 was the beginning of life of poverty, insecurity, humiliation and degradation (Buchowski, 2006). This book is about imperial power and, in particular, about Western cultural power that has deep roots in the colonial heritage of the West. It is a book about the constant reproduction of “European man”: a “rational” and “modern” European in EU Brussels who represents a set of deeply internalized cultural imaginations, expectations and aspirations about “modernity” that seem natural and are taken for granted among some cultural national representations in Brussels. It reveals how allegedly modern and rational structures, procedures and their cultural settings along with cultural processes taking place in the heart of the EU do not necessarily reflect rational, knowledge-driven, plural and tolerant European self-understanding. It shows widely recognized, socially and culturally relevant visual and other markers of “Europeanness”. These markers are implicit and “obvious” among some nationalities and reveal a constantly emerging and modal notion of European modern purity (Latour, 1993). This book is also, however, about the internalization of these visual and other markers of Europeanness and its implicit modernity. It describes imaginations of a “civilized West” and desires for a modern Poland – both embodied and lived in “the Heart of the Union” (Nugent, 2002) in EU Brussels. This ethnography takes a magnifying glass to examine the cultural criteria of belonging that are applied on an everyday basis among a group of people who until recently called themselves “future Europeans”, among those who declare their desire to “push the European project” further (Shore, 2000). It is a book about belonging; belonging to an imagined, culturally superior and self-reproducing “real” and “modern” Europe in the European Union. I set out on my ethnographic journey to trace back imaginations (Appadurai, 1998), imaginations about the West, about the old member states (OMS) and particularly the North-Western EU member states. Concomitantly, it is also an ethnography of imaginations about the East, and the new member states (NMS). These imaginations shape and persist in and through different forms of human agency, in cultural practices, and among people living and working in Brussels, working in the institutions of the enlarged European Union, and in me – an ethnographer coming from the East. Lastly, it is an ethnography of imaginations that possibly form policies on the EU level, imaginations “as constructed landscapes of collective aspirations” and “an organized field of social practices” (Appadurai, 1998). This book is about belonging to this imagined West, about boundaries between embodied divisions that are constantly being reproduced and challenged. It is about attempts to overcome these boundaries, and the consequences of these attempts. Thus, this book is about cultural power and its

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magnitude, it touches upon crucial questions about European society and, in the face of growing nationalism and xenophobia, about the future of an EU Europe. Civil servants are rarely the object of common admiration, and EU civil servants in particular are under constant and recently growing critique – in some EU member states more then others (like in the UK or currently in the so-called new member states), but the general opinion around EU Europe is that there are too many of them, they are overpaid and bored, thus introducing new regulations and making the lives of Europeans more complicated. Paradoxically, this moaning about EU civil servants, as Herzfeld has shown on a different example (Herzfeld, 1992), is a practice producing accountability in relation to this bureaucracy. It also creates, however, among EU civil servants the feeling of being constantly under siege and of being not understood (“we are doing a good job here” is a view that I often encountered, see also Shore, 2000). This, in my opinion, leads to greater divisions between the world of politics, policies and bureaucrats in Brussels and their immediate (Brussels) and wider (European) context. However, these constant complaints on both sides preclude a broad and open (instead of one only among politicians and experts) discussion about what kind of European bureaucracy, and in fact, what kind of European government and governance we want in Europe. The increasing competencies transferred to the community level should naturally lead to growth in the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, there are plans that seek to reduce the number of civil servants by 5% by 20173. This leads to EU bureaucracy’s increased dependency on external sources of knowledge (often coming from lobbyists), and complicated procedures involving member states’ institutions, which in consequence dilute responsibilities. How does this relate to common and loud calls from throughout the EU for more transparency, democracy and accountability in EU decision-making processes? This moaning about the EU bureaucracy and the feeling among EU civil servants of being under siege may explain partly why EU civil servants have created a cultural and symbolic space in Brussels (“a golden cage” as some of them would say), where, as I will show, particular ways of behaviour, gestures, language and lifestyle are seen as more European than others. My study raises similar questions to that of C. Shore (2000) about the existence of an “embryonic ‘European identity’” (ibid., p. 3) and its defining features, but I am posing this question 17 years later and after the biggest enlargement of the EU in its history. What dynamics has been set into motion in this international (some would probably describe it as “transnational”) space where, after the enlargements of the EU in 2004 and 2007, at least 27 nationalities work and live together (see also Busby, 3

In 2012, during the negotiations over a new EU budget, Great Britain demanded cuts in spending on EU administration, see: https://www.ft.com/content/9c5800d4-3266-11e2ae2f-00144feabdc0#axzz2HC4xbHai (last retrieved on 04.06.2017)

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2013)? Which cultural and symbolic strategies and practices are seen as more powerful and legitimate than others? Is engrenage a unifying concept, as Shore found (2000), and do people in the EU-space “mesh together”, or is it rather a tool of power that in the guise of Foucault’s governmentality reshapes subjects in EUspace into those who act and perform according to legitimate rules, and those whose practices are considered illegitimate and are thus condemned to a situation of exclusion? Such a question evokes others about self-making and power extortion, about how governmentality affects subjects on the ground and informs everyday practices and procedures in EU-space that can potentially impact political decisions taken in the EU apparatus. Does European, objective and fact-driven policy making really represent neutrality, objective knowledge and non-nationality (see EC, 2002)? Thedvall has shown (Thedvall, 2006) how EU policy making is a matter of image management and the ability of a given member state to create a particular image while arguing with the use of “objective” and “neutral” numbers and statistical data (on modern and allegedly rational discourse see also Brown, 2008). At the source of this book lies the assumption that the decision-making processes in Brussels are also dependent on cultural criteria, on stereotypes and what they evoke, on performances of national representations, and classifications of these representations within EU-space. These practices and performances reflect the cultural struggles that are taking place within this space. In the following chapters, I scrutinize the powerful discourse and powerful cultural norms that are lived in this EU-space. I have been to Brussels three times. The first and longest period was for eight months, between October 2007 and May 2008. My second field trip was for one month in March 2009 and the last one, in March 2011, was due to an assignment I had received from the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humboldt-University in Berlin to look into the social networks and negotiation strategies within the socalled biofuel policy cluster in Brussels. However, during the last stay I used the opportunity to meet my previous interviewees and generate additional research material for my own purposes. The starting point and theoretical inspiration for my research came from Norbert Elias’ study “The Established and Outsiders” (1994) and from postcolonial theory. Elias is one of the first scholars to problematize the relationship between structures and the individual, placing more emphasis on the reproduction of structures through agency. His study of Winston Parva focuses exactly on everyday life, which I, at least at the beginning of my research, neglected 4 . Therefore, I 4

I do not have a rational and good explanation for this. I suppose it was due to the training I had received as an ethnologist: fixation on interviews, fear of being biased and unobjective when doing observations, while interviews provide tangible “proof” that cannot be questioned.

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initially remained more at the level of discourse; I couldn’t free myself from the textual aspect of culture and doing ethnography. With time something changed, particularly after I came back from field the first time. I cannot say exactly what it was; maybe it was in part the fear of having too little field material (most of which was later gone together with my stolen computer), which forced me to shift my focus to what I already had, but which I had classified as “obvious” – my memories and snapshots of situations in the field. At the time it seemed to me to be something that couldn’t be culturally significant and of anthropological value. A clear incentive was provided by a seminar in Lund that opened up new perspectives, drawing my attention to the autoethnographic approach, which resulted in my focusing on these unspectacular events in everyday life. I started to describe moments that were both significant and personal for me during my field research. I concentrated my attention on my body, on things I had done earlier, during and after the interview, on my memories and emotions in these moments. As Kohn writes: “Often it’s the least recorded, most unexpected personal moment or accident that becomes most viscerally remembered.” (Kohn, 2010, p. 186) So I wrote down everything I remembered and experienced. From there it was a small step to applying Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and taste, whose application in my analysis I owe to my supervisor Wolfgang Kaschuba. Bourdieu provides tools to scrutinize these everyday practices and see in them hierarchies and power – something for which I was searching in my interviewees’ stories, and found in my notes and memories taken after the initial research phase, and, in the latter phase of field work, during my time of “being there”. In what follows, I will reveal the cultural and symbolic rules and norms of what I call EU-space. I will show mechanisms of symbolic, powerful differentiation between EU civil servants, and the ways, means and forms by which hierarchies in this field are culturally reproduced. Thus, I will answer questions about how a hierarchy is symbolically reproduced in the everyday life of the European Commission’s civil servants, particularly between old and new member states of the EU. In describing these divisions, I will refer to the analytical concept of habitus and style, and define what criteria construct a legitimate, powerful habitus and lifestyle (which I call the Eurostyle) in EU-space in Brussels. In many aspects, EU-space resembles a transnational space where transnational processes are taking place (Ong, 1999); however I will show that it is rather an inter-national space, where practices and imaginations are quite site specific and localized, and the EU civil servants form a cosmopolitan, white middle class (Hannerz, 1990, 2004). In the following pages, I will look into how these concepts of habitus and style are locally intertwined and related to notions of nationality, modernity and class.

I. EU-space in Brussels: places, people, power

G OING TO B RUSSELS ,

ENTERING

EU- SPACE

In Köln Hauptbahnhof I’m changing trains and boarding a brand-new type of Deutsche Bahn ICE, called “International”, heading to Brussels. A group of secondary school pupils with whom I’ve been travelling since Hannover on the previous train from Berlin is crowding into the same car. Inside most seats are taken, and I am glad to have a reservation. In front of me sits an elderly couple: based on their appearance (he wears a khaki jacket and a fuller; she a dark blue jacket with a colourful scarf) they both make a distinguished impression on me. They speak French. Are they coming back from a visit with their daughter’s family in Frankfurt? A businessman with a laptop on his lap sits across the aisle, and behind me a cheerful-looking woman with curly grey hair is sitting at the window next to a young man. As I found out later, eavesdropping on their conversation, she is a novelist who visited her friends in Munich and is now travelling back home to London. She is taking a train because she is afraid of flying, in spite of the inconvenience of having to change trains twice, in Frankfurt and in Brussels, in order to reach London. She says also that she likes to have the opportunity to look out at a moving landscape outside the train window, and I think, in an era of low cost airlines, she travels by train because she has a lot of time and money. I am the only person with a huge trolley bag, a 80 litre back pack on my back and a computer bag in my hand – with my luggage I have taken two seats and visibly do not fit into the environment of small, smart trolleys. I hear French, English, German, Flam/Dutch – it’s international. I’m going to Europe. A nice, warm female voice welcomes me on board the ICE international going to Bruxelles Midi/Brussel Zuid in each of the aforementioned languages. Soon I am rushing at a speed of 350 km/h and wondering if I’m still in Germany or already in Belgium – can I see a difference in the landscape? Are the meadows and houses different than in Germany? I feel as though I am in a space-time capsule that is taking me to a different world. I feel excited and attracted by the linguistic diversity surrounding me and coming from the speaker, the comfort and speed of travelling appeals to me,

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and I am fascinated by the indifferent expressions on people’s faces – don’t they feel excited too? I somehow feel connected to those secondary school pupils with their enthusiasm expressed out loud in their conversations – “we’re going to Europe”, “we’re going to discover Europe”, “we’re going to the heart of the Union!” My field diary entry from that day says: “In any case, I have to remain a critic. I cannot let myself be enchanted by the wealth and multi-culti, particularly on a personal level. I cannot change and become arrogant.” Getting off the train in Bruxelles Nord/Brussel Noord, I feel cheated: no shining, granite floors, no vast glass surfaces and iron fittings, but only shabby concrete roofs on each platform and old, beaming TV sets with an almost invisible schedule. So this is Europe? This looked like a scruffy train station in a midsized Polish city. I am running with my huge amount of luggage up and down the platform in search of a lift – which proves futile. There are no clear signs showing the way around, and with my rudimentary French I feel helpless. In order to reach my new house in the capital of Europe, I am, soaked in sweat, taking an overcrowded, shaky train to Bockstael station in Laken/Laeken – a rather poor, immigrant district in North-West Brussels, where the Belgian King has his seat. My accommodation is a tiny room (of approximately 7m2) in a typical three-storey Bruxellois house that has been adapted for renting rooms to students and stagiaires (trainees), usually in one of the EU institutions or EU related institutions. The amount I pay for these 7m2, the possibility to use a shared kitchen and a shared shower (which are located, thank God, on the same floor, not an obvious fact in houses of such type in Brussels) is almost the amount of the whole rent on my 40m2 one-room apartment in Berlin. My Brussels flatmates are two students, one from Ingolstadt, Germany, on an Erasmus exchange, the other is a Dutch medical student on an internship at one of the French-speaking hospitals in Brussels. She left after a month and was replaced by a British intern at the European Parliament whose contract lasted only three months, so I later witnessed his efforts to find another job. He found out then, his main asset was being an English native speaker. From the window of my kitchen, I have a view of the Atomium, and the seat of the Belgian King and the huge surrounding park are also within walking distance. I have chosen this place mainly due to the price, but also because of, as I thought, its relative proximity to the city centre. As I found out later, being 15 minutes by metro to the city centre, it was almost on the outskirts of Brussels (if I were to take a longer walk from the place where I lived, within ten minutes I would virtually walk out of Brussels). Despite the royal vicinity and the Laken/Laeken cathedral with the tombs of all the Belgian Kings and royal family (there were not so many of them, as Belgium is a rather young country), Laken/Laeken is a mixed housing area with typical three-storey buildings and industrial areas. In social terms it is a rather poor, immigrant district, inhabited by a nonwhite urban, poor population, especially

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migrants particularly from North Africa, but also from Eastern Europe1 (with Poles and Bulgarians leading), as well as white working-class and lower middle-class Belgians. On one hand, I was impressed by the racial diversity seen on the streets in Laken/Laeken and in Brussels in general (something I was not acquainted with from living in Berlin), on the other, compared to Berlin’s Neukölln, where I lived, I felt like I had been thrown into a different world of poor working-class migrants. Whereas in Neukölln white middle-class students and German white working class and nonwhite working/middle class with Turkish and Arabic backgrounds all lived side by side, in Laken/Laeken the residents were most of all the working-class poor, either white or nonwhite. Every time I entered the dark, smelly and scruffy corridors of the Bockstael metro station, I would look around and feel a bit anxious, watching out for rascals who would sometimes sit on benches yelling at each other. Perhaps my feelings in such situations, as in many other, similar situations I found myself in during fieldwork in Brussels, were hyphenated by my merely basic knowledge of French. When you get off the U-Bahn in Berlin Rathaus Neukölln or Herrmannplatz you would see similar scenes, but here in Laken/Laeken they felt odd, strange, unfamiliar. However, I have never before seen such visible class and social differences connected to skin colour as I experienced during my fieldwork in Brussels. In Laken/Laeken there were neither cafés nor pubs where one could go out in the evening to have a beer with people of my age and class, and it was a bit scary to walk down an empty street after sunset. Living in Laken/Laeken I felt degraded and excluded, thrown into a social context that was not mine, which was not familiar to me: a white middle-class or intelligentsia Pole. As it turned out later, Laken/Laeken, together with the whole of the West and the North-West Brussels was a “no-go” area for the fonctionnaires2 of the EU. The only reason to go to Laken/Laeken was to go to the Heysel Stadium, Expo grounds or the Atomium3. If I wanted to go out for a coffee during the day, or a beer in the evening, I would 1

According to frequent surveys carried out by the University of Brussels this is an area of the lowest yearly income in Brussels (between 11.400 and 15.000€ per year). Cf. http://www.observatbru.be/documents/graphics/rapport-pauvrete/barometre_social_2011. pdf (seen on 27.06.2012)

2

This is a common, French description for EU civil servants.

3

One of my interviewees, a senior EU civil servant, claimed that this would change with the opening of the “European school” (for children of EU civil servants) in Laken/Laeken that should occur in the near future. In 2008, there were plans to open a new, fourth European School in Brussels (Brussel IV) due to capacity shortages in the previous three. In the end, the school was moved from its temporary address in Brekendael/Brekendaal, in the Forrest commune in the South of Brussels, to new venues in Laken/Laeken in summer 2012. (cf. http://laeken.eeb4.be/en/node/1, seen on 29.06.2012, see also www.eeb4.be and www.eursc.eu, seen on 04.05.2017)

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have to go to the city centre and take either the metro or a long tram ride. My “European lifestyle” 4 – something that I was acquainted with and used to from Berlin, was in the capital of Europe nonexistent. At least at the beginning of my research.

P OSITIONALITY Writing up this ethnography I realized how subjective and volatile my field is, how illusory my observations and experiences of “being there” were and how much they were shaped by the facts of who I was and where I came from. During the whole period of my research, I was trying desperately to objectivize and distance myself from the very personal experiences and observations I gathered and the situations I encountered while in the field in Brussels. Simultaneously I was absolutely aware of how my previous experiences, my life story, shaped my choice of topic for my research. Although I must admit that I was not aware at that time of how my skin colour and class impacted my research. While in the field, I was constantly in search of tangible evidence of discrimination against people from new member states (NMS) of the EU, searching for stories and situations that would reveal their (symbolic or factual) exclusion. This kind of research turned out to be very difficult, as my informants treated me as anything but a “safety valve” that would reveal to the public what they had experienced at the EU Commission5 – something I had been hoping for. Thus, I was unsatisfied with how my research was developing: about the people I had met, about my access to everyday life in EU institutions and to meetings (both of which I didn’t have), and about the things I was told during interviews. However, during my research in Brussels, my eyes and ears were open all the time and my ethnographic sensitivity and memory was constantly “on”. I recorded situations from my everyday life in EU Brussels in my memory. These memories, which I wrote down predominantly after my first research stay, were very personal, and I had not thought of them as something that could become an object of scientific scrutiny. These were only “my memories”. However, after I returned to Berlin, I started to worry about what I considered at that time to be my scarce field material. I began to write down my memories in more detail, and later noted my observations on subsequent, shorter field trips to 4

In my master’s thesis under the title: What Does it Mean to be European? Searching for European Identity among Students in Berlin, I asked my interviewees what a “European lifestyle” meant for them, and often heard that it was Strassencafé.

5

Henceforth also as just “the Commission”. EU institutions in Brussels were often called locally “the Institutions” and I frequently use this form further in the text. Similarly, for EU Parliament I often use just “the Parliament” or for EU Council just “the Council”.

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Brussels. The descriptions of bodies, outfits, movements written down felt dull, plain and without any meaning. I was frustrated with my attempts to collect meaningful field material. Finally, I became inspired by Billy Ehn’s text on autoethnographies (Ehn, 2011), which made me aware of both how to express issues and thoughts I found too personal and had not dared to elaborate on, and how to include personal experiences in the field as a part of a cultural analysis of the people I had studied (see also Ehn & Löfgren, 2010). Autoethnography and self-observation of my own body gave me the keys to a new analysis of those dull descriptions of body movements, gestures, outfits, spaces and places that I had seen and visited in Brussels. And suddenly these dull descriptions and memories acquired new meaning. Autoethnography is also something that turned out to be productive due to the character of my field, which was hostile, hierarchical and hermetic. I was looking for answers on how to cope with the “wall” I had encountered in Brussels (I remember while being there that I thought my research was like licking candy through glass) and with the inaccessibility of the people, which rendered my efforts futile. As ethnography embraces new fields that are far from a traditional understanding of the discipline, and ethnographers can now be found in national banks, factories, detention institutions, laboratories and hospitals, and on national and other borders and in conflict zones, the question of how we do our fieldwork and how we gain access to it becomes more and more relevant. For instance McDowell (1998) remarks how she, doing interviews among industrial and commercial elites in London, shifted and adjusted to every new interview situation, including “playing dumb” with older men, acting “brusquely efficient” when interviewing older women, “sisterly” when interviewing women of her own age and status, and “superfast and well-informed” when talking to younger men (McDowell, 1998). I suppose in many instances research among elites forces us to make a research object out of ourselves and to observe how we enter these research fields, how we relate and accommodate ourselves to them, how we irritate the norms, and what accounts and what ethnographical knowledge these situations produce. But was it not always like this for ethnographers, no matter where they conducted their research and among whom? I guess reading Malinowski’s diary confirms this. I think that what has changed is that some of us – ethnographers – are in a way forced by our research fields to reach for these accounts, and we just tend to be more honest in our writing today. Sitting in front of my computer and thinking about my fieldwork, I subconsciously resisted the idea of an ethnographer who is an objective translator, a person that “was there” and has to give an account of what he/she has seen. Most of all, I resisted the thought of writing a monograph, the idea of constructing on paper

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(or rather on a computer screen) a nice, coherent world of the people I had studied and inflict this world with (fashionable) theories and concepts in order to show that I understood how “they” functioned, to legitimize my encounter and simultaneously veil the very personal accounts with the Other (I suppose I failed in this resistance). This is not how I experienced fieldwork and what the outcome of it is or was: it was a very personal, solitary, difficult and in no way linear process. Moreover, I was and am disappointed that in no monograph or ethnography did I find a comparison, a hint or description of similar experiences and accounts in the field. Did this mean that others had experienced ethnographic research as a linear process? As an objective, scientific observation that had a clear beginning and clear end, from A to Z, and in which the researcher was a transparent recorder of the studied “object”? After Writing Culture we know that we coproduce a text but where are the consequences of this? Where are these postcolonial/postimperial, postbloc and queer(ed) perspectives in ethnology that take into account the twists and turns in power relations in the field? Where are these books and texts about alternative epistemologies? Where is the Writing Culture debate – at least in Germany? Where are those frustrated, angry, desperate, resigned ethnographers from Malinowski’s diary who should now allegedly be included in the final book? Where are the real stories about the fieldwork (Marcus, 2006)? The “big names” and gurus of modern ethnology/anthropology very rarely address these issues, and although it is legitimate to write about them in separate articles on methods or discuss them in seminars, these issues only seldom find their way into a published book. In what follows I respond to Sarah Pink’s call for more transparency in doing and writing ethnographies. In her book “Doing Sensory Ethnography” (Pink, 2009), while stressing her disappointment about “how little other ethnographers (whose work demonstrates so well the significance of the senses in culture and society) have written about the processes through which they came to these understandings”, she urges ethnographers to be more explicit “about the ways of experiencing and knowing that become central to their ethnographies, to share with others the senses of place they felt as they sought to occupy similar places to those of their research participants, and to acknowledge the processes through which their sensory knowing has become academic knowledge” (ibid., p. 2). After Writing Culture, we all know that we, our ethnographic self, coproduce the text, but we still tend to, in the final ethnography, conceal our often personal positions and experiences in the field. Why has Vassos Argyrou, a Cypriot PhD student in the UK, written an ethnography about the divisions evoked by modernity in Cyprus (Argyrou, 1996)? What are the (un-)conscious reasons for metropolitan ethnographers to study urban migrants in Western European capitals? Aren’t they trying to find an answer to questions about the condition of “their own” society and culture? Aren’t some of us studying the Other in order to get to know ourselves and

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our “own culture” better? And aren’t our fields and topics chosen accordingly? If so, it means that the decision to conduct fieldwork in this or that place or on a given topic is in fact very personal (and simultaneously, along Bourdieu’s lines, cultural!) and our experience in this field is, consequently, very personal and personally experienced, as well. Why then do these experiences remain often invisible, in the form of a prologue or a footnote in our ethnographies? What we, ethnographers, are talking and writing about, and what students are taught, is to construct a comprehensible and comprehensive world from A to Z of the people we have studied, infected with fashionable theories that legitimize (and veil) our very personal account of the Other. In my study, however, I define my positionality and refer to discussions about epistemology in ethnology (Haraway, 1988; Marcus, 1998). Positionality equals situated knowledge; this kind of knowledge shapes the knowledge I produced about the EU Europe in Brussels. Positionality not only contributes to the posing of questions on power relations in the field, and on their reproduction in a text, but also asks where the emotions are in “silent ethnographic knowledge”, where scattered knowledge and “irregular ethnographies” (see Ehn, 2011; O'Dell & Willim, 2011) are in a text. I have made the positionality of the fieldworker, my positionality, explicit because I think it allows in this particular field of elitist, international bureaucracy for revelations about the cultural patterns and norms that are in force among the people I studied. Positionality in this case, and contrary to most research studies where it is problematized, serves not so much to acknowledge my own power, as to reveal the twists and turns in and of the fieldwork(er) and management of his own cultural resources and powers, and his frequent lack of power as a novice in the field. Positionality means giving an account of how our own social and cultural position influences the research and writing, but also how field subjectivity in relation to the field informs, and is informed by, our engagement and representation of the Other. I have done all this in order to demonstrate the powerful rules that are valid among the people I “studied”, in order to carry out a cultural analysis of the EU civil servants in Brussels. I am a white, middle-class (or intelligentsia) Pole. I have a certain family history and, using Bourdieu’s vocabulary, a certain habitus, and including my life story and friendships in the field, which all informs my field research, the kind of material I gather, how I present it and what I write about it. My positionality in the field was parallel or even opposite to the big business elites and politicians. Such positionality is reflected in the research process and in the kind of material I gathered. Given the weak Polish network within EU-space it was difficult to access these business elites and policy actors (which in turn is a statement about these Polish networks in comparison to other, national networks in EU-space). However, while I became part of EU-space, I coshaped it and became an actor in the field. I was not a “player”; I was not explicitly playing the game for

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cultural superiority (although I was doing it subconsciously – as I show in the last chapter), nor was I striving to climb the formal hierarchy in EU-space. I did not want to make a career in the EU apparatus although many of my interviewees assumed that I did. However, being an actor in the field, internalizing and adjusting to the prevalent local cultural codes and rules, and making my positionality and my experiences explicit, enabled me to show that this Europe in Brussels is anything but cosmopolitan and cosmopolitizing (Beck & Grande, 2007), a place where people “mesh together” (Shore, 2000). As Browns shows (2008), “cosmopolitization” is just another Western notion, and my work refers to Pollock, Bhabha, Breckenridge and Chakrabarty, who also critically reflect on the Western and colonial roots of the notion of cosmopolitanism: Where once we conceived of the world order in terms of vying and competing political systems and ideological structures, today the neoliberal emphasis falls more on individualist aspirations and universalist norms. But this revenant late liberalism reveals, in a more exaggerated form, a struggle at the heart of liberal theory, where a genuine desire for equality as a universal norm is tethered to a tenacious ethnocentric provincialism in matters of cultural judgment and recognition […] the fetishization of liberal individualism has, in the past few years, created a cosmopolitan imaginary signified by the icons of singular personhood. (Pollock, Bhabha, Breckenridge, & Chakrabarty, 2002, pp. 4-5)

They remark that the cosmopolitanism of today does not stem from the “virtues” of Rationality, Universality and Progress, nor is it embodied by the figure of the citizen of the world (ibid., p. 6), but rather today’s cosmopolitans are “the victims of modernity, failed by capitalism’s upward mobility, and bereft of those comforts and customs of national belonging” (ibid., p. 6). I would only add that these cosmopolitans are bereft of the imperial comfort of modern national belonging. On the following pages, through making my positionality explicit and scrutinizing the everyday life of Polish EU civil servants, I show that EU-space, although often perceived as “cosmopolitan” is neither permeated by a “desire for equality” nor the idea of “meshing together”. Making my positionality in text and in the field visible, and focusing on Poles in EU-space, I am following the idea of decentring Europe, (Adam et al., forthcoming); this idea is one of looking at the core of Europe from a postcolonial, postbloc perspective in order to reveal the operations of cultural power and to see through the mechanisms of how this allegedly modern, liberal and cosmopolitan Europe is produced and reproduced, how it is recentring (itself) and how it is recentred.

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EU- SPACE I suppose Brussels makes a rather rough impression on many visitors, not only those from NMS. However, my experiences show the kind of ideas many people share about the capital of Europe and reveal the image of modern and wealthy that an EU Europe has established, both in the past and today, among its citizens. In reality this “Europe” is more differentiated than the picture of itself it has successfully produced (Shore, 2000). Brussels is one of the most multicultural and multiethnic cities in Europe. Over 50 per cent of its population has a migrant background6, while half of its residents come from EU Europe. However, what is striking are the social, racial, ethnic and class divisions running across the city. While in the North and in the West of the city the majority of the population is poor, nonwhite7 and/or migrant or of migrant background, the East and South is dominated by members of the middle and uppermiddle classes, the majority of whom are of white European origin. This racialgeographical division has been scattered by the arrival of migrants from NMS, adding more white people to areas inhabited traditionally by people from Africa. The enlargements of the EU in 2004 and 2007 also caused a price leap in real estate in Brussel’s districts that were until then not considered to be typically white, European middle class, for example, Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek or even Saint-Josseten-Noode/Sint-Joost-ten-Node. Brussels, according to Eurostat, belongs to one of the riches regions in the entire EU 8 , but simultaneously during the time of my

6

For detailed information, see footnote number one.

7

I use the terms “white” and “nonwhite” similarly to the way Richard Dyer does in his book White (1997) where he scrutinizes the production and representations of whiteness. Nonwhite is the opposite of white, which is “natural”. Dyer writes: “We may be on our way to genuine hybridity, multiplicity without (white) hegemony, and it may be where we want to get to – but we aren’t there yet, and we won’t get there until we see whiteness, see its power, its particularity and limitedness, put it in its place and end its rule” (ibid., p. 4). Nonwhite in his understanding comprises it’s negation, “black”, but also “people of colour” and underscores the racial meaning of white (ibid., p. 11). He also remarks that whiteness has been more successful than class in unifying people over national cultural differences (ibid., p. 19). Moreover, he remarks that for the past two centuries North European whiteness as a cultural construct has been superior within European whiteness and its representation. As he writes, such understood, powerful “whiteness” for Eastern Europeans has only been assumed (ibid., p. 13) rather then being “natural” and “obvious” (for further discussion see also Ahmed, 2004).

8

See http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/submitViewTableAction.do (seen on 04.02. 2017). Brussels in 2011 was on the third place after London-West with 580% of the EU

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research, it was said that the Brussels’ commune Saint-Josse-ten-Noode/Sint-Joostten-Node, which is located right next to the so-called European District, is the poorest commune in the whole of Belgium. Hannerz (1980), Lefebvre (2007) and Soja (2000) claim that cultural and social space is produced in practices and through social relations among subjects in and with a space. The meaning of this space (and I would also say of these relations) becomes apparent in the production of space, in deep relationships that are continuously reproduced in space and that reproduce space itself (Lefebvre & Nicholson-Smith, 2007). Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space (Lefebvre & Nicholson-Smith, 2007) divides the process of production of space into three dimensions: perceived space, conceived space and lived space. To consider this triad is to think dialectically: it constitutes the self-production of subjects and the reproduction of society conjoining the individual and social processes involved in the production of space. Perceived space is an aspect of the production of space, which can be understood as the sensual exploration and experience of space by individuals. Consequently, the material aspect of the space we perceive plays a role here. Conceived space is thought space. It is knowledge, elements of which constitute the space itself. And lived space is experienced space in the everyday life of the subjects. These three elements or aspects of the production of space are complementary and relational, simultaneous and bonded in the constant exchange of their elements. To put it another way: practices and strategies involved in the production of space can be scrutinized in their material (perceived), representational, institutional and ideological (conceived) and affective-symbolic (lived) aspects (Kipfer, 2008). Thus, following Lefebvre, I define space not as the surface of reproductive activity. Space is not just the staging of reproductive requirements. It is not just the physical and spatial aspect; it is part of the cast, a vital, productive element of the social and cultural and vice versa. I will show how this space, which I call EUspace, is produced and reproduced by EU civil servants and people working in NGOs, embassies, lobbies and other institutions involved in political processes at the EU level. Such space is simultaneously perceived, conceived and lived; it is produced in everyday life, but also in imaginations and discourses about space and in significations of this space – its reference to symbols (e.g. buildings that represent the EU as a whole). Such reproduced space however is irreducible to symbols and imaginary, because it is also produced and reshaped by social relations, while geographical/physical space produces the meanings of spatial representations in/of a social reality. Thus, in spaces and places, social relations become visible – in their reproduction. For Lefebvre the category of everyday life GDP average (198% for the whole London) that was followed by Luxemburg, 311%, Brussels with 240% of the EU average GDP.

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was crucial to the reproduction of space and for research on “urbanity” (Lefebvre & Nicholson-Smith, 2007). “Everydayness” points to the dynamic and practical aspects of space – and the fact that it is produced by subjects. On one hand, they appropriate space and establish themselves as subjects through spatial practice, on the other, their actions and their spatial practice become objectified in spatial structures. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of production of space (Lefebvre & Nicholson-Smith, 2007) and inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the field (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), I have coined the notion of EU-space 9 , an imaginative social and cultural space comprised of EU civil servants and people working in institutions, lobbies, representations of the member states (so-called PermRep) and its regions. EU-space however has a tangible aspect: it is constantly reproduced by the people within it and becomes visible both in material space and in interactions and relations within this space and between the spatial, material and symbolic, imaginative aspects of European space in the capital of EU Europe. Such a stance on space allows us to see how social and physical space is reproduced in Brussels, how practices, subjects and spaces are configured in Brussels, and how places reveal the social relations and reflect the hierarchies within the city and within the EU bureaucratic apparatus. Each configuration of these practices and subjects produces a different kind of space (Lefebvre & Nicholson-Smith, 2007). Thus, the production of space, I argue, is conflated with the production of class, nationalities and hegemony within the EU bureaucracy and EU-space.

M AKING

IT TO THE OTHER SIDE : I XELLES /E LSENE

Two days after my arrival in Brussels I am meeting my Dutch friend and his British partner whom I got to know during my Erasmus year in Berlin. We used to drink beer together and go to parties at the beginning of 2000s, when Berlin was still a “wild” city, unpenetrated by tourists and, ostensibly, by commerciality, and still filled with a breakthrough atmosphere. We would go to illegal parties taking place in hidden basements or closed down factories in Prenzlauer Berg – Berlin’s district that was at that time still full of students, but is now a district inhabited by the

9

Dusan Sidjanski (2000), political scientist and adviser to the President of the EU Commission Jacques Delors has used the term “Eurosphere” to describe a “European leaders’ network” (p. 78). More recently A. Busby (2013), based on her research in the European Parliament, developed a term Brussels Bubble as an elite transnational space and a “physical, social and cultural context in which the CoPs [community of practice] are embedded and EP politics is practiced” (ibid., p. 107).

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young, white German middle class. Now my Dutch friend is working in the European Parliament as an assistant to a MEP responsible for environmental policies, while his British partner is a lobbyist for one of the biggest human rights organizations worldwide. They came to Brussels in the mid 2000s and started with almost nothing. They chose Brussels because being from two different countries, they thought it was a good place to start: between the Netherlands and the UK, with many international organizations, institutions and branches of international companies having their seats here. We set up our first meeting at Bourse/Beurs – the old stock exchange building, on Boulvard Anspach/Anspachlaan in the city centre – a popular place to start an evening before going out in the nearby, small quarter called St.Géry/St.Gorik, with its many bars and cafés full of young, French-speaking people. I remember we went into a quite posh looking bar. As I entered it, a vast space opened before my eyes, with shiny tables, modern spotlightning, peach-coloured walls, mirror surfaces at half level on the walls, wine glasses hanging above the bar. The interior was neither of an evening bar, where you go out for a beer, nor a restaurant or a typical place to have lunch in the afternoon. It supposedly should fulfil all these functions, but the place was now on Wednesday evening almost completely empty – the quiet made for good circumstances in which to have a conversation. Later I found out that this bar was an exception in this area. All the others were full of young people, particularly on weekends. These other bars reminded me more of those from Kreuzberg or Neukölln in Berlin, with slightly used and shaky wooden tables and chairs, and a menu and list of beverages written on a blackboard or on a wall. These places were filled in the evenings with young people drinking beer and talking, laughing in groups and listening to live, dynamic music played by young bands. These were the student bars and those for young adults not forced by living conditions to worry about covering their living costs. Later I would sometimes hang out in these bars with some of my Belgian friends. One of them was a social worker who currently lived on unemployment benefits while trying to find his way as a Director’s assistant and an actor in one of Brussels’ French-speaking theatres. I assume the majority in these bars was Belgian, as I heard people in groups speaking mostly French, but I also heard English, and Flam/Dutch, though only rarely. Such places, although favoured by some people working in EU institutions (stagiaires, young adults, often single – my friends) were not the usual places to go out for the majority of people working for the EU. These people would instead frequent places such as café Belga on Place Flagey/Flageyplein, where gym-fit studs with tattoos and studied haircuts would stand behind the bars swanking with self-confidence, and where EU employees, “internationals” or “expats”10, and young, white Belgians 10 These two expressions are used locally to describe people coming from all over the world and living and working in Brussels in any kind of international organization, public

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would meet. Alternatively, they would meet in small bars with a (post)modern interior design in Ixelles/Elsene (such as around Rue St Boniface/St.Bonifaciusstraat), places that for me were rather showy, e.g. places to see and be seen, with people dressed according to the current fashion, not what was seen on the street (e.g. a street-style as in St.Gery’s/St.Gorik’s bars), but as seen in fashion magazines, and usually featuring labels like Lacoste, Hilfiger, Ray-Ban and the like. These were the bars of the white middle class: the people there were neither dressed in luxury labels nor was there a particular shabbiness in their outfits, everyone looked somewhat individual, but still represented certain trends. I was often struck by the bourgeoisie interior of many of the places I entered during my fieldwork where people working in EU-space spent their time. I was not prepared for these spaces: I did not have a label outfit, my hair was not always done (although it shouldn’t look done), and with my worn out jeans and cheap sneakers, on many occasions I felt out of place. It was an impression that often accompanied me when I entered places in Brussels as part of my fieldwork. These were the places where EU civil servants would go, where I would see my interviewees and recognize people from the EU Commission. This boundary between me and “them”, visible in outfit, was always there, either because I transgressed it, or not. These feelings never diminished during my research and the feeling of being out of place was something that often accompanied me during the time when I – ostensibly – was not doing research and not holding interviews, but was just hanging around with friends who happened to work in EU institutions. I had not seen this Dutch-British couple for six years, and during these six years our contact had been limited. However, we had common acquaintances from Berlin about whom we talked (who is doing what and where at the moment) about my research and about what they were doing now. They gave me some practical tips, such as where to buy a sim-card for my mobile phone and where a local English bookstore (Waterstones) was located. They also told me that they had some Polish friends, and that we all had to meet very soon so I would have the opportunity to meet them. The following week I was helping them move from a small flat at the end of one of the fancy streets in Ixelles/Elsene – a traditional white middle-class district with cafés, bakeries, ateliers, boutiques and shops with gadgets – something you can recognize from today’s Prenzlauer Berg’s Kollwitzstrasse, NY’s Williamsburg or London’s Notting Hill. They were moving to a bigger flat in a better-looking, bourgeoisie house two streets away. This was a popular, posh but not exclusive area in Brussels, close to Rue Bailli/Baljuwstraat and Place institution of their country of origin (embassies, representations of regions), or private sector like big international companies, etc. It reflects what Hannerz (1990) described as white middle-class cosmopolitans or Pollock et al. (2002, p. 10) see as the opposite of what they call “new and post-universalist cosmopolitanisms”.

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Chatelain/Kasteleinsplein, where on weekends one could brunch in a café that put tables out on the street (Strassencafé) and go to a flea market, with narrow streets lined with bourgeoisie houses, dense city buildings, and no detached houses. In the area, there were fancy hotels and restaurants, a shopping street with expensive labels and shopping malls with fancy shops (Av. Louise/Louisalaan), one of the oldest socially and age-wise (but not racially) mixed bars (on the corner of Rue Bailli/Baljuwstraat; it later became one of my favourites in town) called Suprabailli, and other bars and cafés popular among students and the so-called creative milieus. My friends, apparently, after a few years in Brussels, were climbing socially and developing their careers; however during my last visit to Brussels in March 2011 they were already gone 11 , having settled down in one of their home-countries, though still working in contexts either connected to European policies or to development help/human rights. The new house they were moving into in Brussels had a huge bottle-green, wooden security door, in the hall the flooring was white marble, there were huge crystal mirrors on the walls, and the stairs were covered with bottle-green fitted carpet. Their three and a half room apartment with high ceilings and marble chimneys in each room had a big living room with a modern kitchenette and huge windows looking out onto a big terrace and calm, green backyard. One of the rooms was a dining room with a big, old table, and next to it was a bedroom with a walk-in wardrobe. I remember on the day they were moving, I had to find out how to reach Ixelles/Elsene, the district on the opposite side of the city from Laken/Laeken. It turned out that there was a direct tram going there from where I lived. It took me 40 minutes to pass through the city centre, and while the tram was moving and people were getting on and off, I could sense I was going to a different world. This impression was amplified when I reached the beginning of Avenue Louise/ Louizalaan, where the popular shopping area is found. Predominantly white, welldressed, young people and couples with kids would enter the tram. I particularly remember one such couple with their son: both parents in their early forties, with fine leather jackets; he had on a light leather jacket, she a slim-fit black leather jacket; both with slim shoes made of thin leather, and both in shirts; she had long, brown loose hair – they looked relaxed, as if a moment ago they had come back from their vacation, and even though it was late afternoon and people were going home either from work or shopping, they weren’t holding anything in their hands; she had only her purse, while the boy had a backpack and was holding a skateboard in his hands. Through their handsome appearance and restrained attitude, they were attracting attention, and I think they were somehow aware of it (maybe their calm, self-distanced behaviour was visible in their not noticing these gazes?). She was slightly and attentively bent forward to listen to their son asking questions I did not 11 As my friend told me when they moved out: “Brussels’ time is over”.

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understand. Perhaps they were going to their house at the end of Av. Louise/ Louizalaan, where one of the few gated communities was located – close to a popular park, Bois de la Cambre/Ter Kamerenbos. I got off the tram at the next stop and found my destination quite easily. After all the boxes with books, shoes and kitchen utensils were placed in the car, I helped lower the sofa on ropes from out of the window – I did not know at the time that this was a “very Dutch” way of handling a removal12. During this removal, I met friends of friends, most of them from Holland, and all of them working in EU institutions or NGOs or consultancies dealing with EU policies. From that day on I have been to my friends’ home many times: to parties, dinners, drinks/beers, meeting people from all over Europe, people who were then, with greater or lesser enthusiasm or criticism, “building Europe” (Shore, 2000). They were all more or less my age – in their late twenties and early thirties – working on their professional careers, seriously engaged in what they were doing, friendly, interested and open. All of them were white heterosexuals – at least as far as I knew. I remember our relaxed and funny conversations, but also my astonishment when I asked what they did. I was surprised how such young people managed to be involved in quite heavy policy development. Brussels is full of young people pursuing their careers. It is a place that offers good opportunities to get experience in both an international context, most often for some reasonable money, and work experience in one of the numerous branches of international NGOs or public institutions. They were all somehow engaged in making the world a better place and Brussels, due to its saturation of public institutions and as a place for policy development, is a good place to start. These policies often impacted third, distant countries, due to both the sheer flow of commodities to and from EU Europe (as in the case of biofuel policy), and the flow of money in the form of development aid (which, as many anthropologists of development have shown, is always connected to ideology, see Escobar, 2012; Sampson, 2002; Wedel, 2001). I met more and more people in Brussels. It is common in EU Brussels to go to somebody’s home for a party, to people you just do not know, but some of your friends know, or you know who they are but never got to know them personally. Private parties belong to a fixed element of social life in EU-space in Brussels. These parties were always, no matter where one worked, somehow connected to professional life. People would know each other from a previous workplace or because they currently worked together on a given policy or issue, or because they worked together lobbying the Commission (or any other EU institution) and shared the same views on a certain EU policy, or because they worked together in an EU 12 Because in the Netherlands, in Flanders and in Brussels staircases in houses are often narrow and very steep, it is common that during the removal furniture are lowered (or elevated) on ropes from out of the window.

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institution or were of the same nationality. Last time I was in Brussels in March 2011, I coincidentally met one of my interview partners on the street, close to the place I was staying – in Ixelles/Elsene – the same district were my Dutch-British friends used to live. She was working at one of the so-called green NGOs and told me that she was moving to a new, bigger flat a few blocks away, in Ixelles/Elsene, and that I should come to a housewarming party on the weekend, which I did. At this party there were people working at the Commission, at the EU Parliament and at the Committee of the Regions. There were also people working in the NGO where the host worked and in NGOs that were dealing with similar issues/policies or working together with the NGO where the host worked. Everyone was young (between 30 and 40) and spoke English; there were people from both from OMS and NMS, and we – I was making research on biofuels – were all somehow connected to environmental policy and shaping it at the EU level. I remember it was a fancy-dress party because it was the Carnival season (though there is no pronounced tradition of fancy-dress Carnivals in Brussels), and the host opened the door with a mask on her face. In her invitation that she sent me via email, after we met on the street, she wrote that she came from “the most famous Slovenian carnival town of Ptuj, and I have not really celebrated it for three years, it is time to change this and put a fancy dress on”. Thus, guests were asked to disguise themselves as one of the NGOs (logos) represented in Brussels. The host had black and white make-up with big black ears made of paper stuck to her head and was dressed in black and white (representing the Panda bear logo of the WWF – World Wildlife Fund). There were others dressed as birds (representing Birdlife Europe) and a tree leaf (as another green NGO) and other, for me unrecognizable NGOs. There was also a Finnish man from the Commission who had on a black shirt and black trousers. He was my age, blond, rather tall and plump, and apparently, similar to me, without fancy dress on. I remember talking to him in a small group. We all laughed about what he should have worn and he was not the only person from the institutions at this party not in fancy dress. There were also people from the Committee of the Regions, from the EU Parliament (assistants of MEPs and permanent officials) and from the European Environment Agency. I went to this party and in contrast to the more official events, where people would wear smart outfits, and also in contrast to Polish parties, where the outfits are somehow very similar according to gender, and people generally look in a way that could be described as smart-casual, the crowd here was more mixed and the dress code apparently more légère and diverse. Completing my field diary I noted: They were different, they were all different from what I have known until now [on this field trip]. Or more similar to [Name] friends [one who was living in Brussels and working in the EP]: relaxed and talking a bit about the environment policies of the EU (I talked to this guy

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from Finland) but in a different way from Poles: not giving one the impression one is ‘making big politics’, without making constant references to what this or that country’s ‘position’ is and considering the moral/historical/ideological stances of it, but staying very much grounded, close to the facts and considering or talking about how this or that country is close or far from the somehow implicitly common and obvious target: reduction of CO2 . This was a courteous conversation as per any other occasion during a dinner or social gathering in Berlin or Warsaw. There were some snacks on the table, very plain, and plenty of wine bottles, as each arrival would bring one with him/her. We drank from plastic cups. Even though I knew only the host, I didn’t feel strange or out of place. People talked and were curious. There was one guy from Poland – we were talking about bars in the city centre and about how ‘the Belgians’ are. Alcohol made the atmosphere even more relaxed and we talked about finding a partner in Brussels and the hermetic environment of the institutions, and about how ‘the Belgians’ are – both men and women – cold, unapproachable and bad sexual partners. This was all done in a polite, funny, ironic way (we didn’t treat seriously what were talking about, but an implicit ‘truth’ was somewhere in these stories about ‘Belgians’, ‘Poles’ and ‘Finns’ I suppose…), telling their [their own] experiences and making jokes either about their own nationality (or about would-be or to-be partners), though we were all somehow convinced or believed that we were talking about the existing reality. This Pole is really somehow disapproving of Belgians.

At all these house parties, I had the feeling that everybody was welcome, everyone was interested and interesting, friendly, smiling and nice towards me. However, I also had the impression they were all from the same class and had more or less the same way of talking about nationality – regardless of their country of origin – ironic and (self-)distanced. They were all well educated (what I mean here is what is known in Germany as Allgemeinbildung or in Poland as ogólne wykształcenie – a feature of the middle class or intelligentsia, and a sound university education), spoke fluently at least one foreign language (it was almost always English; however they all spoke another foreign language, and if the host was e.g. Polish/ Danish/Dutch, one could expect the majority would speak, respectively, Polish/ Danish/Dutch) and shared similar values and lifestyles. At these parties, people would wear casual shirts with jeans and leather shoes; the more “alternative” version of dress, the one I had on, would be a t-shirt and sneakers. If someone had glasses, they were smart glasses with thin, delicate frames (no hipster thick-black frame glasses); no piercings and no visible tattoos (at least during the time of my research); clean, well-kept and well-groomed (hair always styled); rarely smokers and I never saw anyone heavily drunk (apart from my close friends). I once went to a party with my flat mate, a Brit younger than me from a working-class background, who was an intern at the EU Parliament and had piercings the whole length of both his ears. It was a party of stagiaires at the Commission and after we

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were introduced by his acquaintance, a girl came up to us asking what we did professionally. Looking at my friend, she said: “I guess you’re not working at the Commission”. To my friend’s question “why?”, she replied: “because you have all those piercings”. This comment apparently hurt my friend. As we walked back home, he passionately reflected on it: “She just wanted to show me that she already knows what it’s like to be at the Commission”.

F RACTURED ETHNOGRAPHIES :

WHERE IS OUR FIELD AND WHEN DO WE DO FIELDWORK RESEARCH ? I suppose anyone who has done research for extensive periods knows that it is not a linear and clearly reconstructable process. Writing ethnographies nowadays does not necessarily mean travelling overseas to a remote village in the Triobrands, Sudan (Nuers) or Algeria (Kabyles) for a pre-established period of time that is followed by the writing up phase at a desk at home. We may go to distant places, but after we come back we still gather information, pieces of articles; we go back to places we have been before (often not as a researcher anymore); we talk on the phone with people we know there; we exchange emails with them and contact them on Facebook; we have friends in the field and, last but not least, we tend to involve ourselves in the life of those communities we have studied – everything counts and everything is field material then. Doing ethnographies today, as Wilk (Wilk, 2011) notes, demands posing questions like: when do we do ethnography and when do we cease doing it? When are we in the field and when are we not? Doing ethnographies (often considered something that one cannot learn during a seminar at the university, only by doing) means engaging in unstable, varied and manifold relations with the field; it means blurring the boundary between “being there” and “home”. And I argue, between “us” and “them” or “me” and “them”. Thus, the division between “being there” and coming back to do the “analysis” and “writing up”, between “us” (or rather “I”) and “them” is not sharp or obvious. What is then the definition of ethnography? Isn’t it a discipline distinguished by the constant balancing between intimacy and distance, between “being there” and “here”? Isn’t it in the end a written account of a person called an ethnographer, of his/her encounter with Others that produces knowledge that is specific for ethnography? Blurred boundaries between “being there” and being “home”, between doing ethnography and not doing it, between “me” and “them”, shows how much our own experience, our own stories about “being there” and about ourselves shape what we encounter in the field and what representation we produce of those Others we have studied. Blurred boundaries mean that “they” coshape the research (which most of us often refuse to acknowledge) and that the field has an immense

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impact on what we think, feel and finally write. Why not then give an account of both sides of this blurred boundary? If ethnography is now a constant manoeuvring between intimacy and distance to the field, why not describe this process? But who are we writing about then? Them or ourselves? And then the question arises, how to describe the often indescribable: our feelings and the tacit, embodied knowledge we gain as ethnographers that enables us to see that someone, according to local rules, is acting awkward or embarrassing and another person is not? How then to problematize and disclose what Michael Herzfeld calls cultural intimacy (Herzfeld, 2005), which is often concealed behind little gestures and details in everyday life? Describing these observations and the emotions that accompanied my research required strong autoanalytical work – both observations and emotions were strongly connected to these suppressed memories and “private” encounters in the field that I mentioned above and that I did not regard as field material. I think that doing ethnography is a difficult, absorbing process that involves a whole range of emotions, preconditions, assumptions and situations (that one is confronted with and has to adjust to quickly in order to resolve). It is in fact an extremely personal, solitary, emotional, sensory and bodily process. A process of constant awareness of the self and of the Other, of what is happening in and outside of “me” – a process of learning cultural intimacies and distancing oneself from them in order to understand and describe them. Ethnography then is not so much about big cultural events (as Durkheim would see it) or structures (as per Levi-Strauss), but explorations in everyday life knowledge. It means focusing on things that are uneventful, that are obvious and embodied, things that no one questions while “being there”– not even us, ethnographers. I suppose the role of an ethnographer is to recognize these innocuous things in Others’ everyday lives (and recognize also the changes in an ethnographer’s own body and mind while adjusting to the field we are studying) and give an account of them, describe those everyday life practices that create community and meaning. Our aim is also to describe those processes that accompany our research, the learning process of “local knowledge” – processes that we always experience and encounter while doing fieldwork, as we all are interested in the Other and want to gather rich material. But this, however, means that the blurred boundary between “us” and “them” is not an obstacle, is not something that is unanalytical, but rather we have to reconsider its consequences for the production of ethnographical knowledge and make of it an asset from which to gain research material – something that I have tried to do in this book. In the following chapters I will constantly refer to my own experiences as “being there” and how I behaved as an actor in the field I studied: how I entered the field, how my research developed, how I approached and transgressed the symbolic boundaries and limits within EU-space, and how they were challenged by the people I met and studied. These are questions that help show cultural patterns,

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enable cultural analysis, and help illustrate the symbolic structure of EU-space in Brussels. These questions helped me to structure my field material – during the research process and the disclosures in and from the field 13 . I find particularly inspiring Sarah Pink and her “sensory ethnography” (2009) that “accounts for and expands this existing scholarship that rethought ethnography as gendered, embodied and more” (ibid., p. 10). She develops her argument based on the previous writings of such scholars as D. Howes (2003) and A. Coffey (1999) about the corporeal and sensory character of ethnographic research that is self-aware, reflexive and attends to the senses during all stages of the research: planning, reviewing, fieldwork, analysis and representational processes (Pink, 2009). Her account of and clarity (that she also takes from the works of David Howes (1991), and Paul Stoller (1989)) about ethnography’s reflexive and corporeal character – that ethnographic experiences are embodied, so that the researcher experiences and learns through his/her whole body – is what is specifically important for me here. She writes: The experiencing, knowing and emplaced body is therefore central to the idea of a sensory ethnography. Ethnographic practice entails our multisensorial embodied engagements with others (perhaps through participation in activities, or exploring their understanding in part verbally) and with their social, material, discursive and sensory environments. It also requires us to reflect on these engagements, to conceptualize their meanings theoretically and to seek ways to communicate the relatedness of experiential and intellectual meanings to others. (Pink, 2009, pp. 25-26)

In not having easy access to the field or not being able to follow the people in all their contexts and environments, entering EU-space as an ethnographer requires becoming a subject of the rules and norms within it, rules and norms that adhere to the body (and bodily hexis), language(s) and social context(s). This account, along with the experience of living in EU Brussels, of “deep hanging out” among EU civil servants are the experiences that produced my field material. Moreover, in exercising sensory ethnographies, Pink acknowledges the significance of place both for the people studied and for the ethnographer, as sensory ethnography’s goal is to “seek to know places in other people’s worlds that are similar to the places and ways of knowing of those others. In attempting to achieve this, she or he [the 13 While being aware of these discussions in our discipline I still see, in line with Pink (2009), the need to make the research process, our experiences in the field and, what is probably most important, their outcome and consequence for what we write, more visible. Not making everything controllable and accountable in the guise of modernity, but rather, in a spirit of sharing the experiences and ideas that might push our understanding of making ethnography and the kind knowledge we produce.

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ethnographer] would aim to come closer to understanding how those other people experience, remember and imagine” (Pink, 2009, p. 23). My research has been constantly bound to places that each had a different meaning and a different cultural and symbolical context in EU Brussels, where varying political and ideological powers and their interplay made them significant.

P LACES

AND HIERARCHIES

After attending numerous parties in Brussels I realized that the place of one’s employment, whether it was a particular DG of the Commission or other EU institution, or a political public institution in EU-space, had an impact on the way people spent their leisure time, where they lived and where they went out and, would distinguish them from, e.g. lobbyists working in the car industry or any other industry (the industry lobbyists I met were people over 45, mostly men, very often former EU civil servants). At that fancy-dress party, there were people from the Commission’s DG Environment, employees of so-called green NGOs and other EU institutions, but I would say that civil servants working in, for example, DG Transport or DG Energy would not establish more private contacts with people working for lobbies; they would not go to a party to one of the lobbyists’ flats in Ixelles’/Elsene’s Matongé14, but would rather meet in the more formal context of a conference organized by a lobby, or for a drink or to a meeting called a “discussion” or “panel” in one of the venues of the lobby or hotels in Brussels. I knew that this world existed, but to a large extent it remained unpenetrated by me – probably because these were areas strictly guarded against people from the outside world. But I also didn’t have friends working for big industry, nor in DGs dealing with policies that were of interest to big industry. For example, during my research on the biofuel cluster15 I was invited to a conference in Berlin organized by a lobby

14 Matongé is part of Brussels’ district Ixelles/Elsene. It is known for large population of migrants from black Africa and/or white Belgian intellectuals. 15 By policy cluster I mean a network of EU institutional actors (EU Commission, EU Parliament, the Council, EU Agencies and Research Institutions), representatives of EU member states’ national governments (in most cases PermReps, but also people in the member states’ ministries following and handling given policies at the EU level) and representatives of civil society (industrial, business and trade associations, NGOs, etc.) who are stakeholders and negotiating partners in the political process of legislating and implementing EU policies. Such an understanding of policy development underscores the blurred boundaries between institutions and the private and public spheres in EU-space. See also next chapter “Struggles in EU-space over prestige and power”.

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for the Brazilian sugarcane industry. The front page of the flyer of this conference, called Bioenergietag 2011, taking place in the venues of the Brazilian embassy in Berlin, stated: “Zukunft der Bioenergie: global, Europäisch, national, lokal. Potentiale, Stoffströme und öffentliche Akzeptanz, Zweite Konferenz des Netzwerks Bioenergie der Deutschen Umwelthilfe” (English: The Future of Bioenergy: global, European, national, local. Potentials, the flow of goods and public acceptance. The Second Conference on Network Bioenergy organised by German Environmental Aid). Conferences of such types were also organized in Brussels and by other lobbies, e.g. by ePure – a lobby representing producers of ethanol (e.g. http:// www.epure.org/news/ILUC_Seminar1)16. For my friends working in DG RELEX and in other EU institutions in positions dealing with EU foreign policy and/or security policy, it would be the German Marshall Fund’s (GMF) Brussels Forum – a cyclical conference of high-ranking politicians and heads of states, analysts, etc., or events organized by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) scrutinizing and providing a forum for discussions about EU policies in one of the conference venues in the so-called EU District. However, the party described above and the place where my Dutch-British friends lived was on the other side of the city, in the South-East, whereas I was living in the North-West. I would always have to think about how to get back home later in the evening. The night-bus service in Brussels runs only on weekends and a taxi was too expensive for me. Later, my life became a bit easier as my DutchBritish friends lent me a Dutch bicycle – a means of transportation that I was most comfortable with and used to from living in Berlin – a fact and item that helped me to retain my own identity in the process of my fieldwork. However, virtually all the people I got to know more closely during my time in Brussels lived in the same area and were somehow connected to EU institutions, either working for the EU or working in NGOs that lobbied EU institutions. These areas were either Ixelles/Elsene or Etterbeek, two districts adjacent to the European District. During my first research stay in Brussels, a Polish friend who was working at an AD post at one of the Commission’s prestigious DGs, moved from St. Gilles/St. Gillis to a big, four-room apartment on a street close to where my Dutch-British friends lived. His apartment looked similar to that of my friends’: it was in an old, well-kept house directly in Rue Bailli/Baljuwstraat. The kitchen was small but fully equipped, there was a dining room, living room with a TV set, marble chimneys, two bedrooms and a small garden in the backyard. As a young Polish civil servant, he had more Ikea furniture than my friends, who had brought some of theirs from Holland as donations from parents or friends. All the flats that I visited of people working at EU institutions were located in these two districts (although, of course, 16 ILUC in this link stands for a controversial issue of indirect land use changes leading to increases of GHG emissions caused by biofuel crops, link seen on 10.07.2012.

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this does not mean that all EU civil servants live solely in these two districts). These are the areas where the Belgian white middle class lives and generally junior AD fonctionnaires at EU institutions. I was also told that Ixelles/Elsene was traditionally favoured by French and Italians working at the EU (one of the Italian Directors I interviewed lived with his family in a flat in Ixelles/Elsene) and some areas of Ixelles/Elsene, particularly those around Matongé (a quarter known for its high population of people from Sub-Saharan Africa), were populated by Belgian artists and, as my network showed, single people working in international NGOs lobbying EU institutions. Older EU civil servants (over 50), higher in the hierarchy and from OMS, preferred to live with their families in detached or semi-detached houses in residential areas of Woluwe-St.Pierre/St.Pieters or Woluwe-St.Lambert/St.Lambrechts, in Kraainem/Crainhem or Weezembeek-Oppem (outside Brussels Region), Stockel/Stokkel, or in the district of Auderghem/Oudergem – all in the East or South-East. This is what one Irish, outgoing senior civil servant at the Director level told me: Paweł Lewicki (PL): Where do you live in Brussels? Answer (A): It’s called Kraainem, it’s in the suburbs. PL: Ah, ok, yeah. ten minutes from here… A: If you leave late enough in the evening, yes. PL: And in the morning? A: Probably, I would say 20 minutes in the morning, coming in. PL: What…? Why have you decided to live there? A: Well it was by chance, we found a house there, when we moved to Brussels first. It just happened to be available at a price that we could afford. And we liked very much living there so we bought a house there. [as she said it was ‘in the eighties’ – PL] PL: I’ve heard that there are a lot of Germans in the area. A: There are a lot of Germans there, yes. PL: Because of the school, is that correct? A: Yeah, probably. But there are a lot of other nationalities there. But what I mean is, I like to live there because it’s the convenience. I can be at work very quickly and I don’t have to come in to town precisely for the shopping, for my shopping. I can do it on the spot in the incentives [?], in the shopping [centres] there are cinemas, never mind the congress towns and shops in here [in the city centre]. PL: What else do you like about the place? A: Well, I like the… it’s a pleasant suburban atmosphere with nice gardens and so on. And it’s very convenient also to the airport and to the ring when you want to get away, and I do it a lot. PL: Are there a lot of [EU] civil servants living there? A: I suppose there are, yes.

38 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS PL: But you don’t know them? A: I don’t know them or my husband is there who is Flemish. And therefore a lot of our contacts would be with Belgian nationals and his family. We go almost every week to them. And I go home a lot to Ireland so…

Kraainem/Crainhem is a commune East of the Brussels city centre, outside the Capital Region (thus in Flanders), close to Brussels ring and Zaventem Airport. It is, as my interviewee says, a suburban, calm, white middle-class area with detached and semi-detached houses or villas often built out of red brick, with shutters and calm gardens around them. It shows however that many of the civil servants live there (and many of my older interviewees from OMS in higher positions would live in that area or in neighbouring Weezembeek-Oppem) and that one of its’ assets is the ease of getting away from Brussels. The fact that this person had a lot of friends among Belgians was rather exceptional in EU-space; however this was because of her spouse, who turned out to be a Belgian politician. However, one of my Polish interviewees, a Director, grade AD14, who lived in Woluwe-St.Pierre/St.Pieters – one of the “good” white middle-class districts where a lot of senior civil servants from OMS lived, made me aware how places of residence are firmly connected to hierarchy within the EU apparatus. This is what he said: Paweł Lewicki (PL): Coming back to the issue of the district where you live: are there a lot of Poles living in that area? Answer (A): Too short… well you know, I live there since December, I live there since December [the interview was in April 2008] and home is my rare hotel. The more so because when I’m back before eight – then I’m happy. And there is almost no week when I’m not away for two or three days. So this is my… when I have time, I go to visit my wife [she lived in a capital of one of EU member states]. I don’t know. Cars are parked in garages [so he can’t see car plates], those standing on the street are… it’s a bit further. Sometimes I see a Polish car plate, but my impression is that these people don’t live there. There are loads of Poles in Brussels. PL: A lot. Way more then in Berlin. A: From Bialystok (laugh) [Bialystok is a mid-sized city in North-East Poland, the city itself and the region around it – Podlasie – is the homeland for many Poles working in the low-paid service sector in Brussels]. PL: Yes, I just realized that. A: But I think, I think there [where he lives] aren’t many, I think there aren’t many Poles living there. And this is painful. I bear a huge grudge against the Polish government… Polish governments. This is, of course, mine, my long-term knowledge… I am mad, I always have been mad at Poland because… EIT, don’t know whether you have followed this issue, they

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were about to establish an Institute, technological institute in Poland and we lost another opportunity17. PL: It was about to be established in Wrocław, right? A: Yes. For any other nationality it is just unthinkable, how there is zero interest… we are just very, very provincial. The Polish government doesn’t care about… promoting Poland and struggling to place as many civil servants as possible so that they remain connected [networked]. You know, how can it be that I am here… I am a senior civil servant of the Commission and this happens to Poland very rarely. Lately I received an email, an email from the Polish PermRep to senior Polish civil servants at the Commission. And there were about nine, maybe twelve names on the address list. There aren’t that many of us here. There is one DDG and maybe nine or ten Directors.

This interview passage, apart from the lack of interest from the Polish government to place people in senior posts at the Commission, reveals how a place of residence is automatically associated with the hierarchy and nationality of a given person. The outrage of this person about the low number of Polish residents in the area he lives in shows how the boundaries between professional and public life are blurred and how (supposedly) private choices carry meaning in your professional life. Moreover, it reveals that the place where you live marks your place in the formal and symbolic hierarchy in EU-space, and the spontaneous complaint about the Polish government makes it apparent – because there are few Poles in the district where he lives – there is a low number of Poles in senior positions in the EU apparatus. This example shows how real space reflects social space. An AST fonctionnaire from Finland who lived in the EU District but close to the border of Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek, a commune that does not have a clear status in terms of being a “good” district (because some areas of Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek were populated by poor, nonwhite migrants) told me the following: Paweł Lewicki (PL): But do you know… why I am asking that? It is because somebody told me that there is a huge informal hierarchy within the Commission, which is based on the way you look, the way you live and what car you drive. Answer (A): Of course, if you take people that live in Schaarbeek, which is not a good commune, ok, it depends on where in Schaarbeek, you can see that it’s mostly poor people, but you know, that’s… when you live in… Ixelles, that’s… people there are very […], they have a very strong idea where you should live. Because it’s really cool and you know, 17 EIT is the European Institute for Innovation and Technology, which is an agency of the European Union. It was established in 2008 and in the process of its establishment there has been a struggle among EU member states as to where its seat should be. The Institute was finally placed in Budapest but in the run for hosting EIT one of the short-listed cities was Wrocław.

40 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS fashionable. Ukkle also, but that’s really like more for people with family. Then you have a lot of Scandinavians living out in Waterloo and around Waterloo.

She is showing me that that the place of residence has, apart from material status, a symbolic meaning (cool and fashionable places). However, her “of course” points to the fact that such criteria are also relevant in EU-space, and the longer I was in Brussels the more clear it appeared to me. What both these passages reveal is that in Brussels’ EU context there are areas traditionally ascribed to particular nationalities: Germans would ostensibly live in suburban communes (in Flanders) Kraainem/Crainhem and Weezembeek-Oppem (due to the German school in the latter commune), Swedes would live in Waterloo (I was told by one Swede that it “reminds me a bit of a Swedish town”), Brits in Tervuren – both Swedes and Brits also outside Brussels and predominantly in single/detached houses. Brussels’ South, districts of Forrest/Vorst and Uccle/Ukkle, were supposedly occupied by French and British senior civil servants. All of these areas and communes belong to middle-class and upper-middle-class areas, particularly the latter with semidetached and detached houses. The Poles I interviewed, who worked in lower AD posts, would either buy or rent flats somewhere in Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek, in Etterbeek or Ixelles/Elsene, and rarely in one of the Woluwes. The three Polish Directors I interviewed lived in one of these more established districts: one in Auderghem/Oudergem, the other in Uccle/Ukkle. A third quoted above, rented a semi-detached house in Woluwe-St.Pierre/St.Pieters and told me not without some pride in his voice that his immediate neighbour was his German colleague, a Director in the same DG. Some of my interviewees, AD fonctionnaires from Poland who had moved to Brussels with their families and settled down, bought houses outside of Brussels in the surrounding communes in Flanders, or in further communes along the train lines going out from Schuman station (where the main building of the Commission and the Council is located). The communes along these train lines had a different status when it came to prestige depending, usually, on their proximity to Brussels. The price of real estate, which went up significantly just before the May 1st, 2004, was an indicator here. The thin strip of Flemish communes separating the Brussels Capital Region from Wallonia to its South were during the time of my research already very expensive, even for EU civil servants. Thus, Poles would buy houses in Wallonia’s communes South-East of Brussels and generally in the South or in the East of Brussels. I spoke only to one AST civil servant from the UK who was living the North of Brussels with her Flemish partner, and no one with whom I spoke lived West of Brussels. These examples show that places and bodies, as Bourdieu notes, are conjoined with social class (Bourdieu, 2010), but in EU-space these social classes are also often conjoined with

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nationalities, as the previously mentioned German, British and Swedish districts show. I will expand on this issue later. Both the EU institutions that were the main focus of my research, and the abovementioned areas where EU civil servants lived, were on the opposite side of town from where I lived. However, as I was considering my research more in terms of getting into EU institutions, as I imagined it, strolling along the corridors of EU institutions, conducting interviews and gathering data on policy making, I did not seriously consider moving to Ixelles/Elsene or Etterbeek, or any other district where EU civil servants traditionally lived. I felt a bit excluded from the social life, but also reluctant to spend time searching for a new place to live (which is difficult in Brussels), and afraid of the high prices in these two districts. Last but not least: I did not find it relevant for my research to move to one of these areas. I would rather see it in terms of living close to my friends, and thus congruent with my own identity as a white, middle-class European, somehow privileged, on scholarship and researching EU Commission civil servants – a group widely seen and selfperceived as a political elite. On the other hand, I also did not belong to the fashionably dressed people in café Belga in Place Flagey/Flageyplein, or to the modern shiny bars in Ixelles/Elsene and calm streets of both Woluwes. However, I did not want to be excluded, did not want to go back alone at night to a “no-go area”.

E TTERBEEK

AND BOTH

W OLUWES

A few days after I helped the Dutch-British couple to move to a new flat, I met their Polish friends. One of them was working at the EU Parliament; the other was looking for a way into EU institutions, simultaneously studying European Studies at the Brussels’ Free University. We all meet, again, in St. Gery/St. Gorik, in one of the popular bars, where a young live band is performing. I quickly find a common language with my new Polish friends and that evening we laugh, dance and get drunk at one of Brussels’ hip parties18. We met several times, also at dinners, and as

18 KVS (Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg) organized a party called Bal in de Box that takes place once every three months. As in any other European city, a dance party organized in national theatre venues attracts a particular kind of people (middle class, intellectuals, creative milieus) and Bal in de Box is a special occasion because in Brussels there are not so many clubs that have a fixed program and are established in the city’s cultural landscape. KVS is a Flemish speaking theatre in Brussels; hence, the majority is Flemish/Dutch speaking. The party is also special because of its relatively big

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my Polish friend rented out a room that was about to be free, she asked me whether I would like to move in. She lived in Etterbeek, right next to metro station Montgomery at the end of Av. De Tervueren/Tervurenlaan, where lots of embassies are located. The idea of living merely two metro stations from Schuman, where the headquarters of the Commission is located (in Berlaymont building) and close to the Council (Justus Lipsius building), the Parc du Cinqantenaire/Jubelpark that divided the European District from the housing area of Etterbeek and both Woluwes (Woluwe-St.Pierre/St.Pieters and Woluwe St.Lambert/St.Lambrechts), and Rue des Tongres/Tongerenstraat and Av. Des Celtes/Keltenlaan, where popular bars, bakeries and shops are and where the urban life is pulsing – was very tempting to me. It appealed to me to move into a bigger room for similar money, with a “normal” life and two cats instead of constantly changing students and stagiaires, and to live with two people I liked and had a common language with, to be close to places where you could hang out in the evening, close to the park where one could jog and compete with your fellow joggers instead of running alone on empty park paths around the royal palace in Laken/Laeken. My friend, who actually did not have to convince me to move in, said: “here you will have civilization”. After I moved in, I only once went back to Laken/Laeken, and only because my cousin was visiting and we went there to see the Atomium. The spot where I lived in Etterbeek was right on the border between Etterbeek and two Woluwes: Woluwe-St.Pierre/St.Pieters and Woluwe-St.Lambert/St.Lambrechts, both residential areas. On their outskirts to the East and to the South they border the Flemish communes of Weezembeek-Oppem, Tervuren and the Brussels districts of Auderghem/Oudergem and Watermael-Boitsfort/Watermaal-Bosvoorde. The deeper one would go in these directions, the less dense the buildings and the more greenery. In Woluwe-St.Pierre/St.Pieters, between two- or three-storey houses and in calm or even sleepy streets was one of the posh sports clubs called Aspria Royal La Rasante. I learned about its existence from a member of one of the Commissioner’s Cabinets, after I asked this person whether there is a Commission’s sports club that he/she would go to. He/she said: “Yes, there is this one club, what’s the name of it? La Rasante? People have tried to convince me to go there and sign in, but I don’t really have time for such a thing”. I was told about Aspria La Rasante during my first field trip in Brussels, but went there only on my second trip, because I had heard about it many times and knew that some of the senior civil servants would go there. Royal La Rasante was opened in 2005 (it’s a country club) as a branch of the Aspria sports club in Rue d’Industrie/ Nijverheidsstraat in the heart of the EU District. During the time of my research, La Rasante’s predecessor, the Aspria in the EU District, was very popular among EU size: there are two dance floors with DJs performing different music: either techno, or dub/reggae, dance music and it’s crowded until late at night.

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civil servants and was even called DG Aspria. I went to both of them, pretending to be a freshly employed civil servant of the Commission. La Rasante is placed on a plot of land within a whole quarter surrounded by two- to three-storey houses. It has five tennis courts that are available for members, and many of my interviewees in AD posts, both from OMS and NMS would play tennis. Its entrance is not directly from the street, but from a short, curved cobbled street leading to it, and only a stone sign with cut out golden letters reveals the existence of the club in this place. I remember how odd I felt walking down this short cobbled street and when I saw a camera pointed towards me. As I approached the entrance, I started to wonder if they would even let me in seeing that I just walked in and had not driven in a car (this small street leading to the entrance had the function of removing it from the eyes of mortals). The entrance hall was, to my surprise, quite small but maintained in the style of a British country club, with sofas, green walls and some certificates and diplomas on the wall. However, it gave way to a big light reception hall with a big club label hanging behind the receptionist. There were tables with armchairs next to big, Venetian windows, and I recognized bonsai trees in large standing flowerpots. I told the receptionist that I would like to become a member, and after a few minutes a young man welcomed me and gave me a tour around the club’s venues, later telling me about the membership conditions, as we sat back at the table. I was offered a drink and then asked how I learned about the existence of this club and the name of this person because, “here everybody knows each other” and “we attach great value to the fact that people feel well here and like to spend time here among friends and with their families”. I told him that I was a freshly employed EC civil servant and that I had heard about the club from a friend at work. He was surprised when I gave him my email and it was not a Commission’s email on an EC domain (ending with @ec.europa.eu). I was dressed in my dark Boss jeans, shirt and black jacket, but maybe he sensed something because it was early afternoon, and I should have been, as a Commission’s civil servant, sitting in my office. The venue had two big fitness studios, a wellness area, big indoor pool, and restaurant, and because it was already warm outside, between the building and tennis courts, dark wooden teak tables stood under big white umbrellas. At this time of day, the club was rather empty – the atmosphere was calm and relaxed. After I learned the many different membership options (with the cheapest being 137€ a month), and after assurances that I would consider it and talk to my wife about it (sic!), I walked out the way I came in. The Aspria Club, or the DG Aspria, in the EU District was located in a modern office building. It had a big fitness area, spa, restaurant, wellness area, massage and a whole range of classes including aqua-aerobics (the class program read: AquaLatino, Aqua Wake-up, Aqua-Pregnancy or Body Art). From what I could hear from my friends working in EU-space, it was a place preferred by singles working

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at the Commission or at EU institutions. However, one of my interviewees, a Dutch Head of Unit (HoU) in his mid-forties, who had a working-class background and who happened to also be an instructor of a combat sport, and, as he claimed, went to fitness every day, detested Aspria and said that he did not want to “watch my colleagues’ fat, old bodies”. Thus, he went to Passage, a cheaper club of a much smaller size – belonging at that time to the British chain Fitness First, and as I heard, with more mixed (non-EU) public and “normal” Belgians coming in. This club was more crowded during lunch breaks, and its facilities were more simple19, its interiors rather plain in comparison to the modern, shiny surfaces of Aspria. However, this club was also popular among EU civil servants, but it was a place where one would go solely to do sports as it did not offer wellness and massage, nor a restaurant or bar. I was lucky to be a member of Fitness First in Berlin, so with my member card I could work out also in Passage in Brussels. Particularly during the lunch hours there would be a lot of people from EU institutions, a fact that I could determine by the visibility of their “badges” (EU civil servants’ ID) and conversations in languages other than French (Dutch, German, English, Italian). Similarly to one of the Directors at the Commission who told me that it would be difficult for him/her to tell others that he lived in St.Josse/St.Joost (the poorest, migrants’ commune in Brussels), it would also probably be difficult for a Director to confess that he/she was a member of Passage and not Aspria. Despite the differences, both of these clubs were frequently attended by EU civil servants, and both Aspria and Passage were located in what is called the EU District20.

T HE E UROPEAN D ISTRICT From Trône/Troon metro station to Place Lux On my first day in the European District21, three days after my arrival in Brussels, I am standing on the corner of Rue du Luxembourg/Luxemburgstraat and Av. des

19 As I received a tour from a young and talkative sales man in Aspria in the EU District, he presented to me at that time the newest technical achievement in fitness – a vibrating platform that caused reduction of fat tissue without sweating and physical effort. Passage sports club, obviously, did not possess such a fantastic device. 20 The Commission also had its own kind of country club in Overijse, outside Brussels, allegedly with tennis courts. I was not able to see the place – entrance was allowed only to people with a Commission badge. 21 The so-called European District or EU District lies within Brussels’ three municipalities: Etterbeek, Ixelles/Elsene and St. Josse-ten-Noode/St. Joost-ten-Node, all of them East of

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Arts/Kunstlaan with my gaze facing Rue du Luxembourg/Luxemburgstraat towards the arch of the Gare Luxembourg/Luxemburg train station and the European Parliament behind it. At my back is Av. Des Artes/Kunstlaan, a big ring street circling the city centre, with many tunnels and four lanes in each direction. This wide street marks Brussels’ city centre and, to its South-East, the European District. There is a major bus stop with connections to the metro station on this corner and people rushing between the buses and the metro. As I walk down Rue du Luxembourg/Luxemburgstraat towards Place du Luxembourg/Luxemburgplein (called Place Lux by EU civil servants), I pass people in smart outfits carrying briefcases. One of my notes in my field diary says: It’s like in Warsaw here, everyone is in a hurry, not noticing their fellow men and women or any other people in their surroundings, impersonal space, grey office buildings, loads of cars and car traffic on Av. Des Artes/Kunstlaan, people dressed well but not like in Frankfurt or London – you can see that they are civil servants, not bankers. Lots of young people, of that ‘future Europeans’ type, probably making a career in connection with EU policies. Many have trolley cases/suitcases and travel bags – they probably came to Brussels for just a day or two. Buildings in this street are a total mixture of establishments from the sixties and seventies. Regardless of their age, most of them with a coffee-with-milk-colour or grey facades. There are also 19th century old and narrow houses, typical for the Brussels bourgeois, and face-lifted office buildings from the sixties to the eighties with lots of smooth glass, shiny metal and stone frontages. This space does not invite one to contemplate it, nor to enjoy it, it’s a space that you pass in hurry. Everyone rushes through the streets, those with cases are usually alone, and others sometimes in mixed couples or small groups, walking fast and discussing issues. In general everybody is on the move here. Tourists are easily spotted, as well as anybody walking slowly. There are some salad and sandwich bars, where you order and pay at the counter. They look modern: they have shiny pastel and smooth interiors, typical fast-food bars that could easily be in Berlin, Warsaw or Amsterdam. I spot one pizzeria with nonwhites behind the counter looking similar to Neukölln’s Turkish bars. There are two fancy restaurants in this street, one in a hotel. Walking into one of them I saw only people in smart outfits and with papers and laptops on the table (it was late morning) – they apparently had an appointment there. In this district you don’t see people walking their dogs or wandering or people with shopping bags. I saw a group of teenagers kicking a ball on the city centre. It is an area demarcated to the East by Parc Cinquantenaire/Jubelpark, to the North, more or less, by the administrative border between the districts of Etterbeek and St. Josse-ten-Noode/St. Joost-ten-Node, to the West by Av. Des Arts/Wetlaan, and to the South by Chaussee de Wavre/Waversesteenweg. These limits are not to be found on any map, but are based both on how this space is experienced and perceived by EU civil servants and on the location of EU institutions and distances between residential and office areas.

46 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS Square de Meeûs/De Meeûssqare [a square halfway between Av. Des Artes/Kunstlaan and Place Lux] – playing between trees on a small green lawn with their ball flying over the street and banging against pedestrians. They clearly disrupted the usual state of things in this place, provoking either smiles or angry glances on passers-by’s faces.

Exploring the limits in and of the field While in my ethnography the key to producing descriptions came with or through autoethnography, the answers to my questions on cultural norms in EU-space emerged thanks to connections between symbols and practices, snapshots, observations and interviews, facts and figures, and places and people that all-in-all made the culture of EU civil servants understandable. It was this “analytical alchemy” (Ehn & Löfgren, 2010, p. 219) that helped me to make connections and to understand the cultural logic in and of the field I was studying. However, it was oppositions (adopted from Bourdieu) and contrasts in phenomena and encounters that helped to reveal the hierarchies between different cultural orders, and shed meaning both on the body movements expressed and gestures and words spoken in particular contexts and moments. Oppositions assume that there are two sides to things and phenomena, that there is one or another way of doing things, and that there is something that divides them. These boundaries or limits permeated the whole of my research. Scrutinizing the limits and boundaries of practices and bodies (including my own practices and my own body), approaching them and sometimes transgressing them, proved to be very productive for cultural analysis. The evolving process of my field research required overcoming limits and boundaries, and accommodating the realities I sought to understand – a process that is intrinsic to any ethnographic research. I found these limits and boundaries on many different levels: in spaces and in (my) interactions, on bodies and in language (use). What is most important however is that approaching and/or transgressing these boundaries reveals the cultural logic and hierarchies of and in a given cultural space. I argue that this approaching and transgressing is visible on bodies and in practices, including my own, as well as in emotions and interactions in/with the field (Pink, 2009). During my fieldwork, I had to transgress boundaries very often on many different levels, and in different spaces and interactions. However, approaching and transgressing boundaries in the field between “us” and “them” (or me and “them”) occurs either consciously or unconsciously. In many cases, this lack of consciousness became apparent to me only months after I returned from the field. I suppose anyone who has conducted research is aware of the feelings and emotions the people we want to study evoke in us. I do not have clear advice on how to cope with these emotions. But are we really aware of the different strategies

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we use in the field – consciously or unconsciously performed as opposed to performative? Are we aware of our, the ethnographer’s, bodily hexis, gestures and language use, and the type and form of questions we ask at particular moments? The longer I was in Brussels, the worse I felt about myself, the more I felt that I was “selling” myself, trying to, subconsciously, present myself from my best side, presumably in a way appreciated by my counterparts, in hope of gaining more access and relevant information. I am fairly sure that my attempts were carefully observed and assessed, and that they either opened or closed doors. Once I was invited to a dinner with a person I did not know – a Polish AD civil servant at EC. I received this invitation thanks to Polish networks in EU-space. Our mutual acquaintance admitted that being invited to the dinner would help me progress with my research. I do not know how well people really knew and understood what I was doing, but I always explained to them and was open about it when somebody asked. But at this particular party nobody asked. The guests were mostly Polish, and apart from myself and one Polish woman working at a Dutch university, they were all employees of EU institutions. I remember I was sitting next to a Swedish man in his mid-thirties, as far as I remember he and the host were colleagues in the DG Environment. Eating a Polish schab22 I was annoyed by the courteous conversations, by discussions that I’ve been part of or heard 1000 times before: about how do you do this or that in Poland or France or anywhere else, how do you cook this, or what are the traditions, what are we eating right now, and where does it comes from and so on. I was annoyed by this small talk. I probably expected it to be more about the EU and its policies, about working at EU institutions in general, and I expected that at least one person would ask me what I was doing. But maybe they already knew? At one point, I asked the Swede sitting next to me what kind of books he reads or had read recently. He looked at me and ironically shot out of the blue (drawing everybody’s attention to me and revealing that they all knew what I was doing): “So this is what you’re asking people? And then writing ‘EU civil servants read this and that book’”. With this he somehow embarrassed and exposed me, which was probably his aim. He showed me that he was aware of what I was doing and through his irony sent a message: You will not gain any relevant information from me. Maybe it was also his defence strategy? I remember I was struck by the shallowness of this social event, but also by the courtesy displayed, and the friendliness of the people. I was wondering whether my presence affected their interactions: did they always act like this, and my question “out of the box” simply evoked a defensive reaction? Or was it a game they, I 22 Schab is a Polish dish consisting of baked pork tenderloin stuffed with dry plum or apricot. During the period of state socialism in Poland, it was considered a delicacy that was served only on special occasions because of the difficulty of obtaining a pork tenderloin on the market.

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assume, all knew well? To me, the Swede’s question shows that in EU-space one has to be self-aware and careful all the time. Still sitting at the table, I asked a Polish AST working in RELEX (a fact that I learned only later) what she was doing, and she replied in an angry tone: “I don’t talk about work at the table!”. It was apparent that there was a line between me and “them”, an invisible boundary that some would defend in more concealed ways, and others more explicitly. They may have been flattered by the fact that sitting at the table was an “anthropologist” who was there to undertake a research about them, but they were also a bit afraid or not sure how to cope with this. It also showed an anthropologist’s typical experience doing research among elites: there is a courteous, nice and friendly atmosphere as long as you do not ask questions. Later, after dessert was served and the table was moved to the side in order to make room for dancing, I saw and heard the AST woman speaking with my friend in a corner about work – they were employed in the same DG and knew each other well (both belonged to the “first wave”23 of Poles at the Commission). After that, while sitting on a couch, this same AST woman was much friendlier – she talked with me and told me how disappointed she was with her job and that she was considering going back to Poland, but was afraid of being labelled as a loser there. This however was the last attempt at conversation initiated during that evening “from the other side”, the last attempt to overcome the invisible barrier between myself and “them”, though the evening lasted till early morning, and I followed everybody to a club located in a villa in a posh area of Brussels. After that evening, every time I saw the AST woman, she pretended not to know me – something that I experienced very often during my field research. From the outset of my field research, such experiences as an ethnographer and actor in the field denoted the rules in EU-space: they indicated my status as an outsider and the means for defending the limits of being “in” vs. “out”. I remember once sitting in front of my interview partner in DG RELEX, a young British man in a fine suit speaking Oxford English. When I asked him questions he would answer them either very briefly or very literally, using either one or two words, using the kind of language he was familiar with: informative but impersonal. After a while, seeing my anger and nervous smile, he would just smile back, or rather answer my question with a smile fixed on his face. I guess we both knew that we were playing a game, one in which I was not setting the rules and where the winner was already known. Being an actor in the field means going through a cultural process of learning the rules and norms described above. It means learning the symbolic codes that 23 “First wave” was a local expression used among Poles for those who came to the Commission right after the enlargement. This expression was also used in conversations about earlier enlargements and their consequences for the EU administration.

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govern the culturally stiff space of norms that is the political elite space of EU Brussels. It means a process of adapting to and disturbing the rules and norms, as well as internalizing them, often unconsciously, as our engagement with the field and self-definition as an ethnographer remain unquestioned there – in order to gather material that is as rich as possible. Once while conducting an interview during working hours in the Commission’s building at the beginning of my first research round, I approached and learned the boundary between “me” and “them” by, unintentionally, breaking the rules of acceptable language. During an interview, I asked one of the French Directors in DG SANCO about “intransparent decision procedures” referring to a book by Derk Jan Epping24 (Epping, 2007). I was almost thrown out of the office, with the Director saying: “Pawel! This is the level of Bild Zeitung” (my interviewee was French), but I do not know whether this was in reference to my question or to the book. I think I posed this question because I wanted to see how far I could go. However, in this case, the limit was set, and it took me a long time to calm the situation down. Only some of my interview partners allowed a critique of the Commission or the EU as a whole/as an idea, or of the social and cultural relations within EU institutions. As a rule, these were people who were more established within the bureaucratic apparatus (and in higher positions); however, they did not belong to the oldest generation I talked to. The Alte Garde (old guards/old school) – as one of my German interview partners called them – were people who had joined the Commission at the beginning of the seventies and were now on a pension or shortly due to retire – only indirectly showed a more differentiated picture of EU institutions. Nonetheless, almost all of my interviewees were aware of the consequences of every word they said, and thus were very careful (the distinction between higher and lower positions in the hierarchy usually corresponded with how visibly they would express their caution and self-awareness), although they often gave me the impression that their enthusiasm and identification with the “European Idea” (either in the moment of our conversation, or in stories about their early years at the Commission) and with their employer were sincere. Place Lux Walking down Rue du Luxembourg/Luxemburgstraat I reach Place Lux, where there are popular bars, cafés and restaurants. Once it gets warm in spring, on sunny 24 Derk Jan Epping, a former member of the Dutch Cabinet (of Commissioner Frederik Bolkestein for Internal Market and Services) in Romano Prodi’s Commission, published a sarcastic book under the title Life of a European Mandarin: Inside the Commission. The book was published in late 2007, so just after my arrival in Brussels. While very amusing, it casts the Commission’s administration in a rather negative light.

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days tables are put out on the pavement. They are constantly occupied by mostly young people from the EU Parliament, the Commission or neighbouring offices. Every Thursday, no matter the weather, these bars are filled with young people (in their early twenties to late thirties) from the early afternoon on. It is a sign that at the EU Parliament the weekend has started – the MEPs have gone to their constituencies in the member states, and there are no meetings scheduled for Friday. The bars on the north side of the square (O’Farrels, Le Pullman and two others, there is one big bar on the south side, but it never gets as crowded as those on the north side) get filled mostly with MEP’s assistants and stagiaires working in EU institutions, but also with people working in NGOs and lobbies, and young EC/EP civil servants. In the warm months they sit outside, together with the tourists, in their smart outfits (jackets off) and with thick black sunglasses on their noses. Towards the evening, the crowd grows, and people stand outside with drinks in their hands while loud music blares from the speakers. Last time I was in Brussels in March 2011, the number of partygoers had grown significantly, so that tents, beer distributors and provisional bars, standing tables and heaters, were placed outside bars in order to service the crowd. Large amounts of expensive alcohol are consumed, and what was going on inside the bar reminded me of a party in a club rather than drinks after work. I was told by my friends working at the Parliament that some of the young civil servants and assistants of the MEPs would finish their work earlier on Thursday, go back home and change into suits or into an evening outfit just for the occasion of “Place Lux Thursdays” – to impress the people there. Some of these young EC/EP civil servants would still be wearing a badge (EU civil servant’s ID) as a sign of status. Badges from the Commission have more prestige than those from the Parliament, and in this context, those from the Commission are more rare. I was also told that people came here to find a job – buying drinks and trying to “sell” themselves, getting acquainted with someone who could possibly give them a job, exchanging cards 25 . One of my friends 25 Exchanging business cards was a common habit in EU-space. I had my own with the Humboldt-Universität logo and would hand them out anytime I found it appropriate or someone offered me his/hers card. Once, relatively early in my research, I apparently upset the card exchanging rule in EU-space. I had an appointment for an interview with the person responsible for training at the Commission in DG ADMIN. The first thing he did was to hand me his card and I refused to take it, because I did not find it necessary and at this particular moment I did not have my own card to give in reciprocity. The person was very surprised and asked me whether I wouldn’t be looking for a job in an EU institution. When I replied that I was there to do research and was not considering working for the EU now or in the future, he placed a card in front of me and said: “You never know what the future will bring you”. In a sense, saying: take it, you might need it. He made the reciprocal rule of card giving in the EU-space visible, and through his

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working at the Parliament told me that he/she had been often offered a drink or a beer by total strangers, who asked what he/she did. These people, as he/she would find out later, worked for lobbies. After a chat, one would offer him/her a card and expect to receive one, as a sign of acquaintance. My friend also told me that now, after knowing what might happen, he/she refuses to accept a beer or any kind of contact from people he/she does not know. These stories were told with some confusion and pity for people who wanted to find a job in EU institutions “so desperately” or who wanted to lobby even in a bar where people come to relax after work. In my field diary, I note: I was about to go to Place Lux with [Polish woman], but she again backed out at the last moment. Typical. She knew that I want to go there due to my research and that I don’t want to go there alone. But I went there and hung around like Schluck Wasser in der Kurve [I used a German phrase in my field diary that means more or less to stand like a bump on a log]. I hate this place and these arrogant people. It’s not that they are arrogant in any specific or explicit way, but the way they look at you, the way they assess your outfit, your outlook, is just totally aggressive. And just because I am alone there they just make you feel like an idiot, like a loser, like someone who is out of this whole context (network?). They probably think that I’m ‘a beginner’, or do they think I came there to look for a job? I thought I would just puke on these guys at the bar – both the assholes who ordered and pushed me aside and the assholes behind the bar who served these guys probably just because they were ordering loads of expensive drinks and I, with my outfit, was assessed as being good for just one beer. What am I there for?!?! Why do I have to be put and put myself in such a position?

Place Lux on Thursdays has another social function – it is a place to flirt and a place to find a (usually heterosexual) hook up. What is interesting: the local gossip says that young women from NMS are particularly keen on guys from OMS working at the Commission, and there was a condescending undertone in these rumours told by some men from OMS and some women from NMS (those who were more experienced in EU-space). In EU Brussels these “Place Lux Thursday” evenings and parties are labelled “attractive” and the “place to be” by young people who are relatively new in EUspace. Many times I was asked whether I would go to Place Lux on Thursday, hence whether I would be part of that event and society. And I must admit I could see excitement on people’s faces in these bars, probably because of the many languages spoken (although English and French were most common) and the international composition of the crowd, the alcohol flowing and the crowd of “fancy” people, who I found all to look more or less the same (boring). Somehow gesture and words reinforced his status that I somehow depreciated by refusing to take the card and saying that I did not want to work for the EU.

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they all stood in small groups, knowing each other, probably from the Commission or the Parliament or some other workplace in EU-space. I suppose this is how they expected and imagined Europe – meeting people from all over the continent, trying out their language abilities and showing them to others, comparing their occupations and statuses, looking at each other and comparing outfits – thus, reinforcing and shaping their European (middle-class) identities. Place Lux is for young people working in EU-space a place to be, a place where one is seen and where one makes him/herself visible and important. They would also call it “networking”. I note in my field diary: “In my Berlin outfit: blue H&M jacket made of thin material, worn out jeans and sneakers, I visibly do not fit into the crowd; they still either wear suits and even evening dresses, very chic, women often with long, loose hair; hanging on the walls are flat screen pictures attacking me with Fashion TV”. However, there were also EU civil servants and MEP’s assistants who already found it “terrible” to attend these events. More experienced people in EU-space, who have lived in Brussels longer, would distance themselves from Place Lux Thursdays (unless they were single), citing the implicit sexual and freshman character of these parties as their reason. Or they would go to the less sexual and freshman in character (than Ralphs and LePullman) Irish pub O’Farrels on the corner of Place Lux and Av. De Treves/Trierstraat, were there was rarely a crowd and the public was more mixed in age. However, this “terrible” referred to the (hetero)sexual character of Place Lux Thursdays and had a distinctive meaning: we don’t go there, we don’t do it this way. The distinctive character of this statement was particularly clear when it came from women from NMS (as if they wanted to contradict the local gossip about “easy” NMS women), but also from OMS men – “I don’t belong to this group. I am no longer a freshman” was the implicit message when talking about Place Lux. Older EU civil servants, those in AD posts, found Place Lux either embarrassing (mortifying) (also because of the age of the people there) or did not have any clue what was going on there (unless they had grown up children living in Brussels). While Place Lux in EU Brussels functions for some as a fancy place to go on Thursday nights (and a pleasant place to have a coffee during the day); there are various boundaries that cut through its social and symbolic space: these mark both those who feel privileged and those (including me) who do not (want to) feel privileged – both facts were visible in people’s outfits, the bars where they spent time, what people would say about Others, given the amount and type of alcohol consumed, and in their outfits and in the visibility of their “networks”, in short, in the way these spaces were produced (Lefebvre & Nicholson-Smith, 2007). The boundaries in Place Lux demonstrate a distinction in Bourdieu’s meaning and social strata. These were visible in both what people would say about sexualized bars vs. “nonsexual” pubs or disinterest of senior EU civil servants towards events

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in Place Lux, and also in small differences in meaning assigned to places that were side by side (Why are there crowds in one bar/pub, while the one next door is empty or inside are different people?) and the people in them. These boundaries are visible between those inside EU institutions and those who are outside – with the latter identified as self-humiliating. It is a place where boundaries are produced between newcomers to EU Brussels and those who are more established, and also those who distance themselves from the ways of the young posh consumers at Place Lux. It is a place where the social application of attributes and forms of capital are visible (such as the badge), and where social statuses are compared and confirmed. These were based on e.g. age and experience in EU-space as natural status factors, but also on ways of spending free time (those at Place Lux vs. those who do not go there) and place of employment (EC vs. EP). Last but not least, it is a place where European identities are shaped, identities that are remarkably similar to those of the metropolitan white middle class. The space and its production reveal social and cultural divisions, and, as I will show more specifically below, it also reproduces these relations. Entering the EU Parliament The symbolic boundaries criss-crossing the EU District are also visible in the production of space surrounding Place Lux. Whereas Place Lux itself is a lively area surrounded by old Bruxelleois bourgeois houses, with cafés, bars and restaurants; it has a posh, play-area status (during the day it has the atmosphere of pulsating urban life; however, this is only during the week) for juniors in EU-space. Right in front of the Parliament there is a huge, stone-covered elongated space in the shadow of the enormous glass walls of the EU Parliament buildings26. This is Lefebvre’s “conceived space”, which was initially designed by architects to symbolize Europe, but the “lived space”, the lived experience of this space is rather scarce here. It is always windy there, and even though there are benches along the walls, you rarely see anyone sitting on them. On warm days in the evening, kids from surrounding, rather poor parts of Ixelles/Elsene ride their skateboards or rollerblades. But the everyday picture shows people, often crouched because of the strong wind, crossing the space between Place Lux and the entrance to the EU Parliament as quickly as possible. Only when a group of school children, pupils or students is making noise or fooling about, is there more life in this space – 26 The buildings of the EU Parliament are the Paul Henri Spaak building (which houses the debating chamber) and the Altiero Spinelli building. Their construction was finished in 1997. Their extensions along Rue de Treves and above the train tracks are buildings named Brandt (after Willi Brandt) and Antall (after Jozsef Antall), and were finished in 2008.

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something that counters the usual impersonality, emptiness and tristesse. The size of the buildings and the vast stone area make people seem very small in contrast with vivid Place Lux. The EU Parliament buildings and their surroundings resemble the reality of an American downtown with the headquarters of big, global companies, rather than a parliament in a European capital. In front of the Altiero Spinelli building, at the front entrance to Place Lux, there are usually people either waiting for someone or smoking cigarettes, hunched on cold, windy and rainy days. Whereas the entrance from Place Lux is a big portico made of glass and metal, with steps leading to a pair of revolving doors under a huge arch above which often hangs a huge banner on current EU policy, in Rue Wierz/Wierzstraat the entrance is much smaller (this is the entrance for visitors) and placed under an arcade and a bridge joining two buildings of the EP: the Altiero Spinelli building and the Paul Henri Spaak building. On this side of the building, the lobby is decent; it has a light-coloured hall with a security check, reception and guards. The ceilings are much lower than in the lobby in the front, which has a clearly representative role. The latter is a vast space open to the roof, and as you walk in there are long, gently rising stairs covered with light carpet – it gives you the impression of openness, of breathing room. Standing at the front entrance, you can see deep into the building. However, it also communicates power. When you enter the building from this side, you have to walk through this open, light space (and climb stairs, even if they rise only slightly) in order to reach the area containing offices and a huge inner patio. This entrance, although “representative”, is inaccessible to mortals – you can use it only if you have a badge (though, as a visitor, you can walk out of the building here). Hence, the boundaries between Place Lux, the urban life and the Parliament building is marked by this stone, windy, empty space and the inaccessible entrance from the front. The way in for the public is from the back, with security guards, photos saved in a special database, and visitor’s IDs. Demos is detached from cratos, and one can see this in the design of this public space. Even if there are demonstrations in front of the EU Parliament in Brussels (its official seat is in Strassbourg), the majority of people would gather on Place Lux, practically in front of the train station, rather than in front of the Parliament building itself. I have been to the EP building only twice, on both occasions visiting friends who worked there. It is certainly a space filled with symbolic meaning, whose production was conceptualized in the offices of architects and politicians. In the corridors and in the representative area there are displays of “gifts” from member states to the Parliament. The Polish gift is a copy of the painting of the Holy Mary from a sanctuary in Częstochowa, and many corridors have their own names, e.g. Sacharov, Churchill or Solidarność. On my first visit, I was given a tour around the building, from the top levels of which one has a wonderful view of Brussels. My companion and I went for lunch in the Parliament canteen. As a person from the

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outside world, I actually was not allowed to be in the canteen during lunchtime27. But my friend, as an insider, first tried to smuggle me through the side entrance, which was guarded by a security guard checking EPs’ badges, and when this did not work out, he/she asked his/her friend to lend me a badge. With this borrowed badge (with a picture of a woman on it!), I went in. After we ate lunch, we went to an area of the canteen where armchairs and coffee tables stand in order to have coffee. I was introduced to a Polish assistant of a Polish MEP. He asked me whether I was a (Polish) journalist, since if that was the case he would not talk to me, and actually would ask me to leave as I should not be in this place. When he learned that I was researching civil servants in EU institutions and particularly the power relations after the enlargement (this is what I told him) at a German university, he felt obliged to explain his behaviour to me and said that “those journalists” stick their noses everywhere and write unbelievable things about the life of EU civil servants in Brussels. He was defending “his” space against intruders and acted on his power, but he also made apparent that there are more legitimate intruders such as myself, a researcher with the symbolic capital of HumboldtUniversity, and less legitimate ones, such as Polish journalists. I encroached the social and physical boundaries and was about to be put back in place/order; however, my symbolic capital turned out to be of value in this particular place. I suppose the fact that I was accompanied by a non-Polish friend who had brought me into the Parliament also made a difference – my prestige was higher than if I had appeared there with a person from Poland. It was more difficult to intimidate me in front of someone who was a non-Pole and from an OMS. In that canteen, by coincidence, I also met an assistant of another Polish MEP, who I had been advised to contact by one of the Polish gatekeepers (a former high-ranking Polish official, who was now working in another EU institution). I talked with the assistant about arranging a meeting and having an interview with the MEP, but she gently but firmly refused to set up an appointment, and offered her own time and knowledge as an interview partner instead. At first I tried to persist with my attempt to meet the MEP, but after a while I ran out of arguments and realized that she was playing her role of gatekeeper very well. Brussels is full of boundaries between the public and the political; the limits for those not involved in the decision-making process are carefully guarded, and the more closely you approach the areas where decisions are taken, the harder it is to access them. Likewise, the boundaries between the private and public in EU-space, as I will show below in more detail, are blurred, which points to the fact that this 27 Access to the canteen of the European Parliament is limited to holders of an EP badge (civil servant’s ID) in order to, allegedly, stop the flow of EU civil servants from other buildings and institutions who would literally take places and food intended for people working at the Parliament.

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space and the limits within it are constantly being actively produced. Areas where (officially) political decisions are taken are physically and symbolically guarded, and during the whole of my research many of them remained out of my reach. Even though my research often generated curiosity and interest, and a kind of liking, it also evoked fear and uncertainty, most often among Poles in EU-space. On my second field trip in 2009, I tried to take part in weekly meetings in three Units of the Commission, in, respectively, DG RELEX, DG EAC, DG REGIO. I even had a letter of recommendation from the President of the EP Jerzy Buzek, but as it became apparent, this was not a sufficient argument for the HoU to let me into these meetings. The centre: Rond-Point Schuman and surroundings Within the European District, Rond-Point Schuman is a central point of power. It is here where Berlaymont stands (in Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat 200, called Berlaymonster by the British press) – the Commission’s headquarters where Commissioners hold their meetings (the internal expression for these meetings is the/le College) and their Cabinets have their offices (along with, inter alia, the offices of SJ, SG, DG COMM and DG HR). Across from Berlaymont is Justus Lipsius building, which, during the time of my research, housed the Secretariat of the Council and where meetings of member states’ ministers, committees and working groups, as well as the Council of the European Union, took place. Behind the huge Justus Lipsius building, which occupies a whole street quarter, in Rue Belliard/Belliardstraat stands the house of both Committees (Committee of the Regions and the Social and Economic Committee28), and further on, beyond Parc Léopold/Leopoldspark, there is the Espace Leopold/Leopoldruimte, with the buildings of the European Parliament, with the aforementioned Place du Luxembourg/Luxemburgplein in front of it. If one looks from Rond-Point Schuman/Schumanplein down the long and bright alley of Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat, on the right side behind Berlaymont stands the refurbished and modern Charlemagne building housing the prestigious DGs of the RELEX Family29 (during the time of my research there was no EEAS). Berlaymont was built between 1963 and 1967, and from the beginning it was intended to house the Commission. In 1991, the Commission suddenly moved out because of asbestos leakage, and refurbishing works did not begin until 1996, when 28 Two advisory bodies to the EU Commission and to the Council established by the Treaty of Rome (1958) and the Treaty of Maastricht (Committee of the Regions) (1992). 29 The RELEX family were the DGs that, before the establishment of the EEAS, dealt with relations with third countries and comprised of: DG RELEX, DG TRADE, DG ELARG, DG DEV, DG AIDCO, ECHO.

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a final agreement between the Belgian State and the Commission was reached. The Commission moved back into Berlaymont in May 2004 after hasty completion of construction works30. Berlaymont is a 13 storey building that has the form of a fourarm star. Its façade is covered with intelligent glass blinds (that adjust their angle according to the sunlight – resulting in energy savings) and light beige gables that give the building a light appearance. It is slightly removed from the axis of Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat, and in comparison to the huge and heavy Justus Lipsius opposite, Berlaymont makes a decent and friendly impression. Unlike any other area around EU buildings in the European District, there is even a tiny lawn next to the building surrounded with vast spaces covered with stone. There is a permanent exhibition on the history of Berlaymont and on the EU on display on the Rue Archimède/ Archimedesstraat (east) side. In contrast to the surroundings of other European Commission’s buildings, the Schuman area and Berlaymont, with their numerous pedestrians speaking virtually every EU language, and with small cafés and restaurants in old, typical Bruxelloise bourgeois houses (Rue Archimede/ Archimedesstraat, Rue Franklin/Franklinstraat and Rue Stevin/Stevinsstraat with the famous Irish pub Kitty O’Shea’s) has more of a normal, vivid urban-space look and feel than the rest of the European District, which is rather pedestrian free. The entrance to Berlaymont is situated in the western wing. Next to the entrance, to the left, stands a row of masts with characteristic blue EU flags – something that is reproduced in almost every TV transmission on the EU Commission. Behind the glass walls and glass sliding doors (often covered with banners advertising EU policies or programmes) leading to the lobby of Berlaymont, there is a high, spacious and light-filled reception hall that gives an impression of transparency and openness. Apart from the personnel at reception, and a few expectants sitting in black armchairs next to vast glass walls, the people here are in constant motion. This space is filled with the constant beeping of the security gate, the x-ray machine and the rumble of plastic boxes on rollers – a sound that you hear at airports. The light beige stone flooring and light wooden walls provide a background for the dark-coloured suits and skirts that dominate among people in this space. Out of all the EU Commission’s buildings, Berlaymont stands out in size and its common area on the ground floor31. Next to a vast reception area constantly crossed 30 In 2006, an environmental NGO revealed that on the 13th floor of Berlaymont, where the Commissioners meet, the construction material consists of uncertified timber from Indonesian rainforest. 31 A bit comparable in size and design is the lobby of Madou Tower, which reopened after refurbishment in 2006 as the seat – at least during the time of my research – of Commission DGs (EAC, DIGIT, COMM, IAS) and the Executive Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation.

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by civil servants to and from the entrance, there is, beyond the security check, a canteen for 900 people, a so-called press zone with two conference rooms and a socalled “Spokesperson’s zone”. It is from here that most of the media coverage and press conferences of spokespersons are broadcast. Commissioners appear at press conferences only on special occasions. Along with the canteen, there is a cafeteria, several major Belgian bank cash machines, and a pictorial guide of all the Commission’s Presidents – from Walter Hallstein to Jose Manuel Barosso – hanging in a hall. All of these spaces give the impression of openness, although this does not mean they are all open. Sliding gates that one opens with a badge or sliding glass doors mark restricted areas (though, one must remark, these are gates and glass doors, not walls and full doors). The halls are bright, the interior in general is full of light, as the roof in many parts is made of glass, but here and there one comes across a barrier in the form of a gate. Within the overall ground floor area, there are pictograms that inform you about the location of different facilities. In general, this space reminds me of an airport: security checks, sliding glass doors and gates, restricted areas, direction signs, people rushing in smart outfits and with briefcases. There is even a kiosk with newspapers, magazines, postcards and the international press (selling however only two daily newspapers from NMS). There is a special entrance for the press32, and along with a cafeteria and restaurant for civil servants and visitors, there is a cafeteria with limited access, where only some civil servants holding a special badge are admitted (I went there once with a Member of a Cabinet). The entire ground floor of Berlaymont is clearly a representative space, a space conceived rather than lived. Accept in cafeteria, rarely does anyone sit on the numerous armchairs that are located beyond the security check, where only civil servants and their visitors are allowed. Berlaymont is a meeting place for the European Commission’s civil servants, particularly during lunch in a local canteen, rather then for meetings with people from outside of EU institutions, which take place in the surrounding restaurants, bars and cafés. Even those from Charlemagne – a neighbouring building of the Commission that also has a big canteen – come for lunch to Berlaymont. There is a whole lunch culture at EU institutions, and whenever I mentioned that I was going for lunch to Berlaymont, people from EU institutions were interested to know who I was meeting there. On the ground floor in the centre of the building, at the point where the arms of the star cross and behind glass doors that one opens with an EC civil servant’s badge, there are eight smart elevators connecting levels from the garage to the top, 13th floor. To be able to reach level nine and above, one has to have a Cabinet Member’s badge. The office space above the ninth floor looks different than that of e.g. the SG located on lower levels. The difference is most visible in the woodenlike panels and paintings hanging on walls, and the fact that the offices are not like 32 I was not able to see the press room because a special press accreditation is required.

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cells with monocoloured grey panels on the walls, as on the lower levels. On the 13th floor of Berlaymont, there is a restaurant for Commissioners and senior bureaucrats for meetings on special occasions (its name is La Convivalite). Opposite to Berlaymont, on the other side of Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat, stands the Justus Lipsius building housing – at the time of my research – the secretariat of the Council. Beside it, there is another building of the Council called “Europe” – currently under construction. I have only been once inside Justus Lipsius, and the EU civil servants sometimes called it “the pink granite fortress”. This local name reflects the accessibility of its venues both physically and politically. The Secretariat’s staff of around 2500 people is, compared to the political responsibilities and prerogatives of the Council, a rather small institution. Justus Lipsius is well known for its huge patio/hall, which one has to pass before entering the part of the building that houses the offices. It is in this hall that Czech artist David Cerny exhibited his installation “Entropa” at the beginning of the Czech Presidency in the EU Council (second half of 2009) – an installation that depicted stereotypical images of member states and caused many discussions in EU-space and around Europe in general. What was mostly discussed was the demand of the Bulgarian government to cover its image, which showed a squat toilet – in many parts of Europe called a “Turkish toilet”. However, the demand to veil it was mocked in EU-space, and the Bulgarians were deemed oversensitive and not able to understand irony (without a flair) – a clearly negative attribute in EU-space (on irony and cultural intimacy see Herzfeld, 2002; Herzfeld, 2004). Right next to Berlaymont is the Charlemagne Building. The internal hierarchies within the Commission are often reflected in the spatial deployment of the buildings and in the interior design of particular DGs. Thus the building that houses the RELEX family is situated close to Rond-Point Schuman/Schumanplein. Charlemagne is now a modern building with a glass façade and dark-grey stone interior that has been profoundly refurbished. Similar to the Parliament building, it more closely resembles the headquarters of a big international company than a spacious and sometimes pompous modern government building – the one I know for example is in the Hague (where they are, on one hand, stately, and, on the other hand, communicate modernity through their (post)modern, progressive design). Here the space is marked by a conservative, though in no way outdated, design: dark stone and shining surfaces, lots of semi-reflective dark glass, spotlights and dark metal details – the interior and exterior demonstrate transparency, seriousness and power – it is modern but without extravagance; it can be compared to Berlin’s Auswärtiges Amt am Werderschen Markt, rather than with the Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz (the latter, in my opinion, has more similarities to government buildings in the nearby The Hague). In the foyer (which is bigger and higher than in most other EU buildings) and corridors, almost everybody is wearing a suit or skirt

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and/or smart jackets in dark colours, and long, classic winter coats (I can sometimes spot an older German senior civil servant through his rather large posture, his loose, classic wool coat, often in olive green – reminiscent of a Bavarian Herrenmantel – or a long, wide overcoat with an indentation, and not one of those modern, slim-fit coats with buttons in the front or other additions). There are exceptions to this monochrome landscape, created by women with their neckerchiefs or more colourful outfits, but in general, the clothes worn here speak about authority and seriousness. Even the person at reception was wearing a suit and not a sweater with the security company’s logo, as is the case in other EC buildings (except Berlaymont). Once you have registered at reception, you have to go through security control like at an airport (because of the competencies of some of the DGs situated here and similar to neighbouring Berlaymont), and after the secretary picks you up, you are then catapulted, in a dark, stony and shiny elevator, to the proper floor of this three-wing, 15-storey building. I have been to this building many times, but I have also seen many offices of civil servants in other DGs. And there are differences, mostly linked with its place on the map of Brussels, the year of a given building’s construction, its interior design and the density of the offices rooms/people working there. For example, the office of a DDG in DG SANCO looks different from the office of a DDG in RELEX in Charlemagne. The former is smaller, has no view on Brussels, and is in an older building than the latter, which is spacious, lit with big windows with a view of Justus Lipsius house (the Council) and the EU Parliament. In the office of a DDG in RELEX, you see a couch, or at least armchairs, around a coffee table; in the office of a DDG in SANCO there is space only for a desk and a small meeting table. However, the rule that power is visible in space is not so obvious, as some DGs also have quite new buildings (e.g. a rather less prestigious DG Education and Culture in the newly-refurbished Madou Tower, where the offices of HoU or DDG are much bigger, lighter and more modern in comparison to those in older buildings). There are many different reasons for where a DG is placed: it is an effect of political bargaining, EC housing policy and negotiations with the Brussels government and Belgian government, as it hosts the Commission in Brussels. While the Schuman area is the centre of the EU District (Justus Lipsius, Berlaymont, Charlemagne, restaurants and bars), where the saturation of white collars and the rush is visible to the naked eye; going several dozen meters down the Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat and passing by Charlemagne, on the right side one comes to the building of the DG AGRI (number 130), Directorate General of the Commission responsible for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and spending of 40 per cent of the EU budget. Though it is the one of the biggest DGs of the Commission (after the DG Translation) with the biggest budget and close to Brussels’ EU centre, its venue is a building from the eighties, with a grey,

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unpolished stone façade and relatively small windows compared to the wide glass and polished stone surfaces of Berlaymont or Charlemagne. One of many entrances to the building, the one for visitors, is on its corner, under a low and stuffy arcade of this square-cut building. Its lobby from the eighties, with a low ceiling with heavy metal and enamel beige panels and dimmed, fluorescent light, creates a bit of an impression that time has stopped here. Only colourful banners, covering whole windows stuck to glass, which show fields, sheaves of straw and breeding animals and with a single inscription “Agriculture” reveal that we are not in the late eighties or early nineties. DG AGRI resides in two further buildings of a similar architecture and character. Once while I waited for an appointment in the lobby, I could see people coming in and out and moving around in the building. The support staff often passed by with carriage and paper, the corridors are narrow and the floor is covered with a well-trodden carpet. Depending on the competencies of a given DG, in order to enter its offices, one would have to go through a security check. This was the case e.g. in Charlemagne, where DG TRADE, DG ELARG and DG RELEX’s (now EEAS) crisis task force was located. The same holds true for DG JLS in Rue Luxembourg/Luxemburgstraat (now DG Home and DG Justice) and Berlaymont. The Commission was constantly concerned about the so-called badge – a civil servant’s ID in the form of a plastic card with a magnetic stripe and photo, most often hanging on a blue band around the civil servant’s neck. One can open gates at the entrance to some modernized or refurbished buildings with this badge. Otherwise, one had to show it to the security guard. An EC civil servant is obliged to carry it in the Commission’s buildings during working hours, and it gives him/her entrance to most EC buildings. The EC badge, as mentioned earlier, was a status symbol in the EU District. Despite the Commission’s multiple warnings that it should not be on display while outside the Commission’s venues, some of its civil servants would wear it on the streets. A badge was often in a plastic seal and hanging on a blue key belt that often had the inscription or logo of a DG or, when in other colours, of the presidency (that revealed either the place of employment or the nationality of the holder, e.g. a civil servant from Ireland having a key belt of the Irish presidency to the Council). Some people would not wear a badge at all, and some of them, when leaving the office, would put it in the front pocket of their shirt, which still made them recognizable as the Commission’s civil servants. As described above, a badge had a clear status symbol among younger civil servants of the Commission during Thursday evenings at Place Lux. Within the European District I distinguish three spatial axes of political power connected to the EU Commission; I see it, as did my informants, as the symbolically most prestigious actor within EU-space in Brussels. One of these axes runs from Schuman along both sides of Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat towards the West.

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This is the area where, during the time of my research, the “heavy” Commission’s DGs were seated (DG TRADE, DG RELEX, and DG COMP). DG MARKT and DG TAXU) were placed in buildings in one of the short streets perpendicular to Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat, called Rue de Spa/Spastraat. Other prestigious DGs in EUspace, such as DG COMP, DG MARKT and DG TAXUD, were seated in Rue Joseph II/Jozef-II Straat, which runs parallel to Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat. The other axis runs from Schuman to the South-East, towards the venues of the EU Parliament, where DG ENER in Rue De Mot/De Motstraat and DG ENTR (now DG GROW) in Breydel house and in Rue Belliard/Belliardstraat 100 were seated. The third axis is along Rue du Luxembourg/Luxemburgstraat, where at one end the Parliament is seated and along which DG HOME, DG JUST, DG TAXUD and on Square de Meeus/De Meeussquare other DGs are housed33. On these three axes and around them (around Schuman, Place du Luxembourg/Luxemburgplein or in their vicinity) most of the DGs of the Commission are seated as well as the core institutions and actors in EU-space (stakeholders and most PermReps). The political life of the EU takes place along those axes and in the EU District in general. The area is deserted in the evenings and during weekends, whereas weekday lunchtime is the only period when you see life on the streets of this district (apart from rushing cars). These axes and their surroundings (directly parallel or perpendicular streets) are the daily routes of EU civil servants. Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat and Rue Belliard/Belliardstraat, two main streets in the European District, are almost like highways, each with four lanes and speeding cars, incredible noise and air pollution. When you see people on these two streets, they are either lost, on their way to their office or heading to a meeting or business lunch towards Berlaymont or the DG Environment, where there are big canteens. There are usually few pedestrians in the European District in general, except in Place du Luxembourg/Luxemburgplein and Rue du Luxembourg/Luxemburgstraat, which connect the Trône/Troon metro station and the European Parliament or the Schuman area, where there are small, fast food bars and restaurants. On parallel and perpendicular streets along these axes, there are also bars and cafés, where EU civil servants have their lunches or where they fetch their takeaway sandwiches. Lunchtime causes sudden movement on the streets of the EU District, as people head to business meetings, and meetings with friends and acquaintances. I never took part in any of these business lunches, but I knew they were taking place usually somewhere within this area (people would talk about it). I saw my interviewees in bars and restaurants, but also while talking and walking on the streets in this area. Sometimes, from gestures and serious, concentrated faces, I 33 Some of the Commission’s DGs were seated outside the EU District in an office area called Geneve (in rue Geneve) and in the so-called Beaulieu (av. de Beaulieu) office area: e.g. DG ECFIN, DG ENV and now DG CLIMA.

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could sense these were important conversations. There is a whole lunch culture within EU institutions, such as when you meet people from within EU institutions in order to exchange information (in higher level posts) or eat with your friends in your own language (in lower level posts). Thus, I single out these axes of power due not only to the institutional and political power involved, but also due to the character of the interactions taking place within and along these axes. Last but not least – these were the axes that I had to move along as an actor in the field, as an ethnographer following the life of EU civil servants and somehow, in the end, coproducing this EU-space. In the centre of EU-space, in the Schuman area, there are numerous bars, cafés and restaurants that have a different status to those on Place Lux. One of them is La Fontaine, on the corner of Rue Archimede/Archimedesstraat and Rue Stevin/ Stevinstraat. From its windows one can see the Berlaymont and observe the busy traffic on the corner of Rue Archimede/Archimedesstraat and Rue Stevin/ Stevinstraat. Next to La Fontaine is the popular Irish pub Hairy Canary, and for reasons that I was not able to determine, Irish pubs in this area are very popular among EC civil servants. One of my interviewees from Ireland to each of my questions about her pastime activities would answer that she spends time at Kitty O’Shea’s – another Irish pub in one of the side streets of Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat next to Berlaymont34. However, these places are visited by different people than those on Place Lux. My Irish AST interviewee with lengthy experience in EU Brussels is only one example. It is the proximity to the Council (Justus Lipsius), Berlaymont, Charlemagne and other Commission DGs that is significant here and determines the level of prestige – people from these buildings would come to the abovementioned places for a drink or dinner after work. This is also the place where I interviewed a senior German civil servant working in the Secretariat of the Council and holding one of the top positions in its hierarchy. He has spent over 30 years in Brussels and gave the impression (in the conversation he was actually very keen on giving me this impression) that he knew every corner of both EU institutions and the city. We set up a meeting in La Fontaine during the lunch hour – at his suggestion. The place’s interior was a mixture of dark wood and shiny metal fittings. There were leather armchairs and leather upholstery on the chairs; there were dark wood tables and halogen lamps inside. This was not a worn out dark wood like that in the Irish pub on Place Lux, but new, polished, shiny hardwood. The waitress had a white, well-ironed apron, and as it was the lunch hour, there was cutlery on each table. I arrived to the meeting earlier, as I wanted to avoid the usual situation when I hurry and show up still engaged with the thought about whether I was late this time or not. And I must admit that I knew I could not 34 The name Kitty O’Shea’s made its way to a wider public after J.M. Barroso met there over a beer with charity musician Bob Geldof on March 18th, 2009.

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be late – this was one of my gatekeepers and a person high up in the Council’s administrative hierarchy. I sat down at one of the tables by the window, and behind me two men in suits were sitting opposite each other. What drew my attention was that one was explaining something eagerly to the other with a serious face. The place, despite the lunch hour, was quite empty. I did not have a recorder, only my A4 notebook. Just a few minutes after I sat down at the table, not yet having managed to order anything, my interview partner arrived. He was a tall man in a graphite jacket, white shirt, black trousers and no tie. Apparently the waitress knew him, and greeted him in a friendly manner. I was a bit surprised: his outfit was not the newest or chicest. He was smiling and seemed relaxed: he sat at the table with his legs crossed on one side and his arms spread on the arms of the chair. Unlike one of the Polish Directors at the Commission (who was about the same age and same level) he asked me questions about exactly where I was from and how long I was going to stay in Brussels – he showed interest. I could see that he was relaxed, but I also sensed his habit of being the one to determine the topic of conversation, of how long he would speak and about what. He gave me dozens of tips about where to go and where Germans meet, whom to contact and how, what topics I could address. What he said about newcomers to the EU was rather negative, with condescending sympathy. He claimed that all enlargements brought more or less the same outcomes: the newcomers would underscore their uniqueness, want to create a revolution in the EU’s institutions, and claim that their functioning needed to be improved, but after some time this would end up achieving nothing – as allegedly was the case with the Scandinavians. He called it “newcomers’ syndrome”. One other time, on the opposite side of the street, in another bar called Le Franklin I met one of the Polish junior AD civil servants in his early thirties. This place had a lively crowd that was a mixture of white, middle-aged (in their fifties and sixties) Bruxellois from the poorer side of St.Josse/St.Joost, spending time over a beer and playing darts. I was dressed in my jeans and a shirt, but without a jacket, and my interview partner was in a suit as he was coming directly from the office. I actually suggested we meet in Le Fontaine, but he convinced me (somewhat to my surprise) to meet in Le Franklin – a place I had never been before. Did he not dare to go to La Fontaine? Another time on the other end of Rue Franklin/Franklinstraat, at the back of Charlemagne building, I met a German senior civil servant from DG AGRI for an interview in the Old Hack Pub. This place’s interior was rather small and cosy with wooden tables squeezed next to each other and a small bar. It seemed that people met here for a beer and dinner after work. The customers were in their mid-forties and up, smartly dressed, laughing and chatting, they looked more serious than those youngsters at Place Lux, although it was clearly these were afterwork meetings and they were relaxed.

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In the area of Rond-Point Schuman these popular Irish pubs organize pub quizzes. I went to such a pub quiz several times, and it was obviously a form of after-work entertainment during the week (for civil servants or people working in EU-space). These usually took place on Tuesdays and, in the end, were a more sophisticated and calmer (one or two beers instead of drinks and/or heavy drinking in general) equivalent of Place Lux Thursday for more established (people more experienced in EU-space – this was my impression) and older civil servants. From the patrons’ outfits, I could see that some of the participants came straight from the office, some, such as my friends, went home to have dinner and then came out again to the European District (I once went to a pub quiz in Place Flagey/Flageyplein in Ixelles/Elsene) to one of these Irish pubs. I was told that there are people who constantly and regularly come to this or that pub quiz and teams, always comprised of the same people/friends, would take part. The composition of a team was crucial, as there were questions ranging from popular culture to maths and physics. In a pub quiz you have to show your knowledge and wit, but you can also compare it with others. Thus, this activity was a more sophisticated, cultivated and middle-class practice of status comparison than the one that took place in Place Lux. General knowledge (in German it is called Allgemeinbildung) on as many topics as possible was until recently an entry criteria into the EU civil service (checked during a concour). It is seen as valuable and is valued in EU-space. Thus, the more questions you can answer during a pub quiz, the higher your status. The competition was always strong and there was always a large number of teams (up to 15). English native speakers were valued as teammates because questions were read in sometimes incomprehensible Irish English. I was happy to join these pub quizzes, as I usually had nothing to do in the evenings during the week. My field diary notes, however: This is such middle-class entertainment, when you have the opportunity to compare the knowledge and clarity of thought (in Polish inteligencja) of others. It is an occasion to compare statuses based on knowledge and skills that are exactly so precious in this environment. Plus you can always meet someone and talk in between – about life but often about work, as your teammates often work with you. Or you can show yourself as a good companion and a funny person – someone to be liked […]

The blurred lines between work and nonwork are visible again. Yet, there is a clear difference between such activity compared to Place Lux Thursdays, where it was more outlook, money and consumption that marked your status. Here belonging was marked by competition based on knowledge and skills, cleverness and reflex – virtues worshiped by the middle class (Willis, 1983).

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But apart from these pubs, bars, lunch-bars and restaurants, the space around Schuman was produced by civil servants in their offices, in the offices of representatives of big industry either from within the EU or from third countries, and in the offices of the biggest PR agencies. These remained mostly unpenetrated by me. The Schuman area has a more professional, more serious and representative status than Place Lux. It is here where senior and older civil servants, those more experienced in EU-space, would go out for a drink after work or for a (business) lunch. It is an area populated by civil servants who are more settled in Brussels, of people working in more prestigious DGs of the Commission, and simultaneously more relaxed and less inclined to show off their status through consumption. Through their more self-distanced outlook and relaxed body gestures, they emanated more experience and social grace than the young people in Place Lux (Bourdieu, 2010). In EU-space the gradation of power is marked by the accessibility of different areas, both in terms of security measures and social accessibility. However, the areas of pastime, dwelling and work are closely connected, and the symbolical boundaries dividing them are very thin and often unclearly marked, as the Place Lux example shows. These spaces are produced by European Union civil servants joined by their common employer, though differences in hierarchy are visible in the architecture and design, though not particularly in spatial distances, as differences can be concentrated in a small physical space. Thus, the spaces where EU civil servants live and work are cross-cut by many different symbolic boundaries: a restaurant on one side of the street may have a completely different status to the one opposite, one bar might be crowded, whereas the one next door is either empty or occupied by a distinctive clientele. While the divisions within the European District generally reflect generational and formal hierarchical divisions, in the differences between place of residence, divisions in economical capital are visible that are often connected to origin (OMS/NMS) and, again, positions in the formal hierarchy. Despite these class divisions, which are similar to the differences described by Bourdieu between bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie (2010), EU-space is a space of the white, European middle class, sharing more or less similar values and lifestyles, where the NMS have the status of the petit bourgeoisie and live in less prestigious districts. Differences in the production of space were marked both by age and experience in EU-space, and by nationality, as a form of capital that was conjoined with one’s symbolic and material status – this last issue I will discuss in the chapter on the Euroclass. In EU-space you do not see many people of colour in suits and skirt suits, but only dressed as service staff. Whites working in EU-space, one has the impression, are all certain about what “European values” are: tolerance, equality, human rights,

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social liberal, rather than conservative liberal. EU-space is produced and lived separately from the local Belgian and Brussels context; EU civil servants spend their time in such places as Aspria and live in calm, sleepy suburban districts, sending their kids to European schools, commuting back and forth to the EU District and to the airport. Only rarely do they produce the social space of Brussels, usually only taking advantage of the infrastructure, of the high-culture settings (Opera in Bozar, museums), that the city has to offer and praising its connection to London, Amsterdam, Paris and the size of the Brussels Zavantem Airport and the number of connections it offers. They rarely engage in the political and local social life of the Bruxellois/es in ways other then consumption. In EU-space there are divisions between young and old civil servants, between those with long years of experience in service (living in both Woluwes) and those who were inexperienced, both from old and new member states living in Ixelles/Elsene and Etterbeek. But as I will show below, EU-space is also produced in differences between OMS and NMS people, between those belonging to Euroclass and those who do not. These differences are particularly visible in the place of residence. In EU-space places are marking class and mark one’s place in the local hierarchy (that is very often connected to formal hierarchy within the apparatus). Places to live and for use in the context of one’s everyday life, pastimes and professional life, construct bodies that are also placed in the hierarchy (conferences, brunches, lunches, cocktails, events, etc.). Places and bodies are connected in EUspace; they have to be congruent, similar to the division that Bourdieu describes: In contrast to ‘bourgeois’ theatre, the opera or exhibitions (not to mention premieres and gala nights), which are the occasion or pretext for social ceremonies enabling a select audience to demonstrate and experience its membership of high society in obedience to the integrating and distinguishing rhythms of the ‘society’ calendar, the art museum admits anyone (who has the necessary cultural capital) at any moment, without any constraints as regards dress, thus providing none of the social gratifications associated with great ‘social’ occasions. (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 269)

This is the reason why some places were crowded in Place Lux and others empty, why for those dealing with EU external policies it is important to go to the GMF conference, and why some would rather go out in the Schuman area after work than around Place Lux. Thus, the inscribed social order is becoming visible in the spatial settings, in practices and bodies in particular places. Places are important insofar as they indicate your class, ambitions and place in networks, and how you manage these networks. Places shape bodies, the kind of bodies you see in these places.

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W HAT

IS

EU- SPACE ?

To describe the social and spatial settings of EU institutions and the practices of people working for the EU and surrounding institutions (lobbies, PermReps, etc.), to be able to approach and describe ethnographically the actors who are engaged in the political processes of “European integration” and to describe their actions, their everyday, private life, I coined the term EU-space. This concept, inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s production of space and Pierre Bourdieu’s field concept, points to the processual character of the production of space and the cultural hierarchies within it, to the dynamic and reciprocal relation between space, the social and the individual. EU-space, similar to Bourdieu’s field, has its physical space; there are certain forms of capital and stakes in the struggle in this space, and it presumes the existence of a legitimate habitus that involves legitimate practices that provide a ticket to climb the prestige ladder. EU-space is racially and in terms of class quite homogenous, but symbolic hierarchies and divisions are dense and traceable only in small details, which produce the classifications and differentiations within it in terms of consumption and knowledge (or, according to Bourdieu, economic and cultural capital, or both at the same time). What is crucial in the concept of EUspace is its constant cultural reproduction, which is particularly visible in the contested cultural, symbolic boundaries within it, on the fringes of this space, and in the contested cultural powers shaping “Europe” within this space. The cultural boundaries are produced in the application of legitimate symbols, behaviours and discourses in this European space, and these, as I show below, are constantly being challenged. These cultural struggles on inner and outer boundaries performed in everyday life within EU-space are struggles over the meaning of Europe and modernity, over what and who is really European and modern in EU Europe in Brussels. Spaces and places make struggles over prestige and power, over the limits within it and beyond it more tangible. EU-space enables also to show how different registers and orders are applied as capital and strategy (place of dwelling, places of pastime activities, forms of national representation and class performance, network/social capital, knowledge of law and procedure, place in the formal hierarchy) by individuals in the struggle. This space is also produced by legal frames and the capital they provide. It is produced in the legislative rhythm and practices surrounding it, like networking; they coconstruct legitimate cultural power and establish cultural and social spaces, with their respective rules and bureaucratic rhythms. EU-space and its production in struggles enables to show how fine class distinctions, representations of nationality, and modernity and configurations of these are produced in spatial settings, how they produce this EU-space and how this space, in turn, influences the multilayered and conjoined process of class reproduction, and representations of nationality and modernity. This space is also

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produced in walking routes and the intersection of space and the everyday life(styles) of the EU Commission’s civil servants. One’s presence in certain places is marked by belonging to networks, and belonging to networks assumes possession of legal and expert knowledge and, consequently, “efficiency” that is so valued in EU-space. These are the places and spaces of professional life, together with their prestige and political meaning in big politics (conferences, meetings, summits, but also brunches, lunches, cocktails, etc.), but there are also places and spaces of everyday life outside of office corridors, places for pastime activities such as Aspria, and places of dwelling. Places and bodies (bodily hexis) are inevitably and irresolvably connected (Lefebvre & Nicholson-Smith, 2007), and these two categories have to be congruent (Bourdieu, 2010) if one wants to be an actor and a fully participating subject in this space. Places shape bodies in EU-space, but bodies in their practices also shape places, they determine strategies and reveal the subject’s ambitions and social structure. The blurred divisions within EU-space in no way mean a normative (on the level of subjects) and symbolic chaos, and that phenomena and things (materiality) from public and work life are indistinguishable in private life. Moreover, the symbols and norms from a wider context outside of EU-space (its Brussels surroundings and nation-state contexts) are relevant in it and other ways around – EU-space equips people with capital that is applicable elsewhere (e.g. prestige of being an EU Commission’s civil servant). The struggle shows the blurred boundaries between EU institutions (the Commission, the Parliament and the Council) and other political actors in Brussels (lobbies and NGOs, PermReps), as well as between professional/public and private life. These blurred boundaries are also between European and national cultural representations, but such ambiguity is managed and manipulated in order to gain or retain cultural power. However, within it, forms of capital from professional life is exchangeable and applicable as capital in private life, and that from private life has a bearing on one’s professional career in EU institutions. Divisions between public and private, in and out of EUspace, persist; however, they are bound in a reciprocal reaction and have an impact on power setting within EU-space, and they all have an impact on the struggles within EU-space. As Latour would put it, while the production of pure modern divisions into discourses of nature, society and a crossed-out God is very much public and constant (Latour, 1993), hybridization in EU-space persists and is being turned away from the public gaze. EU-space points to the distinctiveness of the practices, rules and forms of capital within it and to the distinctiveness of its material and physical space, not only as a stage for or background to interactions, but also as part of those interactions, reflecting them and influencing them (see also Soja, 2000). EU-space has its own area, its own binding rules, and there are stakes and positions within it.

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However, what I am particularly focused on here, are forms of capital and actor’s abilities to manage, use and apply capital in the struggle for prestige and power. My aim is to scrutinize the process for producing cultural boundaries within this space and around this space, and how the struggle over these boundaries is played out, and when and what capital is applied. Taking Poles in EU-space as an example35, I will depict the processes used in the production of cultural boundaries. Hence, it is not my aim to show what the cultural processes are in EU-space in general, but rather how the “system” had reacted to the coming of people from NMS. “The Polish case” will help me to show how striving for cultural recognition influences the reproduction of cultural status and of the rules and norms established by the OMS. In EU-space, spaces and places are marked by prestige and power, and also have a national meaning (as some districts of Brussels are nationally coded). There are more national places and more European places (e.g. the bars around Schuman) in EU-space. Thus, EU-space is produced in sub-national spaces (Polish EU church), in “socialities” and in networking, where nationality, national trivialities and belonging are reproduced. The cultural structure of EU-space, its social and cultural design, illustrates that both European and national are not contradictive; they are strategies, particularly for those wanting to become fully acknowledge actors in the field, while presence in both European and national places either eases or hinders social, cultural and formal advancement. Moreover, everyday national representations are managed as capital (or a burden) along with other (class) criteria in order to gain higher social and formal positions. EU-space is an inter-national space that is more national than transnational. A. Ong defines transnational as follows: “I view transnationalism not in terms of unstructured flows but in terms of the tensions between movements and social orders” (1999, p. 6), where Trans denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something.

Besides

suggesting new relations between nation-states and capital,

transnationality also alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behaviour and imaginations that are incited, enabled and regulated by the changing logics of states and capitalism. […] I am concerned with transnaitonality – or the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space – which has been intensified under late capitalism. (Ong, 1999, p. 4)

In EU-space I have also observed tensions between movements and social orders, but as I will show, there was little movement through spaces (outside of EU-space), no “changing nature of something” but rather a reproduction of order. I also argue 35 Poland is the biggest NMS and has filled 39% of the newly established positions for NMS within the EU apparatus.

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that this “transnational, transactional and transgressive” order, rather than clarifying the picture, hinders the ability to see how this space is constructed and determined nationally. As I show below, EU civil servants are surprisingly (or not) parochial in their practices, in the imaginations and desires that shape their European living in Brussels. Despite their social and cultural status, despite their positioning in an international and multicultural context, their national representation is rather predictable, stereotypical and is reproduced in accordance with the rules of EUspace. The Europe that they reproduce is rather unquestioned, recentred (Conrad, Randeria, & Römhild, 2013) and very much placed in their social and physical context of the bourgeoisie EU-space in Brussels. Such an image of Europe can be explained by the inability of some representatives of the most powerful countries in the EU to cope with and absorb knowledge about countries that have been traditionally seen as being not “as modern” or “as European”. It reveals some kind of epistemological, intellectual and cultural resistance in the face of a growing diversity that is allegedly so welcomed among EU civil servants. These tendencies are seen by many scholars as a heritage of the colonial and imperial era intrinsic to modern Europe (Gilroy, 2005, 2007; Herzfeld, 2002, 2016; Stoler, 2013a; Stoler & Cooper, 1997). Such ignorance leads to stereotypical and monolithic accounts of the present and past, simultaneously enhancing the parochialism of the powerful and the subjugation of the crypto-colonies (Herzfeld, 2002). I will show how such processes and dynamics are still very much alive “At the Heart of the Union” (Nugent, 2002), and how the limits set out in the colonial era are being reenacted and reproduced. EU-space is cosmopolitan and transnational in the sense that there are different logics coming into it and the different (national) sub-spaces (networks and socialities) existing within it challenge the assumption and self-understanding of what Europe in this space is, but in this challenging, a tacit and imperial meaning of Europe is reinforced. However, while such an understanding of EU-space drifts away from the idea of nation-state and undermines its relevance, I will show that in the production of EU-space, in the everyday life of EU civil servants, the state – particularly in its national representation – is still a very important factor. So while the strategies and actions undertaken by subjects in this space might be called transnational, as they manoeuvre and gather different forms of capital beyond national borders and nationally perceived cultures (visible in classifications and class distinctions) in order to gain prestige and power (Ong, 1999), I claim that EUspace is an inter-national European space structured and produced by nationally positioned and imagined subjects who are, depending on what they represent (modern/nonmodern national culture), placed on a nationally structured global hierarchy of value within EU-Europe (Herzfeld, 2002, 2004) and on a class scale within EU-space in Brussels (Bourdieu, 2010).

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EU-space came into being as a consequence of historical and political processes, successive treaties that formed the current acquis communautaire – the legal body of the European Union. These treaties, set out by the founding states, established Brussels as the main seat of the Council and the EC and EU Commission (the Merger Treaty in 1967 and afterwards, the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, establishing the European Union), and determine the structure, competencies and formal processes within and between EU institutions and within EU-space in general, as they are what primarily define both the forms and institutional proceedings in the decision-making and political process in the European Union. These treaties, in the form of acquis, were accepted by the candidate countries and had to be implemented by them. Treaties set out the legal frames for actors’ actions in EU-space: their provisions determine not only the capital and capacities of individuals (which are determined by one’s place within the formal hierarchy and by the competencies of the institution or DG one works at) and the competencies of institutional actors in general, but also lay down the procedures that inform the strategies of individuals and institutions. EU law, its formal structures, existing law, procedures and regulations, is constantly present in everyday life within EU institution as a structuring element and as structurized capital (e. g. in the number of votes in the Council based on the size of the country), either in the competencies of a given institution or, in the case of individuals, in the form of knowledge about (existing) EU law (for example, in one of the EU policies) and competencies prescribed to a formal position in a given EU institution. Treaties and the acquis communautaire determine how the decision-making process takes place within three core institutions36: the Council and its Secretariat General, the EU Parliament and the EU Commission. These institutions are formally autonomous political actors, but I argue that given the complex formal and informal decision-making process in the EU, one cannot draw a clear line between those institutional actors, as they politically interact in the pursuit of many different, at times congruent, other times contradictory interests (Kohler-Koch & Eising, 2002). Likewise, subjects within these institutions also pursue different personal aims, drawing on many different forms of capital. These applications show how they are able to apply 36 I use this term because these are the institutions that take part in so-called co-decision (a formal decision-making process in which the Council and the Parliament, with the Commission in an advisory role, negotiate over the form and content of future directives or any other law). Co-decision is, after the Lisbon Treaty, the most common decisionmaking procedure in the EU. I do not take the European Court of Justice (ECJ) into account as a “core institution” because ECJ does not take any part in “normal”, day-today decision-making processes, but forms the acquis communautaire through its verdicts. It also has its seat in Luxembourg and therefore is not part of what I call here EU-space, even though it is one of the main EU institutions producing EU law.

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capital that overrides formal/institutional and cultural boundaries. However, the capital and rules in the struggle that I am scrutinizing are in these institutions similar due to similarities in their legal and formal settings (Staff Regulations applying to all staff of the EU institutions) and similarities in the way different forms of capital are applied in the struggle over position in the local hierarchy – yet another factor constructing EU-space and diminishing the formal boundaries and competency limits between EU institutions. Moreover, the practices and actions of EU civil servants and other actors in EU-space cause the boundaries between them and between other political and social actors within EU-space to be very difficult to draw in cultural terms, because they engage in a similar struggle in EU-space: a struggle for cultural superiority that helps to legitimize formal positions and achieve political aims. In this struggle, conglomerates of different forms of capital are used in the pursuit of prestige and power, but they reveal a common hierarchy of cultures (Herzfeld, 2002, 2004, 2016). EU-space attracts ideas, symbols and power that are socially and culturally applicable and valid within it, and thus works like a magnetic field. It pulls closer people and ideas that produce powerful ideas and symbols as an effect of processes taking place within it, first in the form of ready-to-apply policies (directives and Programmes of the EU) and second through the legal logic of EU governance: execution of EU law is taking place through member states’ institutions. This EUspace pulls new people and symbols into it (being in EU-space itself is already prestigious), into a space where private is mixed with public (and the other way around), and where the struggle over prestige is constant. This, in turn, causes more separation and exclusivity to and from the outside world, from EU-space’s immediate context of Brussels. Thus, EU-space may also resemble Ong and Collier’s assemblage (2005), because there are many overlapping and intersecting logics that shape this space and determine the actions of the people within it. However, there is one general and common rule in EU-space. This is the global hierarchy of value, analogous to the Weberian “specific and peculiar rationalism” specific to “Western civilization”, which Ong and Collier mention (2005, p. 10) as governing the space of assemblage. This global hierarchy of value, as Herzfeld writes, “a less direct but ostensibly more liberal assumption that some ways of doing things are simply more decent or more useful then others” (Herzfeld, 2004, p. 3) emerges in this space either as a representation of the rational and modern in the political process, or in the ways practices are enacted according to the aesthetics of bureaucratic practice in the professional and middle-class aesthetics in everyday life spaces of EU civil servants. In fact, EU-space, like any other distinctive cultural space, is in many aspects ruled by rituals and hierarchy, creating its own rules or recontextualizing them to meet the local needs for power reproduction. There is however one, hegemonic ideology of modernity, European modernity (Herzfeld,

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2002), which structures this space and represents what is seen by Ong and Collier as “the global” in the assemblage (Ong & Collier, 2005). In assemblage, reflexive practices are crucial, and in EU-space they emerge as the reflexive management of forms of capital: management of national stereotypes, class and nationality performance in the face of the global hierarchy. This management aims at belonging to the Euroclass. EU-space is distinct from its direct surroundings – Brussels – not only because of the symbolic and economic distinctive status of EU civil servants and struggles focused on cultural and formal hierarchy, but also because a large part of the city infrastructure is directed towards expats and EU civil servants. Brussels sees and markets itself as the capital of Europe. Restaurants, bars, transportation (with one of the biggest airports in Europe in Zaventem and the high speed Eurostar train connecting Brussels with Paris and London), public institutions (e.g. the BrusselsEurope Liaison Office run by the government of the Brussels Region; schools and universities with international curricula), fitness clubs such as Aspria, described above, and even metro cars named after European capitals show the selfrepresentation of Brussels as Europe’s centre. This inter-national and European character of the city is hyphenated by the shared experience of coming and going of thousands of people who fly in for a day or two to negotiate, or – like my DutchBritish friends – choose Brussels as a stopover in their career. Thus, this experience of entering EU-space and leaving it, of buying or renting a house or flat, that comes along with a confrontation with the rather harsh realities of the local real-estate market, of protecting oneself against threats like robbery and crime, which so many talk about in EU-space – it all results in the rather distinctive character of this space and of the feeling people share within it. EU-space is produced on the logistic and spatial tissue of the city of Brussels and Belgium, but the constant mocking and complaining about Belgian services and living conditions only hyphenate the barriers produced between the world of EU bureaucrats and its immediate surroundings (a recent line of conflict being air traffic noise in East Brussels and language conflicts in communes on its Eastern fringes). According to a recent survey published by a popular webpage in EU-space, TheEUobserver.com, the expats in Brussels have few Belgian friends, think that Brussels is “dirty” and plan to leave it once their contract is over (Rettman, 2013). These local and everyday factors all reinforce the division between EU-space and the outside world and foster the community and feeling of belonging felt by the actors within EU-space. The boundaries between EU-space and its wider political context are porous (e.g. consultations and negotiations with third countries and with member states’ capitals), and the immediate spatial context of Brussels is the infrastructural and material tissue in the production of EU-space, but in everyday life the boundary between EU-space and its immediate surroundings – Brussels and Bruxellois/es – is

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clearly produced in order to strengthen the symbolic cohesion of actors within EUspace. Being an actor in EU-space automatically positions these actors in a category opposed to mortals: the Belgians and nonwhite migrants living in Brussels, and opposed to national civil servants (in PermReps or bureaucrats flying in from member states’ capitals). Firm boundaries separating EU-space from the outside world have been mentioned by Shore in his study of the European Commission (2000). Long working hours, high wages and the EU tax (when it comes to EU civil servants), a privileged social and cultural status, and their hermetic social life: belonging to the same sport clubs, (national) churches, living in the same districts, sending kids to so-called European schools – all of these factors, although they refer only to people working in EU related institutions, are intrinsic to EU-space in general, to all political actors in EU-space. They contribute to a stiffening of the social boundaries between EU-space and the outside world, particularly the context of Brussels. They also contribute to the self-reproduction of those outer limits of EU-space, as people in EU-space are consumed with themselves and their struggles, and thus do not have time for outsiders or to cope with a normal life37. As I show below, this EU-Europe in Brussels is built on very localized and in fact racist criteria (as whites are in the overwhelming majority – skin colour matters here) and show imperial genealogies beyond skin colour (I develop this issue further). Simultaneously, this EU-space is characterized by cultural shortsightedness and shared feelings of superiority of the actors within. A non-middleclass (and nonwhite) social background in Brussels forms a racial and class surface for the reinforcement of the cultural superiority of the people working in the EU bubble, while towards the white Belgian middle class, it is produced by the constant resentment and alleged hostility of Belgians. EU civil servants are placed locally, situated locally in Brussels; their most relevant capital is determined by the logic of EU-space, and they are also strongly attached to their professional organization and position. Although they are allegedly dealing with European issues, their way of acting is very local, focused and dependent on locally relevant capital, most of which is locally defined within EU-space. Finally, distinctions are also achieved through the activities they, the people in EU-space, are engaged in – namely the development of European policy (that reinforce the EU-space’s status, which sucks 37 What I mean here is that people working at the EU institutions and in the EU-space are to a much greater extent engaged in their work, than people in other contexts. In “normal life”, while engaging in different communities and activities, we tend to play many different roles in our lives. In the EU-space it is most of all the role of being a civil servant (or other subject having a particular position within this field) – the EU-space is a totalizing space. And this fact structures practices: what, where and with whom one spends their pastime, where one lives and how – particularly if one wants to make career. One remains a civil servant all the time.

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people in) – this forms their cultural/symbolic prestige played out most of all towards their fellow compatriots. Then production of EU-space shows that its boundaries are porous from the inside, but are firm from the outside. It is difficult to enter EU-space (through a concour or politics). The outer world is only indirectly involved in and influences the production of EU-space in Brussels, e.g. political decisions in member states’ capitals influence negotiations in Brussels. They may also produce national stereotypes valid in EU-space. Knowledge produced in distant places, such as expert knowledge produced at universities and research institutions – as I will show further on – coshape this space and influence the capital, representations and power relations within it. However, the ground-breaking study of Cris Shore (2000), while focusing on EU institutions and EU bureaucrats, fails to recognize these struggles within the field of EU power, struggles over cultural and formal hierarchy within the EU apparatus that produces the cultural and spatial EU-space and the limits within it. Shore also fails to take into account the cultural production of places and spaces, the social structure of the EU bureaucracy, the influence of other political and social actors, and the reciprocal relations between EU civil servants and people working in PermReps, NGOs and different kinds of lobbies that are present in Brussels and part of the political process. My research shows that these relations have their bearings on the struggle inside EU institutions and thus on the practices, strategies and everyday life of actors in EU-space, and indirectly on decisionmaking processes within EU institutions. The term EU-space allows for an understanding of the unwritten, cultural rules, a grasping of the strategies of individuals and the detection of circulating capital and their forms that are legitimate in EU institutions and between EU institutions and lobbies, PermReps and NGOs (e.g. expert knowledge). Concomitantly, it expands the ethnographic gaze on the EU civil servant’s everyday life outside their direct professional context because it embraces people and their actions and other political actors in Brussels, rather than solely focusing on EU institutions (Kuus, 2015). What I would like to show is that, even though the boundaries within EU-space are blurred, there is a struggle over prestige, with specific rules and cultural boundaries that have long roots in the existence of the nation-state and their histories, most of all the colonial and postcolonial heritage of some of the member states that reproduce imperial power and class divisions based on a certain idea of modernity and its cultural/social application (Latour, 1993). These boundaries are of a cultural nature and they structure this space.

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Has EU-space ever been European and modern? Despite the ideal-typical, modern and institutional divisions between public-private, collective-individual, subject-object, rational, democratic (and European), secular, vs. irrational and nondemocratic that we know either from our own experience of living in EU Europe or from an implicit understanding of what modernity is (Latour, 1993), the term EU-space is about blurred boundaries between the established dualities of public space and private life. This concept thus makes it possible to show how individuals transgress these dualities within this space and render this EU-space not as modern as is claimed to the outside world. In what follows, I will show that the practices of people working at EU institutions prove these dualities to be false, as they draw their symbolic capital from both public and private spheres both within EU-space and from the outside world, simultaneously constantly struggling over the different types of boundaries and hierarchies within EU-space: over what and who is European and modern, and over what constitutes a legitimate discourse and lifestyle. This capital is applied in the struggle over position in the formal hierarchy of the EU institutions, and in a parallel struggle over cultural and social belonging within EU-space. Both these struggles often involve a redefinition of European and national. There is a large body of anthropological research on how expansion of Western modernity, connected with capitalism has been an implicit and explicit driving force for development and developmental aid and Europe, both in the so-called Third World (Escobar, 2012; Ferguson, 1999), and in Europe and its “peripheries” (Argyrou, 1996; Herzfeld, 2004) in the postsocialist East (Sampson, 1996), including post-EU-enlargement Europe (Keinz, 2008; Vonderau, 2010). What this research has in common is its critical view of the idea of a European metanarrative of modernity, of this “white mythology” (Ferguson, 1999, p. 17) and its contestation, which has been fruitfully developed and discussed in postcolonial studies and postcolonial theory (Conrad et al., 2013; Loomba, Kaul, Bunzl, Burton, & Esty, 2005; Stoler, 2013a). This modern narrative, despite all claims about postmodern “liquid times” (Bauman, 2007) and provocative claims that “we have never been modern” (Latour, 1993), is still powerful and reinstates Eurocentric modernity. I show how this narrative is correlative of Europe, the real Europe, in EU-space. I draw on Latour’s concept of the modernity of the moderns (Latour, 1993) and postcolonial theory to show how Europe and modernity in EU-space (and diluted Western nationalities in this modernity) is reestablished, and how strikingly it resembles the kind of up-to-date colonial empire in its use of soft power. This modern, as Latour would say, invincible (1993) empire emerges in EUspace through the reproduction of a rhetoric of seeming inclusion that relies on imperial practices of differentiation and exclusion (Cooper & Stoler, 1997; Stoler,

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2008, 2013a), and the open purification of discourses about nature, society and a crossed-out God, and their concealed blending (Latour, 1993). Such a European and modern empire and its debris (Stoler, 2013a) is producing class differences in EUspace that become visible once allegedly “shared European values” and shared aesthetic and ethical views of the “old Europe” are challenged. However, these views mark a belonging to a class of people that see themselves as real Europeans – I call them the Euroclass. In his book We Have Never Been Modern (1993) Latour remarks that modernity was born in the Enlightenment with the separation of humanity and nonhumanity, with the division of the entities of society and nature, and, as he put it, with the “crossing out of God”. He writes: “Modernity arises first from the conjoined creation of those three entities, and then from the masking of the conjoined birth and the separate treatment of the three communities while, underneath, hybrids [of these entities] continue to multiply as an effect of this separate treatment.” (ibid., p. 13) He claims that this double division: the visible purification of divisions between entities and their concealed hybridization, plus the separation of the entities of nature, science and God, remain constitutional for modernity. The separation of nature and science, from the mid-seventeenth century on, started to define what and who is human and nonhuman, and to determine properties and relations, abilities and groupings (ibid., p. 15), while, as he claims, they were concomitantly blended in a concealed way. Following the same process, the crossed-out God was removed from dualistic social/natural construct, but was concomitantly left presentable and usable by individuals. Latour writes: “No one is truly modern who does not agree to keep God from interfering with Natural Law, as well as with the laws of the Republic.” (ibid., p. 33) These three entities: of nature discovered by science, society and the republic constructed by humans and a crossed-out God – are in modernity meticulously separated from each other. As he shows, scientific discourse affirms nature as nonconstructed by humans and transcendent, and political discourse affirms society as constructed, immanent and essential, and “clean” of other discourses (about God and nature). However, he also remarks that these modern separate entities reinforce each other, although they are contradictory mutually and internally, in what he calls hybridization: the discourse of transcendent nature produces nature artificially/scientifically in a laboratory, and simultaneously claims that nature is there to discover. The discourse of immanent society claims it is constructed by free subjects, but simultaneously reigned in by the Leviathan, which holds his sword above it and controls it. What stabilizes this duality is the constant separation of mixtures (hybrids) between these two discourses in the work of purification – purification of these three categories and discourses (nature, society, crossed-out God) that is unconcealed and modern. What is also essential for the constitution of

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modernity, as Latour writes, is that it renders invisible, unthinkable and unrepresentable the work of mediation between the three entities, and that it produces, simultaneously, what he calls “hybrids” in a concealed way. While moderns are consumed with the work of purification of the three entities, they simultaneously produce hybrids without admitting it. Latour writes: “The moderns think they have succeeded in such an expansion only because they have carefully separated Nature and Society (and bracketed God), whereas they have succeeded only because they have mixed together much greater masses of humans and nonhumans, without bracketing anything and without ruling out any combination.” (ibid., p. 41) Moreover, Latour claims that the guarantees of modernity (separation of the natural and social world, plus the separation of the work of hybrids and the work of purification) enables “the moderns” to change the scale and to claim that nature can intervene in every point of society while attributing to nature its radical transcendence. So nature/science/knowledge about things, culture/society/politics and God are all threefold transcendent and threefold immanent and, as he writes “[…] in a criss-crossed schemata that locks in all the possibilities: this is where I locate the power of the moderns” (ibid., p. 34). Such a constitution of modernity that emerged in the West enabled its spread to other cultures. As he writes: Solidly grounded in the transcendental certainty of nature’s law, the modern man or woman can criticize and unveil, denounce and express indignation at irrational beliefs and unjustified dominations. Solidly grounded in the certainty that humans make their own destiny, the modern man and woman can criticize and unveil, express indignation at and denounce irrational beliefs, the biases of ideologies, and the unjustified domination of the experts who claim to have staked out the limits of action and freedom. (Latour, 1993, p. 36)

Latour claims, the power of modernity lies in its ability to apply the above described constitution of modernity by the moderns: of the separation between humans and nonhumans and simultaneous concealment of this separation. “By separating the relations of political power from the relations of scientific reasoning while continuing to shore up power with reason and reason with power, the moderns have always had two irons in the fire.” (ibid., p. 38) The power of modernity lies not in scientific discourse itself, but in the universal faith about scientific discourse, and in the breach with the past, a breach with a mixture of entities in the premodern past. The superiority stemming from a concealed blending of entities (hybrids) produced a conviction that there are no restrictions and boundaries to modernity, the constitution of which creates the here and now, and that this here and now is intrinsically different from what Latour calls “yesteryears” – a past that illegitimately blends social needs and natural reality, meanings and

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mechanisms, signs and things (ibid., p. 35). However, the price of this superiority is the inability of moderns to conceptualize themselves in continuity with the premoderns. What is relevant in Latour’s claims about modernity, and similar to the colonial thinkers mentioned above, is that such modernity is constantly modal and variable, transcendent and all pervasive in many different forms, and last but not least, invincible (see also Stoler, 2013a). In EU-space such a constitution of modernity is visible in the way the EU Commission works, where officially science/nature and God are removed from politics, although they are constantly blended behind closed doors in informal negotiations over (national) interests when numbers and data are manipulated and drawn to support an argument. Such mixing is done point-wise and in the everyday struggle for prestige and power – as well as to delegitimize arguments of counterparts, in example when stereotypes about “faithful Poles” are applied. The modernity of the moderns, its constitution with (open) purification and (concealed) mixing is also traceable in the local tastes, in assessments of (ostensibly modern or nonmodern) lifestyles and bodies, in the enactment of (ostensibly rational or irrational) language and application of ethical norms producing distinctions between OMS and NMS, strengthening the cultural power of the people coming from the “old” Europe. They use representations of the “modernity of the moderns”, particularly the ostensible “breach with the past” and mechanisms of distinction in order to reinforce their own modern status and mark NMS people as having the virtues and values of non-Europeans, and, similarly, as shown by Bourdieu (2010) and Stoler and Cooper (1997), creating a new class, resembling Bourdieu’s petit bourgeoisie. European moderns, the OMS, are constantly occupied with the work of purification, with clearing up the division between nature and society while they keep hybridising these and applying both as a power tool. Purification is applied in the performance and production of modern representations of Europe and their own, OMS, nationality, while in fact they invisibly hybridize the discourses of nature and society (as I show in the chapter on networks and efficiency – in order to defend national interests or those coded as national interests). Thus, paraphrasing Latour, I claim that EU-space has never been modern. This visible, performed purification of which Latour writes is culturally applied, is demanded from people from NMS and becomes a weapon of cultural power if it is absent in somebody’s actions and in their everyday life performance in EUspace. This resembles the processes of production of the white bourgeoisie in European colonies and their modernity, and contributes to the production of negative stereotypes about what is nonmodern and who a non-European (Buchowski, 2006; Todorova, 1997; Wolff, 1994). As Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper remark (1997) nineteenth-century colonialism was part of the

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making of the European middle class: “European bourgeoisies valued technological advance, the growing capacity and rationality of European systems of government, and the idea of social and economic progress and used those ideas to demarcate more clearly than in previous eras the distinctiveness of what it meant to be European.” (Cooper & Stoler, 1997, p. 3; see also Kaschuba, 1993) They make a parallel between political processes in Europe, when nation-states strived to incorporate different classes into a polity in the form of common citizenship, which led to the emergence of the bourgeoisie, but this emergence was enabled by the cultural consolidation in production of a “polyvalent discourse of civility” (Cooper & Stoler, 1997, p. 10). In the same collection, Tensions of Empire, John Comaroff (1997) explains the dominant worldview of the bourgeoisie: “[…] its stress on utilitarian individualism and the virtues of the disciplined, self-made person; on private property and status as measures of success, poverty as appropriate sanction for failure; on enlightened self-interest and the free market as an instrument of the common good; on reason and method, science and technology, as the key to progress of mankind.” (ibid., p. 169) He further elaborates that the values of the bourgeoisie were internalized as qualities of the individual personality: “The virtues of discipline, generosity, and ownership, to name a few, were embodied in selfcontrol, self-denial, and self-possession; conversely, hedonism and indolence were, literally, self-destructive.” (ibid., p. 181) These virtues were then applied to “civilize” and “cultivate” the African “desert” by, as he writes: “planting the seeds of bourgeois individualism and the nuclear family, of private property and commerce, of rational minds and healthy bodies, of the practical arts and refined living and devotion to God.” (ibid., p. 181) While Comaroff, Stoler and Cooper described the emergence of the European bourgeoisie in the midst of, as Stoler calls it, a second wave of colonialism (Stoler, 2002), I will show below how these processes are also mirrored in EU-space, how many of these values and worldviews are still applied in EU-space to distinguish what it means to be a real European in EU-space. Among the OMS bourgeoisie, there are established dominant virtues, that are reproduced in application of the above described constitution of the modernity of the moderns (Latour, 1993). Based both on Comaroff and Stoler and Cooper, I claim that this constitution of the modernity of the moderns was able to emerge in the guise of colonialism and capitalism. It produced a European white bourgeoisie with its distinctions and class culture, which are now so visible in the divisions in EU-space. Modern constitution has led to the establishment of European white middle-class aesthetics, applied in EU-space in a similar way as in the colonies in order to mark the Other. These bourgeois aesthetics have been established in historical processes and are an effect of the application of the constitution of modernity by the moderns (a breach with the past, purification of nature and science in e.g. self-control). In EU-space they

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are visible in distinctions, in reapplied divisions and in the production of a lack (of modernity and of purification) expressed in stereotypes about NMS. Or in the form of a constant breach with the aesthetic past and a distinction between self-controlled and modest bodies, on the one hand, and uncontrollable and immodest ones, on the other. After the enlargement of the EU, the constitution of the modernity of the moderns and the aesthetics, lifestyles and bodies it established led to the emergence of class divisions within EU-space that are parallel to divisions into an “old” and “new” Europe. As Latour writes, the constant unmasking (e.g. of superstition) that the moderns perform, and expressions of indignation about false consciousness, have been constantly producing victims of this indignation. “It was only a matter of choosing a cause of indignation and opposing the false denunciations with as much passion as possible. To unmask: that was our sacred task, the task of us moderns.” (Latour, 1993, p. 44) It is these unmaskings – of a lack of some desired values (of being modern) that I focus on in this book.

II. Struggles in EU-space over prestige and power

S TAKES

IN

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A constant, subliminal and all-pervasive question at the Commission is how, when, where and by what means one gets promoted, reaches a higher position and gains additional power. One’s formal position is crucial, because it is proof of social and cultural position; it structures other divisions within the EU Commission and within EU-space in general – in accordance with the logic that the higher the position you hold, the more capital you have at your disposal to activate other relevant forms of capital and decide about European policies. In this struggle over formal hierarchy, the legal, political and social context is highly relevant and strategically important: social networks and knowledge about who does what and where, and about the political positions/political views of actors in the decision-making process are very important, as is knowledge about procedures, Staff Regulations, formal and informal advancement conditions. The network capital is relevant both on a personal and national level: there are nationalities that are perceived as particularly well networked (e.g. the French, Irish, Dutch) and every member state is (or at least its PermRep should be) aware that it is crucial to have one’s “own people” in higher posts in the EU apparatus. Place in the formal hierarchy and advancement within it are among the main concerns in EU-space; this is not particularly concealed, but is also not openly discussed at larger meetings − these issues tend to be discussed instead, for example, during lunches. Position in the formal hierarchy represents both one’s capital and stake in the (cultural and social) struggle over power within the EU apparatus. This capital, however, can be activated only when the subject is performing a legitimate form of habitus, when it performs the modern Eurostyle of the Euroclass, when it represents a modern body, language and lifestyle, and in the case of NMS, distances itself from the nonmodern stereotype of a given nationality. Place in the formal hierarchy can grant an individual the status of being a European; it enables one to show that he/she is defending and pushing “European interests” and performing Euroclass

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habitus. As my interviewee said, “one has to have a style”, something that I will call here the Eurostyle. Being a good bureaucrat in EU institutions means performing a whole set of everyday life practices both within one’s professional life − something that is locally called “efficiency”, leading to “visibility” − and outside of work. These practices outside of work form a legitimate lifestyle, which gives access to more prestige and power; these private practices, given the blurred boundaries between public and private in EU-space, have always had a bearing on professional life and the way one is seen and assessed in the context of it. Thus, the Eurostyle is a set of legitimate practices, both in everyday life and in professional life; it is a set of practices performed by the moderns, the OMS. Openly they strive to divide nature and society in order to be modern and retain symbolic power; privately and covertly, they blend these entities – practices that ensure power over the classifications of who and what is modern. But the performance of the Eurostyle, and the resulting establishment of the Euroclass, also occurs thanks to Bourdieu’s mechanism of taste and the enactment and reproduction, through classifications of taste, of the imperial colonial power of the West, as described by postcolonial scholars. The Eurostyle performed by the Euroclass is reproduced in locations within EU-space that I have described above. I argue that the enlargement of the EU and the “flood” (as this enlargement was sometimes described during my research) of people from NMS into EU institutions in Brussels contributed to the crystallization of the cultural superiority of the Eurostyle as a dominant kind of language, set of practices, moralities and legitimate body regimes. In these struggles over position within the formal and cultural hierarchy, modernity and its symbolic conflation with representations of modern nationalities (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994) and stereotypes about nationalities are among the central issues. National stereotypes and labels are shaped into mental and moral maps of Europe (McDonald, 1997, 2012; Poehls, 2009), but they also overlap with labels about modernity or nonmodernity, and disclose the local understanding of modern and European, and of what practices and bodies are perceived as such. The West and North-West nationalities in EU-space are diluted in modernity once they are confronted with local knowledge about NMS; when the often negative term “national” or “nationalistic” is evoked to describe people from NMS. The Germans, Swedes and French are proud of their modern in meaning nationality: the Germans of their social welfare state, the Swedes of their Swedish design and the French of their “big culture”. NMS often have only their national narration of the past (see also Borneman, 1997), which contradicts the modern radical breach with the past (Latour 1993). This alleged dilution of nationality in modernity, resembles the practices of the colonizers in colonies (Stoler, 2002), when cultural national differences among them began to lose their relevance once the colonized were included in the picture. The cosmopolitizing and class building effects of such

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processes reveal the imperial dynamics of EU-space (Bodirsky, 2009; Stoler, 2013b). These national representations, both as stereotype and as capital, are assessed and hierarchically structured along the idea of the modernity of moderns (Latour, 1993), which is used as a distinction and power tool in relation to those who are ostensibly nonmodern. One might claim that this common, tacit knowledge, the unwritten norms and rules in EU-space, although they have been contested since the enlargement, have led to the establishment of reciprocal loyalties among these moderners and a relatively high level of difficulty in uncovering corruption. Contrary to Shore (2000), I would claim that it is not only the hierarchical system and long, complicated formal rules that themselves encourage a “parallel administrative system“ (Shore, 2000, p. 214), but most of all, cultural hierarchies and the setting of EU-space in Brussels: these struggles over hierarchy and superiority encourage loyalties outside of legal and formal norms, stipulate flexibility of actors, and a constant weighing of capital and strategies, the aim of which is to climb the formal, social and cultural ladder. Efficiency During my research, I constantly heard about “efficient” bureaucrats, about those who were seen as “good”. Efficiency was a local term standing for “pushing things through”, or being able “to finalize” a political issue or process. It thus means achieving one’s political and personal-professional career aims while using strategies within the structures of EU-space (both symbolic/cultural and formal/legal/institutional) that lead to higher prestige and a higher formal position within it. It means detecting the power positions of relevant policy actors and individuals within a given policy field and policy cluster, and defining the achievable (political) aims within it: both on the level of one’s professional career and on the political level. Efficiency requires maintaining networks and the exchange of information, applying economies of practice (in Bourdieu’s sense) while pursuing one’s own targets: elevating oneself within formal and cultural hierarchies. It requires the ability to manage one’s (own) national stereotypes while – where relevant – performing modern and legitimate nationality, which sometimes means, particularly when the stereotype is negative, a performance of nationality reduced to folklore, e.g. eating Polish meals at the office Christmas Eve party, or other, more modern versions, such as using stereotypes, e.g. that of the companionable nature and efficiency of Irish people (see also McDonald, 2006, pp. 97-99, “On the difficulty of being German and the relative ease of being Irish”). Efficiency also means, where relevant, defending national interests by defining them as European, in using legitimate/acceptable European e.g. rational language,

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and, last but not least, the application of managerial skills, such as delegating power and tasks in order to have more time for own career development. Thus, efficiency in EU-space means the subject’s ability to detect and apply many different forms of capital, symbols and representations, often simultaneously and concomitantly (Latour’s blending), in order to achieve personal aims. These actions and practices are often concealed, done behind closed doors or within networks. To the outside world, EU policy is European: transparent, rational and based on science. One defines national interest only through the use of European language, and does so only when it benefits one’s career. An efficient pushing of national agenda often translates later into support from the PermRep of your country when striving for advancement in the EU apparatus – particularly in higher posts. Efficiency is also about using nationality as a formal status (due to national quotas) and about using the status stemming from one’s gender (due to gender quotas in EU institutions). Efficiency is then defined by the application of the various strategies and forms of capital mentioned above. It is about bringing things to an end that you define yourself (career) or that have been defined for you in your work (in policy development). It is, among other things, the capacity to formulate complex issues in a concise and easy to understand manner, so that your HoU and his/her Director receive all relevant information before making any decision1. Last but not least: having the status of an efficient bureaucrat means performing some sort of modernity, some sort of the Eurostyle. As I will show below, this might be limited only to “pushing things through”, but with the rising level of formal hierarchy or ambitions, it is increasingly conjoined with class habitus. Visibility and players vs. bystanders Visibility was another notion that pervaded at the EU Commission and was a word often used by my interviewees. At the Commission visibility means that one deals with and manages (or that someone in his/her career is on the way to dealing with and managing) either policies that are of high interest to one’s boss, that are placed high on the current political agenda, or that are, as EC civil servants say, “sexy”. This provides you with the opportunity to act and present yourself as efficient, and as an active, smart and skilful bureaucrat who “defends European interests” and “pushes the European project” ahead (these expressions were used by my interviewees). The aim in becoming visible is to be spotted by one’s manager (either one’s immediate boss, the HoU, or the Director, or the Director General and sometimes 1

For a Desk Officer this is the moment when he/she has a real impact on the policy – what he/she says and reports to the superior will be passed further on in the hierarchy and will ultimately have a bearing on the final decision of the EU Commission.

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even the Commissioner), as they are also interested in “pushing things through” and presenting their activity as efficient managers. The aim of this visibility is to make them put one’s name to memory in a positive way, to create a mental link between one’s name, the case or policy one is/was in charge of, and the positive impression one made due to the way one pushed forward an issue and manoeuvred it through different interests within the political procedure in order to finalize it. If someone was able to finalize (see also Abélès, 2000) an issue or a policy, and did so along acknowledged criteria and lines, according to “European values” and previous European legislation, if one was able to convince others (meaning both political actors and individuals in EU-space) by arguing for “European interests”, then this someone gains respect from those around them and their status in EU-space is elevated. The way this is done is by applying different strategies and forms of capital, often concealed and invisible to the wider public, but socially and culturally very much relevant in the EU-space. The application of these capitals means becoming visible and is thus crucial when it comes to advancement – one needs to strive for recognition from the boss and the boss’ boss, and for them to remember you and give you points in the Career Development Review (yearly evaluation), which makes visibility one of the crucial elements in the struggle over posts. This visibility also means becoming recognizable locally: in the wider social and political space, in policy cluster(s), particularly those you are interested in dealing with or belonging to2, and in EU-space in general. Visibility then, as a stake and capital in this struggle, is both an outcome and a precondition of one’s efficiency as a policy actor and as a bureaucrat, and it is clear proof of possession of the ability to apply for and strive for the various forms of capital needed to climb higher within the hierarchy: social networks, expert knowledge and the ability to gain such knowledge quickly, knowledge about procedures, the ability to use a specific (legal) language in a certain situation, knowledge about previous European legislation and who was responsible for it. Visibility also means possession of capital that I see, along with Bourdieu, as the style my German gatekeeper talked about: a specific bodily hexis and (life)style matching both one’s moral and ethical stance and place in the formal and social hierarchy, and often also tied to one’s national belonging and its representation. It is a particular means of verbal and material expression and material settings that together form a coherent pattern of legitimate practices that are strongly morally 2

And here, visibility in regard to a wider public, the same that structures hierarchies between DGs, is also relevant. E.g. DG Energy will be more visible than DG Research and, respectively, policies that are taken and managed by the former are seen as more prestigious. One can become more visible to a wider public (outside a given EU institution but within EU-space) through working in DG Energy than if you were working in DG Research.

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and ethically marked, and which are performed by the Eurohabitus. Both efficiency and style equate with self-presentation and self-stylisation, cultural practices that mark shared cultural patterns in the lives of a given class in EU-space, the class of Europeans and, following Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), the class of players – those who want to struggle over posts in the hierarchy or those who struggle to retain their position (as opposed to Bourdieu’s bystanders) (see also McDonald, 2012). Possession of these attributes determines one’s social and cultural belonging and, as the boundaries between the public and private are very thin in EU-space, has a direct bearing on one’s formal and cultural/social status in EU-space. In EU-space the cultural struggle and struggle over formal position is often concealed by the application of powerful notions, such as “being European”, “defending European interests” and representing “European values”, being modern and rational. These expressions in reference to Europe (or its opposite) possess, as Abélès noted many years ago, the status of “floating signifiers” that can be filled with meaning according to current needs (Abélès, 2000, p. 42). As one of my interviewees in the Cabinet told me: “There are no personal opinions, only proposals based on facts or current law, and in some cases, positions argued with European interests.” (see below). In order to be efficient, one has to have some kind of expert knowledge in a given policy field. Information gathered through networks helps both to avoid any surprising arguments from the opposite side (be it the same DG or other DGs within the Commission or another EU institution; in the case of the Council it is the networks of PermReps of member states that count) and, in consequence, due to the legality of intra-institutional negotiations, strengthens one’s own position. Here is a passage from an interview with the Member of one of the NMS Cabinets, a person who was aware of his/her subordinate position in EUspace due to his/her origin. In the moment of our conversation, we were discussing the beginnings of the NMS in the Commission: Paweł Lewicki (PL): So they [the NMS] would only listen and raise their, so to speak, would only raise their hands at the moment when it was suitable to say ‘yes’, or else they didn’t raise their hands. They would just sit and not say anything? Answer (A): Well… yes. […] If you want to play something out, you then have to… especially when it’s something important, you have to get things done before the College [meeting of Commissioners], at our level, because… if you want to do something [achieve something], you have to pass it through at least four Cabinets. Because then it is not possible to ignore it. And only then you get the chance for… for action. Apart from that this requires knowledge, legal knowledge, expert knowledge, and you get this here only through good connections.

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I also asked this Cabinet Member about what soft skills were required to work at the Commission and to be an efficient bureaucrat. The following passage from the same conversation will make the previous statement clearer and show what capital in professional life is a precondition for efficiency and visibility: Answer (A): You have to have the ability to work under constant time pressure and in conditions that… that when you receive a paper, or a dossier, and you have half an hour, or maybe an hour, plus only one telephone to assess what is important and what is not important and what is doable and what is not. And those dossiers are sometimes of a very technical nature… Paweł Lewicki (PL): So then you have to know whom to call, right? A: Well yes… but I also have to have… have to have an idea for this paper. If I don’t like something at the moment [he/she means in this paper/document], I cannot say that it is, for example, too expensive. I have to say that there, in article five, this article contains this and that, and because of this I would like this and that because of this and that3. So these dossiers are very different, ranging from fishery quotas to the matters of… pollution emissions from power plants. So you have to have the ability to find out what is going on and what to do. Second, you have to be effective, because… because when you forward an issue and you get…

you’re hauled over the coals by your colleagues from other Cabinets [you are

humiliated], then it is really unpleasant. You have to have some guts to say something and even to enter into dispute if necessary. Sometimes you block the written procedure, but this requires… because this right away is… your colleagues will notice it […] you just need to be careful all the time. PL: So this is like a constant battlefield, in fact, where you have to keep on thinking strategically? A: Yes, because it’s like constantly putting out fires, so… the greater the risk of making a mistake. There is always a big risk of mistake, because in the situation when you have only time for very limited overview, when you can only call your friend, and you have to make a decision fast, or stand on the side and do nothing, but this isn’t a good… a good way of being efficient at the Commission, because… because here it pays to engage oneself in every dossier, even if you don’t care about it at all, because there might be something you can play with it. Some of my colleagues tried to play on fishery quotas in Spain… […] PL: […] Any other soft skills?

3

During the negotiations and in everyday life in EU institutions, bureaucrats often refer to laws with numbers of articles, without explaining the content of the given law. It is assumed that your counterpart or the parties involved know what are you talking about and what the content is of a given legal document (see Thedvall, 2006, p. 8).

90 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS A: You know, there are different techniques at the Commission. I always… when I recall… at the beginning there was this period, when there was this so-called twinning4, and we were coupled with the Cabinet of [name of the Commissioner]. So there is this feature, this… a terrier, that in a way runs after everybody… and he will bark and bark, so before anyone will put something on the table, they will think about it twice, and will talk about it with them, when they’re going to bring it up again [he means that barking is something that gives you information that this or that issue is important for someone and this, in effect, gives you a bargaining chip]. And… and there are people who bungle [don’t keep their word] (laugh). PL: What do you mean? A: I mean they don’t keep their commitments and are able, at the last moment, to change their position. This is also efficient but has the disadvantage that… that… it’s short term, because when you let somebody down once or twice, then everyone will think twice before… PL: So which nationality let’s you down most often? A: No! (laughs) these things I will not tell you (PL laughs)! There are… there are some… But of course more kind of friendly relationships pay, too. And loyalty. I think we use loyalty in the long term, and this also has its positive sides. PL: So this is also about efficiency here? This loyalty? A: (silence) Well… I think that it is. I cannot tell you, if it is the best strategy… PL: Ok, other way around: Could you reap benefits, so to speak, of this loyalty? A: Yes, yes. PL: OK. A: Sometimes even in quite a spectacular way, so… what I mean, there are some… you have to have the ability to speak publicly well and write well. This is… everyone always tries to engage a British native, because they have good schools that prepare you not only to speak but also to bring forward the argument, to write. This is also important. The ability to synthesize. You know, sometimes you have 15 minutes to write something for the Commissioner, and you have to write it on a few pages. And we have here a ‘one-page culture’, it means being able to fit everything on one page. […] And English doesn’t like wish-wash. You have to do networking, you have to go for lunches, meet people. PL: Do you do that a lot? A: I don’t do it so much, I’m too lazy for that. It bores me. But in general (laugh) it is not the best topic to discuss right now (laugh), but the rule is that almost every lunch should be with somebody [somebody relevant].

This passage from an interview with the Member of the Cabinet sounds like a report from the battlefield, but it gives insight into how the Commission functions at the top level, where the struggle over politics and policies and prestige and power 4

After signing the accession treaties (January 2003) NMS received observatory status at the EU Commission and the Council. The representatives of NMS took part in all the workings of both institutions but had no voting rights.

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is most visible. It shows how the ability to gather information and knowledge, in many different ways, including at lunches in one of the restaurants around Schuman and Berlaymont, is one of the main abilities required at the Commission. Such an ability means that one is able to develop and move within networks, and this quote makes very clear that it is a requirement for efficiency. This interview passage also makes clear what efficiency means in practice: to engage oneself in every dossier, to have expert knowledge and knowledge of EU law (because “it pays”), in order to manage it and use it literally as (exchangeable) capital. Engaging oneself in every dossier gives you a bargaining chip, something you can use in current or future negotiations and makes you efficient; one acquires this capital through networks. Some other issues are depicted by the above quote. One of them is personal skills, which are a condition sine qua non for existing in networks and in the struggle over places in the hierarchy: this includes shrewdness and gamesmanship, because one has to have “an idea” as to what one is going to do with this or that paper and how to use it as a bargaining chip. This “having an idea” for a paper or policy shows that it is not the content of the policy that is at the centre; this is only a factor and capital in the policy game. One has to have the courage to enter into a dispute and block a procedure (hence, also know the rules of the procedure). Moreover, there are “different techniques” for dealing with issues that one has to be aware of and be able to apply (“one-page culture”). These abilities and skills are preconditions to being efficient, to showing others that one is able to acquire (information) capital, and to manage and apply it. To use the words of a Cabinet Member – one has to be a good fireman – and a good player, as Bourdieu would call it. In fact, this Member of Cabinet is such a player, because he is explaining to me how the game is played on the Cabinet level. He has seen through the rules of the game and knows how to apply them (visible in the words “to have an idea” for a paper or policy). He is referring to a set of strategies (to bungle) and forms of capital (knowledge of procedures and expert knowledge) that are relevant in the struggle over political issues and over places in the cultural and political hierarchy. In this game, the ability to push one’s own agenda is crucial; it is a source of formal and cultural superiority and it is, as is visible in the words “to have an idea for a paper or policy”, an amalgamation of different interests and orders. Superiority in this political and cultural game means possessing networks, and thus, knowledge, along with the capacity to understand the interests of the counterparts/parties involved and how to adjust to them in given frameworks, are preconditions of civil servants’ efficiency and increasing prestige. It is the ability to “push things through” and meet the deadlines. This ability resembles the representation of the entrepreneurial white man – an issue that I will reflect upon later. Networks, and in particular, trustworthy networks5, lead to efficiency, elevate prestige and facilitate climbing 5

People from NMS would complain about lack of networks and about their low

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the ladder in the hierarchy, in both symbolic and formal terms (in this case, symbolic terms as it was a Member of the Commissioner’s Cabinet). I have seen this Member of the Cabinet in many different contexts in Brussels. He was marking his presence in Polish networks by taking part in a Polish mass at one of the churches (see the chapter “Polish EU Brussels”), and I have seen him at a prestigious event held by one of the think-tanks. He said: “every lunch has to be used” meaning that each lunch during the week has to be of a business character, either meeting people from within EU institutions or from lobbies, NGOs and other interest groups – to gather information and expert knowledge. La Fontaine is a spatial example here, similarly to many other places around Schuman that produce their social and cultural meaning this way. A La Mort Subite in the centre of Brussels is also known for such lunches or meetings after work (see Epping, 2007). The flipside of visibility is the influence it has on networks – once you have dealt with one issue or policy and have “pushed it through” with success, you will be associated with it, even if you change posts due to staff mobility measures. I was able to conduct this interview due to the fact that a high-ranking Polish official “recommended” me. This Member of the Cabinet was making an open impression and was direct in his statements. He was in fact performing the Eurostyle, and his laughter about my question as to which nationalities let him down, and his clear response (“this thing I will not tell you”) made it apparent that he did not feel constrained in what he was telling me, and felt self-assured and knowledgeable about what can and cannot be said to someone from the outside world. This one sentence told with laughter, “this thing I will not tell you”, makes clear that direct reference to nationality is a taboo in EU-space. Nationality is always present at the Commission, but rarely explicitly and this reaction also points to the fact that this person knows the rules and is a player in EU-space – his laughs about my question reveals a (self)distance to this issue and awareness of the rules in EU-space. The sentence where he says that he is “too lazy”6 to go for lunches and that he does not do it is rather coquettish, serving as a means to leave out a whole conversation topic, which demonstrates his control over our conversation and, I think, points to the fact that the reality was exactly the opposite. This relaxed and unconstrained attitude is a mark of belonging to the Euroclass. I will come back to this issue later in the subchapter on “Polish Europeans”. The above quote also reveals language hierarchies within EU-space. English is the most important and

trustworthiness often due to their own, “parachuted” status that caused hostility towards them, or just because of their status of novice. 6

In a later interview with him, after he changed to Services and was in the position of HoU, he told me that in the Cabinet “I didn’t even have time to clean my nose”, comparing the workload of these two positions.

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commonly used language and competence; it is Bourdieu’s capital in the environment of the EU Commission. In this interview it becomes visible how networks, efficiency and style (including professional style) are all components of strategies and forms of capital that are valuable in EU space and how they depict the work of mediation between the guarantees of modernity: numbers are there to push interests. It also depicts how entities of the Latourian constitution of modernity are constantly mediated and mixed in a concealed way. In this struggle, as the above quote shows, “openness” and relative ease in a conversation increase with one’s seniority within the hierarchy in the EU apparatus and is a mark of the Eurostyle performance. I put “openness” in quotation marks because my interview partner’s position within the formal hierarchy means that he knows and is aware of what he can tell me and what he cannot tell me, what is really important and what has to remain concealed and what can be revealed. This knowledge, this self-assurance, which reveals what Bourdieu calls “communion” – internalized rules of assessing the reality – is an aspect that gave my interview partner the confidence and the ability to make an “open” impression (e.g. openly refusing to answer sensitive questions, that is, those that did not mesh with the dominant rules in EU-space). People lacking a sense of play and struggle, or bystanders, would either start to list nationalities that “bungle”, reproducing negative stereotypes, or, if they lacked the ease of the Eurostyle, would decline to answer but with a constrained or nervous smile. However, this “openness”, I argue, is a mark of a certain habitus, a Eurohabitus that generates practices that mark power and delimit a non-European and non-Euroclass habitus, which is unable to learn and properly apply rules and capital in this struggle. The abovementioned Member of the Cabinet is a player, an efficient male who is smart, entrepreneurial and able to assess his position and use relevant capital as a means to an end and for its own sake. But not everybody plays the game over posts, and not everyone is interested in making a fast career in the institutions, that is, in rising up the formal ladder faster than the pace of normal advancement based on seniority and time of employment (Abélès, Bellier, & McDonald, 1993; McDonald, 2012). Among the people I met there were those who had become disenchanted with the idea of a “unified Europe”, of “European interests” or “European values”, about what they meant and how they were implemented. In fact, I was surprised how rarely people declared that their motivation to work was Europe and European integration, and even if they did, it was said in an unconvincing, sometimes ironic way. Instead they would often tell me about working for the EU as part of their personal development, as a natural step in their career, or as another step in gaining social prestige.

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In EU-space not everybody is performing efficiency in order to reach a higher formal position. At the Commission there are civil servants (and I suppose this is the majority) who are not interested in being visible or doing interesting or “sexy” things. Often they are simply pleased with the status that stems from being an EU civil servant; they see the EU Commission (or any other EU institution) as a good employer, and their efficiency is applied only in order to retain their position in the hierarchy and to avoid being sidelined 7 . I consider these people to be those Bourdieu calls “bystanders” – people who either do not have a sense of play and declare they are not interested in coping with “sexy” dossiers (plain bureaucratic power not being their main motivation), or those who are stepping aside, overwhelmed by the cultural power of the notions of visibility, efficiency and the Eurostyle. Bystanders are in the majority, but this does not mean they do not have to struggle for their position; however, unlike players, they do not strive to climb the hierarchy ladder quickly and do not set out legitimate practices and actions for the whole EU-space. Such situations most often involve NMS people: they themselves do not see their capital, and perceive themselves “naturally” as incapable of playing the game. They are happy with their current salary; most of them are happy with what they do in their position or are convinced of the powerful constraints of the context or are unable to manage capital. They often concentrate, instead, on investing time in their family or personal life, in their hobbies and spending money on consumption: they travel (often) overseas, to South America, to the Philippines and South-East Asia, to the Maldives and to (South) Africa – these were the popular activities for people from NMS (see the chapter “Polish EU Brussels”). But these practices were often also typical of OMS people, although they were performed more “naturally” than in the case of NMS. Among these bystanders, rather than the notion of being efficient or of being a “pioneer of integration” (Shore, 2000), what builds a sense of community among them is often 7

During my research, one of my friends in the EU Parliament strived to change his/her job within this institution because of issue he/she had been dealing with: “because of my stupid, old boss XY, who is there only due to his connections, it is condemned to become a disaster, and I don’t want my name to be associated with this project” – he/she said. Given this person’s competencies and grade he/she was trying to move into a Unit that dealt with a more prestigious and “safe“ project within the EU institution he/she had been working at. In the end, he/she managed to change jobs; however his/her aim was not to make a fast career in EU institutions. An example of a sidelined person was one of the Directors from Poland that had an opinion of being indecisive. During time of my research, he/she has moved from one of main EU institutions in Brussels, to one of it’s agency outside of Brussels and later to one of EU agencies in one of member state. Moving out of Brussels due to employment – at the level of a Director – was often assessed as being sidelined.

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common consumption patterns, those who like Featherstone’s flâneurs (Featherstone, 1998) shape their own identity narrative, adding suitable and fitting elements from their surroundings and making them their own. Bystanders also include those overwhelmed by legal constraints: often in my interviews people from NMS would express their disappointment with the advancement system after the implementation of the Kinnock Reform8 (which prolonged it), and one could 8

At the moment of the biggest EU enlargement, on May 1st 2004, the biggest staff reform entered into force, the so-called Kinnock Reform (named after British politician and vicePresident of the EC responsible for it, Mr Neil Kinnock). The staff reform was part of a wider reforming agenda that was launched as a consequence of fraud and nepotism scandals that led to the resignation of the Santer’s Commission in 1999, but it’s aim was also to “prepare” the EU administration for the biggest enlargement of the EU in its history and to make it more efficient, transparent and modern. Along with staff reform (that entered into force as the last of all three big reforms) a new management framework was introduced (Activity Based Budgeting and Management – ABB and ABM) along with the Annual Activity Report of DGs and Annual Activity Report of the whole Commission. Financial management also changed (accounting system) as well as the contract system for personnel. After the Kinnock Reform the staff of all EU institutions are selected in a standardized competition organized solely by the EPSO (European Personnel Selection Office) and divided into two categories: AD (administrators) and AST (Assistants) (previously it had been four categories A, B, C, D). Each of these categories is set out according to seniority with AST 1 to 11 and AD 5 to 16 where, respectively, 11 and 16 are the highest grades (though, I had the impression that in the AST category, grades above AST6 were rare). The vast majority of new entries from NMS are now at the levels of AST1-3 or AD5-7. The staff reform’s aim was to introduce better management and staff allocation, a new advancement system based on merit and performance instead of sheer seniority, and improvement of performance through socalled career development review (CDR) that formed the basis for evaluation of civil servants and introduced a points system distributed among staff of a given EU institution. CDR is a measure that should stimulate performance but in fact it also stimulates demand for more “sexy” and visible things as your evaluation now depends on what your boss thinks about your performance and he/she is also interested in being visible and finalizing issues. In the CDR, each DG and each Directorate in a DG receives a certain amount of points that are distributed downwards in the hierarchy to each of the employees. The number of given points is the decision of your superior and he/she decides upon your advancement, so for example when one Directorate in a DG finalizes or just brings a law to adoption that is visible, that is currently on the political agenda in the EU or receives bigger (positive) attention from the public and media, it is very likely that this Directorate will receive more points than others in a given DG and further downwards the Unit that was responsible for the given policy. The Kinnock Reform also introduced a staff

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sense their resigning themselves to having to take part in this struggle due to structural/formal factors. Some of my Polish interviewees openly admitted that they were, as they would say, “setting up their life” in Brussels. Or they remarked that others were doing this too, by which they meant installing themselves in a new, Brussels-centred reality. Often they were focused on buying new houses or flats, and renovating them, considering this to be part of their investment 9 (both in Brussels and in their hometowns) and family strategies 10. Most bystanders, both from OMS and NMS, are aware of the struggles over formal position and are aware of the conditions and rules that exist, but do not have sufficient resources. In other cases, their habitus does not possess valid forms of capital. This was sometimes visible in such statements as “I am too young” in terms of their real age and/or their experience in the Commission (from an interview with AD7, DG SANCO, Polish) and their instinctive refraining from entering this struggle. A young Polish AD7 fonctionnaire in DG Admin told me that he was too young, did not have the experience, and would rather wait “his turn”. Alternatively, they had already failed in the struggle (AD14 official from NMS in one of RELEX-family DGs told me, he/she did not feel well in the context of the Commission and would like to move to a different position in one of the EU agencies or delegations) and did not want to join it again, even though they had sufficient structural capital in the form of a high post in the formal hierarchy. Even when not explicitly interested in the struggle over place in the formal hierarchy, one is forced to join the game in order to maintain a stable symbolic mobility program that applies to all staff and, most significantly, to the highest ranks of the administration (it was quite normal before the reform that one person could hold a Directors’ post for over 10 years). The mobility rule now allows staying in one post for a minimum 2 and maximum 5 years, but it does not apply to the highest ranked officials that gained their rights before the reform (thus, the old Directors are excluded from the mobility rule). Because the Kinnock Reform entered on the day of enlargement and applied only to newcomers to the administration (both from OMS and NMS), and because of its neoliberal in character principles of self-development, constant assessment against performance and self-management, it has been associated with NMS and their arrival in the EU. 9

Many of my interviewees from Poland told me about the mortgages they had to pay in Poland for their flats there while simultaneously talking about buying a flat or even a house in Brussels or its surroundings.

10 There is even a network of Polish women in Brussels called Brukselski Klub Polek, or BeKaP (www.bekap.be, last seen on 05.03.2017), comprised of Polish women or spouses of husbands working in EU institutions. One of the events organized by this network during the time of my research was a meeting with an architect of Polish origin based in Brussels. The topic of the meeting was how to buy a house in Belgium.

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position and, consequently, not be marginalized at work. As those performing some version of the Eurostyle, people from OMS are in a better, privileged position in comparison to those from NMS, as these modern subjects have habitus developed in the modern West. Their natural performance of something that is closer to the ideal of the Eurostyle makes them less prone to factual, professional marginalization as they perform the legitimate habitus both in professional and private life. Their decision whether to join or refrain from the struggle is a matter of conscious decision and their success is rather dependent on their conscious shaping of practices that are focused on efficiency and making them in consequence more visible. In the case of NMS, a willingness to play the visibility game was not sufficient, as “naturally”, e.g. coming from an nonmodern NMS, the habitus of such a person was not equipped with legitimate resources. Marginalization, in both the cases of NMS and OMS staff, is expressed in the expropriation of competencies, exclusion from the flow of information, social exclusion, or exclusion from other relevant resources that could make one efficient and visible. This was locally called “sidelining”, and sometimes would coincide with leaving Brussels or being assigned to a delegation of the EC (in the case of people in higher AD posts; in contrast, for young ADs joining a delegation of the EU in a third country was automatically connected with advancement) or to parts of it situated outside of Brussels (to EU agencies or delegations, or to non-prestigious offices in Luxembourg). Subversion of the local rules or rebellion against the hierarchy is unacceptable and treated with cruelty (see also Epping, 2007; Shore, 2000). One of my friends working in the EU Commission told me that people thinking differently were not welcomed in the system. What was expected is obedience and fulfilment of instructions and compliance with local rules. I was once told a story about a HoU in the EU Parliament who wanted to run for the post of head of a local trade union despite his/her boss’ threats of firing. The boss had a long history in the service and, allegedly, extensive networks in EU institutions. Because the HoU did run for a leadership position in the union, he/she was immediately fired and demeaned, becoming, as the story went, an example for others, as he/she was not able to find a job for the next year in any EU institution. Being a player at the Commission does not automatically mean belonging to the EU elites; however, those who strive to gain a higher symbolic and formal position in EU-space and who set out the rules and norms of the Eurostyle – reflective of their ambitions and aspirations – are players. Their strategies and actions reveal a legitimate habitus and tacit knowledge of EU-space. However, they are not always those who climb upward from lower AD levels, but also those rising from the mid AD to the upper levels of the hierarchy – they are all involved in upward movement.

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W HO IS

EFFICIENT ?

Those who have access to information are efficient. As in any other political organization and place of decision-making, information means power, and the same is true of the EU Commission and EU-space in general. Why? Because it is valuable to know “what is in the pipeline” (a phrase I heard in one of the interviews) – which policies and what issues are going to be negotiated now or in the near future, and are part of the political process at the moment. This knowledge is crucial when someone is taking part in inter-institutional negotiations (within each EU institution and between EU institutions11). It is obtained through networks and enables one to anticipate the position of a given EU institution, be it a Unit of one of the core institutions, or of a DG and/or of the EU Commission (or any other core institution) as a whole, and to prepare one’s own position. Hence, knowledge is a condition for efficiency in pushing the planned agenda within the unit, the DG, the EU institution and/or the overall policy cluster, until a policy is finalized (in the form of a passed EU Directive or Programme or any other policy paper). Such efficiency translates into visibility to one’s immediate boss and others in top positions within the institution and in EU-space in general, and leads to a better assessment and more points in the CDR (Career Development Review – an element of internal advancement policy). One of my interviewees in DG SANCO told me that one sometimes does not even need to have (expert) knowledge on the issue one is dealing with, but must know by whom and how it was handled previously in the Commission (particularly when it comes to issues that are later brought to the outside world), what position the boss has (HoU, Director, DDG or DG/the Commissioner) on the issue, and what his/her aim is in regard to the particular policy (from an interview with AD7, DG SANCO). If somebody is in possession of an extensive network, it means that in their professional life they know who has done what and who has dealt with which issues before, and it means they have access to experts in a given field12 who are in possession of knowledge that can help them to formulate a position in line with previous legislation and the boss’ needs.

11 For example, between DG ENERGY and DG ENV on biofuel policy and the sustainability criteria for biofuels, or between the EU Parliament and the Council. In the particular case of biofuels, the DGs within the Commission (at the stage of writing a directive’s proposal) and institutions (at the stage of official negotiations within so-called co-decision) had different views on how biofuel policy should be shaped on EU level. 12 Because of the rotation rule set out by Staff Regulations, the person who has dealt with the issue before might at a given moment be working in a different part of the Commission or in another EU institution.

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While some of the issues addressed in the question “who is efficient?” have already been answered by the Member of the Cabinet quoted above, I would like to develop and highlight the issue of a culturally legitimate type of efficient EU civil servant. I argue, similarly to Riles (2001, p. 89), that the language used in bureaucratic everyday life is legal and abstract, but it is applied in order to reach personal ends and climb up the hierarchy. This is achieved through, among other means, the concealed hybridisation of an allegedly transcendent nature and science, on one hand, and politics and society, on the other. This kind of efficiency in professional life may not be specific to EU institutions, but the local meaning and legitimacy of this efficiency provides the frames and capital for the struggle within the formal and cultural hierarchy, and shows the mediation between rational and non-rational, between the discourse of nature and society (Latour 1993). An efficient bureaucrat from a given member state automatically increases the prestige of the nationality he or she represents. As I will show, the capital that characterises an efficient bureaucrat is similar to that of a white colonial, entrepreneurial, shrewd and target-oriented male, culturally produced in colonies and reproduced in imperial metropoles (Dyer, 1997; Stoler, 2002, 2013a). Efficiency in a policy cluster Efficiency and bringing things to an end is achieved, allegedly, through good negotiation skills (at the level of HoU and above), the ability to listen and understand other points of view (from an interview with AD14 in SG), the ability to express complex issues in an understandable way (AD9, DG JLS and “synthesize” as the above quoted Member of the Cabinet said) and the ability to memorise facts and figures and knowledge of EU law. It is the ability to express interests in “European language”. What efficiency means in practice within the EU Commission and in EU-space and what it means using Bourdieu’s vocabulary, that is, to be a player at lower levels of the administration (below Directors at the EU Commission) became clear to me when I did additional research on EU climate policy and particularly on biofuel policy13. I realized that one should manoeuvre between policy actors in order to push one’s own agenda through with the kinds of arguments that are acceptable to powerful actors within the policy cluster – irrespective of political aims, such as a reduction in CO2 emissions. This ensures finalization of the policy and, in consequence, one’s advancement within the formal hierarchy. What is relevant then is knowledge of the details of a given policy and of procedure, and possession of networks that enable one to acquire this knowledge. It 13 Within the framework of a larger research project “Biofuel as Social Fuel” at the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt-University Berlin. https://www.euroethno.hu-berlin. de/de/archiv/forschungsprojekte/biofuel-as-social-fuel (last accessed on 07.04.2016).

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is also the ability to speak publicly with ease and to convince counterparts. However, these competencies are framed by self-referentiality (Riles, 2001) within EU-space: facts and figures are assimilated into policy in accordance with political needs and their applicability in the struggle within the formal hierarchy, rather than pointing to the real world outside EU-space (in this case, a reduction in CO2 emissions). For example, knowledge-based academic and scientific research become capital that is then applied in a particular way in this struggle, and this fact points to the work of mediation in a concealed political process, rather than to the purification of modern entities of culture and nature. The moderns create concealed hybrids in networks while trying to present themselves as purifiers. I was able to follow the development of EU biofuel policy, which is laid down in the so-called Renewable Energy Directive14 (RED) and Fuel Quality Directive (FQD). The biofuel policy of the EU is part of its so-called climate policy, which emerged as a consequence of political interest in the greenhouse effect and climate change in EU member states, particularly in Germany, the UK and the Netherlands, as I was told by an official of the Dutch government in The Hague. He told me that the governments of these countries initiated this policy at the EU level. When this issue became politically relevant, the responsible body of the Commission was DG TREN (Transport and Energy, now DG Energy), and this is where the draft of the directive proposal came from. The legislative procedure demands from the Commission the collection and use of expertise in the political and legislative process (EC EC, 2002) and foresees stakeholders meeting (with lobbies and NGOs) and consultations with different policy actors (inter-institutional consultations). My research showed, there has been a controversy over, among other issues, the 10% target for renewables in transport (of which 95% will be biofuels) by 2020. This target15 was set out by this directive and was backed up by the biofuel and biodiesel industry (their interest, as producers of biofuels, is clear), the agricultural lobby (for which it was a compensation for reform of the common sugar market – biofuel is made of ethanol [sugar beet, sugar cane, wheat, corn], and biodiesel is made of oil [rapeseed, palm, soya]), mineral oil companies (admixing of biofuels makes their products more “green” and prevents these companies from investing in more energy-efficient production lines that would lead to a reduction in CO2 emissions), and the automobile industry (as with mineral oil companies, biofuels are an easy way to prove that engines are becoming “greener” instead of developing and investing in new, energy-saving, low-emission engines), whereas it was opposed by 14 This directive was a part of a so-called Climate Change Package passed by the European Parliament on December 17th 2008. 15 The target was to cover ten per cent of consumption of fuels in transport by biofuels in all member states by 2020. This target was suspended in fall 2012 due its negative influence on food prices worldwide.

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the so-called Green NGOs backed by research on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In fact, the environmentalists argued, when taking into account the whole lifecycle of biofuels and the so-called indirect land use change (ILUC) caused by their cultivation, they prove to increase GHG emissions in comparison to the lifecycle of fossil fuels. There were also controversies over their impact on food prices worldwide – which the Commission claimed at that time was unproven; above all, the Commission argued, changes in the relationship between food prices and biofuel crops were untranslatable into law. On a political and institutional level, the Commission and the Council have had more or less the same position on the 10% target and have pushed it despite controversies over ILUC and the increases in GHG emissions caused by biofuels. The central role of the Commission in the legislative process was visible here, as the Council, according to my informants, accepted almost all of the Commission’s proposals and amendments (see also Spence & Edwards, 2006). The EU Parliament however, being more exposed to the public, opposed the Commission’s proposal and confronted the Council16. In spite of growing evidence that biofuels cause an increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the Commission’s position was to defend the ten per cent target rather than take into account the ILUC factor and break this ten per cent target down by adding to it (so it would be achieved not solely with first-generation biofuels17) the use of electricity in transport (electric cars and rail transport) or the production and consumption of so-called second generation biofuels. Many of my interviewees pointed to one official at the DG Energy (former DG TREN) of the Commission, who was responsible not only for placing and defending the 10% target, but also for fiddling with the thresholds for greenhouse gas emission savings in the lifecycle of each biofuel18. This is what one of my interviewees from an environmental NGO told me: 16 The Commission, according to the treaties, does not have a formal voice in negotiations between the EU Parliament and the Council (co-decision procedure), but it is always present during negotiations between these two and consults on what is doable (e.g. in regard to the WTO agreement) and what is not, and steers the overall policy through the legislative process. Therefore it shapes the political process significantly. 17 First generation biofuels are those produced from crop: ethanol from sugarcane and sugar beets, and biodiesel from palm oil, soya oil and rapeseed oil. There are also so-called second generation biofuels, which are produced from residues and organic waste, and therefore do not cause ILUC. However, the technology to produce second generation biofuels, at least at the time of my research, was expensive and there was no strong lobby to promote it as there was in the case of first generation biofuels. 18 For example, at the beginning of negotiations, in the RED proposal, the Commission set a 36% GHG savings threshold for all biofuels, which meant that they had to provide at least 36% GHG emissions savings in comparison to the lifecycle of fossil fuels in order

102 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS Paweł Lewicki: So how did this happen? How come the numbers were changed? Answer: That was the [name] thing. I have never seen anything like this before. This guy was able to push through the whole thing [the RED] and place almost everything he wanted to have in there [in RED].

The negotiation skills of this one British HoU impressed not only people from outside the Commission, but also civil servants themselves: given the interinstitutional consultations and different positions within the Commission itself (this is information that I gained from informants from green NGOs. The Commission’s civil servants refused to discuss in interviews internal positions within the Commission; the same holds true for discussions within the Council), pushing through your agenda successfully is a task for an experienced and skilful negotiator. One civil servants from DG Environment who I met at a party, after I revealed that I knew about the differences between the DGs of the Commission, told me the following: He has mastered this. There were differences in the biofuel target [within the Commission], we were very much against it, there were concerns because of JRC reports on that, but he wouldn’t care about it. He knew that there is great support for this policy from the biofuel industry, from the agricultural sector, from oil companies, and he was aware that it’s going to make them happy. So when we showed some numbers that were undermining the target, he said ‘I don’t care, we will have to change the numbers.’

to be qualified as sustainable and eligible for EU subsidies. Such a threshold meant that practically all biofuels (except rapeseed) are produced sustainably and going to be counted towards the EU target in 2020 (20% GHG emission savings, 20% energy saving, 20% energy from renewables in general) and will receive subsidies. However, after the EU Parliament voted for the 50% threshold, a new JRC (a DG of the Commission) report appeared that calculated GHG emission values for certain biofuels anew. In effect, many biofuels that previously had GHG emissions savings between 35% and 50% (for example, sugar beet) now had over 50%. This JRC report has never been published although the Commission is obliged to do so. Also, allegedly as a consequence of German pressure on the Commission, the lifecycle of rapeseed originally provided 32% GHG emission savings (with this threshold rapeseed would be classified as unsustainable), but during negotiations, a more efficient system of production was developed and the GHG emission savings of rapeseed rose to 35% - so the threshold from the RED draft that was produced at the Commission dropped from 36 to 35%. In the final version of RED and FQD, the threshold for sustainable biofuels is 35% GHG emission savings compared to the lifecycle of fossil fuels.

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Another person working at the EU Parliament who was following the negotiations told me: Well, he’s just very smart. He is an incredibly careful listener and has a huge memory; he is probably spending hours reading everything that is relevant for the topic in order to be prepared for counter-arguments and to push through what he wants − he always had an argument handy. But at some point, I realized that this was his strategy, because he would quote the numbers, give you examples, drown you with facts that you’d never heard of and this left you speechless. This is what he did and this is why he had so much influence on the policy. And I guess this is exactly what he did when he was going to see the Commissioner or his Director – I am sure they were all unaware of what the guy was talking about, but he left them with an impression he knows exactly what he’s talking about. So they gave him plenty of space to do what he wanted […] and he was doing what they wanted him to: push the agenda that will make big industry happy.

Within what I call a biofuel cluster in Brussels there was a shared perception that this person had a major influence on EU biofuel policy in transport (given the significant influence of the Commission in EU-space and the political process overall). His modes of operation, for many, pointed to his ambitions to climb in the hierarchy (and, in fact, the person who was deputy HoU became HoU in the newly established DG Energy), and he was regarded as a very efficient and skilful negotiator. One of the persons following the negotiations even told me that he was fascinated by his abilities and skills. Disregarding the moral aspects (like manipulating figures and disregarding research), I think the mere fact this person’s attitude in combination with his career was mentioned is evidence that his actions were considered proper or potentially successful in climbing the hierarchy ladder (and in fact were successful). It must be added here that the RED and FQD passed in the EU Parliament with the 10% threshold – so the Commission and the Council won the battle, but in October 2012 the whole biofuel policy was suspended due to rising food prices. This HoU was pushing an agenda that he recognized to be most profitable for him (and his superiors: biofuels made the agricultural lobby, the car industry, the oil companies and the producers of biofuels all happy) despite growing controversy. He was able to accomplish this based on the knowledge he had gathered through networks and by “spending long hours reading everything” proved by the practice of “drowning people with numbers”. Thus, this person, like the above quoted Member of the NMS Cabinet, knew “what to do with a paper” (to quote the Member of the Cabinet again, “paper” here meaning policy), to manoeuvre this policy through the policy decision-making process, and having an idea or the ability to argue (with numbers, by drowning people with numbers or fiddling with numbers). Thus, it is the ability to use networks to gain knowledge

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about positions, and it is the ability to apply expert knowledge and information (of any kind: factual, technical, political) in a particular moment. I remember interviewing this person and I assumed he set up an appointment with me only because I approached two Desk Officers working in his unit from two different sides (one of them was from an OMS network, the other was from an NMS network – the person from the NMS refused an interview as he/she already knew that I had an interview with his/her OMS colleague because “it has been discussed here in our unit”). I was struck by the long gaps between my questions and my interviewees’ answers, something I did not encounter during any other interview through the whole of my research. He was apparently very carefully considering what he was going to say, and thus aware that the stakes were high, as I might have brought some issues to the outside world. In fact, he spoke quite unclearly and he did exactly what my interviewees said: he explained to me different means for measuring GHG emissions in the lifecycle of biofuels (with or without by-products), although this was not really what I wanted to know. But he steered the conversation in that direction and told me that I could not understand what I was asking, without knowing the methods for measuring GHG emissions (these are called substitution and energy allocation, and they are very complicated). To my questions regarding inter-institutional negotiations, which were most relevant to me and to the political process, he refused outright to answer. This showed that he may not have been so “natural” and relaxed, as my questions (instead of focusing on his private life as was the case in other interviews) focused on the political process, he was not as self-distanced, as the Directors I met were. However, he knew what could be said and what could not be said, and knew how to refuse to answer: by simply saying “this I cannot tell you” and moving on from the topic without any further explanation, which was not the case in interviews with less experienced officials. These interviewees would give the impression of being confused or embarrassed by sensitive questions, while he just cut short the conversation on a certain topic. The British HoU that I interviewed wore a double-breasted, fashionable suit. While we talked, his face was in constant motion and full of expression: raising his brows above his big eyes both while I was talking and posing questions (as if he wanted to say: I follow you) and at the end of his sentences (meaning: you got me?), underscoring words by nodding his bald head, smacking his lips, and smiling in a rather grimacing manner: you understand me? He also used his hands extensively while explaining issues, making rapid gestures meant to underscore his arguments and illustrate his explanations, and holding them together folded in pyramids in his lap while listening. He spoke quickly and not very clearly, with a British accent that was difficult for me to understand. I remember walking out of his office with the feeling that I hadn’t understood much of what he had said, a

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feeling of being outplayed, of being caught out lacking in knowledge (regarding the methods for measuring the GHG emissions of biofuels) and this weakness was ruthlessly used by the time I was told that my time was up. Thus, although he considered his answers very carefully, he also knew and drew the line between what he could say and what he could not say. Perhaps his Eurohabitus was not as “natural” as that of my interviewee from the Cabinet, and he was not performing the EU Commission Director’s self-distance, though he clearly knew how to steer the conversation and make use of the efficiency strategies I have described above. During the interview, I had to leave his office because of telephone calls he received, although my time was not prolonged on account of his telephone conversations (as it had been in other, similar cases). Before the interview, while sitting in the secretariat of his office waiting for our meeting, I eavesdropped on his conversation with his secretary on the phone (hearing only her) when he was telling her how to reply to invitations to different conferences and meetings he had received. From what the secretary said I imagine he was saying: “this one I will go to, this one I will not”. The strategy of this HoU was similar to what Riles noted in her ethnography of Fijian women’s NGOs, strategies that point to the self-referentiality of EU-space. She writes: Negotiators were only momentarily overwhelmed by the spectacular sense of levels in their work because most of the time their focus on language represented a turn away from the world at any level […] Language in this context was also abstract in that it never pointed to a particular instance of anything. In order to participate in the drafting process, one had to amass an astounding number of small pieces of information. This included statistics about nutrition, rising sea levels, or rates of increase in gynecologically related deaths; knowledge about what was happening in each committee meeting or about how far each drafting group had proceeded; knowledge about procedures and compromises reached at other UN meetings and about the workings of the UN bureaucracy; or information about the positions of the parties on each dozens of issues. Just as people collected documents, they [negotiators] spent much time collecting information. Unlike the information about the time and place of meetings, however, the information included in the document as language was never specific. Pacific delegates needed specific information about rising sea levels to argue for the inclusion of a proposed paragraph that mentioned rising sea levels, for example, yet in their proposed amendment those sea levels were rising everywhere and nowhere. During the conference, the difference between the specificity of the facts outside the document and the generality of the facts within the document defined a distance between the inside of the text and the inside of the coffee bar where delegates gathered to talk about their amendments. (Riles, 2001, pp. 8789)

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While my research confirms similar practices within the EU Commission − the language of the directives refers to other directives − the specificity of the numbers was to be found only in other documents and reports, but these were adjusted according to needs. In the case of biofuel policy, they were ignored or fiddled with despite mounting doubts about the GHG emissions savings caused by biofuels. The example here shows that the languages of treaties and of law and science, and numbers and figures were utilised as capital in the struggle within EU-space. The alleged transcendent discourse of science blended with personal, national and other interests, and with the discourse of law. This blending appeared to be legitimate and efficient, as this deputy HoU advanced to the position of HoU. A place in the hierarchy gives one access to a certain policy-making level, but it also requires a certain bureaucratic efficiency − strategies that are developed in EUspace, such as maintaining networks with other Heads of Unit (in exchange for information) and gathering information mostly through access to Directors on a professional basis (this HoU knew what kind of policy would specifically make his Director and the Commissioner happy19), contacts with stakeholders (he knew that a certain form of biofuel policy would make the car industry, biofuel industry and farmers happy, even though the numbers coming from academia were saying that the policy was not sustainable) but also on an informal basis during meetings after working hours (dinners, conferences, meetings, cocktails, briefings). The example of the British HoU shows that one has to be, using Bourdieu’s vocabulary, a player, which means, being able to perform in relation to one’s superiors, using abstract language to create an impression of expertise, and knowing what provides more space for one’s actions and decision-making. Additionally, knowledge about the position of stakeholders and their ability to determine the most effective and plausible course of action – pushing the 10% target in the face of growing controversies, pushing the interests of industry, gave him better career prospects than supporting the position of NGOs or DG Environment or science, since their stance meant that the policy could not be finalized quickly and would require additional negotiations. In order to do this, the British HoU had to learn to delve into one topic, understand (technical) details (an issue that was also mentioned in a previous interview quote with a Member of the Cabinet), and use them as an argument appropriately20 (e.g. as he did during the interview with me). An efficient

19 This was an issue that often came up in my interviews: you have to know what the aims are of your boss and what your boss wants. 20 For example there was a Report by EEA (EEA, 2006) that indicated a 16% share of bioenergy (note: not biofuel!) until 2030 (not 2020 PL) that can be produced in the EU without harm to the environment under certain conditions. But, as I was told by the green NGO associate, all these restraints and restrictions have been omitted and the argument

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EU bureaucrat has to be able to use the whole range of capital that exists within framework of the law and one’s network and due to one’s place within the hierarchy. He/She has to be able to blend the discourses of science/nature and law/politics in order to reach their own, particular aims and gain additional prestige and power. However, one gains capitals through actions (e.g. networks). Being a lower-level manager at the Commission gives you this chance, since the Commission plays a central role in the political process within the EU – as the biofuel example shows. The person discussed here was promoted from deputy HoU to the level of HoU in charge one of the most “sexy” policies of the moment (in DG Energy). However, I also heard voices of admiration for him coming from young policy entrepreneurs in the biofuel cluster, which shows the symbolic prestige of such actions. This example shows the relevance of the notion of EU-space and the blurred boundaries within it, and the work of mediation between guarantees of modernity (Latour, 1993), which again raises the question of who is really modern in EUspace. The efficiency of this British HoU stemmed from knowledge about stakeholders’ positions and the positions of the car and biofuel industries, as well as the agricultural lobby. But it was also his self-control and self-awareness that made him efficient: he used the particular moment in policy-making process and utilized political pressure for his own profit. He resembles the figure of an active, dominating white man, that is guarding his secrets and is able to outmanoeuvre others actors. Both of these features show power instead of subordination. He represents whiteness as defined by Richard Dyer (1997): produced in colonies, a culturally coded representation of the white, entrepreneurial man that epitomizes will and the control over others and oneself that is a precondition of colonization and imperialism (J. L. Comaroff, 1997; Dyer, 1997, p. 31; Stoler, 2002). But this ideal of a white man in EU-space is contradictory to that of a man and masculinity in Willis’ shop culture, where it is connected to manual labour, physical power and violence (Willis, 1983). Here, in EU-space, in this space of the European white bourgeoisie, it is the man who knows how to use his reason and wit, who knows how to control things and get things done, who is smart and hard working (e.g. able to use the abstract language of numbers), which symbolizes masculinity. Such an image of the white male is apparently a powerful one in EU-space, as this example shows (as well as the one of the person from the Cabinet), and is derived from the implicit ideal of the European, one could say pioneer, Protestant (Weber, Parsons, & Giddens, 2007), who owes his success to perseverance and hard work. If such a person is seen as efficient, if he is making a career and is advancing, it allows me to assume that this powerful masculine habitus and homo politicus is able to create was: the EEA said, we can go for 16%. This shows how scientific data has been manipulated in order to reach the aim: push the 10% target and “finalize” the policy.

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political facts in the public sphere of EU-space (as opposed to the domestic sphere of women), one that reveals Western colonial powerful culture (Stoler, 2002). This British HoU has a bureaucratic Eurostyle: networks, wit, the ability to use particular language and knowledge. But he does not possess the bodily hexis of a European from an upper class, a body of a Director (see subchapter “EU bodies”). However, such a habitus, such strategies, and such a type of man and political actor are still the benchmarks for being efficient and visible in EU-space. NMS had no interest in biofuel policy – so I was told. “They didn’t have really any idea as to what it is all about”, some of them were “smart enough” (from an interview with a Dutch government official taking part in the RED negotiations) to use it as a bargaining chip to push other issues that were more relevant for this or that member state (the Member of the Cabinet told me the same thing: it’s worth engaging in every dossier because you can play with it). Such a stance reinforces the NMS peripheral status, and as my Dutch interviewee told me, these countries are too far from Brussels and do not have the capacities to send government officials to meetings in the Council. Allegedly, neither Italy nor other Southern European member states had any interest in biofuel policy (which was in these cases explained by the growing of other kinds of crops in these countries). I guess it would be interesting to know what the positions of these countries would have been (Italy and southern member states in general) on biofuels, how they would have (culturally) justified their position and what arguments would have been used to push interests through if “the South” was or had to be involved? Sweden and Finland were allegedly interested to the extent that the biofuel policy would not influence the current state of the forestry industry in these countries. “Europe” in the biofuel cluster did not emerge as a topic, but was rather a projection screen for other interests. It was Europe as the “floating signifier” that Abélès has written about (Abélès, 2000). Europe was in this case congruent, above all, with the political interests of three member states, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, and with the clear interests of industry, backed by the EU Commission21, and the environmental lobby represented by green NGOs, backed by some MEPs and member states in the Council. Because the discussion took place 21 The impact assessment for the RED was published in 2008 after the Council endorsed the European Commission’s proposal for RED in 2007 with the target of 10% biofuels (changed in 2008 to renewables). However, in my interview with a civil servant from DG Energy (March 2011), he omitted the fact that it was the Commission that proposed the 10% target to the Council and that the Council approved it at a summit in early 2007. Later on, public awareness on the controversies over the ILUC issue grew, and the Council (and the French Minister of Energy and the Environment, Minister Borloo, in particular) suddenly changed its position from 10% of biofuels to 10% of renewables, and the Commission automatically changed it in the proposal.

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mostly among OMS, in this case there was no struggle between member states over what is defined as European. Thus, European modernity in its openly and officially produced representation, remained unchallenged although in the negotiations, in networks, the work of mediation was done and the interests of the car industry, biofuel industry and agricultural lobby were in fact against research findings and contradicted environmental discourse, against modern rationality, and the pure, allegedly modern division into discourses about nature and society (Latour, 1993). Modernity and Europe was not used as a tool to mark difference and legitimize (national) interests among OMS because they see themselves as intrinsically, selfconsciously and obviously modern. It was in a way legitimate (according to the rules within EU-space) for the British HoU to fiddle with the numbers, to push RED politically although the science discourse showed it ran counter to the goal of CO2 reduction. The application of a modern, transcendent discourse about nature and its various editions (hybrids) becomes clearer when one looks at the webpage of ePURE, the biofuel lobby organization in Brussels (http://www.epure.org, last accessed on 08.04.2016). It is full of content that reassures about the environmentally-friendly and climate-friendly intentions of the biofuel lobby. Pictures of green fields suggest a pure industry and show ethanol as a solution to all the environmental problems caused by the consumption of traditional fossil fuels, and simultaneously solving economic problems and problems on the labour market. The name itself (ePURE, The European Renewable Ethanol Association) aims to suggest that the issue is all about a pure environment and pure energy. Such discourse about the environment allows it to push its interests. This is a modern discourse marking the permeation of scientific knowledge and modern technologies, but which in fact promotes other, not always modern, economical and political interests (the 10% target was opposed by Green NGOs and backed by independent research [e.g. through a research report by Princeton-based Tim Searchinger] and by the US Environmental Protection Agency). Efficiency at lower levels of administration My interviewees told me repeatedly that if you want to make a career, you have to be in one of these “sexy” DGs because then you are visible, because then you have the opportunity to work on an issue that is of wide political and media interest and gives you the ability to become visible to the hierarchy. But again, you have to be able to use capital (the law, networks, knowledge) in given frameworks that give you visibility. This, in turn, structures the individual’s capital and ease of navigation within EU-space. Posts in “sexy” DGs were particularly difficult to obtain by people from NMS. In cases when neither “geographical balance”, nor

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“transitional period”22 nor gender balance could be applied, the journey to such a DG could be very long. One of my interviewees from a NMS who had advanced to the level of HoU told me that he had the opportunity to take over the position of HoU in one of the less prestigious DGs (EAC), but was reluctant to do it. He wanted to wait until “something better comes along”. But quickly had been advised by his mentor to take “what is there” because it was most important to climb higher in the hierarchy and reach a certain formal level and then to think about moving to a better, more visible and “sexy” DG. The priority in a professional career is to advance in formal hierarchy, to advance in grades (e.g. from AD7 to AD9 or from AD9 to AD12), only then you have the opportunity to do “sexy” things. People at lower, junior AD posts told me that one has to develop strategies on how not to “get stuck” with some “unsexy” issues that do not even offer the possibility to show off one’s skills and abilities. One of these people used the Polish word spychologia23 – a whole knowledge about how to shift unwanted jobs onto others. One has to be aware of how not to become a victim of such spychologia. Many of my Polish interviewees complained about unclear areas of competence and duties and that it enabled them to be sidelined, given work far below the level 22 During the so-called transitional period, priority was given to employment for people from NMS and in many DGs employment of people from OMS was blocked because they failed to fulfill set out targets in employing people from NMS. Because transitional period became the main hate object of people from OMS, it shows how advancement rules and knowledge about how to apply them is a form of capital in the struggle over posts. The transitional period impeded the advancement of people from OMS, it caused “parachutage” (when people without experience in EU institutions are placed in managerial positions within the system). For a considerable period of time, EPSO announced competitions only for citizens from NMS, and DG ADMIN was overseeing the set out targets for the employment of people from NMS in each DG and at each level. The transitional period lasted until Jan. 1st 2010. During my second research stay in Brussels (March 2009) it was said that 20 out of 41 DGs and Offices of the Commission had a complete ban on employing people from OMS due to missing targets in the employment of people from NMS. The transitional period undermined the hierarchy structures and stirred the rules of the (until the enlargement) struggle in EU-space. Its enforcement, along with national quotas in certain Units, DGs and offices of the EU institutions (that are locally and euphemistically called ‘geographical balance’), was the only possible tool for NMS civil servants to effectively and efficiently use national capital at the EU Commission and especially to be promoted or assigned to a higher position. The transitional period was the only legal stance that singled out NMS and destabilized the power of OMS in EU-space, undermining the division criteria between OMS and NMS and between higher posts and lower posts within the EU administration. 23 The Polish word spychać means to shift.

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of their knowledge and skills that was boring and coordinative rather than focused on policy development. One of my Polish interviewees, a person of 30 years of age, who spent most of his life in France, told me the following: Paweł Lewicki (PL): So you think this… but you said that there is no single culture [in the EU administration]. Answer (A): Well, there is one culture. PL: Ok, so what is this culture (laugh)? If there is one. A: You know what, I think that… there is one culture…I mean no, I’ll come back to something else and then, I’ll tell you in a second, because [I want to tell you] about the working environment. Y… I had an impression that… that people coming over here, that [they] have, you know, some beliefs and ideas, that… [they] focus on their job, they work quite team-like and this is somehow a single institution. I didn’t imagine for example… I mean I knew that there are differences, that there are different cultures, because this is exactly what is written in all these books, isn’t it? [he means political science books on EU institutions, an issue that was part of our conversation before I turned on the recorder]. That each DG has its own specific culture, and so on, and so on, but for me this was pure fiction until the moment I started to work here. Because you see these cults… that people, this is very rational, that people to a quite extent… I mean not that they don’t cooperate, because this isn’t true, some people do cooperate. But most people here act very rationally and try to get the job done. And [they] try to push as much work as possible on others. So there is no… so it’s very rare you are confronted with a will… with a will to take over more work and get things done. People just do what they have to do, they answer your questions only when they really have to and have no other way out. Well and this hierarchical structure, that I have never been acquainted with before, neither at the university [this person worked for a longer period at a university as a researcher], nor in my previous jobs, I have three, four bosses above me [now], but [had before] only one, and it was also a different kind of relation [than it is now]. My boss knew what he wants and what he wants from me. And it was easier. That is… I just wanted to make it precise in this matter… PL: So you mean this one culture also consists of a hierarchy? A: I guess so… there is, there is a strong sense of hierarchy… PL: Rationality? A: Rationality because… well you focus on… not particularly on making something very specific, or to do the job, but on… on pushing away responsibility. And additional tasks. Because this is also… this is also a systemic problem. Your immediate boss is given points for what he does. And he does that because he has people below [in charge] that do the job. And you, as an employee, you have no resources, except your own connections and own skills. Apart from that you don’t have anything. […] The older a person is, the longer he has been at the Commission and the better they are trained, trained in searching and defending

112 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS their own interest, pushing responsibility on others. I think this is very rational and I don’t think this is specific for the EU administration. (AD7, Polish, DG SANCO)

What comes out of this picture is neither a great European idea nor a struggle over the meaning of “European interests” or “European values”, but rather the dull life of a bureaucracy where different strategies are developed in order to navigate within the system and avoid work. I guess this is not a picture specific to the EU administration – as my interviewee mentioned. While people in higher posts would tell me about turf wars, ripping competencies and issues from others in order to become visible and show their boss the initiative, this person is telling me about pushing work and responsibility away as a common sense rationality in the EU Commission. I argue this is the kind of struggle that is taking place at lower levels of the Commission, it characterizes the bystanders and areas of the institution where there are “unsexy” issues being dealt with, where Bourdieu’s economy of practices is applied. What he says is rather typical for a newcomer to the Commission, stressing the loneliness in the procedure and within the system. What is important here however is this learning process, experience with how to cope with the work and the ability to push work onto others. It is a skill that is applied both by players and bystanders and at lower levels of the EU apparatus. Players don’t want to deal with “unsexy” issues that consume time they could invest in their career and in more “sexy” things. The latter, the bystanders, push work onto others out of sheer thrift and due to being overwhelmed by the powers and capital that outline and determine the struggle over “sexy” policies within the EU Commission, which they are not able to take part in. This quote shows again the interplay between the cultural and structural aspects of social prestige; it shows how the hierarchical system works and what its drivers are: a striving for visibility and advancement among players, and pushing work onto others by bystanders.

N ETWORKS EU-space as a net-work In a network space, then, proximity isn’t metric. And ‘here’ and ‘there’ are not objects or attributes that lie inside or outside a set of boundaries. Proximity has, instead, to do with the identity of the semiotic pattern. It is the question of the network elements and the way they hang together. Places with similar set of elements and similar relations

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between them are close to one another, and those with different elements or relations are far apart A. MOL AND J. LAW, REGIONS, NETWORKS AND FLUIDS: ANAEMIA AND SOCIAL TOPOLOGY, IN: SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE 24, 1994: 649, CITED AFTER A.RILES (2001), P. 65

“Brussels is all about networking” – this is what my British friend told me at our first meeting three days after my arrival in Brussels. These words came from someone who had been working in EU-space for four years and who had completed an internship at the EU Commission and was now lobbying it. He/she said, “my Italian friend, after he came to Brussels, told me that for the first time in his life he was not speaking about football with Italians but about who knows whom”. The implicit question whom one knows and who does what in which DG of the Commission, the Parliament or any other institution or organization involved in the decision-making process in EU-space was constantly present during my research: in talks at parties, during meetings and in random conversations, it kept popping up in many different situations, but not as a topic in itself. Networking is an unquestioned and discursive principle. In EU-space no one would ask: what is your network? Rarely even asking: who do you know in this or that institution/organization? Rather, questions ran along the lines of: where are you going or whom are you meeting this evening, which (sport) club do you belong to and who is a member there, who is going to be at this or that party? With whom have you been seen and who are you seeing where and when – these are the key issues in EU-space. Networking in Brussels is firmly bound to the places and events one visits during lunchtime, after work and on weekends, and is bound to one’s prestige and assumed efficiency. I was often asked with whom I came to this or that place or how I learned about it – these were questions that would reveal my cultural and network position in EU-space. My observations in EU-space led me to Annelise Riles’ idea of an “aesthetics of bureaucratic practice” (Riles, 2001, p. 16), and the fact that the way bureaucracies work does not always reflect “rationality” and does not refer directly to the content of a policy, as Weber has described it (Weber & Ulfig, 2008, pp. 1047-1062). The EU bureaucracy is often driven by factors that are not directly bound to objective reality or the content of a policy taking shape within it – as biofuel example shows. However, laws, procedures, policies, and expert knowledge shape the struggle, both in terms of culture and for places in the hierarchy. Riles shows in her book how negotiation and communication processes within networks are self-reflexive and self-referential and often do not have much in common with the content of the document negotiated. She particularly focuses on

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how the production of a document is re-productive and self-referential and reflects the pattern of previous documents that provide a model for new documents. While she writes about documents produced by women’s NGOs in Fiji, struggles in EUspace show how law, procedure, knowledge and networks in processes of Latourian hybridization and the interplay of formal and cultural factors (e.g. producing new national representations) shape actors’ actions and to a large extent are selfreferential. The negotiating skills of the British HoU show that the outside world of EU-space does not necessarily have to be reflected in rational policy development. Expert knowledge is appropriated only to the extent that it is applicable as capital in the struggle. Riles shows that in the network of women’s NGOs the aim was to reach “a clean text”, a text that fit aesthetically into the standards (Riles, 2001, p. 82) provided by the UN and previous documents. She argues that bureaucratic aesthetics are a world in itself that, whether in documents, newsletters, conferences or a network, creates a “sociality” (ibid., p. 116). Networks in EU-space are to a large extent self-referential and form socialities (Riles, 2001), with their own spatial and cultural settings, and their own rules and system of contacts. As Riles writes, in this sociality “networkers took considerably greater care in the interrelationship of the system’s components than in their extension across distances of space, time or scale” (Riles, 2001, p. 51). She shows how people engaged in networks were often more consumed with the network itself than with its aim: reaching out to new people and sharing new knowledge. In EUspace networks often function in a similar way. Belonging to a network often rests upon the performance of a particular habitus, a style, and to a great extent is shaped by national belonging. Nationality, age (the younger one is, the less network capital is assumed) and (formal) status evoke assumptions about density and quality of one’s national networks within EU institutions and in terms of one’s positions, as the above quote depicts, there are more important and less important nationalities. Moreover, in the EU Commission there are nationalities that are seen as particularly well networked: the Irish, Greeks, French, and Italians are some examples here. These stereotypes and representations are simultaneously capital that decides about personal and national prestige in EU-space. I follow Riles’ argument and show how networks in EU-space lead to selfreferentiality, how law and networks frame and perpetuate the struggle over formal and cultural hierarchy and how performances and strategies reflect the quite hermetic character of this space. EU law and procedure amplify the selfreferentiality of networks in EU-space, causing that entrance criteria are difficult to fulfil, as the capital required to enter networks lie in knowledge about procedures and legislation. The possibility to join networks comprises the possession of cultural/social capital and structural capital (e.g. place in the formal hierarchy). Law, knowledge about procedures, expert knowledge on the content of policies,

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knowledge on the position of political actors in the political process and in networks are all parts of and capital in the struggle over hierarchy and also frame this struggle. They co-construct this self-referentiality and the sociality of EU-space and its cultural patterns. Just as in the preparations of the women’s NGOs in Fiji for the UN Beijing Conference on women, “women” were not the main focus, here it is often not “Europe” (or “Europe” as a floating signifier) that is at stake in the workings of the EU administration, but other, bureaucratic, and not explicitly or clearly expressed political stakes, which are at play. The struggle often comes down to a struggle over power – formal and cultural – within EU-space. Previous research on the EU Commission has already shown that “European interests” and the “European idea” are applied as rhetorical weapons and their meaning depend on the situation and context (Abélès, 2000; McDonald, 1997; and McDonald, 2012 on difference between national “culture” and European “civilization”). In EU-space, what really counts is “pushing things through”, making yourself visible in order to do more “sexy” things – as the EC civil servants say, have more political power to decide over issues and climb higher in the hierarchy. This is possibly only true when one reproduces sociality, performs the Eurostyle, and thus belongs to the Euroclass, when one displays bureaucratic aptitude and gamesmanship, and simultaneously performs the modernity of moderns (Latour, 1993). Networks and social bonds within EU-space form a system, an internal system of connections that are formed by structural and cultural factors. Networks in EUspace form socialities (Riles, 2001). This network system shapes and frames the struggle over hierarchy and cultural superiority, and is an emanation of hybridization and mediation between modern entities (Latour, 1993). The concealed hybridization of modern guarantees in and through networks confirms the fact that EU-space, paraphrasing Latour, has never in fact been modern. EUspace is a system of networks, it is a system with its own rules, rules that are shaped by formal procedures and structural factors, such as length of employment in an EU institution and formal position within the hierarchy of the EU apparatus. The functioning of this network system and how the struggles take place within it are also dependent on cultural factors. Of the many different networks that are all part of the network system in EU-space, each of these forms an individual’s capital, and such a network is part of and a stake in this struggle. Networks and the way they function create hierarchies based on formal and cultural criteria, criteria that both frame and are part of the struggle over hierarchy. In order to be visible and efficient, in order to do “sexy” things, one has to have networks. The density and quality of someone’s networks depend on structural and formal factors and on the performance of the Eurostyle (efficiency, visibility and the lifestyle of the Euroclass), a kind of player’s EU-habitus that is legitimate in EU-space. Both

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structure and culture shape the criteria for belonging to networks and mark the “proximity” of which Mole and Law write in the quotation above. Entering networks Coming to Brussels I wanted to avoid focusing solely on Poles working at the Commission or in EU institutions. I did not want my work to be an ethnography of Poles at the Commission, but rather about NMS and their arrival to the elitist EU Brussels – both literally and symbolically. However, somehow “naturally” and paradoxically, through my Western friends I quite quickly came to know many Poles working within the institutions. One of my gatekeepers, a senior German official at the Council, automatically assumed that I wanted to research Poles and put me in contact with one of the top Polish managers in the EU. Networks and thinking in terms of networks (of different kinds) is somehow natural in Brussels and taken for granted. My research evolved along these networks. The main component of my research material is Polish and, as my research shows, nationality is the first association and label that comes to mind in this social space. Networks in Brussels allowed me to meet people and quickly develop a circle of informants, acquaintances and friends. Thus, my field research consisted of going to parties and spending time with people, going to concerts, movies, dinners and meetings for coffee. I was struck by how easy it was to meet people only because I said I knew somebody who they knew or because one of my friends or acquaintances from either Warsaw or Berlin told somebody who I was and what I was doing. Or I just went out with my friends and got to know people and places through them. Such access enabled me to interview people placed in almost every grade in the unified hierarchy ladder within all EU institutions, both from old and new member states: from members of the Polish, Swedish and German Cabinets, through Directors General, Deputy Directors General, Directors and Heads of Units to secretaries starting their first job at the Commission, from the position of AD16 to AST1. I intended to focus on the Commission, because it is the largest institution, employing the largest number of permanent staff. It is also a central body of the EU, involved in almost every decision-making process (Spence & Edwards, 2006). Previous anthropological research (Abélès et al., 1993; Shore, 2000), was also a factor. But my networks and difficulties encountered acquiring access to the Commission as an institution actually forced me to meet anybody who was ready to talk with me – anybody working in EU institutions or who had anything in common with the EU. Besides my own research, in early 2011 I received an assignment from the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt-University in Berlin to examine the networks in a biofuel policy cluster. I thus talked to representatives of

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stakeholders and “green” NGOs and with people in relevant DGs of the Commission (DGs Environment and Energy or TREN) and MEPs. As a result, I interviewed a whole range of actors, and my research somehow developed naturally (see also Marcus, 1995). I interviewed EU Commission civil servants and retired European Commission civil servants. I spoke with civil servants working in the Council and in the EU Parliament. I talked with MEPs’ assistants, with people employed in the Commission’s agencies and other EU institutions, such as the Committee of the Regions, with trainees at the Commission, with people working in lobbies and think-tanks, with coaches working in the Commission but employed by a training company, with people who simply lived in Brussels and tried to pass the concour24 and get in, and with those who were already on the so-called reserve list25 and were striving to attain a position within the Commission. I began my interviews in January 2008, more than two months after my arrival. My access to people and how my research evolved, how I got to know people better and closer, with whom I was able to arrange an interview and what parts of the Commission were accessible or not, with whom I spoke outside the Commission, the places I went to, all epitomize the functioning of the “parallel system of administration” (Shore, 2000), how networks within the EU Commission and EUspace function, how structural factors such as place in the hierarchy and length of employment and cultural factors play a role in the maintenance of and belonging to networks. NMS civil servants were placed in the great majority at lower AD levels and seldom at managerial levels, and because of this they had no structural possibility to gain the additional prestige and power that comes from circulating information within networks and thus further expanding these networks. They were expropriated from the capital that enables the performance of the bureaucratic Eurostyle: efficiency and visibility. Moreover, the experience I gained as an ethnographer in the Commission shows that nationality is important in this system. Contrary to what some scholars claim (Suvarierol, 2007) − that national networks allegedly do not have a strong significance on the decision-making process within the Commission, my experiences show that they do exist both within the 24 There are two types of concours – the selection process organized by EPSO for the position of an EU official (at least before the reform of the personnel selection process in 2010): one for the position of permanent official (a concour is announced for one of the categories – AD or AST - in one of four fields: translators, lawyers, economists, general administrators), the other is for the post of contractual agents (CAST, also for the categories AD and AST, but only for a limited period). Both include a similar procedure; the difference is in the type of contract offered – passing CAST does not grant one the status of a permanent EU official. 25 Reserve list is a pool one gets into after passing the concour. EU institutions are only allowed to recruit persons listed on this reserve list (they have a limited time of validity).

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Commission and in relation to the outside world, between EU institutions, in EUspace in general (as a rule, fellow nationals working within lobbies and NGOs make contacts more easily) and in relation to the member states’ capitals. Whereas the German contact person from the Secretariat of the Council, my gatekeeper, automatically assumed I wanted to interview his/her Polish colleague working in a senior post, the other person from my “Berlin-contact-network”, a senior civil servant from Germany working in Eurostat provided me with the names of outgoing German men working in the Commission26. Both cases depict thinking according to national belonging and categories, and the latter case (providing me with national-German, rather than Polish contacts) was only seemingly an exception. Eurostat is located in Luxembourg, but the person in Eurostat had networks in Brussels among his old colleagues from Germany, probably from the time he/she worked and lived in Brussels before moving to Luxembourg. However, people would usually automatically assume that I wanted to interview Poles because I was Polish. Whereas the second German contact person gave me contacts to his old German friends in the Commission “naturally” because that was his capital, which he could share with me as a person living and working in Luxembourg, the former “passed me” to the senior Polish civil servant, “naturally” assuming that I wanted to interview Poles. Both contact persons were somehow acting according to the state of the art they knew from their work – providing me with what is seen as valuable contacts, not the least due to the obligation or commitment toward my contact provider in Berlin. Moreover, the acquaintance with Poles in senior posts in EU institutions, Poles who had previous experience in EU-space and possessed a wide network of contacts both in Warsaw and in Polish EU Brussels, was – because of the small number of such people – the capital that my German gatekeeper possessed. From my later experiences, I can also tell that the quickly scheduled meeting with the Polish Director, and a friend of my German gatekeeper, was unusual. While this might be explained by the dense schedule of the Polish Director, I think that rather than pointing to my level of importance, it indicates the close bond between the German and Polish Director. This also meant that this German official, as someone who is high up in the hierarchy, had a kind of relationship with the Pole that was sufficiently close to allow me to be quickly passed on to the Polish Director without questions. Based on this, it also means that this Polish official belonged to the Euroclass, to people who are “like us”, because he was in the network of this senior German official, not only due to his place in the formal hierarchy (they worked together). Last but not least, the German gave his capital out due to respect and reciprocity towards the connection to Berlin.

26 Eurostat has its seat in Luxembourg, and this is where its offices are located. It is an EU institution and as such its staff must follow Staff Regulations.

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This national assumption on the side of my interviewees – that I wanted to interview Poles – somehow structured my research and developed “naturally”. Within Polish networks there was only one case when I was passed to a person who was higher in the hierarchy than my previous interviewee. The downward movement in hierarchy of my interviewees, which I grew accustomed to in the first phase of my field work, when I predominantly interviewed Poles, was disturbed by one case of an Irish AST official whom I came across through the British secretary of a Polish Director. This Irish AST happened to be a member of the so-called “AST Network” within the Commission27, the same the Director’s secretary was in. The Irish AST caused a whole explosion of contacts to mostly Irish and other OMS people throughout the apparatus, beginning with Members of Cabinets, through senior civil servants of grades AD14 to ASTs in many different DGs. Besides the Irish contacts, thanks to this Irish official I also met with civil servants from Sweden, The UK, Spain and Italy. For example, he/she gave me a contact to a Swedish member of the Swedish Cabinet who was reluctant to have an interview and passed me on to his/her German colleague. This also happened according to national affiliations or associations, as the Swedish contact wrote back to me that “the German Member of the Cabinet would be interested in holding an interview”. All my interviewees knew that I was writing my PhD in Berlin because I always sent the English and German outline of my research attached to emails. This was also a way to suggest what languages I speak. NMS are still generally more closely bound to nationality in their networks in comparison to OMS, which are more international. There is a structural reason for this: the time of employment in EU-space and lower entry levels of people from NMS. However, there were also individuals from Poland, players who had learned the rules in the struggle, and knew how to manage capital effectively and network outside their national affiliation. The OMS, because of time factor, already had networks within their own nationality, a nationality that was dispersed at all levels of the EU hierarchy, and thus they have had the capacities to expand their networks beyond fellow nationals and possessed more mixed networks. These mixed networks and their “naturality” show the fine interplay between structural and cultural factors, how they reinforce each other and lead to reproductions of networks and power. In some cases, a lack of networks to NMS, as I was told, posed a problem for people from OMS – they wanted to have networks to NMS capitals in order to anticipate the political positions of a given member state, but

27 This was officially existing, however, as I understood, half-formal network of civil servants at the AST level. Its aim was to “engage in anything that makes the work of ASTs easier” (from an interview with one of the network’s members): create a database, provide support and so on.

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most NMS civil servants had no experience in working for the national administration. During my field research, an interview network developed through people who knew each other, in most cases based on private contacts (which are never solely private in Brussels). After spending some time in the field, I could see that the contacts I was provided with, also in the Polish network, were indicative of social interactions outside the professional context. As I observed the Polish EU community, it became clear to me that the contacts I was given reflected the patterns of contacts and divisions within the Polish community, and the Irish AST who had so many contacts, made them – as he/she told me – in Kitty O’Shea’s28. My biofuel research at the Commission also made me aware that there was still quite a clear line dividing OMS and NMS networks, as I have never, within the biofuel cluster, been passed from an OMS person to an NMS person within EU institutions. My presence in the field was not unnoticed. I know people were talking about me “sniffing” around – particularly Poles, as I heard this word at one of the Polish parties I went to – supposedly said in a quiet way but loud enough so I could hear it. Thus, I was an actor in EU-space and the reactions to me or the way I was passed to various interview partners was significant. These reactions and responses, together with bits of information from interviews, where and with whom this or that person spent their pastime, places I saw people and with whom, gave me an idea about the networks and were indicative of the kind of relations that are maintained in EU-space. So when I was passed from one Polish Director to another, who in an interview made, in a very subtle way, derisive remarks about other Directors who happened to meet in the Polish church, I could then see a particular pattern based on political and ethical views in the Polish EU community. The same adheres to OMS Directors: because I was seen as a rather sensitive (I asked questions and recorded them) and unusual guest (neither a journalist, nor a lobbyist nor a national government expert), with particular capital (an anthropologist and not a journalist, a man from an NMS, with the legitimacy of a German university and apparently the ability to reach the highest echelons of the EU bureaucracy, speaking three languages fluently) I was passed within networks that were bound with reciprocity and more informal relations. Thus, it was not just serendipity that caused me to be passed among Polish Directors. Other Directors, from OMS, would pass me to those whom they knew and spent time with outside work, and not only their fellow nationals, but also, as the Irish AST did, to people whom they knew from work at the Commission and from bars like Kitty O’Shea’s. These experiences as an 28 Kitty O’Shea’s is an Irish pub in European District that has a rather “prestigious” status in EU-space because one can allegedly meet there Commissioners, well-known politicians, and senior civil servants.

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anthropologist in the field show, however, how these networks are reproduced and strengthened along pastime activities and cultural lines rather than professional ones. As I did my research on biofuels at the Commission – a clearly defined political topic – it was always either national networks or networks of OMS or NMS that I followed and they wouldn’t mix but within them people shared the same views and values, e.g. on the environmental policy of the EU or moral values, and reinforced them at private parties that strengthened social and cultural bonds. While professional networks strictly focused on expertise and policy, were reinforced at conferences and receptions organized by lobbies, PermReps and the Commission, it was the less formal networking opportunities that served me better as an anthropologist “sniffing around”, who was too sensitive to handle at a professional networking event. These opportunities included the pubs and bars around Schuman, sport clubs and tennis courts, during pub quizzes and joint sport activities, where a kind of belonging and reciprocity was established that could be activated in such a case as mine – when more private and collegial relations were taking place. I claim that my presence in the field and how I was passed to interviewees reveal the network structure of the Commission. The networks were based on cultural criteria, shared lifestyles and activities outside of work, and thus in their reproduction they were self-referential, although they had a bearing on one’s efficiency and visibility in professional life, because activated whenever needed in professional context. Time and visibility as research factors Because of the network-like character of EU-space, an important factor in my research was time and visibility. As my research developed, I realized that it was my presence in different contexts and places with different people that influenced how I was perceived and seen. I realized at a certain point that people approached me only because they had previously seen me with somebody they knew. In the cases of people I knew, either briefly or because I did an interview with them, I could virtually sense the change in their relation towards me, in their look and body language (e.g. not turning their back in my presence) once I was seen with somebody respected or just somebody they knew. A spontaneous “hello” or small talk was rare, even in cases when on a previous day somebody had shared personal details with me such as what furniture they had in their living room, where their kids went to school, or what they did in their spare time. More often than not I was made to feel unwelcome in this or that place, ignored by people I had met before, but who would act as though they had seen me for the first time in their life. Throughout the whole of my field research, on the side of “them” there was a “natural” mechanism at work of connecting people and places and asserting them

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(in this case explicitly me) and their usefulness (and of course my usefulness was not very high, because I was not an important actor in the field or I did not know people). I also had the impression that the higher in the formal hierarchy the person was, the friendlier and more spontaneous he or she would act. Consequently, with presence and visibility, time was on my side, and the longer I was in Brussels and the more I was visible in certain places and on certain occasions and contexts, the more friendly people would be, the more freely they would talk in my presence. I could see that they felt more confident. There was also a flip side to this situation: I was not just passive in the face of the rules in the field. I developed strategies to make myself visible and to elevate my position in the local hierarchy. In EU Brussels “everybody knows each other”, which means you get to know lots of people, if not personally, then through making discreet enquiries about who is doing what or who is who. You gather such information, for example, at parties. I remember once talking to a woman at one of the numerous birthday parties I attended. The conversation, of course, turned to the questions of what each of us was doing, where and why, and at that moment I already knew she was working in one of Commissioner’s Cabinets as support staff; however I did not reveal my knowledge. As she told me what she was doing, I acted surprised and told her – which was true – that just a few days ago, I had talked to one of the Members of the Cabinet where she worked, that my interviewee was very friendly, open, interested and helpful (which was also true). Then she was surprised (or was she also pretending?) and asked me about the interview and how I got to know this Member of the Cabinet and how I got an appointment with him/her. She was really curious about how I managed to talk to this person and in general how I find my interview partners, and if it was easy or not. I must admit I was not completely self-aware about why I was pretending not to know this person, but being out of the field and from a distance I know I did this in order to show that I know people. And I think that it was strategic – to gain some prestige in the field. In fact, I did it also because I was tired of being overseen, or ignored, I was frustrated at my position of being the one to be constantly asking, I felt helpless and at the mercy of other. I wanted to climb in the local hierarchy using the local capital and tools I had identified and to show this particular person that I was not irrelevant, that I had also networks capable to reach higher echelons of the EU bureaucracy. Thus, I submitted to the rules and norms of EU-space. On my second fieldtrip to Brussels, I was more aware of the tacit rules in EUspace and this helped me to transgress the invisible boundary that stood between me and my field. Ostrander (Ostrander, 1993) points to the importance of trust being built up over time and the need to establish rapport with elite subjects from the very first contact, through interview, and after. It was probably also the assets of conducting jojo-ethnographies (Wulff, 2002): going back and forth from/to the

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field, coming back as a known person (see also Keinz, 2008). One of my friends in Berlin had friends in Brussels who were working either in a high position in one of the European professional chambers (Berufskammer) in Brussels or as the head of office of one of the largest human rights organisations worldwide. I had never seen these people before but because my friend knew them, I was invited to dinner. They lived in an old Bruxellois house next to Place Flagey/Flageyplain – a fancy, white middle-class area in Brussels’ Ixelles/Elsene district. The atmosphere was quite relaxed but I was constantly asked questions about my theories, whether I had read this or that book, or whether I knew this or that person in Brussels or had already spoken with him or her. To almost all of the questions I had to reply negatively – I had not read the books, I did not know the people I probably should have known, I did not know the issues or cases they were asking me about (that I assume were “well known” in EU-space) and I did not go to places I should probably have gone to. I just said: “[name] stop asking me these questions because as you see you will get no answer, or a negative answer”. As soon as I said this, the whole dynamic of the evening changed. Not that they became friendlier, because they were already, the conversation just became more personal and somehow natural. I stopped being asked questions and thus stopped in this way being intimidated in this subtle way. Or was my position at that moment already marked and revealed? As the conversation developed, it turned out that one of the hosts had studied in Poland for a while and had later written a PhD in Germany (both were Germans) in the humanities, and we exchanged our views and experiences on German academia. I retained this evening in my memory as very open, friendly and sincere (in German I would call it herzlich). Perhaps because we had a common friend, the boundary between us had been overcome. Maybe it was just the “positive flow” between us. I think there is a cultural meaning in the situation described above. At the beginning I was checked – whom and what I knew and how I answered. I was asked questions as was normal in Brussels to do, probably in order to be able to place someone socially and culturally, but I guess I also replied in a way that may not have been expected, and that was appreciated and legitimate: I really did not know or could not give an answer to the questions I was posed, and I openly and confidently admitted this – probably in order to stop this ritual I knew from before. However, I think it was my openness and confidence that caused such a response and that was, as I see it, valued, as it has been in many situations in the field. Net-working Networks are the condition sine qua non for existence as a subject, as a player at the Commission and in EU-space. They are an expression of a lack of clear-cut divisions between modern entities of nature and society, between human and

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nonhuman, and of the concealed hybridization of these entities (Latour 1993), as ostensibly objective knowledge is applied in networks in order to reach political aims. The network system, how and when people interact, and in what contexts and how political issues are “pushed through” the official procedure show the blurred boundaries between public and private, both in the Commission, in EU institutions and EU-space and in regard to the outside world. The existence of these networks and of the blurred boundaries can be explained by a common desire at the Commission to overcome complicated procedures, and the existence of a stiff and hierarchical bureaucratic system and long decision-making processes. Networks are also a consequence of the highly political character of EU-space, stemming from the superiority of European over national law. Decisions taken in Brussels impact on the whole Union and the life of over 500 million people, and there are many political and other actors that want to influence these policies. Finally, these networks are an emanation of an actor’s ambitions to climb the hierarchy ladder and do more “sexy” things. All of these factors: the dense political character of EUspace and the long, complicated procedures and ambitions lead to the emergence of what Shore has called a “parallel system of administration” (Shore, 2000, p. 214). However, I argue that, apart from the political interests and “big money”, one of the most important driving forces, both for this parallel system itself and for the official, visible political process, are struggles over hierarchy within this system, and within EU institutions. I claim that it is not “European integration”, but the personal interests of the actors, their willingness to do more “sexy” things, to be more efficient, to have more power and to decide over more visible or interesting/”sexy” issues, that drives both invisible (invisible to the public) and (in consequence, to a great extent, visible) official political processes in the European Union29. These struggles over formal and cultural hierarchy cause the reproduction of the network system and of EU-space in general. There are millions of political processes going on in Brussels of which the wider public is not aware (just as there is on the national level). Vast amounts of these are negotiated in limited political circles. Actions, in fact, are aimed at “pushing things through” and displaying that one is an efficient bureaucrat according to the cultural criteria set out by OMS. Official procedures and EU law, a parallel and invisible bureaucratic system (that supplements the official system) shaped by both formal and cultural factors and by the performance of the legitimate Eurostyle are contexts/frames and forms of capital in the struggle. Last but not least, it shows that EU institutions are claiming their modernity, while in fact blending modern guarantees (Latour 1993). While the boundaries between private and public are blurred and it was difficult for me to separate networks or types of networks, there are, in general, two ways of 29 One of the Members of the Cabinet told me that the proportion between issues done (agreed upon) in formal and informal processes is 50-50.

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networking in EU-space. One kind of networking resembles Riles’ networks, defined as sociality (Riles, 2001). This networking comprised of self-referential practices that were aimed at the reproduction and reinforcement of belonging based on ideas about shared, common lifestyles and values (see also Kaschuba, 1993) – often including nationality. These networks are more self-referential than networks where networking practices are more focused on policy clusters and based more on professional grounds that serve to achieve efficiency and visibility, although these network practices are concealed and were difficult for me to trace. However, as with the blurred divisions between private and public, there are close interdependencies between both these kinds of networking, and it is difficult to draw a sharp line between them. Belonging to both networks is dependent on both formal and cultural factors. One’s place in the hierarchy is very relevant, but so is body hexis and lifestyle, the kind of capital one represents (Kaschuba, 1993), and whether one performs the Eurostyle or not. Only then is one granted access to the Euroclass, “invited to the club” (a phrase used in an interview by a senior OMS official). In both cases, performing the Eurostyle granted me the ability to move within and between these networks in Brussels in order to take part in the struggle over hierarchy, both formal and cultural. In more professional networking, prestige and power was dependent on the possession, application and the ability to exchange such forms of capital as knowledge about law and procedure, political positions within policy clusters, and expert knowledge. Thus, the performance of efficiency was more relevant in professional networking. It was also the place and event one attended that marked belonging to this or that network – either factually belonging or inspirationally/based on ambitions (“I belong here”). In this more professional networking, it was the presence on conferences, panels, official dinners, receptions that bore relevance to belonging and increased the level of symbolical capital and prestige. Nonetheless, it was also the need for knowledge to produce legal acts that led people to frequent certain places and spaces. Visibility in the literal sense: being seen in a place or at an event marks one’s belonging based on the prestige and relevance of the place/event. Who knows whom and in what position was crucial, as well as what and whom one represents, and whom one knows and can talk to at such an event so that others can see it. Possessing social networks and the quality of these networks (that is bound to the position of the people you know) is a matter of prestige and power, a matter of access to knowledge that can be applied in the struggle. Networks mean knowledge and information, hence they determine one’s efficiency and influence visibility, and in the end, enhance (or impede) advancement. In the other case of networking, less professional, belonging was more about the ability to perform a particular class habitus and evoke a legitimate, modern

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representation of nationality outside one’s professional life. While in both kinds of networking, physical places were determining for being visible and marked belonging, in this less professional networking one’s belonging was marked more by one’s presence in certain spaces and by the places where EU civil servants spent their leisure time, and less by the official places that are bound to the policies and political interests they represent. These places and events/meetings constructed one’s belonging either to the political class of decision-makers or to national groups. In both cases, it was the feeling of a shared lifestyle and values that constructed social bonds and enabled visibility in its literal and local sense. The aim of such networking was less political, and more of an affirmation of shared belonging based on cultural terms. For many people in EU-space this less professional networking took place in such places as the Aspria sport club, both in the European District, and at La Rasante in Woluwe. These venues had the function of strengthening social bonds and reaffirming status and belonging to a particular lifestyle and pattern of consumption. This kind of networking was aimed at literal visibility, at showing up in places where particular people are or are supposed to be and meeting them “randomly”. For others, a similar meaning of pastime networking was connected to bars and Irish pubs around Berlaymont, places to hang out for a beer, dinner or pub quiz after work. Within the Polish community it was the Polish church (that I describe in the chapter “Polish EU Brussels”), and I have heard that the Irish church St. Anthony’s in Kraainem/Crainhem had a similar status among Irish civil servants. However, the Polish church also had a professional meaning – I once saw virtually a line in front of one of the Members of the Polish Cabinet – people wanted to talk with him, and the line that formed in front of him made it apparent that they did not just want to say “hello”. As I show in chapter “Polish EU Brussels”, these networks and socialities were also permeated by class divisions. This pastime networking took place usually after work or on weekends. During the day, during the lunch hour, people would network professionally and within the Commission: in the case of lower-level ADs (Desk Officers), this would involve socializing in a canteen of one of the EU Commission’s buildings, or, in the case of Directors, meeting other Directors for lunch in restaurants around Schuman and in the city centre. As described in the previous chapter, Place Lux Thursdays was a “junior” version of networking. Every time I would tell somebody I was going for lunch in Berlaymont, he/she would ask me who I was meeting there. Lobbies and NGOs are also networked (connected) between each other in order to better represent their interests towards an EU institution and in the legislation process. These networks and contacts are established at the negotiation table and during the decision-making process. They are often reaffirmed and confirmed at such parties as I described in the chapter on EU-space, where different actors in the

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decision-making process come together in order to affirm and acknowledge their acquaintance and indirectly share similar viewpoints on a given policy. Private parties are usually not places where business is discussed (at least not those I attended), but are occasions at which to confirm cultural/ideological loyalties, whereas conferences or dinners organized by lobbies have a more political and professional meaning (e.g. as a HoU at the Commission you learn the position of stakeholders and political actors and inform them of yours accordingly). In EU Brussels social networking is one of main aspects of social life. Whom you know is who you are. Symbolic hierarchies are reflected in the strategically (consciously and unconsciously) chosen spaces and places in Brussels that one visits and which also mark differences according to class, place in the hierarchy and ambitions. For these reasons, senior managers in the Commission play tennis together with other civil servants, often senior and over 50 years of age. They ride horses and, when they want to mark their belonging to a national community, may go to a performance of the German amateur theatre organized by the German Commission’s civil servants in calm Flemish Overijse, South-East of Brussels, where villas, golf courses and a suburban atmosphere prevail, similar to that of small Swabian towns around Stuttgart or those in Rheinland. Maybe this was the reason why during Brussels’ Museum Night Fever, I met Directors whom I knew from my interviews at an exhibition of old paintings in Bozar30, while myself and my friends, both EC civil servants and employees of NGOs lobbying the EU, spent most of this night in the Museum BELvue – a museum with an exhibition about the social history of Belgium and live jazz music. Hierarchies become visible through places, and it is this visibility in such places that makes a difference between the pubs in Place Lux and pubs and bars around Berlaymont, and mark belonging to a given network, seen as Riles’ sociality. Places give you the opportunity to mark your belonging, to make yourself visible (as I did) within certain social settings and within certain networks. Of networks and jobs The interplay of structural and cultural factors becomes visible when scrutinizing actors’ strategies and practices in employment and advancement procedures. National networks acquire particular meaning when it comes to jobs, and this was the most common context in which the word “mafia” was used. There is allegedly a Greek mafia and a Belgian mafia – I was told this by a senior Irish official (AD9, Irish, DG RTD). As he confirmed, the Irish were also often accused of having their own mafia, and the Irish contacts I was provided with reinforced this impression. 30 Bozar (Palais Des Beaux Artes/Paleis Voor Schone Kunsten) is a center for fine arts, with exhibition space, a concert hall, cinema and dance theater.

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Allegedly there is no German mafia in the Commission because “Germany has stepped back on this issue and acted a bit shy” for historical reasons (AD14, German, DG ECFIN) and “Germans quarrel too much between each other, plus it’s a big country, so they can get what they want anyway” (AD14, Polish). Apart from national mafias, there is a Brugge mafia (Poehls, 2009). The efficiency of a given mafia was based on the perceived ability to “squeeze people on to posts” (AD9, Irish, DG RTD). These opinions were amplified by the specificity of the recruitment process. Possessing or not possessing national networks is an unwritten, but important entrance criteria and something that one is confronted with while on the reserve list and looking for employment positions inside EU institutions. Once somebody passes the concour and is placed on EPSOs reserve list, one has to start searching for vacant positions within the Commission (or some other EU institution) on his/her own. This is exactly the moment when networks become crucial. A wide network of contacts in relevant places provides information about vacant positions or about positions opening up in the future. The probability of finding a satisfying job, if any, is much lower for someone who does not have these networks and knowledge about how EU institutions function. Naturally, these networks for a person from the outside world have a national background, often stemming from one’s time of employment in a public institution in the member state’s capital. If one does yet not possess networks within the institutions, the ability to mobilize or find people who might help is crucial. The way I entered EUspace, how my research developed and how I reached my interviewees prove this. When somebody from a NMS has weak networks within EU institutions, the only capital that one has after entering the service, are networks within national administrations (a national capital), but this was not capital that each NMS person possessed. My German interview partner, an outgoing senior civil servant, told me that after the enlargement, he was looking to employ someone from Poland, someone with experience in national administration, preferably in government administration in Warsaw in order to “have access to this capital and know what is or would be the Polish position” on a given EU policy. My interviewee was working in DG AGRI, for which Poland was an important country due to the size of its agricultural sector and Poland’s interest in EU agricultural policy in general. I have also heard stories that there is an expectation towards NMS people that they will somehow explain their country to the people in the Unit in which they are working in, that they will provide knowledge about internal (Polish) culture and be a joiner between the Commission and this or that member state. At the Commission, this was particularly the case when it was a “geographical” Unit with its competencies covering one of the NMS. Recruiting Poles just because they are Poles, because they provide knowledge about their country, is similar to what colonials did when coping with realities in the colonies, where it was also expected

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from local employees that they would explain the local culture (Herzfeld, 1992). In EU-space there is an assumption that they know the local customs, language, business practices and bureaucracy, which “we” do not know, but which are completely different and impenetrable to “us Europeans”. Such processes occurred after previous enlargements and reinforced the symbolic power of the founding states in the EU bureaucracy. On the other hand, these NMS civil servants are nationalized and positioned as “Poles” in an allegedly supranational organization. The status of European, modern and professional is reserved for those who are already in (in the eyes of those from the West), thus reinforcing the cultural limits and internal divisions within EU-space. It also shows that these networks and their culture, history and social composition were established long before the NMS entered. These informal rules and procedures, who contacts whom and when, which are a sine qua non precondition to being visible and effective, were coded and established without the NMS. They are, so to speak, in this network history nonexistent – as the Cabinet Member’s quote shows. However, not only in the Commission, but in many other institutions, some scholars have shown that (Davey, 2008) discrimination is based exactly on exclusion from these informal networks and on the unprocedural circuit of information, which are often based on cultural criteria. The situation was different in DGs and Units that did not specifically deal with NMS. In these, as one of my interviewees from Poland told me, they do sometimes contact people in ministries in Warsaw to get information or to make “the capital” (of the member state) aware that this or that policy is “in the pipeline” in the Commission or in Brussels in general, and that a position from them is either expected by the EU bodies or might be of vital political/economical interest for the government. Such contact maintenance by people from NMS is an expression of adjustment to the rules of the game within the Commission. Good networks with and within the central government in member states’ capitals or PermReps provide information that can be sold during a meeting in a Unit or DG and thus increase somebody’s visibility, which leads to the development of a career (as long, of course, as it is valuable information – and it is also a matter of abilities to assess information applicability and relevance – something that will become apparent in the chapter on the Eurostyle). If somebody is, e.g. an AD Desk Officer from Poland and has worked either in the Polish PermRep or in any public, central institution in Warsaw, his/her HoU would expect them to provide information on the position (or what could be the position) of the Polish government (or public institution) on a given policy. Conversely, failure to provide such information leads to the symbolic demeaning of the person, which is why national networks in Brussels are important. Contacts in Warsaw, as I was told, are also crucial when it comes to advancement

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to higher posts within the Commission, which is only possible upon previous engagement and support from the PermRep or the government. Structure and culture in networks My experiences as a researcher at the Commission exemplify the intricate interplay of structural and cultural factors that shape networks in EU-space. First of all, they show that networks exist and that national affiliations and national thinking is ever present among civil servants. My initial experiences in my contacts with EC civil servants reflected patterns in their social relations outside their professional life that I was able to understand only later, as my research progressed, and I saw how people in particular places and spaces interacted together. As I show in the following chapter, however, limiting oneself to national networks does not guarantee efficiency in the struggle over one’s formal place in the hierarchy and is rather proof of one’s lacking a European habitus. The intertwined dependencies between networks (people), habitus performance (performance of a particular style), one’s place in the hierarchy (in the case of OMS most often conjoined with length of employment in the EU apparatus), and the spaces one visits all reflect and shape one’s place in the formal and cultural hierarchy. The predominantly national character of the networks of people from NMS (as their experience and time to build networks based on criteria other than national belonging were more limited) made their achieving efficiency and visibility more difficult. Certainly, national networks are important when looking for a job – both when entering the EU administration and while already within it. However, national networks do not grant sufficient position if one wants to be a player. Here is what another Member of one NMS’ Cabinet told me, a quotation that shows how networks are relevant for efficiency, how those from NMS lack these networks, and how performance of the Eurostyle is relevant in networks within EU-space: Paweł Lewicki (PL): Are the civil servants from NMS as efficient as civil servants who have been here for, let’s say, ten years? Answer (A): No. And it’s not a matter of… matter of the individual abilities and skills of each of these persons being as good or as bad as all others. I think that the question of the education, experience, or potential with which one arrives, it’s certainly comparable. There are no differences. The differences are… the most important difference is because… the Commission is based on… the functioning of the Commission, the efficiency of one’s actions at the Commission is based on… on certain connections. And obviously we lack such connections. Not only because there are only few [here he/she named a NMS nationality] at the Commission; it’s not all about national connections, there is a kind of knowledge about

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the institution and the persons who make decisions at the Commission and the ability to move within these frames. Having said that, obviously, being at the Commission, working at the Commission at a high level for three and a half years, this network of connections is relatively weak. So I think this has nothing to do with merit-related weakness, but structural weakness. […] the power of this… the efficiency of this anchorage and connections is very strongly linked to… to the efficiency of the national administration. And in general to the European policy of a given state. […] PL: And this efficiency is a result of…? A: Not efficiency, but its lack. PL: Oh, right. A: I think this is a matter of… PL: A matter that decisions are taken outside of the…[official procedure]? A: Yes, because of that, but this is a reason not as much… this makes life uneasy for everyone. And this makes life uneasy particularly for people from NMS, because they don’t know those, who they should know, in order to be in this group that is taking decisions. […] PL: […] so they don’t really actually know who they should talk to and get in touch with? Or is it a matter of a lack of imagination [I used this word to mean ‘wit’]? A: To a certain degree all of that. PL: All of that at once? A: Yes, all of that at once. And I’ll tell you one more thing, that… if you ask me, what is the quality difference, where it comes from, when we talk about this second [unofficial] circuit [of information], it is about the ease of entering into informal relations. No, not ease, the possibility of it. […] I have a Deputy HoU and HoU in one of the DGs, and they know everyone, every [relevant] person here. PL: And… I know it sounds hopeless in [language] but this is the way things are getting done here? A: If you excuse me, yes. PL: Aha, ok. A: Well, of course, not everything. Not everything. PL: And are the interests of NMS represented in this second [informal] circuit? A: Yes they are. PL: In those nontransparent forms of decision-making? A: They are, but weaker, to a lesser degree. Incomparably. PL: Ok, and do you think [nationality] on the background of other NMS, are they efficient? How do they place themselves on this hierarchy of efficiency, among NMS? On this nontransparent level? A: I don’t have any idea. I don’t have any idea, because I don’t have… don’t know… for me, taking part in this nontransparent play, as I call it neatly, started half a year ago [after three and a half years of being at the Commission and in the CAB]. If you can say that at all. An

132 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS awareness of that. But this is because of the place I am working in. Most of all. But don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean it in a negative way. PL: I know. A: I mean here, the opening of another door of this institution. Somehow the possibilities are there, they are open, even though for my colleagues it is… [unclear]. (CAB1).

This interview passage reveals that not only do national networks exist within the Commission, but that these are dependent on experience and length of service. There is an uncertainty in my interviewee; he/she cannot decide whether issues that are relevant for these “connections” are more structural or cultural. My interviewee mentions networks in the context of everyday work and “pushing things through” rather than in the context of finding a job. He/she thinks that the experience of NMS people is comparable, and that their professional skills are as good as those of people from OMS. He/she also reveals that it is “not all about nationality”, but simultaneously is aware that it is also a matter of numbers, of quotas for people from a given nation in higher positions (“because there are only a few [nationality] at the Commission”). However, what I find most important is that he/she says that networks are a matter of knowledge about the institution, about the ease with which one enters into informal relations (“the possibilities are there”) that gives one the ability to know who does what at the Commission and where decisions are taken. This person also talked about “the ability to move within these frameworks” or the “ease” and “possibility” of entering informal relations that those from NMS do not possess. Here he/she conjoins two factors: by “ease”, I claim this person means a particular style, a way of acting in the Commission, and that “possibility” points to how the structural factor of time, and one’s professional experience, nationality and place in the formal hierarchy provide a person with structural capital. These are both stakes and forms of capital in EU-space, as players strive to climb the ladder in the formal hierarchy, and in the process, manage their national representation in particular way. Although this quote shows that networks and network capital are conjoined with a certain behavioural pattern, with the “ease” with which one enters into relations, that I see here as a certain style – an issue that I develop in the chapter on the Eurostyle – my interviewee shows that those from NMS are not in possession of this style, nor of this “ease” (style) or “possibility” (e.g. structures such as time, one’s position in the hierarchy, and, consequently, one’s innerinstitutional experience). What I want to stress here is the interplay of structural and cultural factors, and that these factors and this interplay form a system of rules about how to develop and move within networks, both within EU institutions and in EU-space. It is this work of modern mediation between the entities of nature/science and society/politics, “merit” and “knowledge” as opposed to or complemented with and by “skills” and “style”, and the ability to conceal the

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blending of these two orders that, as Latour shows, is the source of power in Western modernity (Latour, 1993). In the next chapter, I will show what these cultural factors are and what this Eurostyle in particular means. However, this system of interplay between structural and cultural factors reinforces the subordinate position of people from NMS, and in this reproduction of power, it culturally (self-)limits their capacity for networking. What we were talking about in this interview was exclusion. Apart from my interviewee saying that the exclusion or underrepresentation of people from NMS is not only due to a lack of “ease”, but also of “possibility”, he/she also refers to the “weight” of a given member state. This “weight”, while it represents numbers and quotas stemming from the size of a given member state and written down in treaties, my interviewee also defines it as the image, the stereotype, a given member state has, and that this is reproduced by its nationals. This stereotype is partly produced outside of EU-space; in this interview, this person mentions “European policy in general” and “efficient national administration”. Stereotypes are constructed against the benchmark of ostensibly “positive”, “constructive”, “proEuropean” policies that a given member state is representing, and the language used publicly by its politicians, which is congruent with particular rules – I show this in the chapter on the Eurostyle. In stereotypes, hierarchies become visible, that is, whether a country is European and modern or not, and whether its government has pro-European policies or not; the application and content of stereotypes also shows the limits of the permeability of EU-space from the outside. The quotation from the interview above makes it apparent that they are also relevant in networks, and that cultural factors influence the presence and actions of a subject within these networks and one’s “ability to move” within the EU Commission. This is why in the above quote, my interviewee mentions the current European policies of a given member state and it’s administrations’ efficiency. One other interviewee told me: These young people coming to the Commission in managerial posts [from NMS], they may have some social capital [his/her words] and connections. But their contacts in Slovakia, Poland and so forth, and having contacts in Cyprus is not the same as having connections, for example in France or Germany. You get me? […] what a British ministry has to say on some issue has more weight than when it is said by Slovakia. (AD7, Polish, DG SANCO)

These two interview quotations show that at the Commission cultural factors (“ease” and style) are relevant in the existence of networks and in one’s placement within the formal and cultural hierarchy. They also show how nationality is important, what one represents (the image of a given member state) and what pictures a given member state evokes. All of these factors have an impact on the “ease” of entering into networks and thus on being efficient and climbing the ladder

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in the hierarchy. The stereotypes that one evokes, how one manages them, how one enters this or that relation representing what style – these are the forms of precious capital in EU-space. The Irish AST who possessed so many contacts was a person who had 15 years’ service experience in the Commission. He/she told me, however, that he/she would spend most of his/her pastime in one of the most popular Irish pubs next to Berlaymont: Kitty O’Shea’s – and that most of these network contacts came from there. The way I came across this person was not a coincidence – the person who gave me name of the Irish AST told me that he/she knows a lot of people at the Commission. The example of this one Irish AST official shows how places are important for networks (visible in symbolic difference between Kitty O’Shea’s and bars around Place Lux). Young people (up to the age of 35) and newcomers in EUspace are “networking” (this is what they call it) at Place Lux; they party and think this is networking, they compare their language abilities and compete with each other through sheer (alcohol) consumption, through what they imagine is European – speaking lots of languages, talking about their travels, and what “big issues” they are handling, but also having a particular (white middle-class) quality of life, and being noble by dealing with European policies and other “important things”. This Irish AST official had a different status within EU-space. It stems from his/her origin (Irish, OMS) and long period of employment in the EC. However, he/she also represented a certain style: to a certain extent, he/she performs a distance to European discourse, as he/she, in our conversation, did not hide the fact that there are stereotypes at the Commission about NMS, and half-ironically, half-seriously said that “I am Irish and we like to drink and have a social life”. He/she (un)consciously used the stereotype of the funny and companionable Irish to establish networks: he/she used this stereotype as a form of capital. One of the successful strategies in EU-space is to use one’s own stereotypes as capital, or to be flexible about them, to manage them, to distance or turn them into joke or irony (see also Ong, 1999; Poehls, 2009). Once, on a Friday evening, I was with my Belgian friend in an Irish pub (Hairy Canary), close to Berlaymont. My friend was not working in an EU institution, but had an Italian friend who was supposed to join us later and who worked for the Commission and “knew a lot of people there”. After a while, this Italian male friend arrived in the company of two other men and one woman. It turned out that one of the men was German, and as I introduced myself, after hearing my first name he asked me whether I was Polish, Czech or Slovak – a manifestation of his familiarity with names in the Slavic-speaking part of the new EU (and I must admit many people from OMS were not able to identify my name). The other man was Dutch and the woman was Austrian. They had come to the pub from a reception at one of the NGOs in Brussels dealing with developmental help, and were all smartly

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dressed. After they asked me what I was doing in Brussels and found out that I was from Berlin, we agreed that all of those who came could speak German; only my Belgian friend spoke a little German and did not feel confident with the language. They all worked at the Commission in DGs dealing with external relations, though not all in RELEX. The Dutch and Austrian were more or less my age, the Italian was probably a bit older (around 35), and the German probably around 45. Later I found out that the German was a Head of Sector (one rank lower than HoU). The Italian started to ask me about what I am doing exactly and how my research was progressing. He asked me more detailed questions about my thesis and, as I learned, he had studied human geography in the UK, and spoke Italian, German, English, French and Spanish. He asked me about access to people, and I told him how my research had developed and that apparently a “Polish network functions” at the Commission. He laughed and said, “So there is also a Polish mafia here, too?”. As the evening progressed, I saw him speaking many times with people coming into the bar, joking with them, circulating between us and the various people who walked in and out, changing like the image in a kaleidoscope. His chat partners were mostly men who were older than we were (45 and above). All of them emanated an aura of seriousness because of their suits, as they had all come out of their offices, but they also displayed a kind of relaxation through their loud laughter. I was surprised that a man not so much older than myself had apparently sufficient talent to meet and chat with such people. At one point, after we had all had a few beers, I asked him: “I see [name] that you are a very popular person”. He smiled brightly and said with a forged Italian accent and the gesture of joining his fingertips together and shaking his hand: “You know, I am Italian, we are experts on the mafia” and we all, of course, laughed at this joke. As the evening progressed, I was told by him and others who the people were he had talked to. It turned out that some of them where HoU, and one of them was a Director in the Commission, and that he either knew them from work or had met them at social occasions. He was showing off a bit about whom he knew, but his credibility was confirmed by his colleagues (he told me about these people in their presence), and by all the people he chatted with that night. Later, during my first research stay in Brussels, I saw this Italian two more times. Once I was walking on a warm spring day during the lunch hour on Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat, and he passed me walking at a quick pace with a man older than him, followed by two other guys who both looked serious (smart suits, polished shoes, plain shirts in toned colours, and trimmed, parted hair) and were over the age of 50. At first I did not recognize him; I only sensed I knew him but could not place him in my mind. As he approached and passed me, he was focused on the conversation and he did not see me; I only then recalled where I knew him from. The other time I saw him was in Charlemagne’s canteen. I was there with my interview partner about to start the interview. He was

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sitting at a table in the company of men and women of different ages. I could not hear what language they were speaking. From their appearance, I assume they were not all Italians; they seemed to be mixed in age, between their late thirties and late fifties, men in suits and the women dressed casually. My experience also told me that the fact he was socializing with people who were not all of his own age (in EUspace one can assume the older the person is, the higher he or she is in the formal hierarchy) was also distinctive. All of the above examples show the intersection of many factors that are relevant to network practices for a player in EU-space: place, style, knowledge, and national representations and/or stereotypes and the ability to manage them. The Italians and Irish were seen in EU-space as particularly well networked, and I heard this stereotype repeated many times, either with respect or with anger mixed with jealousy. Both the anger and respect I heard in these opinions show, in my view, the relevance of network capital in EU-space and the fact that these stereotypes were socially and culturally relevant. The Irish AST and Italian AD officials apparently had good networks, but not only within their national group – something that does not actually have to contradict the stereotype about the Irish and Italian mafias and about how these nationals “stuck together”. Yet despite these representations, my experiences as a researcher indicated to me that national networks persisted, becoming more nationally mixed with time and experience, and that those from NMS tended to have networks within their own national groups (in contrast to OMS) or within the NMS, and were organized in a rather top-down manner. With time, contacts become more personal and less official and solely professional. Such “unprofessionalism” in the Commission, the style of contact maintenance exemplified by the Italians and Irish (their “ease”), showed that OMS networks, with their performed friendly character, rather than a hierarchical structure, like that seen in NMS networks, resulted in increased sociality and self-referentiality, a feeling of reciprocity (an AST official will always be lower in any hierarchy than an AD14), and the exchanging of favours. Thus, given that my research among Poles developed down the hierarchy ladder (with one exception), I argue that Polish networks are more hierarchical than networks among each of the OMS and between them; in addition, the style of contact-maintenance is different, and their “ease” is limited. During my interviews, some Poles themselves criticized the stiff nature of the working style and hierarchical thinking of some Polish managers at the Commission. The general opinion about those managers from NMS is that their management style seems like something “from a past era” (read: communist, authoritarian era). On the other hand, one of the top Polish Directors told me that “we haven’t had the tradition of a well-functioning bureaucracy” and “we are looked upon more carefully – and this is obvious”. His colleague from the same

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DG, an Irish senior official, remarked in an interview that this Director reacts very abruptly to any request for help from Poles. Besides the symbolic negative meaning of the opinion about “a stiff working style from a former era” in EU-space, this “stiff” and hierarchical style “from the former era” represents a contradiction to the Eurostyle, a style that is aimed at the performance of equality, based on the feeling of friendly relations and shared views in networks, regardless of one’s place in the formal hierarchy. When the opinion about NMS’ senior managers being “stiff” and thinking “hierarchically” came from junior NMS officials, it also represented the struggle and internalized rules of EU-space. Some of these young NMS officials, whom I call players, recognized the Eurostyle and knew that performing hierarchy in networks was not a legitimate practice, at least not all the time (see the chapter “Polish EU Brussels”, especially the subchapter “Polish Europeans in EU-space”). One can also assume that this “stiff, hierarchical thinking” precludes the development of wide networks among the NMS in EU-space. Last but not least, the widespread “stiff working style from a former era” opinion, when voiced by senior OMS officials, suggests the allegedly flatter or less hierarchical management style of OMS Directors – is also a self-stereotype that enables one to distinguish those from NMS. The opinion voiced by this senior Polish official about the lack of tradition of a well-functioning bureaucracy in Poland is an internalized representation (stereotype) about a corrupt, underdeveloped East and about a transparent, efficient and meritocratic Western bureaucracy. Some of these senior officials tacitly knew what the alleged standard in EU-space was, and apparently strived to perform and produce a different picture of NMS – or, distance themselves from the stereotype and achieve this imagined standard. The words “we are looked upon more carefully” is an expression of this tacitly internalized knowledge, knowledge about the allegedly obvious incongruence of the Polish bureaucracy with European standards because of the representation of corrupt NMS. The fear of allegations of being corrupt, as a backlash to Latour’s purification, which emerges here as internalized power, has its consequence in the stiff and hierarchical habitus of Directors in Polish national networks – something that contradicts the Eurostyle (so audible in the astonishment of the Irish senior official). The Irish senior civil servant in the DG where this abruptly reacting Pole is a Director General told me: “he seems to be a kind, but very serious man” emphasizing this “very serious”. Thus, many Poles are (self-)excluded from networks because of their malperformance, because of their inappropriate, hierarchical or serious attitude (as opposed to that of the Irish AST or Italian AD officials), which contradicts “ease” and the Eurostyle, which are allegedly part of the more flat performance in OMS networks, allegedly less hierarchical and relaxed (self-distanced) and European in character as performed by various OMS national habitus. But this Eurostyle

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networking, relaxed and more friendly, paradoxically points to the hybridisation of the moderns, while the Polish manager is trying to perform purification, which in the end, contradicts the principle of being efficient, and performing the legitimate Eurostyle. NMS are caught in a double exclusion: transparent behaviour and a toohierarchical performance, as opposed to flat networking, is an expression of internalized fear about being marked as corrupt, but when they perform this stiffness in networks, they preclude the expansion of their networks. Networks among OMS, as the Italian and Irish AST example prove, do not develop solely along national lines; their functioning is based on the performance of more collegial, self-distanced and friendly styles of allegedly shared views, values and a sense of humour that is aimed at self-distancing from one’s own national (stereotypical) representation. The representation produced about NMS, that they are “stiff and hierarchical”, points to the standard of the Eurostyle: concealment of sheer hierarchies connected to place in the formal hierarchy of the EU apparatus. This concealment is similar to N. Elias’ “civilizing process”, which he defined as a gradual suppression of natural reflexes and a heightening of shame that is particularly visible in court etiquette (Elias, 1982). However, it is also the concealment of mediations, of hybridizations that destabilize the public work of purification between nonhuman and human entities, between objective and transcendent, on the one hand, and subjective and imminent (Latour, 1993) on the other. Thus, in EU-space, following Elias, court etiquette is meant to give people the feelings of being on the same level, a feeling of reciprocity and a flat hierarchy, as it is allegedly more democratic − because one never knows when a contact might be helpful and worth activating. Although these networks are hybridizing, in their character and functioning (mixing public and private, objective procedure and subjective contacts), they do not neglect the modern status of those from OMS in EU-space. The performance of the Eurostyle assumes that these constant extraprofessional shared activities (such as meeting in pubs) during which one can socialize and confirm bonds without direct or concealed reference to hierarchy or the knowledge one is in possession of, perform visibility and assure potential access to information (Kaschuba, 1993). This etiquette, this European habitus, is prescribed to OMS, whereas NMS have a different, unfitting etiquette, although they strive in many cases to perform modernity and transparency. Given the fact that networks are social capital within EU-space and an indispensible element of an efficient and visible bureaucrat, NMS people, through their (hierarchical) style and/or “too European” performance (stemming from fear of a corrupt stereotype and lacking the ability to openly perform purification, not knowing however how to blend in a covert manner the constitution of modernity), consciously or not, preclude their factual efficiency in EU-space. One could claim that they are victims of their own work of purification, but in fact, they are victims of the power of

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moderns who continue to hybridise the scientific and political order and demand purification from all others. However, the allegedly more flat character of OMS networks does not exclude the existence of hierarchies within them – something I will develop in the chapter on the Euroclass, where I describe the interdependency between nationalities and national performances, taste and European doxa. Exclusion from networks and sociality at higher levels can also have its roots in what is called “geographical balance” and the recruitment goals that have been set out by DG ADMIN (now DG HR). Due to this “geographical balance”, some senior posts were given to people from NMS. For officials from OMS, this was seen as a detested parachutage – placing one’s own people in managerial positions due to pressure from the member states’ capitals. This was a praxis known from the time before the Prodi Commission31 and one of the reasons for the resignation of the Santer Commission in 1999. In reality, such parachuted persons from NMS had miserable lives, e.g. people from NMS who won concours for managerial positions and took over Director’s posts. They complained to me that their boss, the Director General, would trust a HoU in their Directorate more then him/her. These HoU were often people who had climbed the hierarchy ladder for years and were hoping to take over Director’s posts, which the arrival of the NMS made impossible. Such newcomers are often omitted in the information flow as a person who is new, and who does not have the networks that he/she can trust32. This reveals not only the brutal reality of the EC’s inner life, but most of all, that networks are a firm part of the reality and that they can provide either a safety net for those who possess them or, when they are lacking, reinforce exclusion. At lower levels of the apparatus it is the economy of practices and pushing responsibility away (see also the subchapter “Who is efficient”) that becomes a crucial skill. For newcomers from NMS, the network reality at the Commission was often a fatal destiny, and not only for those who were parachuted. Their exclusion from networks was natural due to their short time of employment. In addition, the people from NMS are in a great majority, younger and in junior (the lowest) AD and AST posts; they thus have less access to information, which also reinforces their low prestige. Also, their competencies are usually of a coordinative and not policy character, which both makes them less valuable as a contact person and 31 This is a local expression for the Commission’s (or to be more specific, the College of the Commissioners) term of office; the “Prodi Commission” refers to the term when Romano Prodi was the President of the Commission, the “Santer Commission” when Jacques Santer was the President of the Commission, and the Barosso Commission, when J.M. Barosso was the President of the Commission, and so on. 32 I was also often told that wrong or misleading information would be given to such a person just to expose their incompetence or to humiliate them during a meeting in the Directorate.

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automatically gave them a subordinate and dependent status. The incongruence between OMS and NMS is also visible in the world outside professional life: people from OMS are older, and in general have more grown-up kids who are often already studying; in contrast, newcomers have small kids or none. Thus, instead of promoting mixing, pastime activities often reinforce national networks among people from NMS and thus stiffen the division between old and new member states. All of this reinforces divisions that run along class and lifestyle, on one hand, and between the OMS and NMS, on the other – European geographies (Poehls, 2009) and European divisions are reproduced in EU-space.

P ERFORMING THE E UROSTYLE The German high-ranking official whom I had met in La Fontaine was my gatekeeper. He had spent the last 35 years in Brussels. When I asked him during one of our several meetings about NMS and their arrival, he told me that, apart from the abovementioned “newcomer’s syndrome”, that “die Neuen sind gar nicht so anders” (the new ones are not so different) from previous newcomers, that at the beginning “the national sensibilities are much more present than later”, and that the EU would change their perspective (he did not specify whether he was referring to the people of the NMS or politicians in these countries or EU civil servants from NMS) and soften these national sensibilities. He also told me that “all those previously undemocratic countries, like Spain or Poland” could learn to articulate their interests better, because the EU provides room for that, and that “these countries recognize the fact that they have to do things in the proper way”. I also asked him about stereotypes about the NMS, and he said that the Czechs (the meeting took place during the Czech Presidency in the Council in the first half of 2009) were very nationalistic and arrogant and learned slowly. Poles, he claimed, were better: they now had a government that understood the EU better (D. Tusk’s first government), while Kaczynski (Polish PM between 2006 and 2007 and known for his nationalistic rhetoric) had no idea about it. He told me that there is a strong stereotype about narrow-minded, Catholic and self-opinionated Poles, and a stereotype about le plombiere polonaise (the Polish plumber33). He said, the latter is 33 The Polish plumber was in the second half of the 2000s a vividly discussed issue in French-speaking countries of the EU. It represented cheap labour working in the service sector, which allegedly would push French/Belgians out of their jobs after EU enlargement in 2004. The issue of le plombiere polonais was also publicly discussed and followed carefully in Poland. In response to discussions in France and Belgium, the Polish Tourist Organization (an agency of the Polish government) launched a poster campaign in France depicting a handsome stud as a Polish plumber against the

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in fact more welcome here in Brussels than the one working in EU institutions. He told me that there is a fear among Eurocrats of the style and of way of doing politics being transferred from the national to the European level34. He also said, however, referring to Germans, that the label of Nazis was still being applied, particularly by Brits, that the Germans were stereotyped as being inflexible in general (here he mentioned Wolfgang Schäuble – the German finance minister and conservative politician of the ruling party CDU), and that German policies towards the European debt crisis has strengthened the stereotype of rigid Germans, because some of the countries in the South “would like to maintain the status quo” in terms of their state budget policies. While he confirmed the stereotype about the Germans, I should clarify that there was a positive undertone in this: the Germans are responsible, look to the future and are willing to apply reforms. He also said that “in the EU, one cannot be difficult, a difficult counterpart; you have to be nice and friendly in order to be effective here, to think in terms of consensus, and that is easier when you speak many languages”. In this context, he mentioned a Polish friend with whom he worked on a daily basis. He said that he was a great diplomat and a person “mit einem grossen Stil” (with a great style). He claimed that he knew that some Poles would not like him because of his communist past, but that “he has done and does better things for Poland than some of those right-wing politicians” and that many other Poles in the EU did not have as much experience in international institutions or the ability to speak as many languages. He suggested that his colleague, in fact, contradicted the stereotype of a Pole, and that was why he was appreciated in EU institutions. In the Commission, and in EU-space in general, of great meaning is how one performs, what kind of habitus one represents – both in class terms and in national terms, both in networks (as shown above) and in particular places outside of office hours, and in one’s everyday, bureaucratic life in core EU institutions. This way of acting and performance of a European habitus, which I call the Eurostyle, is comprised of many different elements. One of them is management of one’s national representation, of a stereotype that is denoted in materiality and through visual markers and taste.

background of tourist sights in Poland. The inscription on the poster read: “I’m staying in Poland, come and visit in large numbers”. Such a poster hung in the office of one of the Polish Directors I interviewed in the Commission. 34 The period when Kaczynski served as Prime Minister and the commonly perceived “chaos” of his governance fostered a particular stereotype about Poland in EU-space.

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Stereotypes as tool of power Oppositions, dualities and dichotomies, as previous anthropological research at the Commission has shown, were present long before the enlargement of the EU to include former communist countries (Abélès et al., 1993; Bellier & Wilson, 2000; McDonald, 1996, 1997, 2006, 2012; Poehls, 2009). In 1997 Maryon McDonald (1997) already pointed out that the dualities in the EU Commission often entail moral dichotomies, particularly when differences between the North and South of Europe are described, and then applied in everyday life (e.g. Britain and/vs. France). “Parts of northern Europe have been fertile ground for three sets of ideas: 1. an impersonal, rule-governed market, 2. an impersonal, rational bureaucracy and 3. abstract virtue, encouraging the notion that, independent of social context, there is something called ‘loyalty’, ‘honesty’ and so on.” (McDonald, 1997, p. 66) South Europe is supposedly the opposite of that. McDonald also shows how stereotypical clusters of nations and cultures provide meaningful boundaries within the European Commission. The dualities that McDonald noticed before the enlargement were spread along political and moral divisions, which overlapped with the metaphorical and geographical divisions in EU Europe. North Europe (Germany, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria and sometimes Belgium) were marked as rational, practical, laborious, developed and democratic; whereas South Europe (Italy, Greece, France and Spain), and I claim, now also the NMS, are the opposite, or marked by an absence of these characteristics; hence Europe’s South is rendered as: emotional, underdeveloped, impractical, lazy. Some of the stereotypes about NMS, as McDonald elsewhere has noted (McDonald, 2006), overlapped with the previous symbolic North-South division. I suggest that the recent European debt and the economic situation in Greece, Italy and Spain revived old stereotypes about the South. Asked about hierarchies or national stereotypes, the EU Commission’s civil servants would almost always claim there was no such thing, or that the Commission was a very tolerant place where one learned how not to judge. Indirectly, however, the assessment of bodies, outfits, lifestyles and moralities was always there. This is what one of AST fonctionnaire from Finland with eleven years of experience in the Commission told me in one of my first interviews at the beginning of 2008: Paweł Lewicki (PL): Is your outfit important to you? Answer (A): I think that it’s important how you present yourself. PL: What do you mean by that? A: Because you get one chance to make a first impression. And you represent something and somebody. So because of that I think it’s important how you make this first impression on

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external people, especially when you have to meet ambassadors, or… whoever. So you know, I think it’s important. But people here will judge you on how you are dressed. I probably (…) [unclear]. Unfortunately, this is the way it works and who you are. You might be a specialist, but… if you were to show up here with dirty hair, dirty clothes and smelly, you know, I wouldn’t have that much respect for you. It is something that you have to have… […] (AST4, Finnish, DG EMPL)

My interviewee is saying that the way you look and behave is very important in the Commission – the way you look carries meaning. The same person told me that women from NMS have a “Russian” way of dressing, for which she is “sorry”. Indeed, she says that it is important to make a good first impression on “external people”, but in the next sentence, she says that this is how it works here – at the Commission. She reveals how materiality and/or consumption and manners are important in EU-space, and the mechanism of constantly judging people, which often refers to lifestyle, materiality and nationality (“you represent something and somebody”), produces particular representations and stereotypes about nationalities. While dress code and materiality are important social and cultural features in various fields, and particularly in international or global institutions or companies (Bourgouin, 2012; Neumann, 2012), the above interview shows that in EU-space certain styles are directly linked to one’s supposed nationality, and representations of this or that nationality (Kuus, 2015). The way you are seen, judgments about people, are linked with the country you represent, and these representations are forms of capital in EU-space, something that either eases or hinders the struggle for cultural and formal superiority. The example above shows that these judgments are made visible in the application of stereotypes about nationalities that enable one to delimit what is sayable, possible and wearable in EU-space. In EU-space stereotypes are everyday representations of and about nationalities, representations that are reproduced and shaped in practices and lifestyles of nationally perceived actors. This reproduction is visible in the assignment of particular characteristics to nationalized bodies, languages and lifestyles (Löfgren, 2000; Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994), and how such assignments construct, contrary to what EC civil servants say, the nationally structured reality in EU-space. These representations are applied as a tool of power, because stereotypes “mark the absence of some presumably desired property in its object” (Herzfeld, 2005, p. 202). While Herzfeld remarks that stereotypes are always negative and indicate deficiencies, in EU-space they can also be positive (e.g. the companionable Irish or the stiff/rigid Germans, in a positive sense), and although negative stereotypes about OMS exist, they are rarely as essentializing and powerful as those about

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NMS 35 . Western and North-Western nationalities in EU-space are diluted in modernity when confronted with local stereotypes about NMS. To describe people from NMS, the often negative term “national” or “nationalistic” is evoked and makes the new duality visible. The Germans, Swedes and French are proud of their modern nationalities: the Germans of their social welfare state, the Swedes of their Swedish design (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994) and the French of their “great culture”, fashion and cuisine. NMS habitus developed not in the capitalist context of the social welfare state, as was observed in Western Europe, but is instead marked by a deep rift between everyday material needs and the policies of the (socialist) nationstate. What people from NMS refer to as Poles, Czechs, Hungarians or Latvians is often only their national narration of the past (see also Borneman, 1997), which contradicts the modern radical breach with the past (Latour 1993). A senior civil servant in the SG told me that NMS are “poor but ambitious” and that they have a “long way to go”. I asked this person about the North-South division in Europe, and whether the East-West division has replaced it. He/she said that the latter has more to do with divisions between the less developed/more developed, but “it is not a very clear demarcation at the current stage” and that “the East would probably be closer to the South, because they are poorer and they have further developments to make, but through their temperament and approaches to issues I suppose that many of the East would do more and try to be closer to countries like Denmark or Germany” (AD14, Irish, SG). Such reflections were uttered in an interview, but I will show how they become visible in the reality. As I learned during my research, the North-South division had been replaced by East and West, making imperial European power more apparent. Today however, in the face of the economic crisis in Europe, the South has reemerged as the Other once again (see also Herzfeld, 2016). While stereotypes are common in EU-space, when they refer to NMS they reveal a lack, a negative perception, while those about OMS are sometimes seemingly critical, but in the end, positive in their meaning. The mocking and complaining about managers from NMS and the fear of an uncivilized and “lacking in style” East followed me like a shadow during my research. It showed that in EUspace there is a certain, unwritten norm that is evoked once somebody acts against it or does not comply with the norm, once somebody’s lifestyle, language or body does not fit into the cultural standards of EU-space, or the policy of the state he or she represents is seen as nationalistic or not European enough. The genealogy of this norm, as postcolonial scholars show, has its roots in the establishment of the white bourgeoisie during the era of revolution, industrialisation, capitalist expansion and imperial colonial conquest (J. L. Comaroff, 1997), and I argue that 35 Also because OMS possess other relevant forms of capital in the struggle over position in the hierarchy.

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in EU-space the reproduction of this norm reveals a colonial, imperial dynamic perpetuated by the West (Cohn, 1997; Said, 1995; Stoler, 2002, 2008, 2013a; Todorova, 1997; Wolff, 1994). However, stereotypes are also established on the basis of knowledge from afar, from outside of EU-space, e.g. their production is based on the content and form (“a style”) of the European politics of a given member state (is it a European policy or nationalistic policy? Along the logic of the quoted Cabinet Member). The reproduction of stereotypes in EU-space, both based on lifestyles and representations coming from the public sphere (of the nation-state), establishes a nationally structured reality (Zabursky, 2000) in EU-space, it forms mental maps of Europe (Poehls, 2009). My focus on the practices of representations (of nationalities and their habitus) of the NMS reinforces, like Butler’s opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality (Butler, 2007), the legitimate national representation in EU-space, and through that, marking European, normal, proper and, I claim, modern. Habitus, class and modernity in EU-space Materiality, as Bourdieu writes, is an order of material culture that, and in the form of practical taxonomies, is embodied by habitus (Bourdieu, 2008). Objects, everyday practices and habits (lifestyles) reflect deeply rooted symbolic structures and orders. As in Kabyle’s house, where the setting of the space reflects systematic oppositions and a symbolic structure, in EU-space objects, spaces, bodies, languages, moralities and lifestyles are assessed and represent an often nationally produced and coded in social and cultural order that is taken for granted, and in terms of style, for the North-West nationalities, constructs unquestioned tacit European and modern knowledge (Miller, 2010a, 2010b) and frames proper, modern and European behaviour. Bourdieu, while developing his concepts, saw objects, practices and lifestyles, along with their classificatory and classifying character, as a means by which social classes reinforce divisions and reproduce themselves. Class in his view, and contrary to Marx, is in a process of constant establishment; it is not pre-given or based on fixed markers of status, but is in continuous emergence. Such an approach presumes a constant struggle over hierarchy, over symbolic superiority, over what is seen as legitimate and which practices and bodies are legitimate and defined as such. I argue that this struggle is made visible in the production of spaces and places in Brussels, and particularly when scrutinizing the performance of a nationally constructed habitus. Thus, habitus constructs class in EU-space. However, following habitus strategies and capital application, understood as competence, power and resource, I ask what are the features of the dominant

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Euroclass at the EU Commission and in EU-space? What are the classificatory and classifying practices and criteria of belonging to the Euroclass in this international space, where people from all EU member states live and work together? If habitus practices serve to constitute social collectivities, I ask how are the boundaries between these collectivities established? Do they run along national lines? Or do they run along more general lines, like East and West, North and South, modern and unmodern/backward, or bourgeois and petit bourgeois? What strategies and lifestyles in particular are seen as legitimate and which are not, and thus, what forms of capital are effective in this struggle? If the practices and lifestyles generated by habitus place it in social space, does this habitus also enable one to classify national practices in this international social space? If so, how are these practices placed in reference to the legitimate and powerful habitus performance? Habitus, as Bourdieu writes, is an internalized structure of historically established social and cultural divisions. As a system of dispositions and a generative formula for practices that, in turn, form lifestyles, it is a product of (in the case of EU-space, often national) socialization and depends on localization of the subject in social space (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). However, practices and lifestyles are, on one hand, emanations of belonging to a social group; on the other, they place and ascribe subjects to a given social collectivity. What then is the relationship between belonging to a nationality and a social class – or ascribing practices to nationalities and placing them on a social-class scale in EU-space? And last, but not least: how does taste function, along what lines, creating what (material, graspable) divisions within the bureaucratic apparatus of the enlarged EU? In EU-space, the national representation, something that might be called the national identity, of people from OMS, of the founding states of the EU or “Europe Charlemagne”, is most often diluted in modern, capitalist, Western bourgeois lifestyles and worldviews and in modern, distinctive European performances of their national habitus, developed in the postwar economic boom of the Western welfare state (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994). The European, the real European, is distinctive, is reproduced as modern, it is socially and culturally superior, as opposed to someone who is seen in EU-space as (too) national (see also Abélès et al., 1993; McDonald, 1996, 2012). Thus, modernity in local meaning, contradicts nationality, it causes the dilution of nationality and can be understood as the shared time, space and (consumption) history of the OMS. Symbolically, “Europe” and “modern” are constantly reemplaced and recentred (the legitimate way to push national interests in EU-space is to put them in a “European language”), while people from NMS are marginalized, and, as I show in the last chapter, also marginalize themselves, as being nationalists and unmodern. Not fully European,

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“nonmodern”, “outdated”, “obsolete” − these are all descriptors used in reference to the “new” Europe. I use Bourdieu’s dynamic concepts of class together with habitus, capital and lifestyle to describe the struggles that take place within EU-space and the mechanisms of class distinction, the production of nationalities (or national stereotypes), and the modern Euroclass (and its elites) with its modern Eurostyle. I argue that nationality and the performance of national habitus (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994), its practices, lifestyles and the bodies it generates, classify subjects on different levels of the internal cultural hierarchy, which is based on understanding what being modern and European in EU-space means, and what Michael Herzfeld, in a different context, defined as workings of the global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld, 2002, 2004). Habitus gives one the possibility to analytically scrutinize materiality (taste), which translates into deeper cultural patterns and hierarchies. I show how this materiality is conjoined with ascriptions of modern/unmodern, European/non-European, and with ethical and aesthetic choices; how stylization, ethics and power are conjoined (Skeggs, 1997). During my research, on the question of whether looks mirror the formal and informal position in hierarchy, I would very rarely receive a positive answer. Rather, people would say that the Commission is very liberal when it comes to a dress code and that there are no rules. But often in the same interview, a few minutes later, they would confirm that the way you look reflects your nationality, aspirations or place in the formal hierarchy. As I will show below, while this European order historically has its roots in the postwar Western European nation-state, the cultural mechanism for the production of the legitimate lifestyle of an EU bureaucrat is strikingly similar to the means of producing the white, European middle class, which has its roots in colonial conquest (Cooper & Stoler, 1997), similar to the establishment of a privileged cosmopolitan (Hannerz, 1990, 2004) and flâneur (Featherstone, 1998), and runs along the criteria for what is defined as modern and unmodern (Latour, 1993). The Eurostyle To have a style in one’s professional life in EU institutions – the Eurostyle – means to perform efficiency and strive for visibility. It means both to perform efficiency as described above and perform a certain class habitus: particular material expressions that mark belonging to the Euroclass. It means having the style of a Western European, capitalist, white-cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. But it also means smart application of different forms of capital and representing a European and modern national habitus – in order to gain more power. It is the performance of shared practices in bureaucratic life and the ethical and moral values of the Euroclass. This

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set of practices is visible in language, in bodily hexis and in ethical and aesthetical choices that distinguish Europeans from not-really-Europeans. Language skills (the number of languages one is able to communicate in, but most of all, fluency in as many languages as possible – this fluency points to one’s cosmopolitan capital) and rhetorical skills, the metaphors and arguments one uses to pursue a matter and persuade others (local efficiency) is a mark of Eurostyle performance. It means performance of modern representations: on one hand, the performance of the purification of modern guarantees, and, on the other, mediation and producing hybrids in being efficient – like the efficient British HoU. The alleged purification of the guarantees of modernity and concomitant mediation of these is applied according to need, and the ability to apply the constitution of modernity separates NMS from being European and modern, and infringes on their capacity to climb the social, cultural and formal hierarchy. In this way, modernity and Europe are blended with class markers and pinned down to the way one acts as a bureaucrat and the way one is dressed and the way one looks, the place one lives in Brussels and how one lives, the consumption patterns and ethical choices one represents and the national stereotype such performance evokes. Style is about the impression one makes, the way one manages and forms the bodily hexis, one’s lifestyle and ethical choices, which automatically place someone within the cultural hierarchy in EUspace or ideologically either within EU Europe or outside of it. The significance of style, the relevance of aestheticization, of the performance of a particular kind of bodily hexis, together with the ability to apply whole constellations of capitals, rises along with one’s place in the hierarchy. This last factor, the place in the hierarchy, is, alongside efficiency, a precondition for and an outcome of one’s style: whereas at lower levels one may only be efficient and not really have the “pure” style of a European, at the level of Director, one has to perform efficiency and the Eurostyle, meaning both efficiency in bureaucratic procedures, and the performance of the habitus of an EU elite in one’s everyday life. In performing this Eurostyle, as I will show below, taste is crucial. Taste, according to Bourdieu, divides people into those who have acquired the (Euro)style naturally through communion and are able to savour it, and those pedants, who acquired it through scholarly learning and are not able to play with the learned conventions. Taste enables one to assess the performance of habitus in EU-space, to reveal one’s own, specific habitus, and provides the basis for social and national stratification. Thus, class in EU-space is an important structuring factor; it is connected to nationality, and the creation of hierarchies between nationalities within EU-space (thus the international and not transnational character of EU-space). However, micro differences in the performance of this Eurohabitus, which Bourdieu calls distinctions, also mirrors the divisions between higher and lower levels of hierarchy in the EU apparatus, and thus marks differences between

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styles and social classes, with the “pure” Eurostyle being legitimate, powerful and more aesthetic at the level of Directors among this Euroclass elite, where particular configurations of capital form elite-class lifestyles. The Eurostyle, I argue, is in EUspace performed by players, predominantly by people from the member states of Europe’s North-West, which are locally often referred to as “Charlemagne’s Europe”. Performance of the Eurostyle as a powerful, legitimate and modern practice produces the Euroclass, through distinctions and taste. The divisions and distinctions producing the Euroclass are visible in a locally constructed and applied mental map of Europe. This mental map of the continent conflates class with representations of nationalities and places them on the modernity and Europeanness ladder; national labels are congruent with class labels. European Doxa and imperial cultural power A specific Euroclass performing the Eurostyle reproduces itself through constantly distinctive practices, bodies and languages that are conceived as modern, but also in the reproduction of modern national representations and stereotypes that is often done in the work of purification and hybridisation, or through performance of a radical breach with the past. The Eurostyle and its performance reflects local tacit knowledge, what I call a European doxa, that permeates everyday life of EU civil servants, both in their work and outside of it, and which is enacted on a daily basis. As Bourdieu writes: Schemes of thought and perception can produce the objectivity that they do produce only by producing misrecognition of the limits of the cognition that they make possible, thereby founding immediate adherence, in the doxic mode, to the world of tradition experienced as ‘natural world’ and taken for granted. […] The political function of classifications is never more likely to pass unnoticed than in the case of relatively undifferentiated social formations, in which the prevailing classificatory system encounters nor rival or antagonistic principle. (Bourdieu, 2008, p. 164)

The presence of NMS in EU-space enables the Euroclass to reproduce itself as modern exactly because NMS are produced as not modern. The Euroclass establishes its “natural and taken for granted world”, taking for granted what was and is modern and European by openly producing pure divisions between nature and society, by crossing out God, on one hand, and on the other producing concealed hybridization of these categories. It reproduces itself through a break with “yeasteryear” and through the production of a misrecognition of modernity and Europeanness in the languages, morality, bodies and lifestyles of the NMS – in (self)representations (practices and lifestyles) of NMS nationalities and stereotypes

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about them. This is the European doxa, this “natural world” that is performed by the powerful Eurohabitus in EU-space and reproduces the abovementioned duality. Doxa, according to Bourdieu, is experience of the world “as it is”, it is a state of correspondence between objective classifications and internalized classifications, of social structures and mental structures. Western, modern nation-states, as Löfgren and Hannerz have shown (1994), produce doxa of nationality and modernity on the level of everyday life, of lifestyle; for example, in the idea of being Swedish and modern, a natural and self-evident world of modernity that in EU-space flourishes with imagined Europeanness. This modern doxa is also produced in distinctions provided by ability to conduct purification and hybridization, something that Latour names the “invincibility of the moderns” (Latour, 1993). All this is done to distinguish them from those who are less civilized, less modern and less dignified (Stoler, 2002). As I will show in the last chapter, what one has to do as a subject coming from a NMS is try to get rid of one’s own national label – both distancing oneself from nationality and becoming more modern and European, by acquiring the class characteristics of the Europeans, by performing what I call practices of deserving and by blending the discourses of science and politics in an effort to change one’s national and personal status. The European doxa in EU-space emerges as reproduced Western modernity and its spectre (Buchowski, 2006), as ideological power that provides moral, ethical and aesthetic regulations, which become visible as the governing ideology. This spectre of Europe shapes subjects and becomes visible and traceable in the production of subjects. While the term modernity has many meanings and its analytical application might seem problematic, EU civil servants constantly referred to an imaginative time/development axis, reevoking and making the idea of modernity compelling. Research material and the research process Being an ethnographer in such a dense political context and moving within networks of varying interests means becoming part of the field, a more or less visible actor who tries to adapt to it and in this process of adaptation, willingly or not – irritates the rules and boundaries in force within this field. I somehow merged with the field, responded to it, and developed a bodily hexis, or various interview strategies and other ways to manoeuvre within EU-space in general. In this sense, making ethnographies among elites at its core does not differ much from the experiences Malinowski described among the Trobrianders almost 100 years ago. Whether you call it “studying up” (Nader, 1972), “studying through” (Shore & Wright, 1997), “studying sideways” (Ortner, 2010), “polymorphous engagement” (Gusterson, 1997) among elites, an “extended case method” (Gluckman, 2006

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[1961]) or “multi-sited ethnography” (Marcus, 1995), and whether we study the “deep legacies of subjectivity” and “dynastic uncanny” in order to “identify the sensual, aesthetic medium in which dynastic continuity takes hold” (Marcus, 2000, p. 12), what we do is “probing their [elite’s] intimate spaces” (Herzfeld, 2000, p. 227), because elites form parts of more encompassing cultures (Herzfeld, 2000, p. 230; see also Shore, 2002). We gather facts, figures, statements and observations, and put them together to make a meaningful whole out of them, just as Malinowski did on the Trobriand Islands. But this gathering and sticking together is always done through our own lenses. After the initial stage of the field research, I realized that conducting interviews was somehow ritualized, as they were often in similar locations and had, in general, a similar context: in the Commission’s offices and cafeterias, sometimes in bars and cafés around Schuman or in EU civil servant’s homes. Interviews and their circumstances revealed the power structures between the researcher and the field, and the power structures within the field itself in the application – on both sides – of cultural categories. However, they also revealed strategies that we anthropologists often forget to problematize: how to make them speak, how to get information about what we are looking for, whom to approach and how, how to dress and what kind of impression to make. The interviews triggered emotions that were a constant part of the interactions. The emotions often pointed to power within the interview situation and in the wider field. As in many similar cases involving research among institutional/political elites (Keinz, 2008; Poehls, 2009; Shore, 2000, 2002), meeting people and making use of networks was not only a matter of conducting interviews, but also of understanding the whole cultural context, which often yielded stronger impressions and more ethnographic material than the interview itself. An interview helped me to trace back social contacts between civil servants, but it was also a pretext to enter this or that building, or even restricted areas in some of the Commission’s buildings where no electronic devices were allowed and a body scanner was used when one entered. Many times I felt tired of meeting people because I sensed they would not tell me anything new, that they will respond to my questions in a formal way. Many times I met them only because I was advised to do so by somebody else and I did not want to find myself obliged and would have felt bad and thought it a “missed opportunity” otherwise. On the other hand, I very often had the impression that many of my interviewees had set an appointment with me only because I said I was advised to contact him or her by this or that person. They would meet me not because they saw any point in it, but because they felt obliged to and either did not want to challenge the reciprocity within the network or were not able to assess whether they could decline the interview or not.

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As I gradually learned the rules in the field, I could assess what questions I could pose and which I should leave out. There were a lot of factors that helped me to assess this accessibility and which enabled me to sense which questions were OK and which were not, which would be answered and which would not. Of course, the impression(s) during the first minutes of the meeting were indicative, but so was the language and the tone of the emails we exchanged prior to it: were they rather official and reserved or more direct and lax? Second, depending on the hierarchy (a talkative secretary was always a good sign) – was it a talkative and open person, friendly and/or even funny, or were the emails stiff and was there silence in the elevator on the way to the meeting (and after it)? There was obviously a whole dynamic during the greetings and making the first impression: looking the interviewee in the eye while reaching out for their hand or not, the way people sat, whether they would made jokes and were funny, stiff, tense, or somehow unnaturally grave and distanced (performing their power without self-distance). Men would tend to perform relax by leaning back, and sometimes with a spread-out and cross-legged posture that never really meant relaxation. Being open and answering my questions in a more or less an unconstrained way was also a matter of ability to perform a certain habitus. While I agree with Goldinger (2002) when he remarks that it is difficult to differentiate between the real (German: echt) and performed (German: gespielt) interest of interviewees, which hampers the research process, I will argue that performing openness and/or not was rather a matter of class status, a mark of belonging to a group of players in EU-space (that most often was congruent with one’s place in the formal hierarchy). In my research, I met a lot of people who gave me the impression that they were open with me – nice, relaxed, answering questions. It was only later, when I analysed the interviews and gathered the facts together, when I scrutinized their body gestures and outlook, that I realized that this or that person was just a good performer and the things he/she had told me were not as insidious as I thought when listening to them. Body hexis, small gestures, tension or relaxation, were all indicative of a performance of openness. Better or worse performance was an outcome of my interview partner’s position in the field: age, place in the hierarchy and ambitions, their experience in EU-space, their self-assurance about what they could say and what they could not, and how to phrase things – this was a sign of belonging to the Euroclass, sometimes to the Euroclass’ elites. I met a German Member of a Swedish Cabinet who was very open and critical about the Commission as an institution (or was he just performing this openness very well?) and a very official and stiff Brit at DG RELEX, who was, as I learned later, at that moment struggling for the position of HoU in one of the prestigious DGs of the Commission. There was much less performance of power when I met women, with the exception of a French Director (the one with the Bild Zeitung example), who also definitely and strictly forbade me to record anything.

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She sat upright at the table with a notebook in front of her – she looked like someone who was ready to negotiate some important issue with me (or was it her working-class background that prevented her from performing openness? But then, will she be able to make further career in the EU institutions?). Most women would sit opposite to me, more or less upright. I had the impression they were, opposed to some men, listening very carefully to my questions and trying to answer them as best they could (a fact that does not exclude their self-awareness and caution while answering these questions). However, interviews with Poles in the highest positions within the EU apparatus (two men) took place at the beginning of my research, and I must admit I yielded to their power, as I thought recording might to closely resemble a press interview and therefore offend them, which in turn, would block the way to their networks. In the case of one Polish Director, I was clearly made to wait for the sake of waiting. I walked into his/her office, and the person was sitting at his/her computer at the end of the room. I was asked to take a seat in an armchair and waited in silence for around five minutes, while my interviewee stared at the computer screen and sporadically hit the keyboard. Then, after we greeted each other and shook hands, we sat down again; the person told me to “be brief” and asked me to clarify the aim of my research. He/she firmly stated that he/she has only one hour and cannot spread this meeting and after that he/she said: proszę (please), giving me a sign that I could now ask my questions. After the interview, however, he/she led me to the elevator (because this was the security rule in EU Commission’s venues? His secretary was already out) and gave me a faint smile as a goodbye. I suppose that many of my interview partners were surprised by my questions; they were not typical journalist’s questions. I sensed that this also made them think (differently/critically?) about their professional or private life in Brussels, and I think this is something they often appreciated. Some of them were clearly interested and told me explicitly that they found my topic very interesting, that it intrigued them, and that they would like to contribute to my work. Once I was just lucky, as a top manager in the Secretariat General (SG) told me that she had found time to meet me only because her son, as part of an assignment for his studies in London, had been trying to interview managers at big investment banks in London and had had huge problems getting appointments. She sympathized with me and agreed to participate in the interview. The audience situation was rare and the performance of importance took place most often when I interviewed people from Poland36, and sometimes other NMS; 36 Although I must admit that it was sometimes difficult to differentiate whether it was the performance of power or just the fear of being interviewed. One of the Polish secretaries I interviewed, who worked in an investigation Unit of the Commission (that handled fraud and misconduct), refused to answer questions with a recorder on, even though I

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this took the form of formality and distance, performed through scant verbal communication, reluctant, impersonal answers and their giving the impression that I was taking up their precious time. I suppose it was their lack of experience, their non-European habitus (an issue that I will develop in detail in the chapter “The Eurostyle”) that made them perform in a way that was opposed to all those who were performing openness. People from NMS (due to their relatively limited time in EU-space) were still possibly unsure or unaware of what could be said in such an interview. One difference between interviews with people from NMS versus OMS was in their use of language – some of the latter, with their longer experience, would use words that reminded one of the leaflets spread on the shelves of EU information offices, whereas the NMS were not as proficient in using such EU language. Sometimes I tactically played stupid. I thought people would enjoy explaining procedures and tables to me, so I would pretend I could not understand the figures and regulations. I did this because I thought it would make people speak – and it very often did relax the atmosphere and make people more willing to have a conversation.

recorded the whole interview with her boss directly before speaking with her. In reply to my remark that I had just spoken with her boss and that he didn’t have had any problem with the recording, she claimed that this was a “special Unit” of the Commission and that the use of recorders was not allowed. In fact, there is only one area of the Commission where I was de jure not allowed to bring in any electronic devices, and that was in DG RELEX, where I had to go through a body scanner.

III. The Eurostyle of the Euroclass

There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. FRANTZ FANON & MARKMANN C.L. (1991), BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS, P. 10. For it is implicit that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other. FRANTZ FANON & MARKMANN C.L. (1991), BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS, P. 17.

The recent economic crisis in EU Europe and in the Eurozone, growing uncertainty in labour markets, increasing social conflict (London riots 2011), the so-called migration crisis, conflicts in EU neighbouring countries and debates about culture, social rights and citizenship (e.g. Beschneidungsdebatte or on Leitkultur in Germany or Burkaban in Belgium) in many EU member states have shaken the foundations of Europe’s self-esteem and led many to doubt its leading role in the World. Concomitantly, within academia and the humanities new perspectives have been established for seeing Europe from the South (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012) and for decentring Europe epistemologically (Adam et al., forthcoming; Göle, 2012), to provide a view of what is happening culturally and socially within Europe from the perspective of the global South. In EU-space, particularly among the European Commission’s civil servants, the West and the idea of one European (North-Western) modernity remains culturally powerful despite recent crises. The postcolonial and (post)imperial ideology of Western modernity and modernization (Latour, 1993) continues to be relevant in today’s world (Stoler, 2013a) and as I show further also in EU-space. It becomes visible when practices, languages and bodies are socially and culturally assessed “At the Heart of the Union” (Nugent,

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2002) but it also shows how these classifications produce the Other and how this Other responds to these classifications. This Western modernity reemerges in EUspace in a manner similar to that described by postcolonial researchers (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012; Cooper & Stoler, 1997; Stoler, 2002, 2008, 2013a): it is an effect of the relation to and interaction with the nonmodern, leading to the emergence of both European and non-European as concepts, with the latter subverting and simultaneously reinforcing the former. These processes lead to the reproduction and reinforcement of these categories on many different cultural and social levels, and in many different contexts, forms and times (see e.g. Loftsdóttir, 2012; Loftsdóttir, 2015). Focusing on the everyday life of EU civil servants while at work and during their spare time, I examine their habitus’ performance, which reveals the reproduction of a European doxa (that is intrinsically modern and modernizing) in EU-space. I scrutinize their daily practices, in which representations of this tacit European modern knowledge is reproduced, often in the form of stereotypes about particular nationalities. The doxa is traceable in the discourses and practices that jointly enact and embody it, emerging in EU-space, through its political and historical colonial genealogy (Stoler, 2008), and its unquestioned status (Latour, 1993), as a (post)imperial formation (Stoler, 2013a). Following Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and habitus, I show that this imperial knowledge is sedimentary and learned over time; it is a container and resource for the practice of habitus, and is activated at suitable moments – in particular, when it is challenged or perceived as challenged, and when there is a power struggle in the cultural and formal hierarchy. There is a large body of anthropological writing about how Europe, defined as the West, reinforces and reproduces its identity on its “peripheries” (Bakić-Hayden & Hayden, 1992; Kaschuba, 2007; Kaschuba & Darieva, 2007; Keinz, 2008; Loftsdóttir, 2012, 2015; Todorova, 1997; Vonderau, 2010; Wolff, 1994). Todorova (1997) and Wolff (1994) describe the emergence of Western discourse about South/Eastern Europe. They both show that this space, constructed as peripheries, as space in-between, is symbolically deprived of modern features and is viewed as being in the process of becoming like the West (like “us”). Comaroff and Comaroff’s writing about the South show similar processes: Whether the Enlightenment is seen as an epoch or an ‘attitude’, as vested in Kantian critique or positivist science, in self-possessed subjectivity or civic democracy, in Arendt’s (1958, 4) ‘labouring society’ or Marx’s capitalist mode of production, in the free market or liberal humanism—or in various ensembles of these things—the modern has its fons et origo in the West; this notwithstanding the fact in the West itself, the term has always been an object of contestation and ambivalence. Pace Cheikh Anta Diop (1955), the Senegalese polymath for whom civilization arose in Egypt thence to make its way northward, other ‘modernities’ are

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taken to be either transplants or simulacra, their very mention marked by ironic scare quotes. The accomplishment of anything like the real thing, the Euro-original, is presumed, at best, to be deferred into a distant, almost unimaginable future—to which, as Fanon put it (1967, 121), if the colonized ever do arrive, it is ‘[t]oo late. Everything is [already] anticipated, thought out, demonstrated, made the most of.’ To the degree that, from a Western perspective, the Global South is embraced by modernity at all, then, it is as an outside that requires translation, conversion, catch-up. (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012, p. 114 italics and brackets in original)

The abovementioned scholars use postcolonial theory to show how Europe and modernity is produced through and in interaction, in entanglements with its Others. Similarly, Michał Buchowski (2006), following Said’s Orientalism (1995), shows how Others are produced in socio-spatial proximity: “[…] for those still thinking in ‘orientalizing’ terms a mental map has morphed into social space.” (Buchowski, 2006, p. 466) Buchowski defines Orientalism as a cultural practice, and “a way of thinking about and practice of making the other as well as a set of mind that creates social distinctions” (Buchowski, 2006, p. 466). I draw on these ideas and show that in EU-space this distinction enables people from OMS to retain their own (national and European) representation as purely modern and to reproduce the European doxa. In a manner similar to Fanon’s observations about the colonized “Negro”, this enables people from NMS to be classified, symbolically imprisoned, primitivized and decivilized (Fanon & Markmann, 1991, p. 32). These Orientalizations, which Buchowski calls “idioms of internal societal orientalization” (Buchowski, 2006, p. 466) include: urban vs. rural, educated vs. uneducated, and winners vs. losers of transformation; although they are not literally the same as those in EU-space, they similarly demarcate modern from nonmodern, and real Europe from not-really-Europe. These idioms and dichotomies are produced and run in a similar fashion, making modernity a central point of reference, both in intransition Poland and in EU-space. However, Buchowski shows how class distinctions are produced, and in his example, how they are applied to Polish society (Buchowski, 2006, p. 466). In EU-space these dichotomies and distinctions create social class, but they are conflated with national representation and the division between East and West, marking the West as superior. Many scholars scrutinizing Europe and modernity base their arguments on othering – on practices that include cultural distinction. They rarely, however, point to the interactive and simultaneous reproduction of national, cultural and social class based on material aspects of the everyday life of people coming from a “united” Europe. In the dichotomy between East and West, nationality and nation-state as categories in this international environment remain relevant – and here mental maps of Europe become visible. In EU-space this is most often seen in stereotypes about

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bodies and lifestyles, but also about the histories and policies of countries and regions. However, the locally reproduced East-West dichotomy also points to a powerful understanding of modernity as a particular way of (capitalist) life and set of values, moralities and material and class settings. Such an understanding of this power enables those in EU-space to keep in mind the national differences within EU-space, simultaneously giving priority to the divisions between modern/nonmodern, European/non-European, doxa/nondoxa. The French, Germans and Brits, but also Italians and Spaniards, play in the same, more or less modern and European team, whereas NMS, after the enlargements of 2004 and 2007, are nonmodern, not-really-European. These classification practices (tastes) have, in the highly political EU-space and “At the Heart of the Union”, very practical consequences: it means, similarly to Fanon’s and Buchowski’s observations, cultural exclusion, stigmatization through reproduction of stereotypes, marginalization, misrepresentation and silencing that all mark a lack of cultural power and a symbolically subordinate position, reflecting both a subordinate social and cultural class in EU-space. Ann Laura Stoler’s writings show how race is culturalized and how classifications of bodies and bodily hexis mark belonging, based on criteria other than just skin colour (see also El-Tayeb, 2011; Lentin, 2011; Stolcke, 1995). In her article Epistemic Politics: Ontologies of Colonial Common Sense (2008), she remarks that imperial European power is widely understood and perceived as the rule of knowledge that produces social/cultural and racial taxonomies. She argues, however, that this allegedly stable rule of knowledge is not fixed when seen not as the production of knowledge, but rather as “achieved labor and worldly practice” (Stoler, 2008, p. 350; see also Latour, 1993 on blurred boundaries between nature and science on one hand and self and society on the other and simultaneous hybridization of the space between theses two divided entities). In the colonies, Stoler writes: “The production of social kinds entailed the codification of ‘selfevident’ measures to distinguish racial categories, colonizer from colonized, and not least, the proper classification of those multiple generations legitimately and illegitimately born of Javanese mothers and European fathers who straddled and confused that neat divide.” (Stoler, 2008, p. 352) It might seem odd to presume the dichotomy between OMS and NMS to be parallel to colonial dualities between blacks and whites (or rather white and nonwhite) and colonizers and colonized. I am sure many Poles, including those among whom I have made my observations, would resist such a comparison. While the practices that Stoler describes are concomitant to and an emanation of the functioning of Bourdieu’s mechanism of taste, my aim here is rather to show the similar postcolonial and (post)imperial cultural mechanisms of bodily classifications that are at work. In EU-space they are not based on skin colour, but rather, as Stoler has accurately described, on the

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functioning of visual markers established over generations of colonization, when skin colour became less and less indicative of belonging, in favour of more cultural criteria and class distinctions. In EU-space classifications and their genealogy are similar, and are based on visual markers and taste: the assessment of bodies and practices and judging whether they belong to the self-proclaimed and reproduced modern Euroclass that reproduces itself through and in “achieved labor and worldly practice”. It is also based on stereotypes about bodies and leads to their establishment and/or reinforcement, simultaneously ranking these bodies and a given member state on a global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld, 2002, 2004). Here the deep genealogy of the imperial past and of the imperial present becomes visible in EUspace, how imperial formations are reappropriated in a situation of contact with the Other (Stoler, 2013a). Although those from Eastern Europe, or the “new” Europe, have formally become Europeans and EU Europe, at least in their own view and in view of those from NMS working in EU-space, these dichotomies are only seemingly irrelevant. They are not literally the same as between blacks and whites, and, as Stoler points out, are not so self-evident or stable. The blurred boundaries between culturally codified blackness and whiteness of which Stoler writes about, are precisely the reason why EU civil servants from OMS, like colonial Europeans in Java, Sumatra and Indochina (Stoler, 2002), express a constant fear and anxiety about the cultural deterioration and moral fraud that is seen as coming from NMS bodies. The exertion of power in classifications and taste is subtle and delimits Europeans from non-fully-Europeans, based on, as Stoler writes, the “[…] reading of sensibilities more than science, on a measure of affective states—of affiliations and attachments—more than origins and on assessments of moral civilities that were poorly secured by chromatic indices and not by color based taxonomies or visual markers” (Stoler, 2008, p. 352). These bodily/cultural assessments are established according to Bourdieu’s notion of taste, which shows how divisions are reproduced based on subtle, but powerful criteria. These practices of cultural assessment have a bearing on the development of one’s professional career in the EU administration and thus impede the careers of people from NMS in the apparatus, simultaneously erasing their perspectives, ideas and worldviews from the political process. Finally, these assessment practices lead me to my claim about the emergence of a Euroclass body, a body-class of real Europeans in EU-space that uses the notion of modernity and local idioms of modernity to protect their power. Thus, on the level of subjects, on the level of a quotidian life in EU-space, Europe is Western Europe, with its Euroclass having its own cultural codes, its own EU morality that is inscribed in modes of conduct, in lifestyles and avowed values that need to be safeguarded against “deterioration” and “decivilization” by the NMS. This Euroclass is becoming visible in social conventions in EU-space, in EU middle-class respectability, which restates a culturally distinct and superior mode of

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life reflecting how Europeans in EU-space should live. The reproduction of the Euroclass is based on a shared cultural, imagined genealogy of the OMS derived from the idea, understanding and application of the Western European modernity of the moderns (Latour, 1993), modern nationality and everyday life (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994) and cultural whiteness (Stoler, 2002, 2008), which are all part of the formation of the imperial European doxa. The enlargement of the EU and the arrival of people from NMS undermined the authority of the OMS and of the doxa, and stipulated the establishment of new criteria for belonging. The enlargement in EU-space is characterized by simultaneous practices of legal incorporation and cultural distancing, between the official rhetoric of inclusion and local practices of exclusion. And these criteria of belonging are played out at the level of classifications of culturalized bodies and lifestyle that are in interplay with nationality and the division between East and West. They enable the establishment of a symbolic limit between the real Europe and not-yet-Europe, and place cultures on global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld, 2002, 2004). It is difficult to determine whether (and when) class has more (or less) relevance than nationality in this cultural struggle between East and West. These categories are unstable and situational; however, they are often conflated and coded in powerful discourses that set out the cultural boundaries.

E UROPE : THE LANGUAGE OF REASON , DEMOCRACY , LEGALITY , CIVILITY AND PARTICULAR ETHICS As a set of unquestioned and unquestionable rules, doxa is inscribed in language, including the kind of language that when used in EU-space either grants efficiency, enabling one to manoeuvre in EU-space and climb the hierarchy ladder (and collect further relevant capital) or, when not performed or malperformed, can lead to exclusion from the Euroclass and from the struggle for position in the cultural and formal hierarchy. The ability to use a particular language and the ability to manage negative stereotypes is proof of an increasingly European habitus of being (or not being) modern. Borneman and Fowler have already argued that: “Europeanization has little to which it can appeal outside of future-oriented narratives of individualism and the market. If people become Europeans, their identities no longer turn around categories of religion, folk, or national defence but around categories of exchange, difference, and value.“ (Borneman & Fowler, 1997, p. 492) They argue, as does Abélès (2000), that the meaning of Europe is “[…] an empty sign. Europe has no Spirit, in the Hegelian sense, since, unlike the nation-state, it does not live off the dead” (Borneman & Fowler, 1997, p. 492). The imagined “real European”

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community (Anderson, 1998) in EU-space is modern; however, it is not based on a common past, or, as Borneman and Fowler write, “religion, folk or national defence” (Borneman & Fowler, 1997, p. 492), neither in each of member states nor, as I will show, in the whole EU, but rather on a common genealogy and notion of particular, consumerist-capitalist modernity produced in the West. The lack of a common, European past does not however exclude common Western genealogies (Chakrabarty, 2000; Cooper & Stoler, 1997) that in EU-space define the Euroclass with its distinctive features. In a manner akin to gender difference, where homosexuality reinforces heterosexuality, or femininity reinforces masculinity (Butler, 2007) or particularly akin to cultural divisions produced in postcolony, the NMS represent a socially constructed different or Other tacit knowledge that reinforces the construction of “the real Europe”. Thus, the East and people coming from NMS are conceived of as disorderly (place), where nonreason and (a state of) naturalness pervade, as an uncontrollable and uncontrolled reality that is unpolitical (nonparticipatory), not fully democratic, with a flawed morality and ethics, and bodies and lifestyles from the past – features that all contradict the representation of the allegedly pure, modern division between nature and society and their respective discourses (Latour, 1993). What is legitimate and powerful is efficient: meaning performance of purification of the entities of nature and science, but simultaneously working with hybridization on one hand, on the other hand demanding purification of the entities of nature, God and society/politics while in concealed way mixing them. Legitimate is masculine, self-controlled and controllable, but also rational, responsible, respectable, self-distanced and “nonnational”, which excludes the feminized East. The best vocabulary in the world One of the doxic rules in EU-space is not to make explicit reference to nationality and national interest, because it is seen as backward and an expression of an overemotional identification with some abstract entity called the “nation” (see also Borneman, 1997; Borneman & Fowler, 1997; McDonald, 2012; Shore, 2000). Thus, nationality is a taboo, and those who defend national interests in an explicit way, with reference to member states’ interests and national narratives of the past, are deemed non-European and suspected of possessing an inferior moral stance (Abélès et al., 1993; McDonald, 1996; Shore, 2000). This does not mean, of course, that nationality does not exist in EU-space; it exists in a more concealed way. People from NMS are often unaware of this rule; both that the national language and narration that is brought to EU-space from new member states’ capitals is not legitimate, as well as how it is performed by NMS habitus in EU-space. This, in turn, reinforces a dual discourse about Europe and stereotypical representations of

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the nationalist NMS. Such a language habitus in this international space reinforces the stereotype about the nonmodernity of these member states – their national discourse is marked as allegedly emotional, associated with nonrational language and arguments and referring to the past, therefore allegedly contradicting the purification of imminent, socially produced and controllable social order, and thus, the notion of modernity. They are, at least in EU-space, unable to apply “the best vocabulary in the world” (Jacyno, 1997), that is, perform the language of the European doxa. During the time of my research in Brussels, at the end of 2007, a new treaty was under negotiation (after the so-called “Constitution for Europe” was rejected in the Netherlands and France). In the new treaty, Poland pushed to introduce a so-called root system in the vote count in the Council (decisions of the Council would be taken based on a majority counted on the basis of the square root of the number of citizens of a given member state) instead of a double majority system (55% of member states with at least 65% population of the EU) that was forced through by Germany and France, and in the end accepted by the majority of member states. Only Poland and the Czech Republic were against the double majority voting system1 and threatened to veto the treaty. The draft of the new treaty (what became known later as the Lisbon Treaty and its vote counting system – the double majority system – came into force in 2014) was about to set out a new voting system in the Council that, as Poland argued, would allegedly disadvantage small states. Polish President Lech Kaczyński voiced his concerns about a “German diktat” – a historical rhetoric that was used for internal political purposes, while Czech objections were connected to the Czech president Vaclav Klaus – who was critical 1

The voting system is so important because it adheres to all decision-making processes in the Council. A qualified majority, in all cases where there is no consensus among member states, means that at least 14 member states (or 18 if the proposal was made by the Commission), or 255 of the total 345 voting weights, or at least 311 million people represented by the countries voting in favour support the decision. In weighting votes Poland has, along with Spain, 27 votes (the maximum 29 votes is held by Germany, Italy, France and the UK) that give, as some claim, more power than the double majority system introduced by the Lisbon Treaty. Poland proposed a so-called square root method that would diminish the difference in weighting votes between the biggest and the smallest countries. There were two reasons for this argument given by the Polish government at that time: 1st, Poland will lose its relative voting power with the new, double majority system proposed by Germany and France, and 2nd there was fear among the ruling Polish party that big countries, such as Germany and France together with one other big, OMS country, will be able to pass any decision through the Council (which in fact cannot happen because the double majority means that both criteria: majority of countries and majority of population have to be met).

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towards the EU in general as not being democratic enough2. In the last negotiation round over the treaty, these two countries were isolated in their demands and labelled in EU-space as nationalistic. Fears of a Polish and Czech veto of the new treaty and a subsequent fiasco were high. During my conversations in Brussels, people from OMS often retold a story about a situation at the negotiation table, a story intended to depict Poland’s irrational, nationalistic and horrendous politics. Allegedly, at one of the EU summits in 2007, Polish PM Jarosław Kaczyński told German Chancellor Merkel (at that time President of the Council) in reference to the double majority system, that Poland would have 67 million citizens if Germany had not invaded Poland and murdered so many Poles during World War II. Disregarding the aptness of such a statement, it is remarkable here that it was repeated to me so many different times, always as proof of how “terrible” and nationalistic Kaczyński was. Such events are well remembered in Brussels, and the rhetoric of the Polish government confirmed the stereotype of NMS as unpredictable, not fully rational and unlawful. Retelling the story of Kaczynski’s words to Merkel only fuelled opinions that the enlargement happened too fast or that it was too big (a local phrase – the Big Bang – depicts these opinions). Poland’s being labelled nationalistic and irrational has a broader context: it shows how stereotypes and hierarchies are constructed, and how the idea of purified rational and nonrational divisions is applied to mark those with a different, “backward” view. Poland at that time had an image of “blocking”, it was seen as “horrendous”, “selfish”, “not European” and “immature” in EU-space (these descriptions come from my interviews and talks with people working in EU-space). These opinions and images were pinned to the personalities of the Kaczyński brothers and based most of all on the anti-liberal, Catholic-religious, historically informed, at times homophobic, and socialist rhetoric of the parties that came to power in Poland in 2005. Poettering, then the President of the European Parliament, remarked: “Poland has to remember that solidarity works both ways, not one way”3. Events such as these are well remembered in EU-space and may cause a lot of damage to a member state’s image, consequently impeding its negotiating capacities and, as I was told by civil servants from Poland themselves, in this particular case, making their lives “miserable”. Stories about political developments in member states retold in EU-space have their cultural meaning within it. Labels and stereotypes reveal the implicit and common knowledge that is applied to ease navigation in this international space (see also Poehls, 2009). These labels have the 2

For example see Klaus’ speech to the EP on February 19th 2009: http://www.europarl. europa.eu/resources/library/media/20090126MLT47169/20090126MLT47169.pdf accessed on 13.04.2016).

3

http://euobserver.com/institutional/23640 (last accessed on 13.04.2016).

(last

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characteristics of a longue durée. Although their meaning, content and value depend to some extent on the current political situation in the member states, they are empty of any deeper historical understanding. An Irish AD official told me that after Ireland joined the European Communities, it worked for ten years to change its reputation as an agricultural economy. Many of my interviewees from Poland told me that such labels are hard to erase, and there was “a sigh of relief”, both on the side of the civil servants from Poland and from other member states, after Jarosław Kaczyński’s defeat in the parliamentary elections in 2007, when the conservative-liberal government of Donald Tusk came to power. I even recall a situation in front of the Polish Embassy in Belgium on election day when a young EU civil servant I knew said to his friends as a goodbye: “See you tomorrow in a better reality.” (opinion polls just before the elections predicted Donald Tusk’s and his Civic Platform’s election success) This “sigh of relief” often appeared in conversations with Polish civil servants in AD positions. One of them recalled the period when Kaczynski was in power as “horrible”, and one of the Polish Directors I talked to told me that after the election other Directors congratulated him in the elevator on the fact that “after all, people [in Poland] thought it over” (meaning they had regained their senses). These stories about a horrendous or terrible Polish government and the “sigh of relief” people gave when it was gone, show the reproduction of stereotypes about member states and local responses to it. Repeatedly retold, stereotypical representations of member states show the dominant European doxa that marks actions and rhetoric, and thereby signals who is nationalistic and who is not, and consequently who is modern European and who is not. Seen as a benchmark of sayable in EU-space, this European doxa is revealed in the delimitation of a nationalistic, nonrational and blocking or backward-looking language. Such language is illegitimate in EU-space because references to the past are illegitimate, seen as contradicting the modern breach with the past and the immanence of the political/social order. Here doxa is culturally relevant on two levels: one level is the stigmatization and stereotyping of Poland, the production of a certain image and stereotype; the other level is the “sigh of relief” showing how the doxa carries influence and meaning in EU-space, how it shapes the language and the imagination of subjects, and how power is reproduced by Poles. The retold story about the horrendous politics in Poland shows the standards implicit in EU-space, where anti-liberal, nationalist rhetoric turned to the past is seen as being unseemly, non-European, and not meeting the modern and European – always forward-looking – standards. This becomes more apparent when juxtaposed against the kinds of comments political events in some other member states evoke in Brussels. Interestingly, the French and Dutch “no” vote to the European Constitution in 2005, as well as the election results in those countries

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(Marianne Le Pen gaining over 17% of the vote in presidential elections in 2012, and the participation in the government of Geert Wilders’ Partij voor de Vrijheid until summer 2012) caused neither embarrassment nor put into question the European and modern character of these states in EU-space; the word nationalist was rarely mentioned, and there were little of the negative undertones present in the Polish case. The “no” of the French and Dutch to the EU Constitution in 2005 was referred in EU-space as a shock (from an interview with a senior Irish official in SG), and hence something that was incomprehensible, something that one could not find words to describe. Such labelling reveals that different countries have different statuses and different genealogies; thus, some member states are rendered more European and others not, and there are shades of European status. Kaczyński as Prime Minister of Poland evoked and reinforced the stereotype of a conservative, nationalistic and uncivilized East as opposed to the style of expression of national interest my German gatekeeper told me about. The image of chaos in Poland and in NMS in general (often voiced in the repeated question: what is going on in Warsaw?) completed the opinion about the “immaturity” or “incivility” of the countries in the East (as some French in EU-space would say: pays de l’Ouest) that were often mentioned in my interviews. A senior official in the SG, while discussing the resignation of Czech PM Mirek Topolanek during the Czech Presidency in 2009, referred to NMS as “immature”. After I asked what he/she meant, he/she said that Belgium is a “mature” and “well-functioning European country” that is able to “solve its problems without a shot”, even though Belgium at that time had not had a central government for more than a year. Such labels and representations reveal the rules for language and negotiation within EUspace: one cannot defend one’s national interests by giving particularistic and historically rooted arguments, and without making coalitions and referring to numbers and facts and to the rhetoric of “European interests”. Otherwise a given country is isolated and assessed as immature and not-really-European. On the political level, the rule in negotiations is to look for coalitions, and to negotiate with partners to find allies instead of being isolated – otherwise such a country will be labelled nationalist. The status of an isolated country is a stigma and proof of being not-fully-effective (often referred in EU-space as a “second league country”). This “immaturity” and “incivility” of NMS, like the retold stereotypes that merely confirm this status, is reproduced local knowledge about NMS, about Europe, and what being European means. Referring to the past while defending or pushing through national interests is taboo, non-European and contradicts the modern breach with the past. It is also incongruent with the allegedly legal and rational character of the European language, the use of which confirms modern status and the purification of discourse about politics/society, science and God.

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However, the “sigh of relief” shows how (political) events in member states have influence on EU-space, how national representations and stereotypes shape the capital within it, and thus, how individuals from a given member state are seen in EU-space. Those congratulations to the Polish Director prove that one is somehow a representative of his/her own country. It also shows that nationality, contrary to what EU civil servants say, is important in the struggle for prestige. The often stereotypical representation of nationality has a bearing on one’s place in the cultural, and consequently, in the formal hierarchy, not only due to structural factors (national quotas) but also because of the cultural capital that a given representation of nationality bears, capital that can be applied in the struggle over hierarchy. In this example it is the current policy of a given member state, whether it is assessed as a pro-European policy or a Eurosceptic policy. A pro-European policy implies the opposite of what Kaczyński represented, and thus should be liberal, as my German gatekeeper said: “nonproblematic” (unproblematisch) and rational, forward-looking, based on facts and through this, comply with modern European doxa and the narrative of the future. Because they do not use legitimate language in everyday life in EU-space, NMS are not fully capable of being European, which becomes apparent in the audible surprise and congratulations after the election in Poland, when Kaczyński lost power. For OMS the new government meant that Poland had made, so to speak, progress and was back on the track of reason. The words of the Irish civil servant show however that there is an implicit axis of development, a Europeanizing process similar to the civilizing process (Elias, 1982). The congratulations about the new government imply rationalization (people’s reason had returned) of Polish society. But such a stance towards Poland, while it reveals the modern demand for a radical breach with the past which Latour has written about (1993), also reveals historical ignorance or misunderstandings about nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. NMS appear to be irrational because there is a lack of any deeper cultural knowledge about Eastern nationalisms and history (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994; Niedermüller, 2005) in EU-space. However, both the alleged rationalization process (visible in voting behaviour) and irrationalism of the nationalist language used by some Poles shows how power is exerted both by implicitly placing the histories of NMS in the “zone of nonbeing”4 (see also Fanon & Markmann, 1991), or labelling those Others as inferior, unable to use the proper, understandable and reasonable 4

Ramon Grosfoguel on May 18th 2011 during his lecture at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie of the Humboldt University in Berlin used this term to describe subjects, societies, histories that are not in the “broad entangled ‘package’ called the European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system” (see also http://www.eurozine.com /pdf/2008-07-04-grosfoguel-en.pdf) and did not construct Western epistemology constituted in the Enlightenment.

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legitimate language. Thus, symbolically these countries and people from NMS in EU-space are subjected to stigmatization and marginalized as being unable to perform the modern breach with the past in their national representation and in their performance of the European language, delimited by those countries of the allegedly rational, liberal and modern West. The “sigh of relief” also shows how Poles reproduce the European doxa. They feel marginalized from the status of full Europeans in the Commission, from the shared cultural intimacy (Herzfeld, 2005) of EU-space. The “sigh of relief” shows the internalized and reproduced cultural power, as people from Poland in EU-space feel ashamed and embarrassed – as Herzfeld shows (2005) – a powerful tool to marginalize and to “provide the insiders with their assurance of common sociality, the familiarity with the bases of power that may at one moment assure the disenfranchised a degree of creative irreverence and at the next moment reinforce the effectiveness of intimidation” (ibid., p. 3). After the elections in Poland, Polish EU civil servants no longer had to be ashamed and embarrassed, they were no longer excluded from the secular, modern and rational real Europe and they could breathe a sigh of relief. They were somehow aware that these national representations and labels impede their ability to take part in the struggle at the Commission, that it put them in a lower, subordinate position, and it thwarted their strivings to become European as Poles. Their shame also shows how the “spell of modernity” on one hand labels them as nationalistic, while on the other it produces a desire in those people to be someone else, to not be identified with an embarrassing Polish government using rhetoric from the past that reflects nationalism, homophobia, irrationalism and backwardness. The “sigh of relief” and what Poles would say about it is something that I call a practice of deserving, a practice of distancing oneself from Polish nationalism and a sense of self-assurance that mark belonging to the Euroclass. While it shows what rules are in place in EUspace and what the European doxa is, it also remarkably resembles Fanon’s description of “uncivilized”, black and colonized people, deprived of their language and dignity: Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. (Fanon & Markmann, 1991, p. 18)

The “sigh of relief” is an expression of this renouncement, of internalized, implicit standards. The national representation as performed by Kaczynski is unmodern

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because, contradicting the modernity of the moderns, it represents a continuity with the past. In EU-space such a national representation points to some kind of transcendent element influencing the immanence of the social/political order which contradicts the constitution of modernity (Latour, 1993). Historical processes in Poland did not lead to the establishment of the kind of Western modern national discourse and lifestyle (as Löfgren and Hannerz on Swedish example shows) with which its citizens would gladly identify and that would grant a legitimate existence in EU-space. The “sigh of relief” reproduces the implicit connection that is made between national representation, modernity and OMS (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994; Shore, 2000) among OMS. The “sigh of relief” shows the cultural power struggle involved in the enactment of genealogies (in the Foucauldian sense): the dominant modern and European and its opposite. As shown in the previous chapter, the new and legitimate discourse of Europe is that of environmental protection and of science, but these are blended with policies and political/national and individual interests in a concealed way; the allegedly objective reality, explicable and verifiable, is applied to reach national, economic and private aims often behind closed doors or in an intransparent way. Here I would like to show that environment protection in EU-space is a modern hybrid, a connection of scientific language and national/political interests that are presented solely as scientific, rational and objective. Environment and its scientific taming conceals national interests in EU-space, and is used to push them through – a discourse, the application of which grants efficiency and that is congruent with European doxa. The legitimate representation of nationality, as Thedvall has shown (2006), apart from “having the style”, means performing rationality, representing facts and figures, numbers that are allegedly objective, transparent and politically neutral, like a “scientifically proven” harmful composition of chemicals used in NMS’ cosmetic industry. Thus, modern nationality is a shaped and consciously performed representation conjoined with tangible and very material/economic national interests. It is the management of and constant play with cultural pictures that are marketable – often showing “multicultural”, “open”, “civilized”, “cultivated” and “progressive” member state, which is in fact, at the negotiation table and behind closed doors, creating hybrids between science and politics, and in this way securing interests and retaining power. One of my informants who worked at the EU Parliament on EU environmental policies told me how strongly France was lobbying for the ban of particular chemicals in REACH5. During the negotiations over this Regulation, MEPs, EC5

REACH stands for Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals – a Regulation of the EU that entered into force on June 1st 2007 (reminder: EU law has priority over national law).

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and PermRep/national civil servants from France wanted, on many different levels of the procedure, to introduce a ban on certain chemicals that were in use in the NMS’ cosmetic industries. The will to introduce this ban was officially justified by the outdated composition and harmful influence on the environment of these chemicals. But these ecological arguments, as it became apparent, were inspired by the French company and the biggest cosmetics producer worldwide, L’Oreal, and in fact expressed an attempt to eliminate the local cosmetic industries in the NMS, which still hold a majority share of the cosmetics market. As I was told, everybody in EU-space knew that L’Oreal was behind this ban. The argument of the environment was used to push through the interests of one of France’s biggest tax-paying companies 6 supported by French nationals in different EU institutions, whereas NMS, often unaware of the modes of operation used in EU-space, are marked as nationalistic because of their unskilful, stereotypecongruent and nonmodern way of expressing their interests. Nonmodern, however, also means the inability to mediate between the allegedly entities of nature and society in a skilful and concealed way; it means the inability to be efficient and to use the allegedly rational European language. Blocking the new EU treaty because of the voting system in the Council, which allegedly diminishes the power of small states, is in fact quite rational because numbers – quotas and size of the country – are crucial in the decision-making process. Simultaneously however, such rhetoric puts these NMS, as Herzfeld describes it, at the pedestal and the tethering post (Herzfeld, 2004), that symbolically imprison them as traditional, nationalistic and the opposite of modern. Euroclass language habitus The language and rules described above cause NMS to often be accused of blatantly defending their national interests without respect for other member states – a representation that in EU-space is automatically associated with a whole range of negative moral connotations, e.g. being selfish and disrespectful 7 (see also

6

I suggest that L’Oreal is something similar to Swedish Ikea – a national label that stands for and promotes a certain kind of lifestyle, a French lifestyle: glamorous, successful, fashionable and with good taste, one could claim a French lifestyle that represents a particular modern picture of French state and French culture.

7

Which would also mean that performing modernity, performing a demanded pure division between nature and society, is also an expression of a “better” morality. It seems that the European debt crisis has confirmed this cultural thinking – “rational” and “future oriented” states of the North-West are the guarantees of the stable Euro, while the South has been living day to day and spending money pumped by the EU – yet another reason

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McDonald, 1996; McDonald, 2012 on meaning of national culture and European civilization in the EC). The Euroclass habitus rule is to distance oneself from nationality, to show detachment from national representation, that for the countries in the North-West of the EU is never as embarrassing as the Polish national representation is for Poles, because OMS national representation at negotiating tables is always represented as somehow being rational, openly purified of both nonscientific and nonsocial orders in respectively political and scientific discourses and in the guise of the modernity of the moderns (Latour, 1993). People from those countries use language that constitutes and is congruent with the modern European doxa; they practice, perform and, so to speak, possess modernity. The rule, apart from performing a modern national habitus (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994), is to “get things done” (efficiency) and become more visible, but certainly not through the application of irrational and non-European language – it either represents neoliberal ideas in the economy, or is non-inclusive and illiberal. In one of my interviews a senior civil servant from OMS working in DG Education and Culture (EAC) recalled a discussion taking place in his DG during the Hungarian Presidency (1st half of 2011) over EU policy towards the Roma (EU policy towards the Roma was set out by the Hungarian Presidency as one of its policy foci, shortly after Roma campsites were liquidated by the police in the suburbs of major French cities). He was surprised at the “defensiveness” of three fonctionnaires from Romania, Hungary and Slovakia: “They were not comfortable with the fact that this was even discussed at a general level”. They defended the educational system’s approach towards the Roma in each of these member states. As he said, in some of these countries, there are separate schools for Roma children – something a person from OMS would, as he claimed, not defend because it is “indefensible”. He also said about people from NMS in general: “in the end, they would always return to the problems of the countries from which they come”. Regretfully I was not able to learn what these defensive arguments were exactly, but I asked him about the cleansing of Roma camps in Lyon’s banlieues8 , and whether a French EC civil servant would defend Sarkozy’s policy, and he said no – they would “rebel in scorn”. In the same interview, he recalled a visit of a “very young undersecretary in the Lithuanian government” who gave a speech at a meeting in Brussels on anchoring in the Lithuanian constitution a ban on the ability to create a state budget deficit. As my interviewee said: “There were many similar cases of these young men coming from other NMS, presenting their hyperto think of these countries as corrupt and irresponsible that lead to the crisis (see also Herzfeld, 2016). 8

In summer 2010, French Police began to expel and deport Roma from Romania and Bulgaria back to their countries of origin. For details see: http://www.nytimes.com /2010/07/30/world/europe/30france.html?_r=0 (last accessed on 19.04.2016).

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neoliberal ideas, probably absorbed at one of the American universities. They would say what they had to say and then just walk out not allowing any possibility to discuss these issues.” This story of the senior civil servant from an OMS has two layers. One is the power struggle over representation of three NMS: Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, and of NMS in general. The other is the cultural meaning of retelling such a story – retelling of a negative representation of NMS. The representation is incongruent with what being European means, because it is about discriminatory, racist and noninclusive policies in these countries9. Such representations in EU-space evoke defensive attitudes among civil servants coming from NMS. However, they – and this is the second layer of this story – are acting illegitimately because they are defending national policies that are “indefensible”, and I would claim he also means irrational and backward because of the racism of having separate schools for Roma children. This has a nonmodern and non-European meaning; it is intolerant and not in accordance with the European discourse that is allegedly rational and inclusive. This is also performance of a non-Eurohabitus. The “indefensible” education policy towards Roma, one that excludes Roma from the given member state society (assuming there really are separate schools for Roma in these countries) reinforces the stereotype about a backward East, about intolerance to difference, and nationalistic (hence nonmodern) thinking in these countries. However, in this case, nationalistic is assumed to be ethnic, racist and cultural, and as such, not modern by contradicting the implicitly evoked construct of the nation-state as based on political citizenship. Such a nation-state construct represents the modernity of the moderns, where the immanence of society and politics and the transcendence of nature and science are purified, although as some authors show, scientific discourse in some modern countries is being applied in support of increasingly racist policies (see e.g. Bredström, 2009). However, the reaction of these NMS civil servants is negatively assessed (he says as though they would always defend indefensible issues), and their illegitimate reactions actually lead to their self-marginalization, in this case through incongruence with the dominant social-liberal, inclusive, rational and antineoliberal doxa within the Commission. The allegedly defensive reaction of NMS civil servants confirms the stereotype of a not-really-European East that is retold by the Irish official. The administrators from NMS he is talking about are not performing European habitus, because they have not yet found the language to voice these interests or to defend the policies of their state of origin, or do not know when to keep silent. They defend policies of their national governments that are marked as irrational and based on ethnic nationalism, and thus reveal their national 9

A. Lentin shows how an ostensible discrediting of the category of race in Europe did not abolish racism (Lentin, 2011).

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identification in a way that is unacceptable in EU-space, both not fitting into modern nationalities and not fitting into the way these nationalities are expressed (or not) in EU-space. Bourdieu shows how the inability of a habitus to determine and apply legitimate language (he calls it “legitimate incompetence”) causes exclusion. As he writes: “Speakers lacking the legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the social domains in which this competence is required, or are condemned to silence.” (Bourdieu & Thompson, 1992, p. 55) As opposed to the French civil servant who would “rebel in scorn”, these NMS civil servants are placed on the side of those without such language, where, as Bourdieu writes, they are condemned to silence. Thus, they are inefficient, do not perform the Eurostyle, and, in effect, exclude themselves from being really European, or at least European in a legitimate way in EU-space, due to the stereotype and national representation coming from NMS. Concomitantly, they are labelled not-fully-rational, nationalistic, racist, morally/ethically inferior (selfish and disrespectful of others), and accused of not applying modern scientific knowledge merely because they are unable to determine what forms of capital (and burdens) are relevant. Their status is similar to that of Frantz Fanon’s Negros: “A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. […] To speak means to be in a position to use certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of civilization.” (Fanon & Markmann, 1991, p. 18) These NMS civil servants use their own, as per Fanon, “negro language”, language that is natural for them and that their habitus has internalized in the context of their nation-state, but is (self-)excluding and “blackening” in EU-space, because it is not representative of it. French officials would criticize their government “in scorn” because the rule at the Commission is to openly criticize one’s own governments if it is promoting irrational, nationalistic and racist policies, and to defend national interests (either clearly defined by the government or PermRep or defined by individuals as such) in a more hidden way. The story of the senior civil servant from an OMS is, as he himself asserts, remarkable, and by reenacting negative representations he is reestablishing and reinforcing the rational European doxa. What the senior civil servant says about the administrators from NMS reveals his position: he is in the class of “producers”, who “[…] are led by the logic of competition with other producers and by the specific interests linked to their position in the field of production (and therefore by the habitus which have led them to that position) to produce distinct products which meet the different cultural interests which the consumers owe to their class conditions and position, thereby offering them a real possibility of being satisfied” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 228). On the other hand, administrators from NMS apply “[…] practices which are seen as pretentious, because of the manifest discrepancy

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between ambitions and possibilities” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 171) and a lack of “stylization” that “[…] in language it gives the opposition between popular outspokenness and the highly censored language of the bourgeois” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 172). This is the reason why he is retelling me this story about administrators from NMS, who are in his eyes irrational and defending irrational policies. This OMS senior civil servant, with 17 years service, belongs to the class of those who produce this discourse and who set out the criteria for Europeanness. He belongs to Bourdieu’s bourgeoisie, the class that is able to determine what is sayable and what is not, and how things are to be said – a class of producers of “distinct products”, which in this case is the European language. Marking NMS civil servants as nationalistic, and thus not fully rational, morally inferior, and, in consequence, not-really-European and not-really-modern, mirrors this power struggle and delimits what is legitimate language. Retelling this story also has the aim of reinforcing and reaffirming his own place in the cultural hierarchy in EUspace. This space is set up to be, so to speak, free from nationalism (cf. Shore, 2000). National interests are taboo and defending one’s “own” country is congruent with what Bourdieu describes as the “popular outspokenness” of the lower class. In fact, these NMS administrators use “broken language” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 143) that reveals “linguistic habitus, a set of socially constituted dispositions that imply a propensity to speak in certain ways and to utter determinate things […] and as the social ability to adequately utilize these competenc[ies] in a given situation” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 145). Thus, their habitus does not fit EU-space, they do not perform Eurostyle in their professional life, and they are symbolically nonexistent, though still present to mark the difference and reinforce the identity of the dominant. The cultural meaning of these stereotypes about NMS is that they point to some kind of deficiency and produce a picture of NMS as places where modernity is absent. These stereotypes are applied to mark the lack of desired characteristics of modernity: separate schools for Roma given as an example here by this senior OMS civil servant represents false knowledge (racial discourse) that is openly blended with politics and national representation10. This Irish civil servant is retelling an old, stereotypical story pointing to a lack of modernity, a stereotype that retells the story of an openly performed discourse about (implicitly irrational) nationalism, which in its openness is unmodern, contradicting the purification of political discourse with a transcendent false ideology about race. It is a story of ethnic 10 However, Fatima El-Tayeb in her book European Others (El-Tayeb, 2011) shows how “colorblind Europe”, although claiming to be “postnational”, remains racist in a concealed way, by producing ethnicized and racialized minorities that are constantly excluded from national community and Europeanness. She focuses her analysis on countries of the “old” EU: Holland, France and Germany (see also A. Lentin, 2011).

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nationalism in the East, as opposed to the political citizenship and allegedly inclusive nationalism that developed in the West. Unmodernity emerges here in an assumption about a lack of purification of political discourse from emotional, unquantifiable, scientifically unproven ways of governing based on ethnic and cultural loyalties and “irrational” attachments, while political citizenship is an emanation of a political order purified from unquantifiable, “irrational” transcendence that appeals to higher authorities than the civil one. Purification of the social order from unscientific and ideological transcendence, the latter being a source, as Latour shows referring to Hobbes (see Latour, 1993 on Hobbes), of danger for civil peace coming from immaterial bodies like spirits, phantoms, souls, and other phenomena that civil power is unable to control. Civil servants from NMS reacted according to their habitus, according to their loyalties, but these are marked as unmodern and not-European because they are allegedly not permeated by scientific discourse. As Latour writes: “We live in communities whose social bond comes from objects facticated in laboratories; ideas have been replaced by practices [of experimental science], apodeictic reasoning by controlled doxa, and universal agreement by groups of colleagues [scientist believing in their scientific knowledge, creating a scientific construction with knowledge].” (Latour, 1993, p. 21) This power of scientific knowledge in modernity replaces the transcendent, the unquantifiable, and power not derived from sovereign human beings. Simultaneously, it becomes displaced, universal and applicable in every context. This example shows how this modernity of the moderns is invincible, how different strategies for the ostensible purification (or lack of it) of the discourses nature, society and God is applied in order to mark the Other, the NMS, as not sufficiently modern. After the EU enlargement, the modernity of the moderns becomes a matter of distinction, and, referring to Bourdieu, it places new products on the market in the reality of EU-space after the EU enlargement. To legitimately defend national interest means to publicly criticize one’s own government when it contradicts the European doxa (as French officials demonstrated by allegedly criticizing Sarkozy’s cleansing of Roma campsites because it contradicted the social-liberal discourse within the Commission and manifested detachment from nationality and from irrationality). It also means using language that ensures efficiency, language that performs and reveals the work of purification of the entities nature and society, or hybridization of those entities in a concealed way, all of which are used to produce cultural limits and secure political or personal interests. The ability to blend and purify the constitutions of modernity at a given moment in order to produce cultural limits is proof of the performance of the Eurostyle in the professional environment. Legitimate ways to represent nationality and defend national interests are

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performed during negotiations behind closed doors, through the employment of different discourses, and through hybridization. The examples above show, as Fanon remarks, that the colonized are always “too late” and are locked in the past (Fanon & Markmann, 1991). They show how new criteria and markers of modernity are developed: verbal condemnation of racism or promotion of ecology and ecological-awareness. Environment is a new, modern way of producing distinctions and othering those who are not in possession of environmental awareness and I claim that it emerges as an imperial formation in EU-space (Stoler, 2013a). This powerful discourse produces a deficit in the NMS and the notion of environmental awareness could be, similarly to the cases of former colonies, used to economically colonize NMS (there was a clear economic interest of the French company L’Oreal backed by the French government) and to reinforce, together with other markers of modernity, the identity of the modern OMS. The legitimate language habitus means, as the previously quoted Member of the Cabinet told me, arguing on the basis of EU law and “European interest”, and translating (national) interests into the language and discourse of social-liberal Europe, or, as the above example shows, into that of the environment and science. The previously mentioned biofuel example shows how efficiency means defining one’s positions within a policy cluster and pushing through the agenda that has the greatest possibility to pass. In order to be efficient, you have to blend the allegedly separate discourses of nature and society and possess the abovementioned capital: having networks in and outside the Commission, having expert knowledge and ability to argue, and having knowledge about procedure to steer the draft through the political process. While blending takes place behind closed doors by the OMS, the nonmodern representation of NMS is reinforced in the allegation of their open blending of politics and transcendence, and of what is rational and nonrational. If one is not able to blend these dual entities of modernity during negotiations, or to produce a modern picture of one’s own nationality, one is non-European. European ethics, codes of conduct, and moralities The exclusive discourses about Europe and its Others are visible in stereotypes and in “European geographies” in EU-space that reflect standards of ethics and civility benchmarked by the OMS, particularly, as the European debt crisis has shown, by the founding states of the EU (Herzfeld, 2016). Stereotypes are an intrinsic part of EU-space; they construct this reality and the concealed inter-national character of this space, and determine what is capital in the struggle for cultural superiority. As Herzfeld writes, they are a discursive weapon of power:

176 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS It does something, and something very insidious at that: it actively deprives the ‘other’ of a certain property, and the perpetrator pleads moral innocence on the grounds that the property in question is symbolic rather then material, that the act of stereotyping is ‘merely’ a manner of speech, and that ‘words can never heart you’. But this is the self-justification of the gossip, and it is interesting to note that Greek peasants and urban laborers seem to have more practical, and more performative, view of the matter: ‘The [wicked] tongue has no bones, [yet] it breaks bones’ […] In this sense stereotypes do represent a cruel way of ‘doing things with words’ (Austin [1962], 1975), and they have material consequences. I would only add that this is not just words that are at stake. White middle-class individuals who take studious care not to seem to be avoiding physical contact with black (or poor, or disabled) people may be responding to exaggerated performances of ‘otherness’ by the latter, or to exaggerated stereotyping in their own minds. (Herzfeld, 2005, pp. 202-203, brackets in text)

Similar to the Greek peasants’ usage of stereotypes to “break bones”, in EU-space they are applied in a similar way, showing that nationality is a concealed label. The relevance of the application of stereotypes bears more meaning when Riles’ aesthetic of bureaucratic practice is taken into account, as well as Holmes’ and Marcus’ claims that the functioning of bureaucracies is based on anecdotal knowledge, and that these anecdotes shape their reality (Holmes & Marcus, 2005 on paraethnography). The Roma example and the representation of NMS it produced revealed a fear about moral deterioration represented and caused by the presence of people from NMS (in intolerant and racial school policies, representing the nonpervasiveness of scientific knowledge). However, as my German gatekeeper also mentioned, the stereotype of rigid Germans in the context of the European debt crisis, where rigid Germans implies those thinking rationally, being future oriented and ready to take up reforms, all of which is in fact a modern and positive stereotype. This and the following example show that stereotypes about being (or not being) modern, and thus rational and future oriented, also have an ethical undertone (why have I only heard about Italian, Greek, or Irish mafias and not of Dutch, Danish or German ones?). Not surprisingly, these retold stories produce a flawed ethical representation of NMS. These stories about NMS also tell stories about their malperformance in EU-space (defending their own national government), and thus both the retold stories and these actions reproduce the dichotomous order in EU-space. This is made explicit in a story told about an award the Commission established and an award ceremony with the Slovak Commissioner for education, youth and culture Jan Figel. I was told this story by a senior civil servant from Ireland working in DG EAC. The European Borders Breaker Award was established in 2004 by the European Commission together with the European Broadcasting Union in order to promote young, emerging talents that reached wider audiences with their

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first international (debut) album11. As my interviewee told me: “the criteria for a prize are simple: the number of copies of a given debuting artist sold outside the country of origin”, so the winner was appointed based on a clear criterion. In 2008, a Polish group called Hemp received the prize; my interview partner assumed: “thanks to all these Poles living in the UK and Ireland”. He told me that the band was singing about the GRU (Soviet/Russian military intelligence) and their songs had anti-police and anti-religion lyrics. I had never heard of this band, so I checked their webpage: it is a hip-hop band from Warsaw that apart from lyrics connected to hemp (marihuana), also sings anti-police (anti-state), anti-capitalist, antireligious/clerical and pacifist songs (e.g. “Dr Joint”, “Obudź się” [Wake up] or “Droga” [My way]). Allegedly, as the Irish official said, the Slovak Commissioner was furious because of the content of the lyrics and because he kept on receiving questions from the Slovak and Polish press whether it was proper to reward someone who sings anti-police and anti-religious lyrics. My interviewee said: “but the criteria had been set and there was nothing he could do”. During the award ceremony, the band came on stage and, my interviewee recalled: “they were young and very outspoken and shouted ‘thank you for supporting freedom of speech’, ‘thank you Commissioner Figel’ and ‘Commissioner Figel rules’ and when they said that, the camera was searching the room. But he [the Commissioner] was gone, gone to the toilet or something. And after that the Cabinet was searching to change the whole formula of the prize criteria for at least three months” (AD14, Irish, DG EAC). For my interviewee this was “funny”, “more than he had expected from Polish colleagues here” and, as he said, he had a feeling of being “thrown into former Ireland of strong Catholicism”. The Irish civil servant is retelling his story, a story in which he is stereotyping the Slovak Commissioner, in fact painting an overall picture of NMS Poland and Slovakia. In this story, my interviewee is using Hemp as a representation of the 11 The EBBA is a part of the cultural politics of the EU fostering EU identity under one of the EU mottos “united in diversity” which means: “via the EU, Europeans are united in working together for peace and prosperity, and that the many different cultures, traditions and languages in Europe are a positive asset for the continent” (http://europa.eu/ abc/symbols/motto/index_en.htm, last accessed on 05.03.2013). The EC webpage on EBBA states: “The circulation of new repertoire is important for people’s access to it and the European Border Breakers Awards aim to stimulate the cross-border circulation of new music. Access to new music and its circulation are crucial for artists’ capacity to build up relations with the wider European public. The European Commission acknowledges that the European music sector contributes significantly to our economy, together with our other creative industries”. (http://ec.europa.eu/culture/our-programmesand-actions/prizes/european-border-breakers-awards_en.htm, last accessed on 05.03. 2013)

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voice of Polish youth (the word “outspoken” is significant here) for his own needs: to paint a picture of an oppressive Poland and Slovakia, of all those who had turned their back on these states and were now in the UK and Ireland. For him all Poles in the UK and Ireland ran away from the oppressive, religious, and morally rigid reality of the NMS represented by Figel and the Polish and Slovak press. He implicitly sees the Hemp group and the Poles living in the UK and Ireland (whom he thinks were the cause of Hemp’s success, rather than their real artistic value) as being opposed to the allegedly conservative politics of the Polish and Slovak governments, because they use anti-police, anti-capitalist and anti-religious language in their music. He is suggesting that these Poles and Slovaks living abroad ran away from stiff, conservative states where there were no perspectives. In his view, Hemp represents subversion directed at an oppressive, conservative and implicitly not fully (liberal) democratic and law-governed state, while Figel represents the alleged authoritarian way of thinking as a product of this not fully democratic state – because his Cabinet wanted to change the formula of the prize, as if they, the Cabinet, had not understood the legal frames of the EU. The Irish civil servant is identifying a lack of purification in the actions of the Slovak Commissioner, the purification of modern branches of society and politics, and transcendent crossed-out God, thus reinforcing the unmodern stereotype. I think that his words “they were very outspoken” and his citing the words of the band on stage “thank you for supporting freedom of speech” are also significant here. They are told in this story to point to the “spectre of Eastern Europe” that haunted the Commission; they are the enactment of the stereotype of not fully democratic, conservative and bigoted NMS, where freedom of speech is limited, and thus, where democracy is not fully developed12. By striving to change the formula of the 12 In 2008 it was not long after the elections in Poland when the national-conservative government of Law and Justice (2005-2007) was replaced by the conservative-liberal party of Donald Tusk (2007-2015), the latter seen as more pro-European. In Slovakia, the social-democrat party of premier Fico (SMER) was ruling at that time together with Vladimir Meciar’s populist Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) and the Slovak National Party (SNS) that voiced anti-Roma and anti-Hungarian sentiments. After the Slovak elections in 2006, the Party of European Socialists in EP suspended SMER’s membership (until 2008), because of its coalition with HZDS and SNS. Fico’s first government (he is currently, since 2016 elections, again prime minister in coalition with SNS) was marked by his own verbal attacks on the media and journalists during press conferences, often accusing them of bias and of attacks on his government. He openly used such words as “pricks” and “idiots” towards journalists. Fico’s coalition partner Meciar (HZDS), when he was formerly prime minister (1994-1998), tried to limit the freedom of press during his time in office as PM. The picture of an undemocratic, conservative East suppressing freedom of speech was reinforced by a ban on gay pride

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prize, Figel is publicly mixing a crossed-out God with a procedure (legal order), and the Irish civil servant is identifying this as a lack of purification, as unmodernity. This picture of an unlawful and undemocratic NMS (in this case, Poland and Slovakia) is produced in the assessment of Figel’s actions, which contradict the performance of the Eurostyle. In the eyes of the senior Irish official, the Slovak Commissioner is unconfident and disrespectful of a set out rules – both features that contradict the European doxa, if done in an unconcealed way. A lack of confidence particularly contradicts the principle of visibility in EU-space, and the way one should struggle for cultural and formal superiority. Figel is marked both as backward because of his conservatism and political constraint, and as unprofessional (and irrational – sticking to his old loyalties) because of his (supposed) inability to act confidently by staying in his seat during the ceremony, thereby legitimizing the Award, and acknowledging both that Slovaks and Poles are not the only audience and that he represents Europe. In this story, because of his lack of confidence, Figel is representing an implicit authoritarian mind, and a political system based on personal loyalties instead of an objective and formal, implicitly modern and purified political and legal order. In EU-space his habitual matrix functions according to an authoritarian mindset, but in this story Figel is portrayed as a representative of the NMS. By finding all this “funny”, the Irish senior civil servant emphasises a difference, the otherness of Figel’s behaviour and the cultural values he represents, putting him in the unprofessional, nondemocratic, unlawful, archaic (“thrown back to former Ireland of strong Catholicism”) space of non-Europe because he does not fulfil the criteria of modernity in EU-space. These stories and stereotypes about the NMS are reconstructed to reinforce the old discursive knowledge about the East, to place it back on the symbolic map as (ethically) inferior to the modern West. NMS, as the Roma and Figel example show, apply false strategies in these struggles over representation: they focus too much on their own national representation, which in EU-space is considered as unmodern, and thus they are marginalized. Stereotypes about NMS are widespread in EU-space, but their cultural hegemony is particularly visible when they become parades in 2005 and 2006 in Warsaw, Bucharest and Riga – issues widely discussed in EU-space in reference to Poland, Romania, Latvia and NMS in general. The European Parliament twice adopted a resolution on homophobia in some member states: in January 2006 (P6_TA(2006)0018) and in April 2007 (P6_TA(2007)0167). Poland is clearly an addressee in this second resolution. Last but not least, the current political situation in Poland, after an eight year break, revived some fears about the state of democracy in Poland (see the resolution on state of democracy in Poland adopted by the EP – P8_TA(2016)0123 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&reference =P8-TA-2016-0123&language=EN&ring=B8-2016-0461 (last accessed on 14.04.2016)

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internalized by people from NMS – a fact that points to the prevalence of the imperial European doxa, and of the principle of openly purified discourses about nature and society, and about a crossed-out God. Purification is expected from people from NMS, but in fact, hybridisation is performed in order to distinguish NMS and mark them as unmodern. A top Polish manager told me that in the end, these stereotypes were “normal” because “we haven’t had a ‘normal’ bureaucracy for the last 50 years”. The stereotype about the moral inferiority of people from NMS or distrust towards the lawful conduct of people from these states was popping up in many different contexts. On a different occasion, I talked to a person from a NMS working for OLAF – the Anti-Fraud Office of the Commission that scrutinizes expenditures of structural funds in EU member states. This person told me that he/she was about to go on a mission to one of the NMS, together with one other person from a NMS who originated from the target country. Allegedly, the German boss said that there was no possibility to go on this mission without a person from an OMS in attendance, although, as my conversation partner claimed, he/she had been on such missions many times before and in many different member states. As he/she said: “I have been also in OMS” and he assured me of having a relevant experience. His/her German boss acted according to his knowledge about NMS reproduced in the stereotype of a corrupt East, but also revealed deep divisions and mistrust in the EU apparatus towards the ethical conduct of people from NMS. The retelling of such a story to an ethnographer may also have the cultural meaning of reproducing a self-stereotype and confirming the victim status of this Polish civil servant. However, this story was told to me over a beer and without a recorder. It was, as I see it, a moment of “weakness” in this person, when my status as an ethnographer was for a moment forgotten. As I will show below in “the Bible example”, there were moments when Polish EU civil servants would “open” themselves up and tell insider stories. It was however evidence either of their bureaucratic weakness or of an inefficient habitus that is not able to perform the Eurostyle. Through his performance of habitus, Figel confirmed a stereotypical representation of a nonlegal East. By being unable to accept a formal, implicitly objective procedure (in this example, the formula of the prize) his actions do not fit the image of a progressive, legal and allegedly transparent EU. However, things are not always dealt with transparently, and the L’Oreal and biofuel examples show both that this is certainly not the way things get done in Brussels and that hybridizations are at work. New member states’ nonmodern status and their moral/ethical inferiority (like that of some other southern member states) comes from an open mixing and blurring of modern entities performed by people from NMS in EU-space. What is expected from them is the performance of modern purification, the absence of which evokes distinctions. In such way, the principle of

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alleged purification is applied as a tool of power, and lack of such purification is a marker producing a stereotype about a lack of modernity. However, in EU-space, behind closed doors, a constant hybridization is taking place – a seemingly separated objectivity is blurred with particular interests. Cultural discourses are applied by both OMS and NMS in order to undermine or retain power and to confirm or question European status, locally expressed in belonging to the Euroclass. In a similar fashion and revealing moral undertones, many Poles in the Commission would tell me that they brought “fresh air” that supposedly rationalizes the functioning of EU institutions, as opposed to long, “illogical” or “irrational” procedures and decision-making processes. They claimed they were “closer to normal citizens” and have the ability to “think outside the box” or, as they would claim, “see things more rationally and from a distance”, as opposed to unclear, unsuitable and long procedures. These stories about “fresh air” are also an emanation of a cultural struggle, an attempt to create one’s own positive stereotype based on rationality, questioning long and unclear procedures and performing a purification of the political entity. However, such rational cultural capital, when matched with European doxa was sometimes downgraded with anger. An outgoing German HoU told me about “the arrogant people from NMS”, because allegedly they do not respect procedure and the fact that they are an outcome of long institutional negotiations. This “arrogance”, expressed by the German HoU, apart from devaluing the capital and the representation of NMS, is also a performance marking belonging to a different class because they are from NMS. At other times, this NMS capital, referred to as “bringing fresh air”, was spoken of with condescension. I met one Director from France who was enthusiastic about the performance of people from NMS (“they are pushy, dynamic, very clever”), but it was enthusiasm performed for the sake of the interview. This person, who was acquainted with a high-ranking Polish official, thanks to which I was able to interview the French Director, was well aware that lower AD Desk Officers did not pose any threat to his/her position or have a significant influence on policies. I was put in contact with this person by the high-ranking Polish official because, as he/she has told me, the French Director was enthusiastic about “pushy” NMS. I think, however, this opinion was merely a courteous and friendly strategy towards his/her Polish friend. The French Director told me in the same interview that it was very good that these young people from NMS were placed in lower AD positions because then they needed to “learn how things are done” and it was better “for all of us” because they could then learn these rules. Another Director in DG EcoFin, a German, said that people from NMS would also “assume they know better”, although their overviews on certain topics, because of the short time of their service, were incomplete; he was visibly annoyed by this, by their “conceit”. This last argument might appear to be objective and obvious (due to the criteria of time),

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but its relevance appeared clearer to me when I realized that knowledge of EU law, procedure and how EU institutions function in general is crucial in EU-space. One’s knowledge of treaties, passed laws, and networks, knowing who is responsible for what, for which law or political issue in a given DG, is a form of capital. What becomes apparent with this “fresh air” comment is the struggle over the stereotype, over the representation of NMS in EU institutions. NMS try to assure the OMS and themselves that they are rational and performing modernity in the work of purification (criticizing “irrational” procedures about which even OMS complain) that point to the existence of networks in which power does not stem from the citizens (Latour, 1993). “Fresh air” has a subversive meaning: it is an attempt to change the implicit dominant knowledge about NMS through the application of a rationality discourse (NMS saying “we can change irrational and overly long procedures, something that you, the OMS, do not see”). Simultaneously, it is the performance of a habitus that has detected relevant strategies, but poses no threat to people from OMS or is assessed with condescension. The moral and ethical discourses connected to the performance of modernity (purification, a breach with the past) perpetuate class differences that in EU-space run along the difference between OMS and NMS and reveal the colonial rule of knowledge that is an “achieved labor and worldly practice” applied to distinguish uncivilized non-Europeans (Stoler, 2008, p. 350). The German Director who complained about the arrogance of people from NMS because they were not able to understand procedures, which were an effect of long negotiations and EU institutional history, was also appalled by how people from NMS “fully use the system” and “suck it out” – applying for and obtaining any possible allowance that was available for EU civil servants “as if they would be afraid that someone can take their job away from them”. In his words, he is essentializing people from NMS as greedy and coming from unlawful countries, unable to understand that they were now civil servants of the EU and that nobody would take their privileges away. He thinks that people from NMS – in contrast to those from OMS – work in the EU just for the money and the currency exchange differences between the Euro and the currencies of these member states. The picture he draws is that poor, uneducated people from the East invade the West to “suck from it”, whereas those from OMS allegedly work for the EU for purely ideological reasons, in order to push forward the European integration agenda. Unsurprisingly, the same German civil servant told me that the prestige of Danes, Swedes and Brits was quite high in EU-space because some who would give up their jobs at the EU and go back to their

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countries13, either because they were, as he said, bound to their Heimat, or because they could find similar employment conditions in their own countries. People from NMS were classified as escaping the poverty of their countries; those searching for opportunities in Brussels were thus classified as those driven by “brutish necessity”, a trait that, according to Bourdieu, characterizes the lower classes: It is clearly no accident that the dominant art and the dominant art of living agree on the same fundamental distinctions, which are all based on the opposition between the brutish necessity which forces itself on the vulgar, and luxury, as the manifestation of distance from necessity, or asceticism, as self-imposed constraint, two contrasting ways of defying nature, need, appetite, desire; between the unbridled squandering which only highlights the privations of ordinary existence, and the ostentatious freedom of gratuitous expense of the austerity of elective restriction; between surrender to immediate, easy satisfaction and economy of means, bespeaking a possession of means commensurate with the means possessed. Ease is so universally approved only because it represents the most visible assertion of freedom from the constraints which dominate ordinary people, the most indisputable affirmation of capital as the capacity to satisfy the demands of biological nature or of the authority which entitles one to ignore them. (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 252)

“Brutish necessity” and the nonpervasiveness of objective law renders people from NMS unmodern. The German Director’s words also have an ethical tone, but Bourdieu points to the constraints of the choices of the lower class as opposed to the dominant class. An outgoing AD14 civil servant with a monthly salary of around 14 000 Euros (and a pension of around 9000 Euros, which is, as I was told, still more than a minister in the Belgian government earns) with the prospect of a pension in a second home on the Adriatic in Italy certainly has more incentives for “the manifestation of distance from necessity” than a young AD5 civil servant. This “sucking from the system” and its moral undertones – the assumption of an unlawful East – is exactly what Herzfeld is talking about in regard to stereotypes: they indicate “the absence of presumably desirable property in its object” and function as a tool of power (Herzfeld, 2005, p. 202). It is the production of generalizations and of an Other, marking people from NMS as greedy. The opposite stereotype is that people from NMS coming to Brussels are showing off – I will come back to this issue in the last chapter.

13 As I learned during my last research trip in 2011, some Polish senior civil servants do the same. As one high-ranking official told me, lawyers with experience receive higher salaries in Warsaw and have better career prospects then at the Commission.

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“Why would you use the word ‘Bible’?” This implicit and powerful understanding of what defines Europe is similar to what Argyrou (Argyrou, forthcoming) in Cyprus and Buchowski in Poland (Buchowski, 2006) have described; it is a spectre that constantly haunts the EU Commission, but also makes visible the specific cultural criteria of Europeanness in everyday life. In the following example I want to sum up and scrutinize the issues discussed above. The example shows how procedures and law frame the cultural struggle and how moral undertones produce cultural distances and affiliations. It shows how a secular modern discourse (Latour’s crossed-out God and multiculturalism) is applied in the cultural struggle and struggle for positions in the hierarchy, and how class differences and nationality are conjoined and connected to certain moral and ethical views. This example also shows stereotypes about and (self-)marginalization of the NMS, and in that sense, the existence of the European doxa. On one sunny afternoon in March 2009, I was walking down rue Belliard/ Belliardstraat to meet one of the Polish Directors at the EU Commission. He turned out to be a tall man in a fine but a slightly worn-out suit, with short dark hair and well-matched, black metal glass frames on his nose. His handgrip was strong, and he looked into my eyes while holding my hand; his moves and gestures were dynamic and quick and his smile bright. While we sat, his arms were leaning on the chair beside him and his legs were crossed. In Polish, I would say he rozsiadł się (was spread out). He looked at me in a friendly manner, but I suppose he was also aware that he could relax a bit while talking to me, because I had been “recommended” by his friend, also a Polish Director in the EC – thus his pose. To my question, what had Poles brought to the EU Commission, he started to explain their ability to understand Russian and ex-Yugoslavian “mentalities” because of their similar experiences, and that this was their “capital” (his words). He also stressed the “fresh approach” of new Directors and claimed that civil servants from NMS were closer to normal citizens than those who had worked in the EU institutions for a long time. To my remark that I had the impression that nationality was a taboo at the EU Commission, he replied that it was a place where interests are negotiated in secret. He carried on by telling me that “I have to cope with such problems as in-vitro fertilization every day”. In this context, he mentioned an interview with a politician who was then a member of the Polish parliament (Jarosław Gowin – who proposed a restrictive bill on in-vitro fertilization [IVF] in Poland in spring 2009) that he recently read, in which the deputy expressed his disagreement towards “freezing small human beings”. My interviewee suggested that he had a similar view on this issue. He clarified that “the Swedes and Brits would see it quite differently, and I have to cope with such problems every day”.

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He also stressed that Europe, “as the Polish Pope said, should breathe with both lungs – Eastern and Western”. Although my interviewee, as he admitted, placed himself in opposition to the nationalist-conservative party of Jarosław Kaczyński (PiS), it is interesting that he replied to my question on national interests at the EU Commission with an in-vitro story. I saw this Director often in the Polish EU church (see the chapter “Polish EU Brussels”) and learned from other Poles in EU-space that he often displayed his commitment to Catholicism – just as he had in the interview. I think that with his statement on IVF he made it clear that a restrictive law on this issue was on the Polish agenda based on moral grounds – a Polish agenda which he daily tried to push through at the Commission. This Christian- (Catholic-) Polish agenda was somewhat confirmed in my conversation with a priest in the Polish Church for Eurocrats. The priest said that people would come to him and talk about their moral dilemmas, as they did not want to participate in what they saw as an immoral policy that was being pushed at the EU level. Allegedly, as the priest said, for many of Poles, the Commission was too liberal on ethical grounds. Keinz (2008) showed how a discourse of morality had become conjoined with Polishness in the course of Europeanization, particularly after Poland entered the EU. She described how discourses about Europe and Polishness had become powerful tools in the power struggle (she used the term “negotiations”) to reshape collective life by different groups in Poland (among them sexual minorities). Here we have a similar conjunction of Polishness and “Christian values” that are seen as under threat. On my second fieldtrip to Brussels I asked the same Director for an appointment. During an interview he told me about a meeting within his Directorate when he said to one of Head of a Unit, a British woman responsible for external communication: “We need a Bible for external communication”. He clearly used the word Bible to mean a set of common rules that outline how to communicate the actions undertaken by the Directorate to the public. He told me that this word caused confusion and resistance. His colleague asked him: “Why would you use the world Bible? Here at the Commission there are people who find such words inappropriate”. Regretfully, I did not learn what the response of the Director was to this question. However, after the interview, as we walked out of his office and stood in his secretariat, the mentioned woman entered – coincidently. The Director introduced us with a strained smile and said: “So this is the person who doesn’t like the word ‘Bible’”. I only looked at the British Head of Unit, smiled brightly at her, and said “Oh, ok”. The woman glanced to me and said in a meant-to-be-funny way: “Don’t look at me like that!” Then, after some small talk, I said goodbye to both, went out of the office and walked down to the lobby of the building, where I sat down to note my impressions. While sitting there, fortunately, the same woman passed by. She smiled at me and I said to her: “To make the situation clear: I didn’t

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look at you ‘like that’” – words that were aimed at establishing some kind of (cultural) bond – and, in fact, a distance from the Director. She came over to me and started to chat. She told me that one can not use words such as Bible at the EU Commission, and not even in Brussels, because it is a multicultural environment, and that she herself is Sikh and cannot accept it. She was, in fact, using the argument of political correctness as a tool to establish cultural limits by marking the word Bible as too religious for an allegedly secular Europe. She was marking an open mixing of separated discourses about society and God (Latour, 1993) and using such marking as a tool to resist the word Bible and what it represented: a Polish Director personifying a stereotype about NMS. She carried on by telling me how much Brussels had changed since the enlargement (as I learned, she and her husband – an EU Commission civil servant – had been on a mission since 2003 at the Representation of the EU in New York City) and that she had come back to the Commission after a five-year break. She complained how difficult it was to find a suitable job for herself because of the transitional period. She also told me how sorry she was for all the new employees of the EU Commission, because most of them had no idea about their new job and no experience in an international environment. That, in her opinion, caused huge problems in the functioning of the Commission, and, in the end, led to the reinforcement of stereotypes about people from NMS (such as the Bible). As she argued, this was because some of them, in spite of their formal education and qualifications, were not suitable for a job at the EU Commission and hindered its proper functioning. The Bible example shows that it is not solely bureaucratic efficiency that counts in the EU apparatus, but also other factors that inform the power struggle over posts. There are two issues at work here: one is the language of power, the multicultural language and representation of modernity, the other is the legitimate European habitus. Both are issues that are rarely openly disputed and both reveal implicit cultural limits in EU-space and the European doxa. I suggest that here multiculturalism is applied to mark an incongruent behaviour by underlining Bible as a word that does not fit into this Euro(language)style and contradicts the modern language with a crossed-out God. For that reason, the British woman explained to me in the lobby that she felt sorry for all those coming from NMS who were unprepared to work in an international, multicultural (and I would suggest she also means a modern, secular and European) environment. Her feeling sorry depicts not only condescension, but also a kind of fear that the workings of the Commission would be hindered, fears about the deterioration and degeneration of a secular or allegedly multicultural Europe. She used this argumentation as a power tool, constructing cultural limits by reinstating the picture of a nonrational, and I would claim also nonmodern NMS. She did this also in order to legitimize her argument against the so-called transitional period, which gave privilege in employment and

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promotion to civil servants from NMS, undermining the hierarchy structures and stirring the established rules (up until the enlargement) in the struggle for position in EU-space. The enforcement of a transitional period, along with national quotas in certain Units, DGs and Offices of the EU institutions (that – as mentioned previously – are locally and euphemistically called “geographical balance”), was the only possible tool for NMS civil servants to effectively and efficiently use national and structural capital (citizenship status) at the EU Commission, especially as a means for being promoted or assigned to a higher position. The transitional period was the only legal stance that singled out NMS and destabilized the power of the OMS in EU-space to fill posts, and through this undermined the stiff division criteria between OMS and NMS, and between higher and lower posts in the EU administration. However, the applicability of this transitional period was limited, and, as I show further, the lack of other legal categories for promoting NMS, and references to their newcomer status, led to increased cultural strivings among them to become European. The example above also shows how allegedly objective and transcendent laws based on rational equality discourse (the principle of “geographical balance”) were applied differently and mixed with discourse about cultural hierarchies. The British HoU was purifying discourses about society/ culture and a crossed-out God (by resisting the word Bible), but she also strategically mixed the objective entity of law (transitional period) with culture (unprepared NMS) in order to produce cultural limits and delegitimize NMS (her being sorry). This is an example of Latour’s application of the guarantees of a modern constitution: the threefold transcendence of science, politics and a crossedout God, and threefold immanence in this criss-crossed schemata that blocks all possibilities (purifying and blending of the three discourses). As Latour writes: “By playing three times in a row on the same alternation between transcendence and immanence, the moderns can mobilize Nature, objectify the social and feel the spiritual presence of God, even while firmly maintaining that Nature escapes us, that Society is our own work and that God no longer intervenes.” (Latour, 1993, p. 34) People in EU-space often skilfully blend and apply different (rhetorical) capital and in this way produce limits between modern and unmodern, which, together with class criteria, produce the Euroclass. One of these class criteria for being European is to present one’s cosmopolitan capital (which some call transnational, e.g. Ong, 1999), of which this British HoU is in possession and the Polish Director is not. Kerstin Poehls has shown in her ethnography how important this capital is in EU-Machtfeld (EU power field) (Poehls, 2009, p. 193). However, the British HoU feeling “sorry for all those people coming from NMS” is also, in my view, expressing her conviction about their fatal state. Her patronizing and condescending attitude in the word “sorry” actually marks a distance and belief about the unchangeable, contained condition of the people from NMS. As the people from

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NMS are perceived as different than those from OMS, they are, through her feeling sorry, put in the distant, unchangeable and condemned position of a not-reallyEuropean and assigned a non-Euroclass status; it seems she is aware of this, but is still “worried” for the Commission because those from NMS do not have experience in working in international (postcolonial) environments, and are hindering its well functioning. She classified NMS people and put them in a notfully-European class that is acting incongruently with the European doxa by not – at least openly – crossing out God. Her overall reaction to the word Bible aimed to legitimize marginalization. Bourdieu writes: In class societies, in which the definition of the social world is at stake in overt or latent class struggle, the drawing of the line between the field of opinion, of that which is explicitly questioned, and the field of doxa, of that which is beyond question and which each agent tacitly accords by the mere fact of acting in the accord with the social convention, is itself a fundamental objective at stake in that forms of class struggle which is the struggle for the imposition of the dominant system of classification. The dominated classes have an interest in pushing back the limits of doxa and exposing the arbitrariness of the taken for granted; the dominant classes have an interest in defending the integrity of doxa or, short of this, of establishing in its place the necessarily imperfect substitute, orthodoxy. (Bourdieu, 2008, p. 169)

Doxa and the application of doxa in EU-space is thus conflated with certain nationalities and the performance/application of the idea of the modernity of the moderns that produce divisions in the cultural and class limits between East and West within EU-space. It makes apparent that cultural struggles are also class struggles and that national identities are conflated with class identities, revealing an imperial dynamics in the processes perpetuated by people from OMS (Stoler, 2002, 2013a; Stoler & Cooper, 1997). The Polish Director sees the alleged better understanding of dictatorships as capital because of the historical experiences of NMS (it is his, as he says, “capital”). He is, referencing Bourdieu, trying to push back the limits of the European doxa. He refers to the moral mission Poland has appointed itself at the EU Commission, assuming that it represents a better morality than that of Sweden and Great Britain. He finds the IVF stance of these two countries morally inferior, like the outrage about the word Bible. Thus, he represents a different set of moral and ethical values that are incongruent both with the constitution of modernity in the European doxa and the application of this modernity as a doxa, though he acts and speaks as though he is right. He is accused of openly (rather than covertly) blending the constituent entities of modernity, society and a crossed-out God, which causes irritation and is used to mark the Other as nonmodern. The word

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Bible triggers the actions of two different habitus formations, but also releases two different worldviews and histories that meet in the micro field of the European Commission. On one hand the Director is irritated that it is not normal to use the word Bible; on the other hand, it is irritating for the Head of Unit that this word has been used, and that she has to intervene to reestablish the modern and allegedly secular order of purified guarantees of modernity (Latour, 1993). Concomitantly she is objectifying the law (transitional period), blending it with culture (unfitting NMS) in order to produce a stereotypical picture of NMS, and through this maintain cultural power. The British HoU resists the word Bible and finds it inappropriate because EU-space has a multicultural logic of Western, purified secular space, while she objectifies the cultural rules of EU-space in order to marginalize NMS. Finally, the indignation about the word Bible shows that as capital, “faith” is in fact an anti-capital. On the other hand the Director makes fun of his colleague by treating me as a type of (Polish) insider, and pointing the finger at the woman: look, this is the one that has a problem with the word Bible, being ironic and simultaneously assuming, because of my nationality, a shared cultural intimacy. Through irony (Herzfeld, 2005) and laughter (Mbembe, 2001) he is trying to subvert power, the power of modernity, which is invincible (Latour, 1993). The Director’s cultural discourse, his claiming moral superiority, is an example of what Michael Herzfeld sees as crypto-colonialism (Herzfeld, 2002) emerging in a discourse about nationality “fashioned to suit foreign models” (ibid, p. 901). Herzfeld sees such an allegedly superior moral discourse as a response to external cultural hierarchies and evidence of the oppression of the dominant culture discourse. Explaining the crypto-colonial status of Greece and Thailand, he shows how the elites of these countries […] put civilizational discourse to enhance their own power, at the cost of accepting the collective subjugation of their country to the global hierarchy of value. […] They appear to resist domination, but do so at the cost of effective complicity – a model that more closely approaches the Gramscian definition of hegemony then do more recent and controversial notions of ‘resistance’. (Herzfeld, 2002, p. 903)

In Herzfeld’s example, the crypto-colonial cultural discourse about the Hellenic past and of the “intellectual and spiritual birthplace of the Western cultures” (ibid., p. 901) was in fact produced at German universities at the end of 19th century. This cultural discourse about the “intellectual and spiritual birthplace of Western cultures” is now applied by Greek elites in order to confirm the European status of Greece (as distinctive from its neighbour Turkey) and to elevate its cultural status in the global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld, 2002, 2004).

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Many Poles at the Commission see themselves as defending Christian values, or at least having an ethical problem with the kind of modern discourse that is dominant in EU-space (and the Bible example shows that they voice these concerns)14. As Herzfeld shows and my research depicts, the application of such discourse will be exposed and devalued. Alleged knowledge about Russia and former Yugoslavia, and in general, about the conditions of living under authoritarian regimes and transition into democracy is what NMS (especially the Baltic States and Poland) see as cultural/symbolic capital at the EU Commission but what is often underplayed by the old civil servants. As I was told, “the Spanish and the Portuguese told the same when they came to the EU Commission” (from an interview with a German Director with over 30 years service experience). In fact, as Herzfeld shows on the Greek example, the ironic and ignorant stance of people from OMS to what Eastern Europeans say about their history not only creates a hierarchy among European historical experiences but is also an expression of what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as the marginalization of non-European histories (Chakrabarty, 2000; see also Fanon & Markmann, 1991, p. 34). The cultural status of the East reveals symbolic power relations within EU-space. The alleged moral superiority of the East (or specifically Poland) is confronted with inexperience in international organizations that threatens its well functioning. The Director is performing practices of deserving, a practice to ascend in the cultural hierarchy, but he in fact petrifies the subordinate cultural status. In this struggle over what is defined as European and how this label is used in power struggles over posts, tolerance (and in this particular context multiculturality evoked by the British Head of Unit), referring to Wendy Brown, becomes […] a practice of governmentality that is historically and geographically variable in purpose, content, agents and objects. […] Tolerance nevertheless produces and positions subjects, orchestrates meanings and practices of identity, marks bodies and conditions political subjectivites. This production, positioning, orchestration, and conditioning is achieved not through a rule or a concentration of power, but rather through the dissemination of tolerance discourse across state institutions [and I would add international institutions too]. (Brown, 2008, p. 4)

In my example, the discourse of tolerance and particularly the political discourse of multiculturalism represents the application of the constitution of modernity, where social order is purified from God and becomes immanent as one of the guarantees of modernity (Latour, 1993). However, it is only, as Latour also shows, seemingly apolitical and rational. It is used as a tool to mark “European civilization” and the 14 See also Fanon & Markmann (1991) on how “Negros” are constantly striving to prove at all costs to the white world that a black civilization exists.

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internal, tacit EU knowledge that NMS, personified by the Polish Director, are said to be lacking. This tolerance as defined by Brown that here emerges as multiculturalism (see also Lentin, 2011), becomes a benchmark, thanks to which progress and the modernity of representations of NMS is assessed. It enables marginalization to a not-yet-European status, marginalization that may have significant practical and political consequences – particularly in terms of advancement and the allocation of posts in the Commission. This British HoU is sincerely appalled by the word Bible and represents the “naturalness” of the doxa. Together with the biofuel example it also shows that only some member states can decide about cultural issues (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) and policies in EUspace. The Bible example shows that the moral agenda (on IVF) is seen at least by some as a (Polish) national agenda that has to be pushed through at the Commission. But in fact it represents nonmodern mediation, an open (instead of concealed) blending of the guarantees of modernity: society and a crossed-out God. The Polish Director sees Europe as an entity that is based on Christian (Catholic?) values, at least as determined by the Vatican (or the Polish Pope). He is asserting and seeing the world according to his habitus and the objective social divisions it has internalized through (Polish) socialization. However, habitus, as Bourdieu writes, is “[…] the strategy-generating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations […] it reacts to the solicitations of the field in a roughly coherent and systematic manner” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 18). But the situation with the Bible shows that his habitus is not yet European, because he is not using European language and generating coherent practices, but acting according to “Polish standards”. His habitus is inflexible (as opposed to Ong’s flexible citizens). The conviction about a Polish better morality and his stance on IVF is a response of the so-called divided or torn habitus (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 127) on solicitations coming from the field (this is not the way you play the game neither over what is European nor over positions in the hierarchy, at least not with a seemingly subversive Bible, because it is against the guarantees of modernity). Along with the Bible example, it can be read as an example of subversion of the dominant language and the rules in EU-space, but in fact, such representations of Polishness, together with inability to assess and apply relevant forms of capital, perpetuates a marginalized cultural status. However, as I have shown above, there are strong moral or ethical undertones on both sides. The European doxa becomes visible in this Bible example, but also in Poettering’s words about the new treaty and the Polish position (marking Poland as selfish), and in the Irish official’s opinion about the behaviour of Hungarian and Romanian civil servants being uncomfortable with discussing Roma policies in their countries. Scrutinizing these representations in the EU Commission reveals

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that there is a rhetoric of solidarity, altruism and sense of community that is wrapped up in the “shared values” of (superior) Europeans (as opposed to nationalist Poland). In practice, this rhetoric ends up in the reproduction of stereotypes about NMS and such notions as faith, nonlegal and nationalism, and such adjectives as unprofessional, which are marked as immoral and un-European in EU-space (see also McDonald, 1996; McDonald, 2012). Such a rhetoric of inclusion combined with practices of marginalization is, as Stoler shows (2002, 2008), typical of the production of cultural differences and distinctions in imperial colonies, in order to retain the superior, powerful status of the European (white) man. The Bible example shows however that although there are powerful idioms of what European means (in this instance secular and rational), guarded by the OMS, the limits between NMS and OMS are constantly being negotiated. So while I argue that “old” Europe still possesses powerful language and symbolic power in EUspace, the Bible example shows that symbolic boundaries separating West from East are not self-evident – they are an effect of “achieved labor and worldly practice” (Stoler, 2008, p. 350). What happens with the allegedly secular discourse once Muslims are brought into view? Would this Polish Director defending the Bible still be seen as non-European? Or would he find some OMS colleagues who would support his stance on Christian values? Or would he start to defend secularism? I once asked a Member of the Polish Cabinet why Poland would push the topic of Ukraine at the EU level. During the time of my research, the topic of Ukraine and the EU’s support for its democratic changes came up in my interviews with Polish EU civil servants. It was long before the EU launched its Eastern Partnership policy and long before the events on Kiev’s Maidan in 2014, the subsequent annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, and their intervention in Donbas. The Member of the Cabinet responded that Ukrainians were Christians and that “it is better to have such migrants in Europe than those praying to Allah”. However, the role of being a constant ambassador of the Ukraine in the EU is in fact placing Poland symbolically in the role of “civilizer”, helping the Ukraine to become more democratic in the East, and through such an attitude trying to change its place in the global hierarchy of value (see also Drążkiewicz-Grodzicka, 2013). There are many criteria for being European; they fluctuate, are flexible and often situational, and are based on the ability to apply capital, not the least in the guise of the constitution of modernity (Latour, 1993) but they all reveal the powerful construction of who a European is. Besides religious markers (or secular/nonsecular ones), there is a whole set of other criteria, such as having one’s place of residence in particular district of Brussels. The body and bodily hexis are also powerful markers of belonging to the class of Europeans.

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What all the above examples show, each in different way, is that nationality, contrary to what EC civil servants say, together with the stereotypes and associations they evoke, is one of the main ascriptions and core forms of capital at the Commission in the struggle over cultural and political superiority. Or, as in the case of NMS, it is a shameful burden that makes power apparent (as in the “sigh of relief” example) and forces people to employ elaborate strategies to overcome this burden. The current meaning of national stereotypes (that are either capital or a burden) is on one hand dependent on many different external criteria (that is, independent of a subject’s performance, e.g. the current politics in a given member state, such as blocking Poland and the Czech Repubic), and on the other hand, it is reliant on one’s own ability to manage this capital/burden in a particular moment, situation or context. Unmodern stereotypes about NMS are constantly evoked and produced in EU-space (as shown in the Bible example), but coming from NMS one may want to manage the stereotype and try to overcome the unmodern status (see chapter “Polish EU Brussels”). The old, rather firm ideological raster and distinctive capital of the developed, progressive, wealthy, democratic North-West is constantly reproduced in many different ways and situations. It is applied at times as a tool of power, as purified divisions between modern entities representing an imminent society, transcendent nature and a crossed-out God, and at other times as blends of these entities and of immanence with transcendence. Such cultural practices build a cluster of stereotypes like a snowball effect (all new descriptions fit into the old ones and create a whole) and establish the European doxa, the doxa of the Euroclass, where discursive factors are strategically blended with class factors in order to retain cultural power. There are many minor and situational stereotypes whose meaning and weight (power) are more in flux and contextual (see also Abélès et al., 1993) and depend on the performance of subjects in EUspace, on their ability to manage their national representation. The above examples show that in EU-space there are two forms of nationality: literal and distanced. Literal as non-European and characteristic of NMS, and distanced as European and simultaneously modern and characteristic of OMS. Performing the Eurostyle means the latter; it means a rational and modern representation of nationality that in a concealed way refers to science (REACH example) and blends with this discourse, as opposed to visible blending with emotions and past. Performing the Eurostyle nationality means referring to nationality that is connected to “national items” or numbers and not to discourse about the past. Eurostyle nationality is a performance of nationality that, through its reference to science gives an impression of a nonemotional detachment from it, from the traditional and historical narration, perceived as a backward performance of nationality represented by the NMS. It is evidence of the public purification of discourses about transcendent nature, imminent society and a crossed-out God; yet

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in fact it is also about blending these and their statuses. However, nationalities and modernity are also represented in bodies.

EU-B ODIES I begin to suffer from not being a white man to the degree that the white man imposes discrimination on me, makes me a colonized native, robs me of all worth, all individuality, tells me that I am a parasite on the world, that I must bring myself as quickly as possible into step with the white world, ‘that I am a brute beast, that my people and I are like a walking dung-heap that disgustingly fertilizes sweet sugar cane and silky cotton, that I have no use in the world’. Then I will quite simply try to make myself white: that is, I will compel the white men to acknowledge that I am human. FRANTZ FANON & MARKMANN C.L., (1991), BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS, P. 98. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his body schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. FRANTZ FANON & MARKMANN C.L. (1991), BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS, P. 110.

Styles of dress, manners at the dining table and the language used at the negotiation table, etiquette and small talk, ways of speaking and verbal expression, postures and gestures learned through socialization and by observation, all of these are bodied expressions of habitus, linking persons to groups of dominance or subordination and marking their positions. These body expressions are called by Bourdieu a “bodily hexis”, which: […] is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking and thereby of feeling and thinking […] The principles em-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be

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touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit; nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and, therefore, more precious, then the values given body, made body by the transubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as insignificant as ‘stand up straight’ or ‘don’t hold your knife in your left hand.’ (Bourdieu, 2008, pp. 93-94, italics in text)

Thanks to taste, bodies place people culturally and within certain social strata. A passage from my field diary, a description of a situation before one of my first interviews with a Polish Director at the EU Commission, reveals how my bodily hexis was possibly “Europeanized”, and how I tried, referring to above quote from Fanon, to become acknowledged as a human, and how this contradicted the stereotypical representation of a Pole: I am standing in the lobby of one of the Commission’s DGs, smartly dressed: black jacket, black trousers, white shirt with black buttons and thin, delicate black stripes, black leather shoes, my black fine cotton coat slung over my arm, on my lapel a sticker with the European flag and the inscription ‘V’ for visiteur. My hair is styled with matt hair-wax, I wear a fresh scent, it’s winter and due to my self-tanner I don’t look pale. I have made myself ready to take one of my first interviews at the Commission. I tried to comply with the local rules of outer appearance. The person I will interview is a Polish Director. I am waiting for the secretary to pick me up. After a while, a middle-aged woman dressed in a brown skirt suit and with styled loose, long brown hair approaches me and asks ‘Monsieur Lewicki?’. ‘Yes!’ I reach out my hand and smile although I’m slightly nervous, or rather excited. She looks at me with no particular expression on her face and says: ‘please’. We walk to the elevator, and wait in silence until the door draws aside. The elevator has a dark, cold, stone interior and a big mirror on the back wall; it’s a bit dark inside. I am confused by the silence and don’t know what to say. I see her gazing at me and suddenly a question comes out of her lips: ‘And you are Polish?’. I sense disbelief in her voice and in the intonation of this question. I answer and smile, somehow in expectation of a reaction, maybe a joke or a smile, so we can laugh together. But there comes only another question: ‘And you are writing your PhD in Berlin?’ with the same kind of tone. I answer. Her reply is ‘Aha’. Silence. The doors open and we walk to the office of the Director.

I am white middle class, I speak Polish and two foreign languages fluently, I received a sound education (in Germany it would be called Allgemeinbildung) in Poland, I dress according to my taste and according to the occasion, I am tall and blond and I try to be friendly. I represent what Dyer calls “white” (Dyer, 1997). But the reaction says: You’re Polish, but you don’t look Polish. Have I been Europeanized already or is my bodily hexis revealing a non-Polish performance? In

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fact, I doubt the reaction would be different if I looked more Polish to her. Either way, what she says is: you don’t belong here, you don’t fit in here. Either because I look non-Polish to her or because I don’t comply with the stereotype of a badly dressed and boorish Pole, and apparently there is no other representation of a Pole in her mind. This is audible in the tone of her voice and questions revealing astonishment that point to her cognitive incongruence with the stereotype of a badly dressed (or overdressed), badly educated Pole. For her, I do not fit what she imagines a Pole to look like. Thus, because I am a Pole but I do not fit her stereotype of what a Pole looks like, she is giving me the impression that I do not fit into this context, although I do fit into to it. As I will show, many of the people from NMS have tried to grasp the rules in EU-space, tried to represent through their bodies a modern nationality and being modern in general: self-controlled and permeated by scientific discourse about bodies, a healthy body that represents a breach with the past and capitalist aesthetic – a certain style that I call the Eurostyle. However, it is then the ways of shaping and making the body that are distinctive and even very skilful imitations may be rendered futile if they are not made légère, if they are not self-distanced and relaxed – a feature of Bourdieu’s bourgeoisie (as opposed to petit bourgeoisie), that taste will detect immediately. It is also a feature that marks the Euroclass habitus and accounts for the sheer class divisions in EU-space. Bodies, nationalities, class and the East/West division are conjoined, particular body performances localize subjects on a social scale and evoke imaginations (and essentializations) about a particular nationality and its modernity (or lack thereof). I show here that in EUspace taste and the aesthetics of bodies and practices are increasingly relevant as one rises in rank in the hierarchy ladder of the EC apparatus, where the congruency between national habitus, an imagined European modernity in EU-space and class (belonging to EU elites) become more relevant, visible and compelling in lifestyle and bodily hexis. At the levels above HoU, the production of the Euroclass is increasingly dependent on fine readings of taste and its attributes, while HoU apply strategies of efficiency in which Latour’s hybridization plays a central role (similar to the efficient British HoU). The main weapon in the struggle over posts in the hierarchy, at the level of HoU and below, is efficiency – pushing things through, and in this way making yourself visible. However, at the upper levels, at the level of Euroclass elites, it is the configurations of different forms of (aesthetic) capital, their distinctive application, and the ability to read them, that together form a legitimate lifestyle for an EU Director, one of the Euroclass elites. Ann Laura Stoler in her book Carnal Knowledge (2002) poignantly and accurately describes the interplay between race, class and gender in the production of whiteness in the European colonies, showing how cultural criteria of morality and moral conduct, sexuality, gender (virility and femininity) and class were

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constantly reiterated, updated, reestablished and reapplied in order to reproduce the category of the European white. She argues, quoting Stocking (Stocking, 1982), that in these “laboratories of modernity”, the conflation of European and white was not a product of a new discourse of racism (Stoler, 2002, p. 97), but a backlash and effect of the longue durée of colonisation. “The Big Bang”, as the enlargement of the EU in 2004 and 2007 was called in Brussels, brought old colonial patterns of imperial (ideological) thinking back to life, connected less with skin colour but rather, just as in colonies, to an outlook. Like the colonial categories of “black” and “white”, in EU-space the way one looks is linked to the assumed level of civilization and class, similar to colonies, where racialized bodies were connected with cultural hierarchies (Fanon & Markmann, 1991; Loomba, 2005; Loomba et al., 2005; Said, 1995). In EU-space, the classification of bodies evokes cultural classifications that are, however, detached from skin colour, but based on other visual markers and conflated with moral and cultural stances. Visual markers and taste that classify bodies, emanate cultural, moral and political differences that are powerful tools that perpetuate exclusion and marginalization. They turn the gaze on the “distinctive culture” of the NMS, the bodies of whose citizens are described and culturally categorized, though in EU-space without clear reference to race. My experience as a researcher at the EU Commission shows that the dichotomies and struggles I have described above in language use and discourse are also translated into bodies and their hexis. Bourdieu writes: I think that one cannot fully understand language without placing linguistic practices within the full universe of compossible practices: eating and drinking habits, cultural consumption, taste in matters of arts, sports, dress, furniture, politics etc. For it is the whole class habitus, that is, the synchronic and diachronic position occupied in the social structure. That expresses itself thorough the linguistic habitus which is but one of its dimensions. Language is a technique of the body, and linguistic (and especially phonological) competency is a dimension of bodily hexis in which the whole relation to the social world expresses itself. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 149 italics in text)

Bodies in EU-space, as suggested in previous chapters, are not only conjoined with places and spaces, but together with language, mark belonging to the Euroclass, and in the classification of bodies and their practices inclusion and exclusion is established. These classifications place representations of nationalities on a global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld, 2002, 2004), delimiting European from non-European bodies, modern from unmodern, and through this revealing the European doxa of the Euroclass. Here again, taste is at work, taste that not only places nationalities and their representations (stereotypes) on a hierarchical ladder, but also forms the Euroclass in EU-space. Bourdieu writes:

198 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied, helps to shape the class body. It is an incorporated principle of classification, which governs all forms of incorporation, choosing and modifying everything that the body ingests and digests and assimilates, physiologically and psychologically. It follows that the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste, which it manifests in several ways. (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 188, italics in text)

Bodies may or may not provide a ticket to an EU career during the selection process. Poehls (2009) shows how in College d’Europe they are shaped to embody Europeanness as the ability to move and act in a particular social and cultural context. I have also observed how the failure to perform a certain bodily hexis and body habitus leads to expulsion and reinforces negative stereotypes. In the Commission, EC civil servants constantly assured me that there was no particular or clear dress code and that it was such a diverse environment that you have to learn to drop your prejudices and stereotypical thinking. Some of them, however, mostly holding higher positions in the EU bureaucracy, would admit that there was a dress code in line with your place in the hierarchy, but in what they said one could sense some kind of evolutionist-aesthetical thinking about dress at the Commission. The passage below from an interview with a Director from an OMS reveals that there is a unique style at the Commission, a style the rules of which were formed long before the enlargement of the EU, and that is marked, as I show below, by white, middle class cosmopolitanism: Paweł Lewicki (PL): Is there a particular dress code at the Commission? Let’s say within the [name of the Directorate]? Answer (A): No. There’s a, there is a… there is a different dress code according to the grade. If you are going out to a meeting or you may be called to a meeting at any time and to represent the Commission, or Europe, as you might do, as I might do or any of my colleagues, Heads of Units or Directors or whatever, they [incomprehensible word] too often to come into the office in a suit. PL: Yes, but is the quality of the suit also important then? A: M… I don’t think ech… I think you find a national character that so up there enormously [?], I mean Italians are all beautifully dressed. And Irish are always quite shortly [?], I mean they are dressed…. Less well dressed. Less attention to details, you might find that men wouldn’t have their shoes well polished as, perhaps, an Italian would. They won’t necessarily have the handbag and the shoes and everything else matching. But that’s a national thing, it’s not a Commission thing. The… thing about the Commission though is that it does tend to be… I mean it pulls you up in the sense that… because there is that… there is a certain sense of a… well, that’s very nice way to dress, perhaps I should do that too. There’s always a… it’s good to have… to be able to compare with other stars and you can learn from them. That

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is a great advantage actually of different nationalities, that you can pick up good things from them. PL: Do you think people assess…. When you enter an elevator, when you see somebody very well dressed, do you automatically think this person is high up in hierarchy? A: No. PL: No? A: No. I mean I’m very familiar with the… with the situation where one dressed Italian chauffeur can look far better then an Irish Director. That culturally…. Or an English one, the English are badly dressed as well. It’s a question of the importance from your own culture or society is put to that aspect of being very well dressed. And I think it’s very nice […].

This passage exemplifies that something like “national tastes” exists (Zabursky, 2000) within the Commission. But although this diversity of “national styles” is appreciated and somehow welcomed, there is a comparing, meaning assessment, and there is this rule, which, as my interviewee says, “pulls you up”. Thus, even if an Italian chauffeur is better dressed than an Irish Director, there is a norm that “pulls you up” and makes you change your national habitus and dress European, which is possibly a mix of national tastes and styles (Zabursky, 2000). Such a statement shows that there is a shared taste, a way of dressing at the Commission that is somehow more legitimate and better15, that there is a Eurostyle of dress. It is this shared tacit knowledge that you learn over time, embodied in habitus and its practices, but some habitus performances are more European and others less. This European taste, as the above interviewee says, means picking up styles from others and integrating them into your own outfit. This is the “mixing and matching” of which Zabursky has written (2000); however, she made her observations before the enlargement, and therefore, NMS tastes and styles are not included in her notion of European taste. Moreover, my analysis reveals the rules and hierarchies produced by this “European taste”, which became more visible after the enlargement. In EUspace there is, as I show below, the expectation that the new ones will fit in. This picking up of styles of which the senior OMS civil servant speaks, this Eurostyle taste, is similar to the attitudes and features of Hannerz’s cosmopolitans. As Hannerz notes, they are those who have:

15 Stacia Zabursky in her ethnography of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), mentions how Swedes would distinguish themselves from Finns based on the notion of “sensitivity” and being “thin-skinned” (in the context of sauna visits and birch-rods), and by that assuming more civility and development in their taste. She also shows how internationality and European is asserted as “more tolerant” and as a matter of taste (Zabursky, 2000).

200 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS […] an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other. It is an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather the uniformity. To become acquainted with more cultures is to turn into an aficionado, to view them as art works. At the same time, however, cosmopolitanism can be a matter of competence, and competence of both generalized and a more specialized kind. There is the aspect of a state of readiness, a personal ability to make one’s way into other cultures, through listening, looking, intuiting and reflecting. And there is a cultural competence in the stricter sense of the term, a build-up skill in maneuvering more or less expertly with a particular system of meanings and meaningful norms. (Hannerz, 1990, p. 239)

However, cosmopolitanism, as Hannerz remarked later self-critically, implies a certain kind of modernity and privileges a certain kind of masculine subject, namely coming from the West and approaching the world as an artist, intellectual, mobile tradesmen, businessmen or correspondent and symbolizing privilege (Hannerz, 2005). He has pointed out that being a cosmopolitan has nothing to do with a commitment to any particular culture, “as one always knows where the exit is” (Hannerz, 2005, p. 200). It is an attitude that historically has to do with NorthWestern elites and now with professionals of white middle-class European origin, such as e.g. foreign reporters. Thus, while there are other concepts of cosmopolitanism pointing to the cosmopolitan character of labour migrants and the life of the urban poor in a Western metropolis or of non-European elites (such as Bhabha’s vernacular cosmopolitanism, [Bhabha, 2000] or, as in the spirit of entangled modernities [Randeria, 1999], urban Jamaicans [Wardle, 2000] or Copperbelt Zambians [Ferguson, 1999]), the white upper-/middle-class cosmopolitans, once the Other from NMS is present, unsurprisingly and unabashedly hold firm the cultural rules in EU-space in Brussels. This is represented in the rule of picking up the best from other “national styles” which the senior civil servant talked about (see also Ong, 1999 on practices of “flexible citizens”). The rule that “pulls you up” and causes this mixing and matching in EU-space, but somehow the “national styles” of NMS are not included in this rule of “mixing and matching”. Simultaneously, as Hannerz remarks, cosmopolitanism is a mark of distinction, and this “search for contrast rather then uniformity” takes place only within certain (class) and national aesthetical frames. The enlargement caused the notion of cosmopolitanism to become a new marker of the Euroclass life (style) and the benchmark of a legitimate lifestyle in the Commission, but with particular Western, capitalist/welfare aesthetics. The above interview passage shows that there is a common sense and acceptable styles of dress and lifestyles that are akin to the notion of white European cosmopolitan. I claim that even though an Italian chauffeur can be better dressed than an Irish Director, they both belong to the (same) class that reproduces

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European doxa, even though, as I show below, they do not belong to same fractions of the Euroclass. They represent different versions of the same class, of a differently developed national habitus, but still remain within the acceptable standards and frames of aesthetics of modernity and capitalism, of “big culture”, visible in stereotypes about bodies and lifestyles, both of how Italians are seen in EU-space and how NMS bodies are seen. The representation of Italians is that they are well dressed, and although their country may have problems with its economy or organized crime, and in many ways contradicts ideas about a modern state and society, they, as one of my German interviewees told me, “can be forgiven, they have a marvellous cuisine and a big culture”. Italy is also – in the end – one of the EU’s founding member states and has a long and rather undisrupted history of capitalism. I show below that due to the interplay of formal position and ethical and aesthetic choices, the various types of bodily hexis that form legitimate representations of style and taste will not make an Italian chauffeur into a Director just because of his good outfit. Each component of this style is relevant and form the Euroclass’ Eurostyle. At the top levels of the EU Commission’s hierarchy, the Eurostyle assumes its pure form, the Euroclass elites’ style. However, the Eurostyle of the Euroclass will always represent the modernity of the moderns (Latour, 1993) once the Other is in the picture. The lifestyle of people from NMS is locally seen as deprived of features of a cosmopolitan class – and the complaints of the abovementioned British HoU about their inability to work in an international environment confirms this view. In terms of their bodies, men from NMS are seen as overweight and women as overdressed or dressed as if from the eighties. This represents a lack of both a breach with the past and of self-control. While a cosmopolitan status and lifestyle is powerful in EU-space, and it has Bourdieu’s status of “stylization” that marks belonging to a class of “producers”, to the Euroclass, the quotation below from an interview depicts that it is also a matter of origin, and that cosmopolitanism in EU-space is connected to nationality/origin and progress or modernity, understood as contemporaneousness, or in Latour’s understanding, as a breach with the past (Latour, 1993). Thus, the Euroclass is marked by a Western, cosmopolitan lifestyle, which is simultaneously intrinsically modern. This passage from an interview shows how an AST official meticulously listed all nationalities and combinations of mixed nationalities to me – in a rather distinctive way, as she was telling me about the AST-network within the Commission16. She herself was, as she said, half Swiss, half British; her mother was Swiss from a German speaking Canton. This is what she said: 16 The AST Network is an official network of AST officials (secretaries, support staff) within the Commission that provides mutual support and facilitates information exchange among AST officials (see footnote 27, p. 119).

202 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS Answer (A): Hang on a second. I have to have a look. Right, Nina is Finnish, Paolo is Italian… Paweł Lewicki (PL): Italian or Spanish? A: I don’t know… French? Kits is Scottish, Marie-Luise is half Belgian, half English, I’m half English, half Swiss. Lauretta is, I think, half Italian, half… no, I think she is Italian. Birgit is German, no, Birgit is Finnish… [name] is Danish, Brigitte is German, Katarina is Czech, I think, or maybe she’s not. One is Polish, this is somebody who left. Moira is Irish, Chat [Chad?] is Dutch, Carolina is French. There was also a Greek lady but she left. And then we also had a half Italian, half Belgian. He was one of our representatives, but he left. PL: I see that there are many people with mixed, with mixed nationalities here… A: I don’t think that’s… I just think that it’s more obvious here. Because it is rather… it’s an international community, but if you go to any European city, you’ll find… that… I mean most people are… when people ask me, I would say I’m English. But I am actually half English, half Swiss. So I think that mostly you’ll find that there are mixed nationalities. Are you completely Polish? PL: Yes, I’m completely Polish. And you don’t find so many people in Warsaw that are from mixed… A: Yes, but up until recently not a lot of people went to visit, I think, Warsaw. Whereas in Europe… You will find also in Poland in 20 years time, you’ll find [a verb] the same cosmopolitan mix, Belgian or Polish.

This fragment from an interview shows that mixed nationalities, more specifically the bi-nationality, is a somewhat distinctive feature17 in EU-space. It is visible in the scrupulous way she is listing the mixed nationalities to me (which, I must admit, in her place I would also not be able to remember). What is also visible here is not only the distinctiveness of mixed nationalities, but also its “normality” in Europe but not in Warsaw, which is placed outside of Europe and will reach some kind of desired state of development in 20 years time. Multinationality in the EU Commission, or rather this cosmopolitanism that Hannerz mentioned with irony (2005), emerges as distinctively European incarnated by a real European that has many different identities and speaks presumably many European languages. This AST official reinforces the notion of Hannerz’s white European cosmopolitan, who is distinctive due to “[…] an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other […] an intellectual and aesthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences” (Hannerz, 1996, p. 103), but that is not present or possible in the NMS. However, Hannerz also remarks that historically it was a category that described many of the

17 I don’t have the exact numbers, but all of the senior German civil servants I talked to, who started their careers at the EC institutions in the 1970s at the age of around 30 and were now about to retire, were all married either to Italian or French women.

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elites and meant “[…] more formal education, more travel, more leisure as well as material resources to allow the acquisition of knowledge of the diversity of cultural forms” (Hannerz, 2004, p. 74) and a form of distinction among the upper classes; a distinction that is visible in this interview passage above. These classifications and distinctions are becoming more apparent when NMS come into view and when this mixing and matching has to include these NMS styles, which are, as I show, incongruent with those of OMS, with European doxa. NMS bodies represent, most of all, continuity with the past as opposed to the moderns’ continuously undertaken and accomplished breach with the past, as this is allegedly the case in modernity (Latour, 1993). While the Italian and Irish allegedly dress differently, once NMS come into view, the Italian and Irish belong to one family; they become, according to the measure of affective states (Stoler, 2002), more culturally “white”, more “us”. The differences between them is not laid down in ascriptions of being backward, irrational, brutish, immoral or out-of-style. The Italian chauffeur dressed better than the Irish Director only confirms the positive stereotype of the former, a stereotype that in this case does not have an unmodern or backward undertone. I show below that there are other factors than just dress that decide whether an Italian can be assessed as a Director or “just” a chauffeur. The flashy, trashy, sober, overdressed East When asked directly about the dress code, almost everybody would say that there was no such thing at the Commission. These cultural codes were more concealed, and in interviews, EU civil servants would try to establish a representation of a normal bureaucracy, although, as I show below, one is “always representing somebody or something” (from an interview with an AST official). The tension in the limits of what represents a legitimate external appearance became apparent to me when in one of my first interviews with a Polish female Director at the Commission I was told that “some of the women from old member states here look like they were going out for a beer”, and that she could not quite understand “the habits” (Polish: zwyczaje) at the Commission, giving this lack of habits a negative meaning. As my own experience in the elevator shows, EU civil servants are constantly preoccupied with assessing and classifying bodies and the lifestyles these bodies represent, linking them with nationalities and class. Thus, imaginative maps of Europe are established by individuals and are widely applied at the Commission, producing and reproducing differently evoked and applied stereotypes about the appearance of different member states, which in turn reproduces the cultural power of the Euroclass, of the founding member states. Not all of the representations and stereotypes that form these maps have a negative meaning, but when it comes to the

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NMS they often reveal the functioning of distinction and evolutionist thinking among OMS. The reproduction and application of these stereotypes, because they mark a lack, point to the established and legitimate body regimes and lifestyles (see also Poehls, 2009). What I have heard from EU civil servants, often over a glass of beer or wine, is that Greeks are small and dark haired, Spanish women would more often have long, loose dark hair, Italian and Spanish men are particularly well dressed 18 (belts matching shoes in colour), Irish are pale, older German men are big and wear thick, dark green coats, younger Germans always wear fine glass frames… A young German assistant to one of the Directors General told me, not without pride: “I am sometimes approached by Italians and they say, ‘with your suits no one would think that you are a German’.” However, young women from NMS, those in AST positions, are seen as overdressed, often overtly trashy and flashy, making themselves visible through “high heels and short skirts, big handbags as though from the eighties” and strong make-up (from an interview with an official from Ireland) – they are perceived by women from OMS as desperately looking for a partner. One of my OMS interviewees, asked about what she means by flashy, said: “Gucci! But not the real Gucci, [but] this sort of market, cheap, sort of things you would buy at a market: flashy, handbags with gold, Gucci, Prada, Italian except not Italian, flashy look, hair more … more done” (AST3, Irish DG EMPL). As my research progressed and I was frequently walking down the corridors of the Commission’s venues, I also learned to spot people from different countries in the same way the EU civil servants did. It was like an internal play of alleged “doing nothing” that was going on in my mind (Ehn & Löfgren, 2010). I was also submerged in the powerful aesthetics that was mirrored both in the amount of money I spent on my outfit and in my experiences as an ethnographer. Was I slowly “whitening” my body and becoming European, or was I already equipped with a European habitus? I remember my astonishment when I was once met in a lobby by a secretary of one of the Polish Directors I was to meet for an interview. She was Polish, and I could sense and see that she clearly did not fit into the common way of dressing for the position of a secretary that I was acquainted with at the Commission. Her outfit, her appearance, as I would later learn from conversations about outfits and styles in the Commission, was exemplary of secretaries from NMS; there was a strong stereotype about how they looked. With a short, bright lilac skirt that was short even for the Brussels early spring19, contrasting long black boots and stockings, a 18 Is the aim of these performances of people from South European member states to elevate themselves in the global hierarchy of value? 19 In Brussels, March can be quite warm, and the temperature during the day often exceeds 10°C.

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thick long necklace falling down on the low décolleté of a pistachio shirt, long nails and lilac lipstick, she clearly did not match her surroundings. That was on my second fieldtrip (in the spring of 2009), and it was the first time I was able to understand what I had been told previously both by OMS women and by some Polish women. The latter told it with embarrassment. This secretary, as I spoke with her briefly, had recently moved to the Commission from a representation office of one of the Polish regions, and, based on my knowledge and taste, was not much removed from the fashion of a secretary in some middle-sized city in Poland, but she was, also in my view, a bit “dolled up” (on “dolling up”, see the chapter “Polish EU Brussels”). However, her outfit and style were illegitimate in EU-space, and her body was marked as unfitting, as petit bourgeois and typical of a NMS secretary. I also remember one male secretary who picked me up from the lobby of Berlaymont as I was meeting another Polish Director there. According to my knowledge, he also did not entirely fit the style seen in the corridors of the Commission office buildings, particularly Berlaymont. It was spring, and this Belgian man, who was in his mid-forties, wore a light-grey suit, but left his white shirt half way open so you could see his hairy chest and the gold chain on his neck. He wore moccasins, had a ponytail, wore many rings on his fingers, and smelled strongly of perfume. However, he did not represent a group that would be talked about with either disrespect or condescension; he was not sexualized and marked as “from the eighties ”. He was “ours”, and thus I did not hear that this kind of outfit was cheap or trashy; he may have drifted from the fashion style of an OMS civil servant at the rank of administrator (AD), but he was culturally recognizable as an official from OMS, as an AST official. He was not labelled as belonging to a backward, out-of-fashion class; he was indisputably “ours” and his ethical stance, in contrast to that of NMS women, was unquestioned in spite of his outfit. What the above examples show is that bodies from NMS are marked as incongruent, and this incongruence is based on a sexualized body and thus an alleged lack of control over the sexual body, which points to an alleged lack of purification of the categories of nature and society represented by these bodies, and that this is out of place in EU-space. Women from NMS are naturalized, and this contradicts the modern principle of purification; however, it is an expression of the application of the constitution of modernity as described by Latour (1993). NMS bodies are labelled outdated, their fashion is outdated and “from the eighties”, they are not able to design and form their bodies according to the current fashion, and, most of all, they do not represent a breach with the past. NMS bodies in EU-space are seen as not being permeated by the modern discourse of medicine and a healthy lifestyle, of being in control and shaped to represent efficiency and personality. They represent a lack of purification, and the production of such a stereotypical

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representation points to the allegedly self-controlled and up-to-date OMS bodies, which represent transcendent medical knowledge about healthy living. Many of my interview partners were women from NMS, usually between their early thirties and mid forties and working in lower to middle AD posts. One of them, a Slovak in a prestigious DG RELEX with whom I was holding an interview on biofuels, walked briskly, with her head up high, and spoke quick, giving the impression of someone dynamic who has loads of important things to do. She wore a navy-blue trouser suit and a neckerchief with a folk-looking paisley pattern. This folk-looking pattern made her look distinguished, as having her own, personal style according to local norms (pointing to her NMS descent), and in this way was in congruence with the common style for the place where she worked. However, there was one thing that made her distinctive in EU-space, and which made her origin detectable: her high-heel shoes, which make, as I was told by women from OMS, those from NMS distinctive. Women above the age of 45 from NMS were recognizable, as I was told, through their baleyage, which looked, again, “as though from the eighties” (as opposed to the “modern” baleyage of some Scandinavian, German or Austrian women – which had more contrasting and sharp colours than the NMS baleyage) or through their “sober” outfits: a jacket, dark trousers (rarely jeans), no skirt, a plain shirt (as I noticed myself, often white), no accessories (rarely a scarf or neckerchief), and little jewellery. The term “sober” was often used to describe how (Polish) women dressed and how they made (themselves) distinctive. While women from OMS would also wear skirt/trouser suits, in contrast to NMS women, they usually wore flat shoes, and they would also try to introduce to their outfit, as some of them would say, something “personal” or, as one French lady told me (similar to the Irish senior official cited above), pick the best things that people coming from different countries have in their style and match it to her/his own. These features were either combined and made someone recognizable, or there were small details, such as these high-heel shoes or different baleyages that were distinctive and prescribed either to a nationality or to the OMS/NMS. “Sober”, referring to women from NMS in EU-space, means serious and stiff, without distance and imagination. The internal taste in the Commission classifies NMS bodies as outdated (“from the eighties”), but also careful, and in French, soigné, that is, as Bourdieu writes, the mark of the petit bourgeoisie. According to him, soigné was “[…] so strongly appropriated by those who use it to express their taste for a job well done, properly finished, or for the meticulous attention they devote to their personal appearance, that it no doubt evokes for those who reject it the narrow of ‘up-tight’ rigour they dislike in the petit-bourgeois style” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 192). These classifications and assessments show how allegedly modern labels are conflated with distinctions that produce a class: the Euroclass.

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But even if the NMS women in AD posts matched the dominant fashion style at the Commission, and even if their outer appearance and gestures were more or less congruent with that of the legitimate one of the Euroclass and more personal (as per the above Slovak woman), they would still often be recognizable, if not by their high-heel shoes, then (like the men) by the allegedly American accent in their English or by “their hasty way of walking, stamping with their heels” (AST3, Irish, DG EMPL). The American accent was often connected in EU-space, in a disrespectful way, to labour migration from NMS to the United States (as I heard it once from a French AST official: “They learned it while working on construction sites or as housemaids in Chicago.”) or with studies at an American university. This latter fact was however often an explanation for the alleged uncritical adoption of neoliberal thought and congruent with a stereotype about the Americanization of the NMS societies. In this sense, Americanization meant vulgarity and bad taste. These assessments show the working of taste and how class and Europe in the classification practices become conflated. Opposed to an American accent is the British accent that in EU-space is distinctive of non-Brits. It is a sign of a sound education received at a British university. Eurocrats from OMS often send their children to the UK, usually to study at the LSE, in Oxford, Cambridge or Edinburgh, and sometimes to France (in which case, as I was told, to study law) or the Netherlands. Similarly, a good French pronunciation in a person from a NMS evoked assumptions about French roots or growing up in France and not about a good education or language skills. Their accent, either in English or French, and the stamping of shoes were body performances that, thanks to the taste that marked what was legitimate and what was not, labelled bodies with moral and aesthetical classifications (e.g. the vulgar Americanization of NMS) but also gave them the European or non-European, cosmopolitan” or not-really-cosmopolitan labels that make moderns invincible. Hasty walking and stamping one’s heels were also, together with stereotypes about inadequate outfits (“high heels are not for an office, but rather for the opera”) and sexualisation (or the implicit sexual character of high heels in this stereotype) were seen as an irritation of the rules, as something that did not fit the acknowledged bodily hexis of modern bodies under control. While these classifications implicitly reproduce the criteria of modernity, they are also congruent with Bourdieu’s production of class. As he writes, rather than “ease”, that is “[…] a sort of indifference to the objectifying gaze of others which neutralizes its powers, presupposes the self-assurance which comes from the certainty of being able to objectify that objectification, appropriate that appropriation, of being capable of imposing the norms if apperception of one’s own body” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 205); hasty walking and stamping one’s heels has something of a

208 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS […] petit-bourgeois experience of the world [that] starts out from timidity, the embarrassment of someone who is uneasy in his body and his language and who, instead of being ‘as one body with them’, observes them from outside, through other people’s eyes, watching, checking, correcting himself, and who, by his desperate attempts to reappropriate an alienated being-for-others, exposes himself to appropriation, giving himself away as much by hyper-correction as by clumsiness. (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 205)

A sound education was, according to the European doxa, available only in the West. Studying abroad is capital in EU-space, and it was particularly weighty capital for people from NMS, as there was a strong stereotype about bad educations and bad universities in NMS (and my experiences as an ethnographer, coming from a Western university, confirms this), so an education in the West was very valued in a person from a NMS – and, as shown above, connected to accent. I heard an anecdote from one of my OMS friends working at the Commission, a story, told not without embarrassment, about two senior officials chit-chatting before a meeting in the SG, one from France and the other from Belgium, asking each other in a joyful tone, what kind of PhD his NMS secretary had. There was a stereotype in EU-space about an alleged monopoly of NMS women in the position of secretaries at the SG. However, their PhD titles were apparently worthless, or at least it was funny to have a secretary with a PhD degree from NMS. This anecdote was confirmed in one of my interviews with a civil servant from Poland. I was told that it was even “fashionable” to have a secretary with a PhD degree. “Fashionable” was used by my Polish interviewee in an ironic way (Was he also angry because of the devaluation of NMS women?). Apart from downgrading the status of education and universities in NMS, there was also a distinction made through the assumption that if you wanted to be a real European, you had to study abroad. This assumption was often also played out towards me, visible in my status as a PhD student in Berlin, which gave me access to many people in EU-space, a status that again recalls Hannerz’s notion of cosmopolitan. But a “sound education” is also a classical feature and fable of the middle class, as Bourdieu has also shown elsewhere (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), and this fable of a sound cosmopolitan education marks class divisions in EU-space, class divisions that run along the OMS/NMS divide. The outfits of the NMS female employees at the Commission had one more connotation: they were seen as prefeminist. One of my interviewees from an OMS, a woman, said that NMS secretaries tended to underline their sexuality (because, as she claimed, they thought it would “be more attractive to men”). She also told me that “they seem to be dressed as women who are oppressed, so as a group they seem to be more behind, behind with emancipation” (AST3, Irish, DG EMPL). Not only are they again being placed in the past, defined as nonmodern, but this

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sexualisation is in fact also a devaluation of their other, nonsexual capital; it places NMS women on a mental time-space map that also reflects a proximity or distance to some kind of European ideal. It is a map of bodies and styles that is congruent (or not) with class characteristics in EU-space. On this map, the Eurostyle, like Bourdieu’s notion of style, assumes a congruency between ethical, moral and aesthetic choices. The opinions about NMS secretaries also imply some kind of ideal type of femininity, something opposed to what many women from NMS represented. Different ideas about femininity, those of the developed West, are apparently beyond comparison, an ideal and a threshold, and NMS women are symbolically colonized either by imposing their sexualization on them, or by labelling them backward, stiff and sober, and thus, as those who, using Bourdieu’s vocabulary, are not able to distance themselves from their selves, and thus belong to the petit bourgeoisie. Sexualized women, as some feminist theorists have shown (Weigel, 1987), are the opposite of a rational subject. These scholars have pointed out how the rational subject has been formed through a disjunction from femininity, which belonged to nature and was/is thus an object of colonial conquest. These alleged strivings of NMS women to “be more attractive to men”, and the meaning that is given to it, is in fact also a moral classification of NMS women, of their alleged lack of respectability (Skeggs, 1997). Women in the Commission are expected to perform modesty, but the newcomers allegedly do not follow this implicit rule, and are thus seen as morally inferior. In fact, this immodesty stems from the imposed sexualisation of their bodies, and this representation is incompatible with a controllable, modern body. The women from NMS, as mentioned above, themselves claimed that some women from OMS looked “as if they are going out for a beer”. On the other hand, OMS women said that those from NMS look “as if they are going to the opera or on a date” – both viewpoints reflecting the cultural struggle in EU-space. However, NMS women were sexualized in my interviews because their outfits were, according to local OMS standards, (too) sexual. This shows that the East-West/modern-backward divisions and the struggle over what represents a legitimate Eurostyle were also reproduced and played out in gender and class terms (Skeggs, 1997). According to this parallel, the capital of people coming from NMS is (self)reduced to sexual (im)modesty and respectability or a lack thereof, revealing the production of allegedly modern and powerful images of self-controlled and self-controllable subjects and their opposite in sexualized NMS bodies. Simultaneously, these sexualized NMS women seem to accept this kind of tacit knowledge, as their sexual outfits seem to point to their conviction that their bodies are their only capital, since their cultural capital (education) is devalued (Bourdieu, 2010). Self-sexualization is classified by Bourdieu as a practice of those belonging to the petit bourgeoisie (ibid.). He writes that women from the lower classes subconsciously see their bodies as their only

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capital, and this is why they invest time and money in shaping them. Both these shapings themselves, this “over-investment” in their bodies and the aesthetics of these bodily shapings (“as if they were going to a date”), are revealed and marked in EU-space as incongruent with the aesthetics of the Euroclass, as a petitbourgeois style. The short skirts of AST officials from NMS, their high-heel shoes, and their strong make-up can also be seen as self-sexualization. It marks these women as performing what Bourdieu calls “pretentious practices”, illegitimate practices that point to discrepancies between one’s ambitions and possibilities. It points also, again, to a lack of self-distance, and thus reflects their place in the social universe, their incongruence with aesthetics and Euroclass respectability. Bourdieu writes: “The self-assurance given by the certain knowledge of one’s own value, especially that of one’s body and speech, is in fact very closely linked to the position occupied in social space (and also, of course, to trajectory).” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 204) Pre-feminism, evoked by one of my female interviewees from an OMS, is another performance of modernity discourse, a sign of suppression of any difference and complexity in the Other. It shows the modern and universal assumption that there is one femininity and one axis for the development of this femininity. It also blanks out historical developments within NMS and the status of women there, both before and after 1989, making women from NMS subjects without a history (Mignolo, 2000). Such a suppression of complexities, as C.T. Mohanty has remarked, is characteristic of colonial power in colonization, meaning the immense suppression of any heterogeneity in the colonized subjects (Mohanty, 1988). Stereotypes about men from NMS are not as common at the Commission as those about women – “the dress is more uniform: it’s a suit” (AD9, Irish, DG RTD), and therefore they are, allegedly, less recognizable, particularly younger men from NMS – those below the age of 35. Stereotypes about NMS men are often heard in the more “national” EU Parliament 20, where MEPs and their assistants work – both are legislative-term related positions that both formally and practically require contacts with their national constituencies. However, an inside joke at the Commission says that men from NMS have too short socks while wearing a suit – something that for an Italian “is unthinkable” (CAB, German) as Italians are stereotyped as being very well dressed and fashion conscious (thus, NMS men are marked as “lacking stylization”, Bourdieu, 2010, p. 172). NMS men are also often spotted by their obesity and unkempt hair. Another opinion that I heard was that “those young men from NMS tend to be overdressed”. This overdressed had a 20 This local ascription to the EU Parliament as more ”national” adheres not only to the formal and procedural character of this institution, but also points to its cultural heterogeneity as opposed to the Commission, which is allegedly more European.

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different meaning than when it was applied to young AST NMS women. Both marked incongruence with the Eurostyle: a lack of self-distance, characterizing, according to Bourdieu, the petit bourgeoisie, or a torn habitus that cannot detect valuable capital and is unable to adjust to new conditions. Yet, while the overdressed women from NMS evoked sexual connotations, NMS AD overdressed men caused instead, as I was once told by a German senior civil servant, a condescending sympathy. Condescending because, as my interview partner said, most of the NMS AD men are young and allegedly one could see that their suits are fine and the latest fashion, and that they “doll a bit up” (in German he used a pejorative expression sich aufputzen). He also told me that this is rather what a stagiaire would do – sich aufputzen. He compared NMS men to stagiaires – young people from all member states (the upper age limit for a stagiaire is 32) that come to EU institutions for six months to gather some European experience, which may also be a ticket to a further career in EU-space. As I observed for myself, stagiaires were recognizable in corridors and in the canteens of EU Commissions buildings: they are young, stick together, and are often very smartly dressed (particularly when seen in Berlaymont). But the words of this German senior civil servant place NMS men at a lower social and cultural level. Simultaneously, as subjects they are somehow aesthetically, and thus also morally, able to elevate to some idealized kind of European, through education, and time and experience in EU-space. These NMS men are placed at the level of stagiaires, of those beginners and youngsters whose incongruent behaviour (sticking together and being overdressed) can be understood and forgiven, simultaneously giving them credit for development. This is strikingly similar to what Stoler has written about powerful idioms of domination in the colonies: Colonial cultures were never direct translations of European society planted in the colonies but unique cultural configurations, homespun creations in which European food, dress, housing, and morality were given new political meaning in specific colonial social orders. Formal dress codes, sumptuary laws, and military display did more than reiterate middleclass European visions and values. They were responsive to class tensions in Europe and created what Anderson calls ‘tropical gothic’, a ‘middle class aristocracy’ that cultivated the colonials’ difference from the colonized while maintaining social distinctions among themselves. (Stoler, 2002, p. 24)

National cultures and national forms of habitus (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994), as in colonial cultures, are unique cultural configurations in EU-space, but they acquired, similarly to Stoler’s description of a colony, a new cultural and moral meaning after the enlargement, diminishing although not eliminating differences among OMS. Well-dressed Italians or Spaniards are just another, national but legitimate version

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of a modern and real European habitus. The Italians and Spanish may not be seen as modern (especially now in the Euro crisis) as the North-Western member states, but they are European enough through the essentialized representation of their culture (well dressed, good cuisine) and the European representation of their national lifestyle. After the enlargement of the EU, those from the OMS are seen as better. They are powerful and create a “middle class aristocracy” in EU-space, as shown above; these white cosmopolitans are eager to distinguish themselves from those from NMS while retaining their “national characters” (such as well-dressed Italians or sociable Irish). They also implicate the nonmodern status of the NMS through their own pure modernity. This sich aufputzen marks the moral and cultural position of the NMS as being not European enough. NMS bodies are tagged as those representing a savage, bodies unfit to the purified, an allegedly modern immanent society. In such an assessment, their bodies are hybridized with an allegedly transcendent nature (sexualized) in contrast to OMS, permeated by discourse about medicine and a scientifically produced discourse about a healthy and fashionable lifestyle on time. However, these ascriptions of NMS bodies and the kind of moral and ethical stances they represent, as Stoler shows, were based on a “[…] reading of sensibilities more than science, on a measure of affective states – of affiliations and attachments” (Stoler, 2008, p. 352). Some of my interviewees from OMS would say that young people (between 25 and 40) from NMS are often unrecognizable (which in fact is meant to be a positive opinion) because “they have a different style than those older men in managerial posts” from NMS. Men from NMS, those with professional experience and working in higher managerial posts at the Commission, are often seen as those “thinking as though from the former era”, referring to their need to control their subordinates, their mistrust and their inability to make decisions and push things through. This is also how their outfit was assessed, both by the young NMS officials and those from OMS. A German Member of the Cabinet told me once, “they are visible through their unkempt haircuts, suits in grey, dark colours, out of fashion, like from the nineties a bit”. Some women from OMS would make fun of the “NMS men’s moustaches” or their suits being “thick fabric and out of fashion”. The collision between these two styles was particularly significant because the level of the Directors at the Commission, as I will show further, is this keeper and preserver of Euroclass aesthetics and lifestyles, of this “tropical gothic”. The level of Director is the level of Euroclass elites. Younger men from NMS, although they had less power, working primarily in lower AD posts, were seen in a more positive light, as more fitting and, as some OMS managers would say, “very pushy, dynamic”, revealing their condescension, but also had the potential to “learn the rules of the club”.

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The EU Commission as an institution is officially full of inclusive rhetoric and is constantly concerned with political correctness and equal opportunities for its staff in all the documents it produces. The message it gives to the outside world is that of a Europe of democracy, equality and rationality. Many EU policies that the Commission significantly shapes, are aiming at diminishing differences between EU member states and providing equal opportunities. Official, internal staff policies deny the relevance of nationality, and there is a constant striving to embody and live the slogan “unified in diversity” – which can be heard in the declarations of EC officials. Still, when looked upon more carefully, one will find that strong divisions exist, even if they are less explicit. The cultural classifications of bodies, moralities and languages show how hierarchy and class belonging are culturally established and applied, and how they are congruent with divisions based on nationality and between the OMS and NMS. These divisions based on nationalities and origin that are inflicted with stereotypes about bodies, moralities and language are reproduced at all levels of the formal hierarchy of the EU apparatus and they crystallize the European doxa produced by the Euroclass. However, with the rising grade and experience in the Commission, the relevance of stylization rises: superiority of form over function, and distinction, which is prescribed to the dominant class (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 228), where whole configurations of capital mark the social status of rising prestige and power. This “middle class aristocracy” that “[…] cultivated the colonials’ difference from the colonized while maintaining social distinctions among themselves” (Stoler, 2002, p. 24) becomes nowhere more apparent than at the level of Director at the EU Commission, were a “reading of sensibilities” and whole sets of capital mark one’s distinction and social class (Kaschuba, 1993). The secret charm of the EU upper class: Directors The reproduction of established, high echelon EU elites (from the level of Director in a DG and above) reveals all the characteristics of a classical elite formation process, based on the reproduction of material/cultural power. This process has the typical symptoms of elite reproduction in other contexts, including social separation and exclusiveness, material and symbolic status visible in distinction and taste, and self-perceived moral superiority. There is, however, one difference in this process when compared to elites in nation-states: nationality in EU-space, based on its modern or not-really-modern status, is either capital or a burden; nationality is a subject of symbolic management (something that again points to the hierarchy ladder between nationalities in EU-space) because nationalities are conjoined with bodies, lifestyles and moralities, forming stereotypes that either hinder or ease your upward movement. Understood and performed in such way, nationality in EUspace determines the symbolic and hierarchical position of individuals in this space.

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My understanding of elites is anthropological, so rather than analysing the social status of the people who define themselves as elites, I am interested in the ways cultural power and capital are acquired and managed in particular symbolic and social contexts (for good overview on research on elites in anthropology see Marcus, 1983; and Shore, 2002). I am interested in the processes and procedures that produce EU elites and the Euroclass and its elites, that reproduce the local European doxa, and that “create a mutually shared, tacit praxis as the basis for an informal order” (Marcus, 1983, p. 42), all of which that are highly relevant to EUspace. EU enlargement and “the Big Bang” in Brussels led to the sharpening of the power struggle over posts, even though new positions had been created for the people from NMS. These posts were established mostly in less prestigious, horizontal DGs and Units, or were posts dealing with inter-institutional issues or responsible for contacts with the public, all of which offered limited influence over political processes, and hence, had less prestige, less visibility and were less “sexy”. A French Director I talked to told me that it was good that people from NMS were placed in lower AD posts because they had to learn how to function within the EC, and that there was less they could mess up. Such a stance was quite widespread, but it leads to the perpetuation of hierarchies along conjoined national and class divisions (due to the scaling of remuneration according to grade). Simultaneously, the presence of NMS people stirred up this relatively homogenous space by adding new bodies and practices representing the Other’s forms of habitus in EU-space: bodies and practices that were and are different from those national forms of habitus that had emerged in the modern, Western European and capitalist nationstate (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994). This presence of NMS has fuelled the power struggle to define the limits of what is European and modern in EU-space and has made class divisions in this space visible – particularly on the level of EU elites. While in the field in Brussels, I was deep hanging out (James Clifford, quoted in Geertz, 2012, p. 110). I went to places where civil servants went, and hung out with my friends and other people I knew. They were neither Directors at the Commission nor at the Parliament, nor were they, with one exception, working in “sexy” DGs of EU institutions, nor were they representatives of big industry lobbies. However, I was still able to have interviews in all core institutions of the EU in Brussels with people at top levels of the hierarchy and grades AD14 and above, both from OMS and NMS. The encounters with people who were seen locally as elites was limited to interview situations. But I also later saw these people in many different contexts other than just their offices before, during and after interviews: I saw them in bars and restaurants around Schuman, on the street, and at different meetings or in art galleries. All of my interviewees at grade AD14 and above, with one exception, were people around 60 (+/- five years), and when I

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asked for suggestions about whom to contact for my next interview, they often advised me to contact their friends who were at a similar grade. There was also one Cabinet’s Member from Germany who was younger (around 47) and made a career within the EU apparatus after he left the Cabinet. Directors from OMS never gave me the impression that I was taking up their precious time, although their secretaries often would. I had the feeling they were interested in the kinds of questions I was asking, and I suppose they even enjoyed them, as they were not the “typical questions of political scientists”, as one of them put it, and, given their experience and time spent in service, my questions gave them the opportunity to reflect on their life as EU civil servants. However, being at the top level of EU administration and close to retirement, they either already knew how they could act and what they could and could not say, and/or because of their position in the EU administration, they had nothing more to lose or to fight for; therefore, my questions were not seen as threatening or offensive, and the interviewees gave the impression of being more relaxed (or was it, again, only their performance of being relaxed, in which they are so skilled?). In almost all my interviews I asked people about their backgrounds, families, Heimat and living in Brussels, about their motivation to work for the EU, “how it all started” for them, and where and who their friends were – these were all biographical questions. Niedermüller points out how the biographical method enables interviewees to take a glance at their own life. Biographical stories, the way they are told and facts that are retrieved from memory, while others are omitted, reveal deep cultural structures and meanings (Niedermüller, 1988) in which subjects embed themselves. Thus, these interviews revealed the rules that are valid in EU-space, as they were more “natural” and “obvious” to these experienced officials than to others. This relaxation they performed, either consciously or not, marked their place in the cultural and structural hierarchy. Given the fact that one’s place in the hierarchy is so important in the EU apparatus, and that it structures one’s capital in EU-space, people at managerial levels in the EU Commission significantly shape the cultural logic of EU-space and decide about capital and issues (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), including those that are strictly political. Bourdieu writes: The symbolic profit arising from material or symbolic appropriation of a work of art is measured by the distinctive value which the work derives from the rarity of the dispositions and competence which it demands and which determines its class distribution. Cultural objects, with their subtle hierarchy, are predisposed to mark the stages and degrees of the initiatory progress which defines the enterprise of culture, according to Valery Larbaud. Like ‘Christian’s progress towards the heavenly Jerusalem’, it leads from the ‘illiterate’ to the ‘literate’, via the ‘non-literate’ and ‘semi-literate’, or the ‘common reader’ (lecteur) – leaving

216 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS aside the ‘bibliophile’ – to the truly cultivated reader (liseur). The mysteries of culture have their catechumens, their initiates, their holy men, that ‘discrete elite’ set apart from ordinary mortals by inimitable nuances of manner and united by ‘a quality, something which lies in the man himself, which is part of happiness, which may be indirectly very useful to him but which will never win him a sou, and more then his courtesy, his courage or his goodness.’ (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 226)

Here, Bourdieu describes a fine-grained mechanism for making distinctions, of the production of little differences and their meaning, and points to this savour, unaffectedness in consumption that marks the “discrete elite”. I argue that at the higher levels of the EU bureaucracy, it is these class distinctions and savour in consumption and body that marks belonging to EU elite more than at lower levels of the hierarchy. It shows how a certain style, apart from being efficient, is required and performed by the top levels of the EU bureaucracy. However, it also shows how the performance of alleged modernity, modern aesthetics and class distinctions have a bearing on one’s position within the EU administration. Beyond the conflation of class and national belonging in EU-space, there are also sheer class differences, as described above by Bourdieu. The fewer number of people from NMS during the time of my research was not only due to the time factor (length of being an EU member state), but also because of the hostility towards them and because NMS are seen as unmodern (as in Bible example) and boorish, and the higher echelons of the EU bureaucracy were still reserved for OMS. The statistics at the time of my research showed that out of 693 Poles in AD posts only 69 were at AD9 post and above. In comparison, Spain, a country of a comparable size to Poland, has 737 people at posts AD9 and above out of 970 ADs in total, and Sweden has 266 out of a total 329 AD posts 21 . There are some exceptions: some managers from NMS have made a career within the EU apparatus, and I will return to this issue in the last chapter about “European Poles”. However, taking a closer look at these lifestyles and the bodily hexis of OMS Directors reveals the “inimitable nuances of manner” about which Bourdieu writes, and these are very important in EU-space. Class distinctions were visible between NMS and OMS, but the “inimitable nuances of manner” were also present among people from OMS, among Directors from those countries where social origin was translatable into bodily hexis and lifestyle. While at both lower and higher levels of the bureaucracy class distinction conflated with the performance of national habitus, with those from 21 Cf. http://ec.europa.eu/civil_service/docs/europa_sp2_bs_nat_x_grade_en.pdf (seen on 05.03.2012). These numbers are exemplary and apply to levels AD9 and above; however, in some DGs in order to be a HoU, one has to have at least grade AD12. During the time of my research this rule applied to DG RELEX.

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“Charlemagne’s Europe” being at the top of the cultural hierarchy, I claim that at the level of Directors, what was significant for Euroclass elites was not merely the conflation of class/modern/national classification, but a whole set of fine-grained distinctions and practices in lifestyle and bodily hexis, governed by the configurations of taste and its individual performance. Even an Italian chauffeur who is better dressed than an Irish Director will not be able to belong to the Euroclass elites because there is a whole constellation of capital that makes someone an elite. This does not mean that national representations do not play a role. In this rather homogenous group (that consists mostly of people from OMS), national representations were less visible in commonly applied stereotypes, but much more strongly connected to subtle markers of national belonging and their representations in lifestyles and consumption patterns in EU-space. In cases when national essentialization did not represent a “big culture”, it was often the tactic management of auto-stereotypes that marked class belonging; it was the ability to distance oneself from one’s own nationality and to frame it – often in a from of a joke. However, as I will show in the last chapter, once a NMS person acquired some of the features of the EU elite, he/she was granted the ability to make a career in the apparatus and attain the status of a European – and such exceptions actually made the criteria for belonging to the Euroclass and class distinctions in EU-space more explicit, as well as making the imperial dynamic that Stoler has described more visible (Stoler & Cooper, 1997; Stoler, 2002, 2013a). Before I come to the fine distinctions between OMS, I would like once again to refer to a difference between OMS and NMS, between a legitimate and illegitimate performance at the level of Director that reveals how sheer class distinctions and fine differences matter at this level. Among my interviewees was a person from a NMS who had spent at least the last 25 years in Brussels due to his/her citizenship of one of the OMS. This person worked in a politically crucial institution of the EU, and within it held a position dealing with relations with the outside world. I asked him/her, how Directors from NMS were received at the EU Commission. Before he/she answered the question, he/she told me that “until recently, and certainly until the moment when the Scandinavians came in, the Swedes and Austrians – they have mixed everything up – [because] the level of Director at the Commission was reserved for the elites of the founding states”, though after the enlargements (and he/she meant here all enlargements after 1973) this elite culture – he/she described it as “a marriage of British and French elite culture” – would be diluted, and what used to be, at the level of Directors, a “club that one can pretend to join and either one is accepted or not” had somewhat faded away. He/she also told me that many of those old Directors from OMS possessed a chateau or a maison in their home countries, that they were already elites when they came to Brussels 20 or 30 years ago, and although some of them had a working-class background, all of them were

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graduates of Grande Ecoles and Oxford or Cambridge. They allegedly also despaired at the Kinnock Reform, which introduced the rotation rule to the highest levels (though in the end it was not enforced for the OMS), because they had already all planned who was going to receive which post (“they had it planned for many years who gets what”). He/she told me that this elite in Brussels is quite homogeneous and that “they” would go to the same sport clubs and would live in great, big houses (rather then in apartments) in Uccle, Woluwe-St.Lambert/ Lambrechts, Woluwe-St.Pierre/Pieters, Watermael/Watermaal-Boitsfort/Bosvoorde or Ixelles/Elsene (if in Ixelles/Elsene, then in apartments). An interview passage below depicts in a nutshell the classical elite reproduction in this international field and shows how fine nuances are socially relevant and how one’s place of settlement is an important class factor in EU-space. It shows also, contrary to what some scholars claim, that Bourdieu’s theory was developed in a quite homogenous French society, and is therefore not applicable in other contexts (Daloz, 2010), that his concepts and ideas are transferable to European elites in EU Brussels. Here’s what this person said: Paweł Lewicki (PL): Ok, so how are Poles…? How they have been… they don’t have the lifestyle, the same lifestyle as this old elite? Answer (A): More and more. But I’ve also noticed that… PL: But do they live in the same districts? A: They do, they do live in the same districts, but… most of them invest in new houses. PL: They build houses? A: No… some of them build houses, but some… you can say that an ordinary Pole that got into [the Commission] would prefer a new… clean house in which… PL: But you say ordinary, and what does it mean, till which position? Head of Unit, or…? A: I even think it is Directors, Directors… PL: And rather lower…? A: …that their wife would prefer [to choose] a modern, and if one of these old [houses], then really… really done as a new house. And not, let’s say, not restoring, caressing the old one [house]… PL: Mhm, what else? What are the differences between…? A: This is… now I’m speaking of differences… PL: Yes. They are most interesting to me. Do they drive the same cars? Poles and…? A: I guess a car isn’t a… is not a marker of a status. PL: Are clothes? A: Clothes… Maybe a car too, but let’s say… some… nouveau riche are slightly more focused on cars. Yes and no. But it depends… One can see that a car somehow fits… PL: To the rest?

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A: Well I wouldn’t say it fits the tie, but if someone, if someone has a BMW, or something, or a Mercedes, then you can see that it fits somehow, that it’s a part that doesn’t shout. And there are persons who have started to work just recently and already have a Mercedes, and this shouts. So there are many ways, I guess…

This interview shows, like no other conversation during my fieldwork, how class distinctions are applicable, and belonging to the EU elite is based on configurations of capital and their proper application: on the congruency between one’s social capital in private and public life and on proper performances and application of whole sets of capital. It shows, most of all, that this elite class distinction is reproduced through “inimitable nuances of manner” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 226), where “a car somehow fits to the rest”. This interview passage depicts the interplay between structural (time and place) and cultural factors (place in the hierarchy of Europeanness and the modernity of essentialized cultural national representations) that are significant in EU-space and mark social belonging. The above quote shows that national stereotypes were applied and conflated with class on this EU elite level. The comparison to Polish Directors makes the legitimate lifestyles apparent because they do not fit to the settled EU elites. Even if a NMS Director buys a house in a proper district of Brussels, there are other criteria developed by taste that will place him/her on the margins of the EU elites (“caressing” of an old house instead of buying a new one). However, this mechanism apparently applied not only to recent enlargements. As our conversation developed, my interviewee recalled a situation at a dinner table, after Greece entered the European Communities (in 1981), and a Greek Director had been invited. One of the Dutch senior civil servants allegedly “was appalled by the fact that he would have to sit next to a Greek, as if someone would invite a peasant to a lordly table”. He/she told me that if there was a dinner at one of the Director’s houses from an OMS, there would usually be approximately ten people from France, ten from the UK, some Germans and Dutch, “and only one Greek or one Portuguese”. He/she said the criteria for selection would be the fact that this or that person represented a “big culture” or a “big country”, that is, one that contributed significantly to EU policies or to the EU budget. He/she also mentioned that in such moments as the one described above, people would tend to forget that my interviewee came from a NMS (or previously from a non-EU country). This person also told me that people from NMS at lower levels had been received “quite well”, whereas those at higher levels “much worse”. When I asked why, he/she told me that “cultural issues come in here”. Directors from NMS would often buy luxury cars, and rent or buy houses even though their wives and families would remain in the country of origin and not settle in Brussels. He/she told me that all this was “being showy”, and stood in contrast to the old houses in Uccle/Ukkle or Woluwes

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where the old EU elite live. He/she recalled one situation at a dinner table when the guests were discussing a non-present newcomer, a Director from a NMS; they said that this person was “unbearable” and that “no one likes him”, but “at least he has a French education”. This interview shows that in EU Brussels, the level of Director is a stage where nationalities are assessed by their representation (Poehls, 2009). It also shows, however, in more detail how the hierarchies between nations in EU-space are established: according to the length of membership in the EC/EU, and according to the class distinction of its representatives. In other conversations with Directors, the criteria mentioned also included the size of the country and its contributions to the EU budget 22 and whether a country represented “a big culture”. While these classifications are based on performances and the reproduction of stereotypes, the reproduction of processed and essentialized information about a given member state, they are also based on the performance of a “national habitus” in combination with other class capital (like education, “charm” and “fussing over an old house”). It also shows that there is a legitimate style for the “old” Europe, a style produced by taste, of the settled “good society” in Brussels, and all newcomers have to learn these rules (see Elias & Scotson, 1994). I remember that after the interview for a long time I did not know what to do with the things this person had told me, in part, because it was quite early in my research in Brussels. I could not place them in reality, and considered them to be exaggerated stories told to an anthropologist. And while in this interview passage the conflation of national representation and class is also visible (particularly in the reactions of the Dutch to a Greek), he/she was the only person at a higher level to mention these differences so explicitly. I was able to better interpret what this person had told me after I met other high-ranking officials in EU-space, his/her friends from OMS who had spent more than 25 years in service. The description the abovementioned person gave became more plausible to me after I was able to compare how people looked and acted, after I met and talked to OMS Directors. A friend of the above quoted person from an OMS, a top official from Ireland (AD14) working in a prestigious DG, matched the description and performed the habitus of the EU elite – particularly in bodily hexis. Although this is not a person from the founding state of the EC/EU, I think she was representative of other Directors and persons at the AD14 level and above. Her habitus and bodily performance was distinctive not only when juxtaposed with the habitus of managers from NMS, but also with those from OMS. This senior official was married to a 22 This was also confirmed in a conversation with my OMS friend working at an AD post in DG RELEX. He said that the countries that “really count” are those producing wine (vide “Charlemagne’s Europe”) and Scandinavians, because “they make big contributions to the EU budget but don’t make any problems when it comes to institutional reforms”.

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high-ranking Belgian politician and had spent the last 30 years in Brussels. Her secretary told me that she was “surprised that [name] found time for you”, but the Director, although I knew she was in one of the central positions within the structure of the Commission and in EU-space, turned out to be a calm, unaffected, distinguished woman in her mid-sixties. She was a tall, slightly forward-leaning person, but she sat up straight. Her attitude was rather reserved, visible in her calm, almost slow movements and warm, friendly smile. She had dyed brown curly and loose semi-long hair parted in the middle and a loose fringe. She wore big, green clip earrings that matched her thick necklace. She looked at me carefully and listened to my questions very carefully; sometimes she would faintly smile as if to signal “I know what you are aiming at”. She spoke clearly and slowly in good English, and, as I was able to learn, she had a PhD in physics from a British university, and her father was a senior civil servant in the Irish Foreign Service. To my question about her pastime activities, she told me that she liked to go sailing offshore23. However, her boat was docked neither in the Mediterranean, nor in the Caribbean (where some of the younger junior civil servants sailed), but in South Holland, and she would sail with her friends on weekends, although, as she claimed, since she had become a manager at the Commission, she did not have as much time to do it as she would like and that this was a “great shame”. She was also one of only a few of my interviewees who claimed to have friends mostly from outside of the Commission – precisely through sailing. She lived close to the European District, but in a suburban area that was one of the “good” places in Brussels, and where lots of other senior officials I talked with also lived. She liked the area because of its “calm, suburban atmosphere” and proximity to the airport, the ring highway and the EU District. She told me that she went to Ireland quite often and spent her vacations there, meeting her friends and spending time with family or sailing. Simultaneously, she was the person who told me how well the Belgian state functioned despite its inability to form a federal government. She said it was a “mature country”. I was not able to visit this person’s house to see whether she had old or new interior decoration, which, as my formerly quoted interviewee would claim, makes a difference, but her offshore sailing hobby made her distinctive. Not tennis nor horseback riding, which are both “Commission sports”, but sailing offshore, though not in the Mediterranean nor in tropical islands, but somewhere relatively close to Brussels. The distinction of the EU Brussels’ elite was marked by their performed consumption modesty, their production of social respectability and their symbolic embeddedness in the Brussels and European context. Their pastimes and holiday 23 Offshore sailing, as I was told, means sailing a distance of over 20 miles from the shore when one does not see the land. This type of sailing requires, along with special permissions, a special boat with suitable equipment.

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activities were placed in a European context, even in Belgium or Brussels, and to some degree, in their home country, unlike those of junior officials, both those from the OMS and NMS. All but one of the Directors I interviewed from OMS lived in Woluwes, Kraainem/Crainhem, Weezembeek-Oppem, Uccle/Ukkle or Auderghem/ Oudergem (one lived in Ixelles/Elsene) – all districts of Brussels that were traditionally Belgian, white, middle class and bourgeois before the EEC/EU established its seat in Brussels. Many from the EU elite would, as this senior Irish official did, go relatively often to their home countries, either to see family or friends, or to spend time with their family in their country of origin (in the case of mixed partnerships, in the country of origin of one of the partners), at least during their holidays. The Irish Director told me she now travelled to Ireland more often because “the children are out of the house”. However, even if the children were younger the EU elite would still go to their country of origin to spend time there, so that the children would “learn” the countryside, landscapes and history (as one of them told me). Orvar Löfgren would classify this as the “inscription of national landscapes“ as part of a nationalization of habitus (Löfgren, 2000). Their spouses would live and work in Brussels, their children would be grown up and also embedded in the Brussels EU context, as they spent their childhood here living in the abovementioned districts, but now would be studying in London, Paris or Amsterdam. They would be, on one hand, familiar with local politics and policies and use the local structures and facilities, but still, only with rare exceptions, live in a social world parallel to that of the Belgians. Interviewing these senior managers at the EU Commission I was surprised how similar their lives were, how predictable the answers were to questions about where they lived (in which part of Brussels) and where their children studied, where they went on holidays (either South Europe, like Italy, France – rarely Spain – or their home country, in both cases often to their own cottage) and where they shopped (locally, buying groceries in the districts where they lived and clothes in Brussels, as opposed to younger people from both OMS and NMS, who would go to Gare du Midi market or London to buy clothes). My interviewee would ask additional questions when something was not clear to her; she asked me about the people I knew in Brussels and what books I had read (this last question was a question posed “in return” because it was also part of my questionnaire). What struck me was the astonishment she expressed after I told her a story about what went on in Place Lux on Thursdays – she did not know that these “events” even existed and would not consider them “networking”. To me, this made her position in EU-space clearly that of someone detached from the reality of the status competition, but also unaware of the realities of younger AD officials. She also told me that networking for her would mean going for a beer after a long day of negotiations, after an issue had been resolved at the negotiation table, and

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one could celebrate the success. She referred to the Commission as “the club”, and said that when you join the club you (the NMS) have to learn the rules. All of my direct questions about stereotypes were dismantled and negated with her own experiences allegedly contradicting them, but they would become visible in statements such as that NMS are “doing quite well”, and she would tend to act and operate in the Commission with a “style” similar to that of those from some Nordic countries. I interviewed this person twice and on both occasions it was towards the end of her working day (that may go till half past eight pm or later), around six or seven pm; she was thus relaxed (or at least this was my impression), though I knew that she stayed longer in her office. The last time I interviewed her, she wore a dark olive-green suit with trousers and a light olive-green shirt with a frilled collar and thick (though not flashy) golden jewellery. Her desk was covered with papers. Opposite her desk, by the wall, stood shelves with some personal knick-knacks, photos and souvenirs, on the wall was a photo of her son. She told me during my first interview that she was doing this interview rather out of compassion, as her son was trying to interview bank managers in London and received only refusals, though she also agreed to set up a meeting on my second trip to Brussels. I think it was a type of entertainment for her, or she did it out of curiosity. A second person was a woman in a similar position, but in a less prestigious DG (an AD12 grade position). She was also from an OMS, but had a working-class background. She was younger than the above described senior official and had less experience at the top managerial level, a different bodily hexis and a slightly different style and gestures. In her pastime, she did not go sailing, but horseback riding, although, as she said, she “hated it”; her husband, a senior manager in the EU apparatus, did it, and so she had to do it too. She refused to allow me to record the interview and sat at the table as though at a meeting – with a notebook in front of her, taking notes and making drawings while answering my questions, often using official language in her answers (she was the person who compared my questions to Bild Zeitung and almost threw me out of her office when I suggested that the decision-making process in the Commission was intransparent). Her outfit was, by Commission standards, flawless: a dark blue skirt, black jacket, black plain, low-heeled shoes, a blue shirt and neckerchief and short, curly black hair. She was almost at the limit of being “sober”, but what made her distinctive from the NMS sober was her short black hair and age. While the Irish official was a great fan of Shakespeare and Irish theatre (“Irish theatre is very good”), which was also a kind of national performance with a bourgeois touch, this French official, who used to be a French diplomat, read British and Swedish thrillers and missed her mother’s giblets and the vegetables from South-West France. Both of these cases (Irish theatre and giblets) were performances of national representations, but they had a

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different class meaning (the opposition between Shakespeare and British/Swedish thrillers and giblets as typically lower class French). The French woman was very friendly and smiled, but in comparison to the aforementioned official from the SG, she was much more affectionate, hasty and direct – her bodily hexis was not as calm as the Irish official, who was self-distanced, performing openness, but still self-assurance and self-awareness, and feeling in control of the conversation. The last time I interviewed this AD12 official, I had to wait for an hour because, as I was told, “the Commissioner was on the line”. I remember this person’s irritation, anxiousness and unease when she found out after the interview, while I was still in her office, that the email she had send to the Commissioner just before our conversation had remained in her mailbox and did not go through. She was saying, sitting in front of the computer and holding her hands in front of her mouth, while I gathered my items: “Oh my God! What is going to happen now!” It is this relaxation, this unaffectedness, the self-distance and simultaneous attention of the female Irish officia that she showed during our meeting, visible in her additional questions, body movements, in gestures and facial expressions (smiling during the conversation, nodding instead of taking notes or opening her mouth and making an Oh!, as the French official had) that connected the abovementioned person with the Polish Director in PermRep (description follows in the next chapter) and the German member of the Swedish Cabinet I interviewed (and who had rapidly climbed the hierarchy ladder) that made them all distinctive in EU-space. This was Bourdieu’s “relaxation in tension, ease within restraint” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 312) in their habitus performance: gesture, body language and spoken language, which were different than those of the efficient British HoU from biofuel example or French Director, or the Polish Director with the Bible spread out on his seat and whose movements were hasty, slightly nervous, and whose facial expressions were exaggerated (like those of the efficient Brit), and whose performance expressed only seemingly relaxation and power (through hasty movements that say: I don’t have time, I’m busy – even if that is the fact). Both the French senior official and the Irish one drove compact class cars (“a Fiat Punto” as the French said); they also both lived in one of the EU elite districts of Brussels, though they differed slightly in terms of sport activities and bodily hexis, as well as in their formal position and age. The comparison between the Irish Director and the French Director makes plausible the above quoted story about the differences between the “old” (“fussing over an old house”) and “new” (“making it all new-like”) house of the NMS Director. Fine differences in class habitus performance and many different configurations of capital (bodily hexis, place of residence, consumption strategies, lifestyle and education) are apparent and relevant in EU-space, particularly at the top levels of the EU apparatus. These configurations of capital and their proper

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application indicate a difference between one’s place in the hierarchy, and, as I show below, the ambitions of a given individual. It shows how an elite’s Eurostyle is produced as a class style, how nationalities and knowledge about nationalities are produced together with class when some national habitus performances are seen as more prestigious than others, among those from OMS, as well. It shows how class distinctions intersect with nationalities and stereotypes about nationalities and between NMS/OMS, how these distinctions are produced through difference in places and pastime activities, in particular, bodily hexis, which marks time of employment and place in the social and formal hierarchy in EU-space. These fine differences and class habitus producing the Eurostyle became more clear to me after a meeting in the Polish PermRep when I met one of the “Polish Europeans”, a Director who had made a brilliant career in the EU apparatus and was marked as real European (I describe this meeting in the next chapter). I had a similar impression after meeting a German Member of the Swedish Cabinet who had an unconstrained and unaffected attitude and had rapidly climbed the hierarchy ladder. This was the moment when it occurred to me that the spectre of an old Directors’ elite was still haunting EU-space, that this “marriage of British and French elites” still held symbolic power in EU-space and set out cultural hierarchies and limits. It showed me that at the Director’s level, exclusions and inclusions were based on class, which is strongly conjoined with national performances: in bodily hexis and in possession of valuable, material and distinctive symbolic capital in EU-space, rather than solely on efficiency (I assume these Directors had already have proven their efficiency and that is why they were now Directors). As one rises in position in the formal hierarchy of the EU apparatus, this class distinction matters more, the embeddedness in local social elites is more important than sheer efficiency, as described in the example of the British HoU. I will come back to this issue in the last chapter, where I describe successful strategies used by some Polish men for acquiring and managing capital at the EU Commission, where I show how success in the EU apparatus is also dependent on the ability to move within EUspace, and the ability to manage national capital and adjust to the struggle for position in the hierarchy. As shown above, this distinction was relevant among OMS and conflated with formal hierarchy, but the presence of parachuted managers from the NMS made these distinctions particularly clear. One of my interviewees from Poland confirmed, in what he said, the above quoted story about Directors from NMS. He was a Polish Director in one of the less prestigious DGs of the Commission. A tall man, around 45 years old, dressed impeccably and according to my taste and knowledge his outfit complied with the Eurostyle: a fashionable, light blue, double-breasted suit that fit perfectly to his rather stocky silhouette. He smelled of fresh cologne and made a very friendly impression on me. We laughed a lot, and he told me, among other things, how he is

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humiliated by his boss and how this boss, together with an HoU in his Directorate – a person who had been waiting to take over his position for years – tried to disgrace him at meetings and show him how little he knew and how unprepared he was for his function. The last time I was in Brussels he was already working outside of Brussels, though still at the Commission, and when I checked his position one year later, he was working in one of the Commission’s institutions in one of the Southern OMS. During our conversation, he asked rhetorical questions that he answered himself; he was thinking aloud and was quite straightforward with me (through his affable behaviour). Simultaneously, he used first names to refer to people at his level and above – a practice that was meant to reveal his acquaintance, but was rather peculiar, based on my experience, for a person at his level. He told me that he had bought a new S class Mercedes and that the Commission, through its remuneration, allowed for a better life with better consumer goods and that it was a “great employer” (meaning salary, certainty of employment and conditions of pension). However, he also self-reflexively remarked: If we talk about my lifestyle, not much has changed, it was more or less always the same. But, to be frank, now I can afford better quality, basically a better quality of the things I need: a better pipe, better tobacco, better alcohol, I can afford to eat better food and drive a better car and that is what I really enjoy because I have a weakness for that [cars], because it’s a good car [the one he bought, S Class Mercedes] and I don’t see any reason why I should fight with myself. But… you see, again, these communist, these postcommunist… postcommunist style… it’s a bit difficult. I studied in communist Poland with Soviets beside, when nobody even had thought that it all might collapse. When passports were handed out at a police station… So you know… this is… and there were these food and fuel ration coupons and empty shelves in shops – I remember all this very well. This was my school then, as I grew up. So the chasm between then and now… (meaningful silence). Absolutely! People from OMS are not able to understand that. I guess that you, I don’t know, you are not contaminated – thank God. […] You know, I think the faster the differences diminish [between OMS and NMS], the less the trauma for… for Polish mentality. But… I remember… I am completely aware of these differences, I am happy tremendously [about their diminishment]. But there is… there is something that is ephemeral and I hope that it will vanish… The faster Poles will become like these old countries [OMS], the better. But this influences behaviour… For sure [the experience of living under communism]. And I think the same applies to Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians, Bulgarians and… and the Baltic states. (AD14, Polish)

I also asked my interviewee about where he lived in Brussels and why there. As he explained, it was his wife who had done the searching and chosen the house (although she was not living in Brussels). This is what he told me about the conditions of the new dwelling that he had found with his wife:

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I have made a condition [to my wife], because my whole life I’ve been living in a concrete block in the city centre. I made the condition that I don’t want to have any neighbours. For the first time in my life I don’t want to have any neighbours, so I can play my stereo loud at night when I fancy to. So this was an important argument. And the third condition was the location. And was looking for this dwelling for a very long time […] It is in Woluwe-St.Pierre. It is in Woluwe-St.Pierre, and when we talk about people then… and it wasn’t any criteria or condition. I learned that later and by coincidence, not that I just came from Poland and went nuts and bought a house there, but almost fence-to-fence my neighbour is [name], that is, a Director General, he is 800% German, a Bavarian... so…

My interviewee told me also that he was absolutely aware that for people from OMS some things, some consumer goods, are more obvious than for all those people from NMS. However, for a long time during our interview, he elaborated on his new lifestyle, and from the excitement with which he told me about his new car, I could sense that it was very important to him. As I have shown above, these were not the performances and cultural rules of the EU elite in EU-space (a previously mentioned car that shouts of Directors from NMS). Still – and in spite of his selfreflexive attitude – this would not prevent him from doing such things as buying an expensive car, alcohol, and tobacco, things that he could now afford. He was aware of his “heritage” (as were his colleagues from OMS at the same level) but he was also taking advantage of the new possibilities made available to him for consumption, which also appeared somehow natural (“I cannot fight with myself”). This Polish Director was aware that he was incongruent with the Eurostyle, that his “heritage” did not fit into the cultural order of EU-space. The word “heritage” in his lips exemplifies well the tacit awareness of deeply-rooted habitus structures, a nationally established habitus structure in one of the NMS, and in this case, these habitus structures did not fit the real European habitus. His habitus performance placed him in a subordinate, social position that Bourdieu calls a dominated dominant (Bourdieu, 2010). But he also expressed some kind of imagination about a better West and nostalgia for becoming “like the West” – similar to what Fanon has written about a black man wanting so badly to become white (Fanon & Markmann, 1991). During my research, I memorized what the Polish Director told me about his new car, but forgot the above story about the elite culture among OMS Directors, about this “marriage between British and French elites”. It was only when I analysed my interviews and thought about my research, my experiences, that I realized the rules and fine divisions among Directors in EU-space. In the field, I could only sense them as I observed and listened to what people said about each other and how they looked and I responded to that. Even though this world of elites

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remained inaccessible to a vast extent, I realized that the spectre of the old EU elite was haunting the Commission. I found out that at the level of Director what was relevant, besides efficiency, was performing certain behaviour that projects prestige and power. The Polish Director, although he was self-aware of his “heritage”, and although he lived in a house in one of the “good” districts and dressed perfectly, still performed a habitus that did not fit into the dominant aesthetics at his level (or any other level in the hierarchy). One could say, referring to one of my interviewees, that his lifestyle is “showy”. The above examples show that there is a class lifestyle at the level of Directors (rather puritan, as the car is not so important – and as the French Director told me, she drove an old Fiat Punto), and differences between OMS and NMS made this Euroclass more apparent. This Polish Director referred to his past because it was a reference point for him. He self-reflexively gave historical depth to his current behaviour that was meant to explain his deeds, and he was aware that he somehow did not fit into his surroundings. Still, this did not abolish the social and cultural rules at the Directors’ level and the reactions it evokes – revealing how knowledge (or lack thereof) about histories was not transferred into everyday life dynamics. He was still confronted with these rules and his self-reflexivity did not suspend the struggle for position in the hierarchy and for cultural power. But his story told to me, also marked his distinction as a person formerly living in socialist Poland and assured him about his own social leap, about the progress he had made. However, this behaviour, this NMS habitus is confronted in EU-space and is perceived as “shouting”. Even though it is sometimes treated by OMS people with compassion and understanding, it is still aesthetically unfitting and causes marginalization – a fact that was confirmed by his gradual but steady displacement from Brussels, which in EU-space is often evidence of being sidelined. I claim that here different habitus formation become apparent – even if it is conscious, there is a huge difference between the overall habitus performance of the senior Irish official and the Polish Director. The latter’s statement shows how aware he is of the differences between him and the West; it shows the lived desires connected to this cultural idea of the West. Simultaneously, it is evidence of how the marginalization of NMS occurs based not only on professional, but also on class factors, on the “brutish” habitus performance of people from NMS that does not fit into Bourdieu’s distinctive “truly cultivated reader – liseur” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 226). It also reveals the postcolonial and (post)imperial dynamics in these distinctions (Stoler, 2008, 2013a), when certain practices essentialize the representation of the Other in order to maintain a distance and cultural power curtails opportunities in allegedly democratic or at least legal-rational EU-space. The example of this Director shows the overwhelming cultural power of the upper middle-class Eurostyle and how it is applied to marginalize representations of

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incongruent nationalities – visible in the Director’s expulsion from Brussels and claims that he feels much better working outside of Brussels, when I got in touch with him on my second fieldwork trip. Concomitantly it shows distinctions and class divisions that run along the imagined performance of North-West European and “the rest”. It also raises the question of tolerance and the multicultural character of the EU bureaucracy. Are EU civil servants really cosmopolitans that are able to understand and non-Western histories and act accordingly in their everyday life? While the Polish Director represents a non-Euroclass habitus and does not fit its elite’s Eurostyle, the fine differences between the French and Irish officials become visible, not in their material, consumption lifestyles (which are similarly middleclass modest and respectable, in contrast to that of the NMS Director), but in their aesthetic choices (Shakespeare vs. Swedish thrillers) and bodily hexis (hasty vs. calm movements). These small differences are all connected with length of service, social/class background, and formal position within the hierarchy of the Commission, but they are also blended with national representation. It is these subtle class differences, together with the legitimate management of national representation and of stereotypes that make social position apparent and the social reproduction of EU elites visible. One could ask whether this French Director, because of her working-class background, will ever reach the position of the Irish Director. Differences between these two officials show the taste of EU elites, which set out what are a legitimate habitus performances and lifestyles in the Commission. They show how an elite status is granted only to those in possession of class capital and those performing the Euroclass elite’s habitus. This picture of EU elites shows that white, middle-class cosmopolitanism, as described by Hannerz, was more European and Brusselized in EU-space, as EU elites are placed and localized in their practices in Brussels and spend their holidays in EU Europe, unlike those at level of junior AD posts – both those from OMS and NMS. Distinctions towards NMS, like at lower levels and as shown in the below quote, were also produced through a “cosmopolitanism” that was declared, though not lived. EU elite’s cosmopolitanism is vernacular (not in Bhabha’s (2000) and Werbner’s (1999) understanding, but in the literal meaning) because it was very much locally determined; in their life, being cosmopolitan means facing other representations of nationalities in EU-space, but not their histories. Neither it means to face different class lifestyles and nor, akin to what El-Tayeb has described, “racialized cultures”, where bodies mark otherness (El-Tayeb, 2011). In that sense, they are cosmopolitans who first make parochial interpretations of culture, religion and ethnicity, but instead of Werbner’s vernacular cosmopolitanism, in which people transcend their own culture and assert wider cosmopolitan values, they become, so to speak, stuck in their ways and stick to their (Western) Eurocentrism conflated with class distinctions, assessments of national representations (and

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histories), and performances of modernity. OMS elites have similar lifestyles, and their cosmopolitanism is based on the reproduction of their own, allegedly cosmopolitan Euroclass habitus, on the reproduction of class habitus, even though it comprises a different national habitus; yet, this national habitus is still just another version of a similar (white) modern, middle-class habitus, as opposed to that of the NMS or, as shown in the chapter on EU-space, of the nonwhite Belgians living in Brussels. Their tolerance, as I also show in the Bible example, is not a real acceptance of different modes of living and values, respect for different histories and the forms of habitus they produce, but is reduced to acceptance of different national representations, but only when there is the same modern class habitus performance representing the aesthetics of modernity. Tolerance was not only a tool of power (as in the Bible example) used against NMS, but also a declarative discourse; a word describing some kind of pragmatic, bureaucratic patience that should make life easier in order to “push things through”, rather than real understanding and interest in other cultures, modes of living, histories and habitus performances. OMS Directors could better (because without mobilization of national stereotypes [cultural criteria]) apply the abovementioned class factors to mark their distinction. Here is a passage from an interview with one OMS Director about tolerance and cosmopolitanism: Paweł Lewicki (PL): Would you say that there are huge… different national, cultural national differences in the negotiations, that they come up somehow? Answer (A): E… not really. I think, I think the difference, the cultural national differences are very blurred in the European context and you… there is an accepted way of doing business, and most people agree on the fundamental ends. So it’s not too difficult. Because of your differences, your notions in a… perhaps in the… in communication skills, body language, the way you, some people, some nationalities talk too much and some nationalities don’t talk enough, their sense of humour is different. You have to have… you have to have a quite degree of tolerance and understanding that perhaps if somebody says what sounds rude to you, isn’t actually meant to be rude, so you have to be able to… but that’s something that a diplomat learns very quickly anyway, and I think it’s a… everybody here in European institutions understand this fact very quickly. PL: Where, where is the multicultural character of the Commission visible? In what way? What… [unclear] what do you think? Except that there are people here working from 27 countries. A: Hm… Well I’m so used to it that it’s very hard to see what it looks like from the outside. Very hard to place myself… I mean the other institutions are similar, of course, the Parliament and the Council and everything… all the other bodies relating to it. I meant it’s… I suppose it’s the cosmopolitan nature of the… of the society here, that we have here in the

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Commission. I mean it’s certainly more tolerant, there’s no question about it that they are tolerant. PL: What do you mean tolerant? Is it tolerance towards other nationalities, or is there a certain distance from…? A: No, no. Tolerance would be, would mean open, and friendly [attitude] towards new experiences and new nationalities and different languages, and the way that new member states have been absorbed almost without a hiccup. It’s, it’s, it’s just something we rather enjoy. And meeting people from new places that makes swapping experiences with them here about where… what it’s like where they are from, what they think about Europe and Belgium or whatever. I mean it’s a very tolerant and open way of a… being… I think that’s probably one of the strongest characteristics that separates the European institutions from national institutions. (AD 14, Irish, SG)

Here, being a cosmopolitan means being tolerant. It is the “enjoyment” of “other cultures”; this is mentioned in the context of “absorbing” the NMS. If one bears in mind that 90% of people from NMS are young junior AD or AST officials and not Directors, his/her statement shows a rather culturally superior position. But also the fact that people in EU institutions are recruited based on a long and difficult selection process in which some class performances and skin colours are favoured over others (Poehls, 2009), it makes more clear what this tolerance is. It is also the kind of cosmopolitanism that Hannerz (1990, 1996, 2005) has described: engagement in other cultures, but also “knowing where the exit is” (2005, p. 200). I have shown before that this “enjoyment” is reduced to rather stereotypical representations of nationalities and a lack of any deeper historical awareness. It is a tool of power, rather than real engagement with the Other. And even if my interviewee mentions different senses of humour, different body language, it seems that either he/she is referring to a situation at a negotiating table, where an agreement has to be made, and a practical and pragmatic approach is needed, and/or he/she is using this tolerance talk for the sake of our conversation. In his/her private life he/she has ensconced her/himself with other Directors who have a similar white, upper-middle class lifestyle, living in particular districts and having similar pastime activities and values. These examples show that when one wants to be a player, one has to perform the Eurostyle that emerges as Euroclass cosmopolitanism, meaning “international” and “world-open” in its white middle-class version (Hannerz, 1996), which in EUspace is rather parochial and connected to sheer class distinctions: one retains and represents one’s own national identity that – in the best case – gives some class status. However, with the growing formal hierarchy, belonging to the dominant Euroclass is increasingly marked by what one does in everyday life, both as a bureaucrat (is one able to apply capital in a legitimate way in the struggle and is one

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efficient?) and in everyday life outside professional life: where one lives, how one spends his/her holiday, where one eats and with whom, how one dresses, what car one drives and who one’s spouse is. Efficiency is a precondition to becoming a Director. At this level, the Eurostyle is not only the ability to distance oneself from nationality and efficiency, but also class habitus: suppression of function over form, opposition between lively talk and the censored language of the bourgeoisie, vivid gestures vs. self-constraint. The bodily hexis is becoming increasingly relevant on Directors level and it also becomes visible in the similarity of the Eurostyle and bodily hexis performance among women and men. Most of the Director’s posts are filled with men, but women who also have Director’s posts have to act like men or even more or better (thus, they are sometimes as harsh as the French Director almost throwing me out of her office) – make a self-constrained impression, selfdistanced, self-assured if they want to retain their symbolic status (as Irish Director). Plus women at Director’s level have to be, same as men, efficient and, same as men at this level, have good managerial skills. This elite’s Eurostyle sets out rules of cultural action in the whole EU-space and strikingly resembles the distinctions between the colonizer and colonized in European colonies (Stoler, 2008). Men at the HoU level do not have to have this bodily hexis that emanates distinction (the lively gestures of the efficient British HoU), they do not have to have this natural, self-constrained and légère habitus – a fact that is visible in their bodies and outfits. But they do have to, like Directors (that is the whole rule of the game!) be able to manage their nationality, to use it as capital in their (efficient) work and symbolic struggle: either like the efficient British HoU, ramming things through, or, being open and performing openness, which provides a ticket to climb the cultural and formal hierarchy. In the case of actors who lack efficiency, the distinction between modern performances and those marked as backward, illegitimate, and aesthetically incongruent is drawn harder and becomes more socially relevant. Modernity then is a matter of labelling that is used in the power struggle over posts (Bible and IVF example); it reinforces belonging and justifies discrimination (Stoler & Cooper, 1997).

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Performing the Eurostyle of the European white middle class in EU-space is, as my German gatekeeper said, to be “mild” and “friendly”, “not difficult”. It means having social-liberal political views, it means faith in Western liberal democracy, it means being tolerant (but only as long as one does not challenge the dominant

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views), rational and secular. It also means being educated, but only in Western schools and universities, and cosmopolitan in its European white, middle-class version. But the Eurostyle of the Euroclass also means self-distance, it means restraint and self-restraint, it means self-control and being in control, as opposed to NMS irrationality, American vulgarity and the (self-)sexualization of their bodies. Performing the Eurostyle and belonging to the Euroclass means performing and staging the separation and purification of private and public, of affected and rational, of nature and society. This separation and purification emerges in EUspace as performed and shared ethical and moral values of modesty and lawfulness, but also faith in rationalism and progress – values that are also visible in language and assessments of the lifestyles and bodies of the Euroclass. These class moralities are not only visible in language habitus and language use, but also in stereotypes about bodies, in assessments of bodies that evoke and are congruent with ethical and moral classifications and linked to nationalities. These Euroclass moralities, fine-grained distinctions and configurations of capital gain more weight with rising stakes – with the rising position of an individual within the EU administration. It is also particularly important then, that the Eurostyle is marking and marked by spaces and places of the Euroclass – districts in Brussels, the offices of EU institutions, and interiors that imply belonging to a powerful class. It seems that the cultural and class limits within EU-space mirror that invisible limit running through the city of Brussels, from its North-East to its South-West, dividing the city into a, nonwhite urban poor North-West, and a white, rich and middle-class South-East. Performing the Eurostyle means the legitimate application and management of capital available in EU-space: one’s presence in places and spaces, networking, the application of legal and expert knowledge, management of national representations. However, it also means particular body, language and lifestyle performance, it means performing laxity (Ger. Entspannung), self-constraint, modesty and flexibility – the ability to make use of many different class and national and/or European registers. Such a legitimate performance of the Euroclass habitus is detected by taste and veiled behind small details of bodily hexis and consumption patterns, and in unconstrained attitude, particularly towards own national representation. The compositions and combinations of these forms of capital and their skilful, legitimate performance marks belonging to the EU elites. At lower levels of the EU apparatus, performing the Eurostyle of the Euroclass is determined increasingly by efficiency in one’s professional life; however, it is also managing national capital and – again – the ability to distance oneself from national representation and, where suitable, blend it with scientific discourse (as in biofuel example, see also Thedvall, 2006). This (self-)distancing is a crucial and central characteristic of the European and modern habitus performance of the Euroclass. Thus, the Eurostyle, assuming flexible subjects and performing laxity, suggests

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rationality and both marks an alleged breach with the past, and, for those performing it, gives space to blend in concealment the discourses about nature and politics, about transcendent science and immanent society. The Euroclass in EU-space emerges as a distorted mirror reflection of the NMS and their unmodern habitus. Assessments along the implicit idea of modernity are made naturally; they are an outcome of taste, that is, as Bourdieu writes: […] a match-maker; it marries colours and also people, who make ‘well-matched couples’ initially in regard to taste. All the acts of co-option which underlie ‘primary groups’ are acts of knowledge of others qua subjects of acts of knowledge or, in less intellectualist terms, sign-reading operations (particularly visible in first encounters) through which a habitus confirms its affinity with other habitus. (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 239)

Modernity becomes a matter of taste; through habitus it coproduces national representations and classes in EU-space. It reproduces itself through the enactment of European taste and shared “European values”, disseminated in this space as common sense attributes of consumption patterns, bodies (bodily hexis) and ethical and aesthetic choices subsumed in the modern Eurostyle of the Euroclass. While the East in EU-space are subjects only becoming modern and real Europeans, this real Europe and its Euroclass is constantly in a process of self-definition and reemergence. The symbolic and physical presence of people from the NMS only perpetuates this process (Stoler, 2002, 2008). The East in EU-space is retold as a single, but variable stereotypical story of lack, it is not European and modern enough, not permeated by transcendent science and not rational enough. Among the West there is a “style similarity” (Bourdieu, 2010) – a similarity in the practices of actors, of bodily shapings, of consumption strategies, and I would claim that a certain “aesthetics of modernity” emerges that separates West and the rest. It is an aesthetics of the Euroclass, visible in items, outfits, lifestyles and bodies that marks who and what is modern and stipulates the reproduction of cultural limits. In EU-space the OMS are seen as one class: French, Swedish, German and Italian habitus are variations of one class that is modern and European in its national variations – and here a common imperial dynamic becomes visible. People from NMS are of a different habitus and have different tastes – an issue particularly visible in the differences among EC Directors. Those from “old” Europe, with their bourgeois values reproduced against the NMS, retain their national identities and complexity. Concomitantly, they are uniting and unified in this exertion of imperial power based on class and bodily distinctions in opposition to the NMS. In EU-space modernity is pinned down to the ability to be “like us”, meaning performing efficiency as a bureaucrat and performing legitimate language

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and bodily hexis. Both of these factors – efficiency, which leads to visibility, and performance of the Eurostyle – are things the NMS have been deprived of. This is either due to structural criteria and the establishment of a system that structurally discriminates and culturally petrifies the subordinate position of the NMS (the Kinnock reform with its remuneration and network system within), or NMS are excluded from social spaces and the exchange of information due to their alleged unmodern performance, because of the different habitus structures that NMS have historically established and because of the labels they evoke in EU-space. Both of these factors reiterate the existence of a European doxa that becomes apparent in the practice of the Eurostyle. This sigh of relief, as well as the other examples above, make clear that the legitimate language within EU-space is a language that does not make clear references to nationally perceived interests, which in EU-space is always suspected of being unmodern. These national interests are wrapped up in a European and modern language of the moderns, in reference to numbers, quotas or fiddling with numbers, skilfully referring to paragraphs and previous or existing EU law. This language is proof of the application of the constitution of modernity – the allegedly purified entities of science/nature, politics/society and a crossed-out God, while in more hidden way these entities are in fact mixed in order to mark the unmodern. Such conceived modernity, together with the “aesthetics of modernity” referring to bodies, outfits and lifestyles and the general aesthetics of everyday life, together with the middle-class tastes of the OMS, is constantly marking the cultural limits within EU-space between the OMS and NMS, between the Euroclass and NMS and the Brussels context. This production of limits coconstructs EU-space, a cultural space where there are cultural rules and capital set out by the OMS. Armed with these weapons of cultural power, with the aesthetics of modernity and taste, the OMS and particularly North-West member states are producing the one, legitimate European doxa. The European doxa is produced in oppositions, in stereotypes, in the application of the constitution of modernity and in performances of the (national) habitus of people from “Charlemagne’s Europe”. The presence of NMS, of the not-reallyEuropean Other sets into motion and makes visible something new in its genealogy and history – colonial and imperial dynamics. The NMS stirred up the order and became Others within, they stipulated the hardening of the core and the development of new membership criteria for entering into what Europe is in EUspace. Like the local notion of “Charlemagne’s Europe”, that is locally defined as the Europe of wine-producing countries and, thus, as I was told, sometimes Austria would be coopted into this idea (a member state that is also a net payer to the EU budget), as would Sweden because it is making a significant contribution to the EUbudget and “does not make problems when it comes to institutional reforms” (from

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an interview with AD7 in DG RELEX, OMS). Great Britain, although not a founding member state, but one of biggest contributors to the EU budget, culturally belongs to this core Europe and, as one British senior civil servant said “the British have always had a complex about French culture”. The founding states or “Charlemagne’s Europe” was seen in EU-space as the Europe that is setting the agenda, that has the language to define issues and influence policy in the EU, and define what and who the real Europe is. The biofuel case exemplifies that some member states have more power and resources to define political issues than others, and, in this particular example, it was the Netherlands, the UK and Germany. In the production of the European doxa, however, other OMS are also included. The REACH and biofuel examples show that nationalism and the environment are the same side of the same modern coin of the European doxa. Allegedly separated and purified, nature, society and God construct a dichotomy in Europe, delimiting those who are European and rational. Simultaneously the European doxa is represented by those who are blurring these discourses in a hidden way and putting some member states into the zone of the nonmodern, not-yet-rational and not-yet-European. The European doxa is represented in hybrids between science and politics (as in biofuel example), in (national) interests that are put in unpurified, strategically applied European modern environmental discourse and mixed with the production of modern national stereotypes together with a notion of an efficient bureaucrat that is in its cultural roots very much colonial. The other side of this modern coin are those NMS that are neither purifying, nor mediating in a proper way or moment; they are the ones without (habitus) abilities, capital or language; they are forced into silence, either in a symbolic or direct way, because they are labelled and to a vast extent see themselves as not fulfilling the criteria of Europeanness. Their histories are fixed, their experiences and subjectivity in EUspace are challenged. The Irish civil servant’s words that “Ireland has worked for many years to change its status from an agricultural economy to a modern state” assumes that there are, on one hand, learning processes that are at work, hence that Ireland has gone through the process of Europeanization. On the other hand, it assumes the existence of some implicit and somehow natural European core that is able to impose its worldview and thus language that is setting this Europeanization in motion and class/cultural limits within EU-space. The obviousness of these European standards, this naturalness, is what Bourdieu calls doxa. But the naturalness and obviousness of the Euroclass doxa, how it is imposed on NMS and expected from people from NMS to perform modernity, recalls the colonial mission to civilize and cultivate the African dessert (J. L. Comaroff, 1997). As Fanon has written, the colonized are always living in the past of the metropole; they are locked in that past (Fanon & Markmann, 1991).

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While Argyrou (Argyrou, forthcoming) and Buchowski (2006) have written about, respectively, the spectre of Europe and the spectre of Orientalism, I argue that in EU-space it is the spectre of modernity that is haunting the corridors and places of the EU bureaucrat’s everyday life. Modernity, conjoined with the idea of Europe, as constitution of modernity that is strategically applied to mark the Other, or the the Other within, makes the meaning of European – once maybe a bit more graspable and definable (when purification was expected and performed), other times rendering it more abstract and implicit (when concealed mixing is performed). All of this is there to reproduce imperial Western power in EU-space, which becomes particularly visible in the cultural limits between NMS and OMS and the North-West (or “Charlemagne’s Europe”). The criteria for belonging to the Euroclass are in flux and ever changing; they are maybe sometimes more clearly defined (as a breach with the past), or more implicit and tacit, but they correspond with the map of Europe and its East-West and North-West divisions and are similar to those divisions produced by colonial power as described by Stoler, where sensibilities and fine-grained distinctions are applied to create distance and reproduce the white European. EU-space is not postnational, nor is it a place where a third quality is established as Beck and Grande (2007) would like it to be. What my research shows is that the modern, Western and, in its historical/genealogical and cultural setting, colonial and imperial EU-space, in which the interests of the OMS, and particularly of those North-Western member states usually have superiority over those of the NMS. OMS set out both cultural rules in EU-space and legitimate political issues (as shown in the example of the biofuel cluster, in which the alleged lack of interest from NMS shows and perpetuates the division between OMS/NMS, modern/backward) and legitimizes political power. Is postnational then a utopia and national interests are just put in a new, modern and European language and wrapped in European middle-class values? The national is framed by an imperial and powerful global hierarchy of value, where national representation, e.g. Polish culture (and one can replace here “Polish” with any other member state’s “culture”) has to be modern and it has to be submerged into the discourse of modernity and Poles have to represent a modern habitus (that will never be as modern). Then the success in this submerging is visible in its place in the local hierarchy24 and in a place in the global hierarchy of value.

24 Already Abélès, Bellier and McDonald (Abélès et al., 1993) in their report on culture in the Commission noted that divisions within the EC are used not as simple geographical or national divisions but “as metaphorical statements in which moral or political perceptions and preoccupations both take up and are distributed in various ways across

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Europeanization in the centre of the EU then is neither “meshing together” in engrenage (Shore, 2000), nor Entgrenzung (Beck & Grande, 2007) but a weapon of cultural power that forms subjects. It is similar to that described by Keinz (2008) and Vonderau (2010) on the EU fringes, a powerful cultural process that forces and pushes the establishment of new subjects desiring to approach an imagined and doxic Europe, understood as a benchmark of civility, of wealth and modernity. Europe is then as a standard achievable, and to be achieved, the standard for a particular cultural code of conduct that have to be met in order to, in EU-space, belong to European class, the Euroclass. But in this way, Europe with it’s modernity bears a striking resemblance to imperial projects described by postcolonial scholars. Rather than Europeanization through “meshing together” (Shore, 2000) or engrenage, leading to “integration” among the EU civil servants, what comes out of my description is Europeanization, which means class struggle within EU-space, causing detachment from the local context of Brussels and reinforcing the boundaries of the EU-space in opposition to locals. However, even if the reality of EU-space does not mirror the relations and character of the nation-state, and the nation-state model might not be fruitful here for the analysis, it is not possible to escape the nation-state’s relevance in EU Brussels. Not only because national representations are so relevant in EU-space, but also because of the modern and colonial roots of the nation-state and the consequence it has for the social and cultural reality within EU-space, and, I would argue, also for Europe. Today’s Western nation-state emerged as a consequence of long historical processes that had and have shaped the lives of communities and individuals. One of these processes was the evolving division between public and private, between collective and individual, between secular and religious, all of which at some point became if not clear, then at least obvious in Western liberal democracies and something that is valuable and should be universal. As many anthropologists have pointed out – inspired by postcolonial thought – these divisions are also the self-perceived marker of Western modernity and for many years formed the criteria to place ones culture(s) on a scale of cultures and civilizations (Herzfeld, 2002, 2004; Latour, 1993; Mbembe, 2001; Stoler & Cooper, 1997). My ethnography of the EU civil servant shows that EU-space in many aspects resembles Beck’s and Grande’s “Empire”, particularly with its blurred boundaries. However, one of the most striking features of the everyday life of EU civil servants in Brussels is that in EU-space those modern and allegedly purified divisions between public-private, collective-individual, and nature-politics are blurred and overlapping, and the order of things, both within the professional geographical and ethnographical space” (p.42) Within this space, I claim, the idiom of a rational, ideal-type of bureaucracy belongs to the North-West.

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environment and life outside institutions is unclear. I also show that there are other boundaries, modern cultural and implicit limits that are established as distinction markers in order to leave out and deprive the newcomers of power. These limits redefine national representations and national belonging in EU-space anew, and these criteria have their bearing on people’s place in the formal hierarchy in the EU apparatus. These criteria are measured by the implicit and “natural” understanding of modernity, the kind of modernity of moderns that Latour has described (1993). Thus, scrutinizing the cultural limits between “old” and “new” Europe shows that this EU-space is in no way postnational and posthegemonic (Beck & Grande, 2007), as criteria are applied to classify different representations of cultures, criteria that are omnipresent and are also applied by EU civil servants. In EU-space, mental maps and time-space conjunctions are there to mark modernity and its Other; these divisions are socially and culturally powerful, and as previous research in the EU Commission shows, these criteria have been applied to the EU Europe’s South. However, Orientalism does not exist without Occidentalism25, and I think the division lines are more blurred and subtle, although as I show below, there is no escape from power reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Bourdieu & Thompson, 1992; Jacyno, 1997). It is not only stereotypes that form this space; just as the abovementioned division of space in the city of Brussels into poor, nonwhite and rich white is also more diffused than suggested here. As Borneman and Fowler have noted: While all identifications have to confront the power of stereotypes and caricatures, and frequently succumb to them, they are nonetheless fundamentally ambivalent. Identifications are always marked by fascination with the possibility of resembling or, in the extreme, replacing ‘the Other’ and alternately by a fear of one’s need for this Other and of what is at stake in acknowledging resemblance or replacement. (Borneman & Fowler, 1997, p. 493)

25 And given such a view, it is no wonder that the European Union came into being shortly after the disassembly of what was called the Eastern/communist block, while the recent EU enlargement is still seen in EU-space as a political necessity or the need of filling up the vacuum that emerged after the fall of communism.

IV. Polish EU Brussels As a result of the tension inherent in the twin project of emancipation and assimilation, discussion of the possibility of an African modernity was reduced to an endless interrogation of the possibility, for the African subject, of achieving a balance between his/her total identification with ‘traditional’

(in

philosophies

of

authenticity)

African life, and his/her merging with, and subsequent loss in, modernity (in the discourse of alienation). For the men and women of these generations seeking some crumb of fulfilment, such was the stark choice available. For many, it has ended, either in acceptance of a tragic duality and an inner twoness, or - as a result of repeated stress on the absoluteness of the African self (in the terms of Afrocentric theses) – in an extraordinary sensitivity about identity. ACHILLE MBEMBE (2001), ON POSTCOLONY, P. 12 I exclaimed forthwith: ‘Be quiet, stop persuading me, because ‘tis out of the question that I should be against the Father and my country, especially at a moment like this!’ He muttered: ‘To hell with Father and Country! The son, son, that’s something that I understand! But what is the Land of the Fathers to you? Isn’t the Land of the Sons better? Substitute the Land of the Sons for the Land of the Fathers, then you’ll see!’ WITOLD GOMBROWICZ (2014), TRANS-ATLANTYK, P. 77.

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Many scholars have shown over the last decades how modernity and Europe have developed as a powerful discourse through and in colonies (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012; Cooper & Stoler, 1997; Stoler, 2002), but also through a delimitation from a predefined Other: blacks (Dyer, 1997; El-Tayeb, 2011; Fanon & Markmann, 1991), the Orient (Said, 1995), Eastern Europe (Wolff, 1994) and the Balkans (Todorova, 1997). The processes these authors describe adhere to bodies, language and discourses. They show the constant reemergence and reproduction of the “white West” (Dyer, 1997) and “the rest” or at least the straddling of these entities (Göle, 2012). As some of them remark, this often translates into a struggle, on the side of the Other, to become like the (white) Westerner (Buchowski, 2006; Fanon & Markmann, 1991), and thus escape a subordinate status by becoming bodily and symbolically “white” (Dyer, 1997). I will call these practices and technologies of the self practices of deserving. These bodily and symbolic practices of deserving and their enactment reveal the conflation of cultural value inscribed on bodies, and cultural value inscribed on materiality (Bourdieu, 2010; Miller, 2010a, 2010b). It shows how in EU-space a specific, essentialized and stereotyped culture is lived in body and flesh (Gilroy, 2007; Stoler, 2002, 2008). The double bond of the reproduction of the self and the Other is a process that has been previously described both in reference to gender (Butler, 2007) and class divisions (Bourdieu, 2010; Elias, 1982; Elias & Scotson, 1994), but also observed in colonies (J. L. Comaroff, 1997; Cooper & Stoler, 1997; Stoler, 2002). Reflecting on postcolonial power, Achille Mbembe wrote: […] the postcolony [as a specific form of power] is chaotically pluralistic; it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a specific system of signs, a particular way of fabricating simulacra or re-forming stereotypes. It is not, however, just an economy of signs in which power is mirrored and imagined self-reflectively. The postcolony is characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion, as well as by distinctive ways identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation. (Mbembe, 2001, p. 102 italics in text)

These reflections are translatable to the realities of EU-space and the internal coherence of which Mbembe writes is the normative, imperial, common-sensual superiority of the European doxa, of the aesthetics and moralities of OMS, of the North-West or the founding states of the EU, which multiply, transform and place identities into circulation, creating what Stoler has called “imperial debris” (Stoler, 2013a) visible in subjects’ curtailed possibilities although their rights are formally equal. Thus, my research shows that the power of the empire is constantly perpetuated, although in ever changing forms and on different levels.

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D IVISIONS Divisions among Polish EU civil servants were caused by discourse and “work of imagination” (Appadurai, 1998) about a real Europe and a pervasive, powerful constitution of modernity applied by the moderns, by the OMS (Latour, 1993). I have shown above how European modernity becomes visible in stereotypes, marking a lack of openly performed purification of guarantees of modernity, pointing to an irrational East, an East that is permeated by conservatism stemming ideologically from its Catholic faith. Faith and religiousness, however, is something that is also socially and culturally relevant among Poles, something which divides those who are seen (and see themselves) as modern and European from those who are not seen as such. European Poles and some of the Directors in the Commission were mocking “Polish bigots” – all those Poles in EU-space that through their performance of a bond to the Catholic faith represented stereotypical Polishness. In EU-space there were groups of Poles who would distance themselves from anything that had a connotation with the stereotypical representation of Polish, because this implicitly meant being not modern and sometimes explicitly religious, evoking associations with an allegedly boorish or brutish and thus non-European lifestyle (see also Asad, 2003; Mas, 2011). These Poles tacitly detected and rejected practices that caused their desubjectivization and limited their available possibilities. Sacro-kitsch bath In March 2008, I moved from a tiny room in Laken/Laeken into a four-room flat in Etterbeek, where I lived with two Polish women (plus two cats: one black, the other silver) until the end of my first research stay and during the second one (in March 2009). One of my new flatmates was working in a core EU institution, the other was preparing to pass a concour and trying to find her way into the EU administration. We had common friends, also from EU institutions, with whom we would spend lots of time at dinners and parties and during weekends on one-day trips to the Belgian coast or to another Belgian city (Ghent, Bruges, Ostend, Knokke, De Haan, Dinant, Nivelle). These were activities that many of the young (under 35) EU civil servants, both from OMS and NMS, practiced. In the flat I moved into, the bathroom was painted bright pink with many different sacro-kitsch pieces of “art” that stemmed from places of pilgrimage around the world. There were huge reprints of Jesus Christ in thick golden frames with the facial features of a man from a luxury label advertisement, or a “painting” of the Virgin Mary with a fashion-model face. There was a pink, plastic figurine of the Holy Mary with holy water in it, and many other, different sacral gadgets that

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one could buy in sanctuaries. What is interesting, however, was the meaning this sacro-kitsch and pastiche had for this person: As my friend told me laughing, “some of those Polish bigots” who would visit her were shocked by the sarcastic and offensive interior design of her bathroom. She said that they would become outraged; I must admit it amused me, as well. However, this was a clearly distinctive element of her flat, manifesting her secularism (also to numerous, nonPolish visitors in her flat), it showed her ability to distance herself from the Catholic faith in a rather unusual way1, but this unusualness was distinctive and simultaneously made this distancing legitimate, because it was sarcastic and funny – a legitimate way to handle a negative national stereotype in EU-space. She was escaping the powerful (as shown in the previous chapter), often reapplied stereotype about religious Poles. Through this she was sending a message: I’m different! She was trying to establish her own Polish representation, quasi nonstereotypical, and through that, simultaneously position and subjectivize herself in the power matrix of EU-space by crossing out God (Latour, 1993). Doing so marked her as belonging to a secular, European lifestyle and taste, to the world of the secular West, which visibly purifies guarantees of modernity. The bathroom example shows the performance of habitus that comes into light as opposed to another, different, religious and in EU-space stereotypically perceived Polish habitus (as in the Bible example). These different forms of habitus show how dispositions are established not only in a historical process, but also represent an adjusting to the current conditions of the European doxa in the EUspace. Bourdieu writes: Dispositions are adjusted not only to a class condition, presenting itself as a set of possibilities and impossibilities, but also to relationally defined positions, a rank in the class structure. They are therefore always related, objectively at least, to the dispositions associated 1

For me, a Pole, it was unusual – funny, a bit self-ironic and in the end a clear statement on (Catholic/Christian) faith, that consciously or not, also made a statement about the national identity of the owner of the bathroom. One of my German reviewers (for whose remarks I am very grateful) commented that it is not very unusual but rather fashionable to have such a bathroom that would reveal the places the owner had visited (Spain, Mexico, as these devotional articles, through their characteristic aesthetics, could be easily recognized as being from these countries). While I fully agree with this interpretation (that somehow reinforces Bourdieu’s argument about habitus’ congruent ethical and aesthetic choices) and this seems to be relevant particularly in EU-space, where aesthetics play an important role, I still claim that, besides aesthetics/fashion, referring to national representation is also a very relevant frame of interpretation here, because the owner of the bathroom was laughing about those “Polish bigots” who were outraged by it.

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with other positions. This means that, being ‘adapted’ to a particular class of conditions of existence characterized by a particular degree of distance from necessity, class ‘moralities’ and ‘aesthetics’ are also necessarily situated with respect to one another by the criterion of degree of banality or distinction, and that all the ‘choices’ they produce are automatically associated with a distinct position and therefore endowed with a distinctive value. (Bourdieu, 2010, pp. 243-244)

A distinctive sacro-kitsch bath, laughing about faith, as opposed to “Polish bigots”, are “natural” practices, generated by a habitus that is able to assess dispositions, and through this, position itself in the class/national structure of EU-space. This positioning demands distancing oneself from stereotypical performance of Polish nationality, the more so when it is a stereotype of the backward, irrational and faithful Pole, who mixes the social and divine orders. This is an example of reproducing the powerful position of the secular European, simultaneously showing the conjunction of ethical and aesthetic choices (a legitimate way of distancing oneself from nationality in a funny way) that mark the Eurostyle. However, power reproduction is possible in and through habitus and its structure, through its composition, which is an effect of experiences and capital gathered over time (Bourdieu, 2008, 2010; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). And this habitus structure, and such an ironic and distancing performance, becomes clear in the case of my friend. She spent a few years of her life in one of the French African postcolonial states, returning afterward to Poland going to a French school in Warsaw (which is and was distinctive); she then studied in London and Berlin. She spoke fluent French and English and a bit of German, and had no problems finding her way around French-speaking Brussels, having most of her friends outside Polish networks and among non-Poles. Still she was employed in one of the core EU institutions as a person from Poland, and this is how she was perceived there. Her sacro-kitsch pink bath was somehow natural for her habitus and its performance; given its Western past, in line with the European doxa, it responded to the power frames in EU-space. Not taking nationality seriously is a virtue in EU-space. It is precisely this performance of self-distancing and showing the ability to frame one’s own national representation that is seen as European in EU-space. Her habitus depicts strategies of subjectivization, strategies that are aimed at a full existence in the allegedly secular EU-space. However, habitus also tells her how to position – using irony as a tool of power (Herzfeld, 2005) – herself as allegedly modern or at least freed from tradition and faith. It is habitus’ taste and its capital gathered in Western contexts that tell her how to design her bath, what to hang on her bath’s walls and what to put on the washing machine: because taste helps one to make choices according to one’s place in the hierarchy of class cultures (Bourdieu, 2010) and detects implicit rules and cultural limits. The dispositions of habitus detect

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what practices, moralities and aesthetics are legitimate and European, and in her case it – according to the dominant taste – tells her to distance herself from stereotypically perceived nationality. Habitus’ taste gives an account about what is distinctive and what is not, but it also drives to reproduce powerful cultural hierarchies and enables becoming a subject in the EU-space, to be granted belonging to the Euroclass. Wild Geese The relevance of the stereotypical, unmodern representation of Poles in EU-space and how it is conjoined with taste and belonging to a certain better class, the Euroclass, became very clear to me when I myself became an object of stereotypization and Orientalization (Buchowski, 2006). This relevance was visible when Poles working in EU-space would joke about working-class Poles in Brussels, about Polish construction workers and housemaids from Siematycze or Białystok2. In parallel, these stereotypes produced class differences, visible in class discrepancies between two Polish churches, one “European” and the other drawing non-EU Poles living in Brussels. However, there was one other Polish EU-place: an Irish pub, Wild Geese, where on the first Friday of each month a meeting of “Poles and Polish speaking persons working or closely related to European institutions”3 would take place. I learned about these meetings quite soon after my arrival in Brussels, and I was told they had a long tradition and were where the “first wave” of Polish employees in the EU institutions would meet. These meetings, what different groups of Poles in EU-space would say about them, and who went there and why, often reflected the fear of being stereotypically represented as a Pole. Some Polish EU civil servants would either laugh about or detest these meeting,

2

Białystok is a mid-sized city in North-East Poland, the capital of the region called Podlasie. The city is close to the Belarusian and Lithuanian border. Podlasie is a predominantly agricultural and rather poor region and has a long tradition of labour migration to Brussels. Allegedly, a small city close to Białystok called Siematycze has a direct bus connection with Brussels. I was told, rather in an ironic way, that people in Brussels think Siematycze is a big city in Poland because every time Brusselers ask their house maid or craftsmen where they come from, they would hear “from Siematycze”. However, Białystok has long held underdog status in Warsaw and other parts of Poland, as it is associated with backwardness and an Eastern dialect.

3

This is a quote from the Facebook Group “Polscy Europracownicy” (Polish Euroemployees), which I joined after coming to Brussels. These Friday meetings were organized by the founders of this group – junior AD civil servants working at the Commission.

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claiming “I meet people I like, not because of their nationality” (AD7, DG EMPL), while others would stay away from them arguing that “one can only meet beetroots there” 4, and yet others would join them regularly. While becoming a subject in EUspace is connected to one’s performance of nationality and management of one’s stereotype (which can be capital or a burden), I show below that other local rules and rationalities also generated strategies for positioning oneself within EU-space. These were connected to network capital and the prestige that came from one’s acquaintance with people high in the formal hierarchy of the EU apparatus, which often overlapped or criss-crossed with national stereotypes and class markings. I attended meetings in Wild Geese many times. The initial atmosphere was usually quite stiff, and people would talk only to those they knew, but after a few beers, as time passed, the atmosphere would relax a bit. People would start to talk to me, although some of them, after we were introduced, would ostentatiously turn around and walk away. I guess on my side there was also some kind of expectation that they would start to tell me “the real stories” (and I think some of them did) about being an EU civil servant from a NMS. I was able to set an interview appointment with a couple of people, and once was even invited to dinner to some EC civil servants’ homes, where I met other EC officials. I suppose this happened only because I was recommended by a common, mine and the host’s, friend, who was also there. What I remember particularly well from these meetings in Wild Geese are two situations that occurred or that I witnessed. Quite early in my research I went there and met a person who I already knew through a friend of a friend from Warsaw. This person was a junior AD official, around 38, who worked in one of the “sexy” DGs of the Commission. It turned out that we also had other common friends working at the Commission (I became acquainted with them only in Brussels, not before). That evening I arrived in Wild Geese earlier because later I wanted to go to a huge party with Italian stagiaires5 in Autoworld6. I started to chat with him, and 4

In Polish burak, a beetroot, is a pejorative description of someone coming from the

5

There is a tradition of “national parties” of the Commission’s stagiaires (on “national

countryside, of bad manners, more or less equivalent to an English country bumpkin. parties” in EU context see also Poehls 2009). They were often sponsored by “national” labels, as sponsors knew that EC stagiaires are a valuable target group and good for PR. This particular Italian party was sponsored by Ferrero and Peroni, thus Nutella, Ferrero Roche, Ferrerro Kiss and Peroni beer were served. 6

Autoworld is an automobile museum placed in a pompous museum building around the triumphal arch in Parc Cinquantenaire established by King Leopold II at the end of the 19th century. It is a rather prestigious place in Brussels and mirrors the prestige of the party – it was not just a normal stagiaires’ party. The arch and Autoworld is a few hundred meters away from Schuman roundabout, and thus not far from the Wild Geese.

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he said he could arrange a meeting for me with one of the top Polish Directors at the Commission as he had worked previously in the Polish PermRep and knew this Director. While mentioning him he used a short version of his last name that I have never heard before – a fact that seemed to reveal close acquaintance with the manager. I told him that I had already spoken to this person and had an interview with him, and that he did not need to put me in touch with him. As I said that, he automatically frowned. I pretended not to have noticed and continued the chat by telling him about the Italian party and trying to convince him to come along, as he was not sure what to do next and whether he would go there or not. I told him in maybe a bit too hail-fellow-well-met manner: “Come on! There will be good chocolate, lots of good and cheap wine and beer and loads of people”. He replied that if he came, it would certainly not be because of the cheap wine and chocolate and not to get drunk. Then he turned around on his heel and walked away. I was suddenly left there standing alone, a bit confused and wondering what happened. Only later I realized that he felt intimidated by the fact that I actually responded intimidatingly to his offer of putting in contact with this Polish Director at the Commission. He wanted to impress me with his good positioning in networks and his status as a gatekeeper, and did not expect me to have the capacities to have access to this manager. He felt degraded (to the level of some young PhD-student in comparison to a European Commission civil servant?) when I told him that I had already spoken to him. I devalued him and his capital, and he felt intimidated; thus, he reacted by devaluing my manners, as if I was going to the Italian party because of cheap wine and only to get drunk – something that for many Poles in EU-space would come across as typically Polish and something many of them would like to distance themselves from because it reminded them of the stereotypical representation of Poland. His taste told him to distance himself from my allegedly coarse and not-European-enough manners. In doing so, he was reestablishing the order and hierarchy between us that I had irritated by my revelation of already having interviewed this high-ranking Polish official. He was reproducing hierarchies that ran along the limits of being in or out of EU networks, and between being symbolically Polish or European. But here these hierarchies were expressed in class distinctions. He had to mark the symbolic line between me as Polish, reducing or essentializing me also to this being Polish and boorish, which makes apparent how national representations are applicable as capital or burdens and how they are connected to stereotypes, and him as European – at least in manners and (network) status, marking his belonging through a reproduction of hierarchies and Euroclass taste. This was his strategy and positioning in such a situation. It reveals an internalized Polish stereotype and how it can be managed in the struggle for position in the symbolic hierarchy. It shows the divisions that are caused by the internalized negative stereotype of a Pole (similar to the “fresh approach” or “sigh

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of relief” examples), a stereotype that refers to coarse, brutish manners, as opposed to those of a civilized European. It exemplifies how an internalized European doxa, powerful Euroclass taste and discourse about Europe causes distinctions within Polish groups in EU-space. It shows also how formal hierarchies in EU-space are interchangeable or evenly applicable both in private and professional life as capital in order to reproduce power and become a subject – a fact that contradicts the claims of many researchers (e.g. Marcus & Holmes, 2005 on Para-ethnography where they claim that in highly political contexts private is strictly separated from public). In this particular case, formal hierarchy is conflated with cultural and class hierarchy, and the application of the stereotype of a Pole (in order to demean me) is an example of how capital (or burden) is applied in the struggle for position in the formal and cultural hierarchy, and how it causes class divisions. It also shows that having contacts and networks in EU-space implies higher or lower social and cultural status and exemplifies how the cultural struggle is parallel to the struggle over place in hierarchy. The above examples show how cultural power produces social divisions between Poles within EU-space and how individuals position themselves within the powerful cultural matrix. They show how modern discourse and class criteria lurking behind national stereotypes override that of national belonging. They show how the European doxa provides frames for subjectification and positioning and creates the desire to perform types of Polishness that differ from the traditional one, the one represented in the unmodern and not-European-enough stereotype. These examples also show habitus structures and the strategic application of different forms of capital to advance in the local hierarchy of EU-space. European is a powerful notion, evoking the imagination and desires, and overriding national borders. This lived Europeanness divided Poles into those having class and performing the Eurostyle, on one hand, while on the other were those stereotyped Poles who, in the eyes of those not attending the meetings in Wild Geese, were considered coarse, and by those distancing themselves from faith, were deemed bigots and blamed for the negative Polish stereotype. Thus there was among Poles in EU-space a gradation of Europeanness that was socially visible in the “[…] reading of sensibilities more than science, on a measure of affective states—of affiliations and attachments—more than origins and on assessments of moral civilities that were poorly secured by chromatic indices and not by colour-based taxonomies or visual markers.” (Stoler, 2008, p. 352) This division delimited “European Poles”, who tried to break the stereotype of a poor, coarse, tasteless and backward Pole. They embraced the imagination of a good and European life, such as mine and my friends’. The above example also shows that these class divisions were conjoined with formal status within the EU apparatus. On the flip side of the

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coin, as I will show further, there were also those unable to embrace this European life or who resisted it. Europe and modernity were the grounds of overlapping class and cultural divisions. These divisions, however, depend on the performance of habitus, on a flexible and proper application of different forms of capital that in given situations have different meaning and weight. Being associated with the Polishness of a craftsmen (the abovementioned le plombier polonaise), of a Polish labour migrant, was in EU-space anti-capital or a burden in Bourdieu’s terms, because there was a strong stereotype among EU civil servants about poor and unskilled labour from NMS, particularly from Poland, the Baltic States, Slovakia, and later Romania and Bulgaria, coming to Brussels, allegedly to escape the poverty in their own countries. I was placed in this category through the application of the image of a coarse, drinking Pole. I irritated the self-imagination and self-representation of this “European Pole” working in the Commission. I intimidated his network status, and thus, I was degraded to being “a Pole”. The divisions I describe here permeated my research among Polish EU civil servants. They depict deeply internalized criteria of civility, a desire to become modern, to become European – both in terms of class and cultural status as opposed to the Polish stereotype. They show how a culturally established and powerful imagination of Europe and modernity frames desires, positions and subjectivization strategies in practice, how it divides people into classes, and how these run along the lines of one’s formal position within the EU apparatus. These imaginations about modernity, however, while in some cases setting subjects free from tradition and faith, in others lead to the reproduction of cultural and social hierarchies, and thus reinforce their subordinate position. A Polish party The invincible modernity of the moderns (Latour, 1993) and the divisions this creates can be scrutinized by focusing on material habitus performance, and by looking at the lifestyle practices that are imposed by powerful frames and imaginations about Europe. The Eurostyle is intrinsically modern; OMS are, so to speak, possessors of this Eurostyle, while Poles in EU-space, in performing their national habitus and “national trivialities”, are automatically deprived of this Eurostyle and, in most cases, represent continuity with the past. Once I went to a Polish EU civil servant’s party with a friend. It was a birthday party for a Polish AD official at the Commission. The friend I went there with was the owner of the sacro-kitsch bath; she had grown up in a French speaking country and was, as I described above, in her taste Europeanized – as was I. The party was held in two adapted rental flats connected by a big hall that was meant to be a dance

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floor, in one of the old Bruxelloise houses near St. Catherine/Katelijne – an area of Brussels in the city centre that already during the time of my research had undergone rapid gentrification, and where posh restaurants and bars had been opened. As mentioned earlier, private parties on private occasions, in addition to numerous official ones, were a fixed element of the cultural landscape in EU-space, where people would meet, compare their statuses and reinforce their belonging (see also Kaschuba, 1993). This party was big, and there were already many people inside when we arrived. The tables in one room were covered with all sorts of appetizers, such as smoked fish, ham, olives and cheese sticks. In addition, in a small kitchen there were bottles of red and white wine and plastic cups standing on a small table. The two fridges were full of strong alcohol, and the party was in full swing when we arrived, though the dance floor was still empty. We went to that party towards the end of my first, longest stay in Brussels, so I knew many of the people whom I saw there, either because I had interviewed them or because I had met them at the Polish meetings in Wild Geese or in another context. Actually, all of those I knew pretended not to know me – although I had spent almost seven months in Brussels, I still did not belong to this society, and I suppose they knew I was conducting research there, “sniffing around”, as I once heard. It was beginning of April, so it was already warm outside and the windows were open to let fresh air in – this also had the consequence that the party was audible and visible from the street. In the kitchen, there was a group of young Polish men (between 30 and 40) discussing European and Polish politics vividly and loudly, sometimes yelling at each other. It was very warm in there, and the heat of the discussions and of the alcohol had become visible on their red faces. They all had on light-coloured shirts: blue, light blue, white and checked, soft colours and tones or light red stripes on white. They wore black or dark blue trousers made of suit fabric, and always a belt, even if some of them wore jeans. There were also a few (two or three) women in the kitchen, who were sometimes involved in the conversation, but not as real conversation partners (“am I right Ania? tell me, am I right?”), but rather as an audience that would support or reject an argument of one of the men who discussed with each other. Whereas in the kitchen vivid discussion was going on, in the room next to it, where tables with food stood, there were more women and the atmosphere was less emotional. People were standing in groups and talking. People were still coming in, and as they walked in they would greet each other and get involved in conversation. Women had more diverse outfits than men, at least above the waist, but rarely left their shoulders uncovered; most wore shirts, tops, skirts or dark trousers, and long, loose hair, and often had a neckerchief or shawl around the shoulders, contrasting against the dark top. Some wore a skirt and had their shoulders uncovered – that was a rarer and smarter evening version of the women’s outfits. I was surprised that most of the people did not look like they were at a party

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but rather at some half-official meeting. This was different from what I knew from Berlin or Warsaw, where people wore more casual clothes at parties. It was also different from the parties of my Dutch-British friends in Brussels, to whose home I had gone, or even the party of one of my interviewees, who worked in an environmental NGO and whom I described in the first chapter. This party reminded me rather of a corporate “get together”, to which people would come not because they wanted to have fun, but because they somehow felt obliged and would not dare not show up. After a long while, the dance floor was still empty. Apparently, many people were acquainted and the atmosphere was not stiff, but I also did not have the impression it was relaxed and natural. This half-official and rather stiff character was visible in the attendees’ behaviour (allegedly not recognizing me, being exclusive) and polite conversations, exchanging compliments about how they looked, discussing recent trips either to Poland or overseas, or “big politics”, as in the kitchen, rather than talking rubbish and making fun, although some guests were already tipsy (like the guys in the kitchen). I remember one woman who visibly stood out in this crowd; I knew she worked as an assistant in one of the Commissioner’s Cabinets. Her outfit fit a different dress code, distinctive in this context: relaxed and casual. She had on blue jeans and a light-blue shirt, and pumps on her feet. She looked more like someone going to a friend’s party, rather than to an office – as most of the other people did. Through her outfit, this woman from the Cabinet was sending a message that she did not need to dress up, that this was not a special occasion for her. I approached her. We had a “normal” (in local terms) conversation for such an occasion: asking who does what and where. I revealed that I had had an interview with someone from the Cabinet where she worked – she curiously and thoroughly questioned me about how I had come across this person, how my research had developed and what it was about – she was curious about how I was able to access this person. My outfit was a bit more unusual for me: instead of jeans, I had on black trousers with a crease, a dark-blue slim-fit t-shirt and black sport sneakers. My tshirt made the difference in this context as a collared shirt was the norm. Most of the time that I had stood with my friend talking, we both felt we did not really fit into the crowd, neither to these discussions in the kitchen, nor to the exchange of polite compliments or stiff conversations in the room. She spoke to some friends, but I was not introduced and these conversations did not last long. We did not fit into these common cultural practices among these EU Poles: talking about family, about trips and journeys (to the Philippines and South-East Asia, to South America, to Africa – individually arranged, not package tours), about social life in Brussels, about “big politics” yelling at each other. For me they came across as stiff and aloof, boring and pretentious, and in consequence revealing their – in my Europeanized eyes – petit-bourgeois status. I cannot remember such yelling

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conversations about politics from the parties at my Dutch-British friends’ nor other parties, although there was always a lot of alcohol consumed. Moreover, while people from NMS would extensively go to tropical and “exotic” places, many of my North European interviewees would not do that, but rather fly to Berlin for parties (in the case of young Germans), go to Amsterdam to visit friends and/or go to a club or concert (in the case of young Dutch). Young Polish junior AD officials would rather go overseas – as long as they did not have children – or go to Poland to visit family, or sometimes take the Eurostar train to London or Paris to go shopping and buy clothes. When they had children (who were almost always young), they would go to e.g. South of France, Croatia or Italy for holidays. Young (mid-twenties to late-thirties) single civil servants, both from old and new member states, went on shopping trips to London or Paris, and although this was seen as rather showy, it was considered a legitimate cultural practice among young civil servants. My Dutch friend bought his slim-fit tailored shirts from a fancy tailor in Utrecht7 – a different act of distinction than travelling to London or Paris (on the Eurostar), and though through its aesthetic meaning it marked his class belonging (a tailor instead of a shopping mall), it was also a reproduction of national, “Dutch triviality”, as stereotypically Dutch men were known to wear fancy and fashionable shirts. In this intersection of class and “national triviality” it was proof of the “natural” Euroclass status of the Dutch representation. Myself and the friend with whom I had come to this party did not reproduce the outfits and cultural styles that were seen in this context as European (and what is often called business casual), which for me and my friend were seen as stiff, pretentious and in fact not really European, but provincial and petit bourgeois. We were dressed casually (my t-shirt and sport sneakers); nor did we discuss political issues vehemently in order to assure ourselves and our surroundings that we were familiar with and part of European politics, nor did we talk about the “exotic” places we had visited. We did not perform imaginations about what it means to be European, often brought from Poland. We were performing relaxation and selfdistance instead of constant self-awareness and self-assurance, but we were also trying to distinguish ourselves from the context. We already felt like and performed as Europeans, and we felt distinctive towards these Poles. What we reproduced in our minds was an image of a stiff Pole from which we wanted to detach ourselves from, an image of insecure and bumptious Polish guys reproduced in EU-space, confirmed at this party in these polite, stiff conversations about oversees travels, “big politics” and a noncasual bodily hexis. In our view, they were conservative (symbolized by their outfits) and tried to show off their ostensible Europeanness by attempting to imitate the legitimate notion of a masculine, active and political bureaucrat in the kitchen. In fact, their loud and almost aggressive conversation was 7

He studied in Utrecht and was married there.

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pretentious and out of place, like their conversations about travelling overseas, meant to assure themselves of their new social status. It was seen by me and by those from OMS as funny, as undistanced and thus indistinctive behaviour (Bourdieu, 2010). We classified them, thanks to our European taste, as belonging to the petit-bourgeois class of people without any distance from their role; we reproduced in our minds the view of non-European Polish bodies, overdressed and stiff, and thus positioned ourselves as those belonging to the Euroclass, reproducing the European casualness and alleged relaxation. We reproduced similar hierarchies within the Polish EU-community as those between OMS and NMS because we wanted to be different, to present ourselves as Europeans, and we thus produced distinction and self-assurance about our European status. There was an invisible line at that party between me and people I ostensibly knew. I felt anger and pity for them not because I was not travelling overseas – this did not interest me at all – but as they demonstrated their power to me by making me invisible, pretending not to know me or not to see me, I was the one who felt I was better, part of the Euroclass. I felt superior, but I suppose this was my reaction to their exclusiveness. I simultaneously applied the capital and rules in the cultural struggle that I had apparently acquired quickly in EU-space. This time, after just seven months spent in Brussels, I played the “network card” (access to a Member of a Cabinet in a conversation with a woman working in a Cabinet) similar to the scenario with the previously mentioned AD official in Wild Geese, who felt degraded because I devalued his network capital. I played with the capital I had, performing belonging to networks, knowing people at high levels of the EU bureaucracy, simultaneously performing European habitus as another form of capital. I knew who this person working in the Cabinet was, I knew what she did, but in our conversation, when she told me she worked in the Cabinet of a Commissioner, I pretended I was surprised. I also “coincidentally” mentioned that I had had this interview with a German Member of the non-German Cabinet where she worked. She was of course very surprised (or was she also pretending?) and asked me how I got in touch with this person. This whole situation was a small staged drama performed according to an invisible script. I was strategically surprised when she told me where she worked, and I deliberately told her how easy it was to get in touch with this person (which surprisingly in fact it was). I no longer wanted to be this nobody and an outsider because I did not know anyone at the Commission, because allegedly I did not have the capital in the form of networks and access to people higher up in the hierarchy that is relevant in EU-space. I also wanted to be visible in this context; I wanted others to see that I was speaking with a person working in the Cabinet in order to become visible. And while trying to be Polish in EU-space was not an option for me, I started to position and subjectivize myself by applying my network and Euroclass capital. I internalized and started to

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reproduce hierarchies: both when it came to my European outfit and self-esteem (or did I already have it before?) and the management of capital, such as networks and formal hierarchies. This time I knew what the consequences might be when I said that I had interviewed someone high up in the hierarchy. These strategies were all framed by established rules in the struggle over cultural and formal hierarchy and the European doxa and global hierarchy of value. A powerful internalized and performed cultural matrix was emerging in my feeling of superiority stemming from the whole bodily hexis, self-assurance and performed relaxation, which in my eyes gave me the status of a European. I was trying to become a European subject through the reproduction of class distinctions between myself and them. Still, my feelings were those of repulsion, of not belonging to these people, although I wanted to be part of their community. I was caught in a constant balancing between inclusion and exclusion, between belonging and marginalization, between immersion in modernity and sensitivity about my national identity (Mbembe, 2001). What these examples and divisions show is that in Europe there is a strong stereotype, a particular representation of being Polish, and this stereotype is internalized by Poles in EU-space. Their response to their negative stereotype is to reproduce it, and thus to submerge themselves in its power. Simultaneously, these examples show that performing Europe and a national, stereotypical representation in Polish EU Brussels produces divisions in class terms, similar to the divisions between OMS and NMS, and that these divisions are also measured along the lines of the formal hierarchy in the EU apparatus. Europe is represented by an educated middle class, performing tension in relaxation (Bourdieu, 2010), a white cosmopolitan of which Hannerz has written; it is represented by an individual who is able to communicate in many different languages and represents a particular white, middle-class lifestyle, someone dealing with “big politics”, but who “always knows the way out” once the experience of the new culture becomes boring, unattractive or challenging the comfort zone (Featherstone, 1998; Hannerz, 2005), or places one lower on the hierarchy of value. Europe is also represented by the ability to play with conventions and national representations rather than taking them too seriously, like the opposition between lecteur and liseur (Bourdieu, 2010). These examples show again the interplay of cultural and structural factors, their mutual bond in the struggle, and that in EU-space the modern divisions between public and private, between professional and private, are blurred.

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R EPRODUCTION The performance of practices that are aimed at positioning one in the power matrix of the European doxa, as has already been mentioned in the Polish party example, reproduce power in a twofold manner: Poles reproduce European lifestyles and bodies, and they reproduce particular “national trivialities”, which are imported from Poland and seen by Poles as distinctive in the national Polish context in EUspace (because they are stipulated by their presence in an international EU-space and at the heart of EU Europe), but are in fact undetectable and/or reposition them in a subordinate class. These practices are evoked by imaginations about Europe, and should mark European habitus, but are undetectable in the wider EU-space context and incongruent with the Eurostyle. In the Polish context in Brussels they are thus distinctive (Europe in this context is distinctive) – most of all aimed at distinguishing one from other, non-European Poles, and in EU-space at strengthening one’s own European identity. They do this through their national networking, understood as “sociality” (Riles, 2001), and belonging to their Polishness through class distinctions evoked by Europe. And this is exactly where they reproduce the cultural power of the European doxa. I will show that these European and national performances complement each other; they are caught in a double bind, reinforcing one another. Because of their unmodern national representations, Poles in EU-space are caught in an irresolvable dilemma between nationality and Europe. These practices and performances are generated by forms of habitus that are, on one hand, expressing and representing national belonging, but also show the reproduction of imaginations about Europe and how the discursive frame called Europe is reproduced in their everyday life; however, these imaginations are brought from Poland and do not have much to do with real Europe in EU-space – with the performance of the legitimate habitus. Europe and being modern, as I show in the example below, do not always mean the same for Poles as for those from OMS. It means, on one hand, the reproduction of the habitus of a flâneur and a cosmopolitan. But the Polish EU church that I describe below also shows that Poles strive to be modern, but without crossing out God, because this God is part of their national representation. The contradiction to the constitution of modernity is revealed in the unconcealed performance of such mixtures, of national representation and God. In the Polish EU church, they try to reproduce their Polish national belonging by manifesting their faith, simultaneously reproducing class divisions and distinctions imported from Poland that should give them European status. But this national reproduction – both on a symbolic/religious and more material level – causes the reproduction of their marginal status in the wider EU-space. They reproduce Polish sociality but also reproduce their (imported from Poland) Europe and in doing so, create class distinctions among Poles in EU

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Brussels, and subordinate their status in EU-space – because these imaginations about Europe do not fit into what the Euroclass performs. And herein, again, I will show that the representation of nationality, depending on its stereotype, is only one factor, one form of capital that has to be managed in the process of positioning and subjectivizing oneself in the struggle over prestige and power. These reproductions of class distinctions, both between OMS and NMS and those evoked by Europe, as well as those, so to speak, brought from Poland, point to the fact that EU-space is anything but postnational, and that Bourdieu’s writings on taste and oppositions between the petit bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie, the opposition between tensed and relaxed habitus, are very much relevant in international EU-space. Thus, reproduction here refers to the reproduction of power. It becomes visible in practices that are brought from Poland – imaginations (Appadurai, 1998) about Europe that do not match the European doxa and lead to a subordinate status in EUspace. But it also refers to the reproduction of a Westernized habitus, that is, striving to become European – and in such way also reproduces power. European life: Gare du Midi Sunday market The deeply rooted, even emotionally expressed divisions that emerged at the Polish party that I described above were reinforced and hyphenated by my practices, by the performances I undertook together with my Polish friend in EU-space. They were meant to performatively confirm my own belonging and identification, confirm my distinction from Poles and their negative and other representations. My habitus and the habitus of my friend with the sacro-kitsch bath, with whom I went to that Polish party, were apparently similar; we felt a cultural and symbolic proximity to EU-space, our European taste joined us. My acquaintance with her was a good example of Bourdieu’s claim that most private choices are simultaneously very social and cultural choices (we met through our Dutch-British friends) (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). As mentioned earlier, soon after I got to know her, I moved into her flat. My new flat, where I lived with her and another Polish woman, was situated close to the Parc Cinquantenaire/Jubelpark, and when I jogged in the morning I saw some of my interviewees going to their offices in the EU District at the other, Western end of the park (close to Rond-Point Schuman). It was a “good” part of Brussels, where wealthy, white middle-class people lived, with numerous bars, cafés and restaurants, and with “good” schools for white, middle-class children, and “good” shops (e.g. Del Haze with freshly squeezed juice, small fancy snacks, portioned fruits in fridges, pastries, sandwiches, smoothies, and frozen coffee). A bit further to the East a posh district with villas begins (both Woluwes). On the North edge of the Parc Cinquantenaire/Jubelpark there was a Dominican, Catholic church where each Sunday at ten o’clock a Polish mass was

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organized within what is called the Foyer Catholique Européen. This is a Catholic community founded by nonclericals as a “center for meetings, formation and celebration to serve international institutions in Brussels”8. I often attended these Polish masses (solely for research purposes, description follows) but I often either skipped them or after the mass, together with my flat mates, I would turn to typical white urban middle-class activities of people from OMS, and go to one of the biggest markets in Western Europe at Gare du Midi in Brussels, where you can buy virtually all sorts of things coming from every corner of the world, beginning with fresh meat and fish, including all kinds of Belgian cheese, fruits and vegetables, to pots, fabrics, detergents and household utensils. Thus, living with Europeanized Poles and being one myself, I reproduced Europeanness, the life of a flâneur (Featherstone, 1998) and a cosmopolitan (Hannerz, 1990, 1996), the legitimate way of life in EU-space. Gare du Midi market was a place in Brussels where the white middle class would meet the nonwhite9 and racialized minorities (El-Tayeb, 2011), the urban poor, where the former would come in small groups (as we did) to experience cultural diversity (reduced merely to consumption), buy cheap food, and have Moroccan coffee, sweet Belgian waffles, Portuguese churros and Turkish olives. The poor would come to cover their basic needs in the cheapest possible way. I and my friends were reproducing the European lifestyle legitimate in EU-space that is cosmopolitan and tolerant, as the Irish Director above had described: tolerant but only as long as it does not include confrontation with radically different histories, lifestyles and class contexts. As soon as you exit the metro station Gare du Midi, you have to find your way through stands filled with food, flowers, suitcases, and washing power for sale. I could distinguish more or less two areas of this market spread along both sides of the train line. In one area, closer to the train station and the exit of the metro station, there were all sorts of things, but also vendors selling food: nonwhite migrants selling fruits and vegetables, and white people (usually Flemish) selling cheese, meat and fish. The other area was around the old trading halls, where mostly food was sold and where both vendors and buyers would consist mostly of nonwhites. Like us, with a big bag on wheels, wondering through the aisles of fruits and vegetables, peanuts and olive stands, with their yelling owners praising their goods, many other white, middle-class Belgians and “internationals” or expats came here to buy food for the whole week, to meet friends, and to have a coffee and sweets afterwards, eating fresh olives straight from the bag, watching people and enjoying the exotic crowd speaking French, Flemish, English, Arab, Turkish, German and 8

Quote from the webpage of the Foyer Catholique Européen: http://www.fce.be/

9

Here I again refer to Richard Dyer’s (1997) notion of white.

files/en.pdf (seen on 11.07.2012).

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many other languages (including our Polish). After we bought fresh vegetables and fruits, with our bag on wheels full and with plastic bags in our hands, we would go back home and as both of my flatmates were vegetarians we would prepare and cook tabouleh, fried rice with ginger and carrot, and make a fresh salad with olives and nuts. Sometimes we would invite non-Polish friends from OMS who also worked in EU-space to consume the fruits and vegetables, and the cheese and olives we had bought at the market (“Oh, you went to the Midi market today?”). Living an urban life – not caring about career during our pastime, distancing ourselves from Polish groups, choosing friends from non-Poles or Europeanized Poles – this is the lived and experienced urban space that communicates openness; it is a conjunction of thrift and entertainment and even urban adventure that reinforces and reproduces my own and my friends’ belonging to the cosmopolitan Euroclass in EU-space (although I also did my shopping at Aldi in Brussels, my flatmates would not). This example shows how Brussels provides good cultural tissue for producing Eurostyle practices in EU-space, which are most of all, as I claim, aimed at changing one’s status in the struggle within the cultural and social hierarchy. Through bourgeois, “open” attitudes towards “cultures”, through our fun while passing through aisles full of people and stands filled with fruit, we were performing and marking our being Europeans (and in this particular context also colonials, reproducing imperialism), we performed enjoyment with diversity (praised by the EU Commission as one of the “European values”) – a socio-cultural practice so valued in this white, middle-class EU-space. This European diversity that I also performed has more to do with Featherstone’s flâneurs who walk around the city in search of new excitement, adding elements of their surroundings to their own life story. Feathersone’s flâneurs aesthetically shape their own identity according to a particular style (Featherstone, 1994), but they would not engage in the life of these migrants or even with white farmers from Flanders. It was easy to shop at the Gare du Midi market and buy all these goods, but it was just as easy to leave it, take the goods with us, and consume them home with people like us, all the while remaining convinced about our own openness and tolerance towards other cultures. These flâneur’s strategies were the kind of strategies and practices that were legitimate in EU-space; they fulfilled the slogan diversity and tolerance, and this was the Eurostyle of the Euroclass that reinforced the notion of cosmopolitan as defined by Hannerz (Hannerz, 1990), mentioned in the previous chapter. My flatmates and I submerged ourselves into powerful European discourses and class practices, and apparently our habitus was properly developed and able to detect relevant capital to perform Europeanness and manifest it to ourselves and our European friends. Through our attending this market, we reproduced and reinforced our position in EU-space; we produced our own belonging to this cosmopolitan and European Western (in Poland there are no markets where non-European, nonwhites

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sell things) white, middle class. European also means cosmopolitan; it sets out a particular lifestyle and consumption practices that my friends and I coming from Poland reproduced. Polish EU church During the time of my research, there were two churches in Brussels that held a Polish service: one in Sablon/Zavel (Église de la Chapelle/Kappellekerk) – a big cathedral in the city centre, with two Polish masses each Sunday – and the other being the abovementioned Foyer Catholique or just “Foyer” in the Dominican church next to Parc du Cinqantenaire/Jubelpark. They both were Polish, but each represented a different national performance and different class. They are examples of the reproduction of national representations (thought connection to Catholic faith) and how Europe evoked these representation or how it evoked distinction from them. These different Polish national representations were conjoined with class distinctions and reaffirmed the cultural power of the European doxa. While my friends would still be asleep I would get up early on Sunday mornings and go to the “European” mass (unless we went to Gare du Midi market). The Sunday mass was attended mainly by Polish EU civil servants and other Poles working in EU-space: apart from the EU institutions they also worked at NATO, the Polish PermRep and the Polish embassy to the Kingdom of Belgium, at different representations of Polish regions, in the private sector and in NGOs lobbying EU institutions. The mass was held by a charismatic Dominican Polish priest who strived to establish a kind of family atmosphere – something one usually does not find in normal churches in Poland, but rather only at Dominican churches, particularly popular among young, emergent and successful middle-class conservative people in big Polish cities. The whole religious ritual, the whole event, reminded me of a Sunday mass being held at a Dominican church in Warsaw’s old town: with a choir, candles and neocatechumenal groups, where politicians, lawyers, Warsaw’s elites, young intelligentsia and the young, successful Polish middle class would meet, striving for strong feeling of religious community and an intellectual consideration of the Gospel. In Warsaw, this was a manifestation of belonging and a political statement among a certain group of Catholics – conservative young people representing the counter-current to the liberalizing Polish society (see also Keinz, 2008), simultaneously enjoying economic success and displaying it in their lifestyle and consumption patterns. Here in Brussels, the situation was similar; there was even a choir accompanying the service – just as in Warsaw. Unlike Warsaw, however, people were more mixed in age; there were no candles, but I had the impression that the people knew each other well.

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The mass was a whole ritual, not only religiously, but also in social and cultural terms. I actually had the impression that the mass was a mere pretext to manifest social belonging. It was a place where Polish “sociality” (Riles, 2001) was celebrated and networks established. Here this new conservative elite habitus from Warsaw was reproduced and in that sense it was an example of the reproduction of “national trivialities” brought over from Poland. They were tacitly aware of the power of the European doxa, but this Church and their presence in this church were meant to subvert it, to manifest Polish-Catholic (or rather conservative) belonging as opposed to the allegedly too liberal Europe (similar as in Bible example). However, in this church Poles performed their distinctive class towards other Poles they were ashamed of – working-class Poles in the church in Sablon/Zavel. And this is exactly the moment where they reproduced the power of the European doxa. The class divisions produced in this church were evoked by Europe and the desire to become European, reproducing imagined European practices, minus the crossed-out God, which gave them the feeling of representing Polishness and a “better morality”. I could distinguish at least three groups, three types of people attending the mass. In the front rows sat not only Directors from the European Parliament and the European Commission, but also people working at the Cabinet of the Polish Commissioner and those who wanted to be more visible in this context and were willing to express their belonging to those allegedly having an influence on policies. While male Directors in their fifties and sixties were there with their spouses, those aspiring and wanting to be more visible were younger, between 35 and 45 and at the level of HoU. Most of these Polish Directors (with one exception that I know of) had experience as politicians (at a ministerial level in the Polish government – usually dealing with EU affairs in some way) or had worked in the Polish PermRep in Brussels before and right after Poland’s entry into the EU. Some of them had been engaged in the anti-communist opposition and/or had come from academia. However, among the praying crowd, there were people from throughout the whole hierarchy ladder of EU institutions. While age was congruent with place in the formal hierarchy of the EU apparatus, in this Polish church hierarchies were also visible in differences in how people performed, how they looked, what they did and what they wore. Because most of my research took place during cold months and early spring, I traced back distinctions in fashion according to the current season. During one of these masses, I sat down in the middle of the church in order to have a good view. I saw one of the Directors in the European Parliament walking in through the central nave with a stern face and his wife beside him, holding his shoulder. He had on a thick, dark and plain wool coat in a dark plum colour, one that represented the stereotyped and specific style of NMS Directors over 50 or MEPs from Poland. This style was marked in EU-space as out of fashion, old or

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from a former era: thick black coats, black, plum, or graphite in colour, with small, plain collars and silk scarves with a paisley pattern, and most often trousers with a crease and black leather shoes. One of the Directors in the church wore a flat cap on his head. These Directors would walk into the church not looking at anyone nor greeting anyone, with a stiff, pompous pace. There was one exception: one Director always walked into the church at a brisk pace, with a serious face, and proceeded with his wife and grown-up sons directly to the front rows. He was a bit younger than the other Directors and looked different from them. He wore a wool, kneelength jacket, with pockets sewn in the front, no scarf of any kind, leather shoes and trousers with a crease; unlike his colleagues at the same level, who had classical male haircuts parted to the side – he had short hair that loosely fell forward. In the church, he would mark his distinction most of all through his hasty behaviour. I always experienced him entering and leaving the church hastily, whereas other Directors would walk through the central nave to/from the front, with their wives by their side. The one that was so dynamically walking in and out, as I found out later from a Director who also attended these masses, had, despite his distinctive behaviour (as if he were trying to say: I don’t have time, I’m not going to talk to you), a more communicative attitude, at least toward his Polish colleagues at the same level. In the church, there was only one woman who I know at the Director’s level. She always looked smart: either a skirt or trousers in dark colours, jacket also in dark colours, and a thin golden chain on her neck. Hers would fit the previous description of a sober NMS women’s outfit. The second group consisted of younger men (late thirties to mid forties), those wanting to be more visible and who also sat in the front rows with their children – those in positions of HoU or working in Cabinets – were dressed more casually, wearing British countryside jackets in brown, olive green, made of waxed material, with leather collars and sewn-on pockets. They wore English jackets of the type you can see from such labels as Burberry or Barbour. They would often wear cords or dark jeans or just casual trousers without a crease, made of dark fabric, and low, leather sport shoes with thick soles, of the type you can find in Ecco or Geox. Their distinct outfit also had another purpose: as I was told in an interview, later during the day they would socialize in non-Polish milieus, and I suppose there their British country style was not as distinctive as in the Polish church. When I came back to Brussels in March 2011, I was struck by how the British country style had spread among people in the church and how popular this kind of fashion had become. Regrettably, I had not seen anyone from the Cabinet nor anyone who wore British country style previously, thus I was not able to see what they wore now or how these distinctions had developed. In the front rows there was also one younger man (between 40 and 45), who always wore a fine, black or dark suit, a shirt, and a fine,

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black coat, and whose hair was always modelled with a wet-look hair gel. His outfit and outlook (he was obese) singled him out. As I was later told by one of the EC civil servants (the one who wore a British country style jacket), this man worked at NATO and, as my conversation partner said: “yes, he is trying a bit to come to the fore”. However, these individuals wearing British country style were visibly different in the church, and I describe my experiences with one of them in detail further in the chapter on Polish Europeans, as he represented a group of players: those Polish Europeans who had had success in EU-space. Their performance was distinctive because as long as it was cold and grey outside, until the beginning of spring, I did not see among other Polish men in the church any of the lighter colours that are worn more frequently in Brussels or in countries where winter is not as frosty (Italy, France, Spain), as in Middle and Eastern Europe, colours like light bottlegreen, khaki or beige, which were more visible on Brussels’ streets. There were different versions of deep purple, blue and navy-blue, all shades of dark brown and very dark green, but I could not see any extravagant additions or bright or nondark and toned colours among the middle-aged and older men in the church (except those British country style jackets, which were dark, but still different). I mean here plaid jackets or coats in colours other than grey, black or navy blue. There was also a third group, a group of young civil servants (under 35), whom I could recognize and knew worked in lower AD posts (AD5, 6 or 7), and who for the most part were not married, but were often with their heterosexual partners10. The men wore either wool or cotton black or navy-blue slim fitted short coats and jackets to the knees, some with large, standing collars and two rows of buttons in front and other additions (similar to trench coats). However, those with more plain coats and jackets often wore a thin-striped long and colourful scarf tied in a knot around the neck. I was surprised how many of them would wear the same kind of scarf, which seemed to be somehow popular among Polish men at the Commission – a scarf that contrasted in colour with the rest of their outfit. On a different occasion, one of my Dutch friends working in EU-space asked me: “What is this with the scarf, Paweł? Why do Polish guys always wear this scarf around their neck?” These colourful, striped scarves and the contrast against their monocoloured outfit made these men distinctive as a group of young ADs. However, as I went to Poland for Christmas that year, I also saw many such scarves on men of a similar age – apparently they were in fashion. I saw them in shops like Peek and Cloppenburg and worn by men in newly established big shopping malls, where the successful young middle-class people buy their outfits. An alternative taste within the same age and hierarchy level in the church was a sport jacket. However, not in 10 These young ADs performed similarly to the Directors who came with their wives; traditional gender roles here were rather visible.

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the British country style, but rather that of an Austrian ski slope: dark blue or light grey, sometimes red, made of gore-tex, some with red or other bright colour inlays, jeans or casual trousers and low shoes or sport shoes. Were they going to do some sports after the mass in some sports club? While some of the Directors attended Polish mass at the Dominican church, and in that way either marked their belonging (like the men wearing distinctive British country style – intentionally or not, they would take part in a social ritual and make their distinction visible) to the Polish community, some other Polish Directors in EU-space would openly or in a more concealed way make jokes about it and about all the activities that surrounded Foyer Catholique Européen. Some of them would openly distance themselves from the Polish community in general, and would also, and then less openly, make fun or slightly disrespect their Polish colleagues going to the church. In the latter case, I learned to decipher some comments after I realized the existence of divisions at the level of Polish Directors. Such divisions that, by manifesting secularism as opposed to the stereotypical representation of Poles as Catholics, and similar to the meaning of the sacro-kitsch bath, were there to mark one’s belonging to the Euroclass. These divisions at the Director’s level were not openly expressed, and I had the impression both parties involved tried to minimize them; sometimes, however, one could sense them, not in a direct assessment of one’s performance as an EU civil servant, but rather in comments about one’s lifestyle and pastime activities (laughing about singing in the church’s choir), or, on the other hand, about one’s past (of being an apparatchik in the former system when talking about those seculars). It is difficult to determine any patterns among women’s outfits due to the mere fact that I knew only one single female Director from the Commission who attended these masses. Younger women (up to their late thirties) often wore plain jackets. However, in contradiction to the men, their outfits were different in terms of colour: light or olive green, light purple, dark turquoise, and were also made of thinner fabrics. This was due to the fact that underneath they wore a sweater matching the colour and/or style of the jacket and a scarf. In the first rows, it was men who occupied the places, with women only there as partners/wives, which was visible in the overall social arrangement. The young men in casual British country style outfits were also distinctive because they were performing their progressiveness through their taking care of their kids, talking to them and explaining elements of the mass, as opposed to the traditional gender roles visible in the dominant male figures in the family, who were stern and gave the impression of not being present for the family. However, in taking seats in front rows, these British country style wearers were also marking their class belonging and their ambitions. As representatives of this middle-aged, progressive and career-oriented class, they came to the church without their spouses and performed the role of progressive

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father. However, there were also more traditional configurations of male behaviour, similar to that of the Directors, among this age group. This is what my field diary from 1.03.2009 says: The priest tells them to ‘turn off your TV-set’, he knows they are watching TV a lot and he is using a ‘we’ form, as opposed to the usual impersonal grammatical forms (as in a ‘normal’ mass). Those from the Commission, mostly [wearing] coats made out of fabric, brown, black, often colourful scarves. Conservative! It’s all good quality, but not chic, women [with] matching colourful sweaters, scarves and other elements, other colours than the men, but also grey coats, alternatively jackets. You can see that those from the Institutions know each other and stick together. Masses of children and buggies! After the mass signatures are collected supporting Gowin’s11 IVF bill proposal. They look at me curiously but discretely – probably not knowing where to place me, as I wear cargo pants and a cord jacket, lamb-wool jumper, a brown, white and black scarf around my neck, and casual, black sport shoes. Those women, I guess, not from the institutions wear nylon jackets (wives?), looking thicker and warmer, brown, lilac, white – they are more practical, water resistant, good for Brussels weather. Apparently children are integrative factor. [name] coming out of the church with a stern face with his wife beside – like a landowner in a village church in Poland.

Apart from collecting signatures in support of the anti-IVF bill, another time they were collecting money for an orphanage in Poland. After the mass in the “EU church”, as in the Dominican church in Warsaw, the priest would invite the community for a coffee and tea in the community’s venues behind the church. The crowd at the coffee hour was young (and I mean here people between their late twenties and late forties), composed of Polish EU civil servants in lower AD posts and those middle-aged men in British country style outfits, who were, as in the church, distinctive in this group. The times I attended these meetings, I only sometimes saw one or two of the Directors from the Commission. The kawa i ciastka (coffee and cake) was also a clearly EU-profiled and social occasion, where social distances and belongings were manifested, where networking was performed and Polish bonds reaffirmed. These were EU profiled, because there were people there from the EU institutions – some of the younger 11 The same IVF bill proposal as in the Bible example. Jarosław Gowin (born 1961) is a conservative politician and a former member of the Civic Platform party (a conservativeliberal party headed by then-Prime Minister Donald Tusk) and former Minister of Justice in the Polish Government (2011-2013). Gowin established his own conservative party in 2013 called Polska Razem (Poland Together), and later entered a coalition with Kaczynski’s Party PiS (Law and Justice). Since Nov. 2015, he is a Minister of Science and Higher Education in the PiS-led Szydło government (national-conservative).

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ADs wearing scarves, but most of all middle-aged families. People would know each other and their children would go to one of the European schools together, or would get prepared for their first communion or Christmas nativity play together. I attended these coffee hours several times, and I was clearly a foreign body there (also because I did not have a kid with me?) – they looked at me as if I was an intruder. Even if some of the people knew me, they would either pretend not to recognize me or clearly ignore me, by looking at me and not replying to my nod and looking away. However, they were also strongly preoccupied with themselves, with chatting to the proper persons about children and work – strategically choosing their conversation partners, somehow naturally but it was visible that they were waiting for each other’s turns or until the desired conversation partner was available. These desired conversation partners were those British country style wearers, one of whom worked at the Cabinet, the other as HoU in a prestigious DG of the Commissions, both having good networks to Polish Directors. However, the children of the British country style wearers were visibly bored. They were outsiders in the crowd of Polish children, as they did not go to the Polish section of the European school, but to Belgian schools. This small talk about children, about everyday life with strategically chosen partners fulfilled not only the function of exchanging information about private life, but created social bonds (“we know each other”) that could be activated when suitable (see also Kaschuba, 1993). They were establishing the Polish sociality, performing and applying Polish, religious habitus. I could hear them discussing schooling strategies for their children, but also their travel plans and sometimes issues connected to their place of residence, doctors and other public services. Socializing around the Polish EU church, establishing Polish networks was somehow there to subvert – a too liberal in their view –European doxa, but it simultaneously reproduced aesthetically the divisions created by the imagined European superiority and thus the power of the European doxa. These meetings reminded me of meetings of some kind of elitist club, of Rotary Club meetings that I knew from Warsaw: similarly dressed people, organizing charity events and social events – only these here had a more ideological meaning (anti-IVF) – that rather than having a charity function were there to strengthen social bonds, outlooks and statuses12. However, unlike the Rotary Club, they also had political meaning and a EU-space context. Signing supportive letters against IVF bill should reaffirm shared values, like practices focused on children and their upbringing in the Catholic faith (First Communion, jasełka13), subverting liberal 12 I also once went to a performance of the Commission’s German amateur theatre, which took place in the small, quiet suburban town of Overijse, next to Brussels. I remember sitting in the audience and looking at people, at their outfits and faces, I had the impression of being in a rich suburb of Stuttgart or Munich. 13 In Polish jasełka means Christmas Nativity play (Ger. das Krippenspiel).

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Europe, and reproducing the Polish-national traditional representation of conservative values, and, simultaneously, the divisions caused by the superiority of the Eurostyle of the Euroclass, as well. While charity fits elite practices both in Poland and in EU-space, their manifestation here to bond conservative values reinforced both Polish social belonging and values, and the reproduction of the national representation in the secular environment of EU-space. It was their national distinction in the EU environment, their positioning, somehow subverting the European doxa, and in this seeming subversion of the cultural norm in EU-space, perfectly reproduced doxa’s domination (Herzfeld, 2002, 2004). They organized charity events and money collections for charity purposes in Poland (financing schools for the disabled in Poland), which is also what people from OMS, the Euroclass, would do, except not in Church (except for, as I was told, the Irish). However, they also organized joint, Polish trips to Belgian cities or made pilgrimages to French or Italian sanctuaries to reaffirm their national and political/religious belonging. This was a performing and inscribing of nationally conceived practices (pilgrimages, preparing for First Communion, cake and coffee), manifesting belonging and shared values, and having their source in Poland. The coffee hour shows the reproduction of a national universum, of “national trivialities”, but it also makes a political statement in EUspace for those Poles gathered in the Church – we belong to Europe, but we have not lost our nationality (coded in the conservative Catholic faith). Simultaneously, however, these activities and practices in the Foyer Catholique, the colourful striped scarves that were seen by them as European, but in fact were Polish, were a legitimate way of building their national “sociality” (Riles, 2001) in the EU-space. The purpose was more or less copied from other nationalities – it was national networking, but in this case in the Polish way – in the church14. As I will show further in more detail, only those British country style wearers were performing the European habitus, and they were in the church to strategically mark their Polish belonging. The Directors with their stiff and aloof behaviour, reenacting their national habitus, and the young junior AD civil servants with their allegedly European colourful and striped scarves brought from Poland, were, in their own view, performing the Eurostyle, but their colourful scarves were not a clear status marker in EU-space, as they would have been in Poland. In the EU church, Polishness was reproduced in Catholicism and conservatism, but also in new class distinctions, caused by being “in Europe”, but brought back from Poland, 14 Similar to the Irish, as allegedly the Irish would network in “their” St. Anthony parish. As I learned from a senior AD civil servant from Ireland, an Irish mass in the Irish parish of St. Anthony had a similar social/professional meaning to the Polish mass. He told me that when he came to Brussels over 15 years ago, he was told by his Irish colleague that he “must go to St. Anthony’s in order to get to know people”.

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and resulting from an imagined Europeanness in the consumption patterns of the new Polish middle class. Those gathered at the coffee hour did not reproduce Eurostyle, as they rather reproduced “national trivialities” (Löfgren, 2000) and ethical conservatism (as opposed to the social-liberal European doxa). They copied both Western elitist class distinctions (e.g. charity), trying to mark their status within EU-space and towards other Poles in Brussels, and copied a middle-class lifestyle and practices taken from Poland. However, the real Eurostyle performance was that of those British country style wearers; I will come back to this issue later. For me these practices were overexaggerated: they were too obviously aimed at the affirmation of status. Those at the coffee hour reproduced “national trivialities”. They reproduced the “Polish universe” and Polish networks as sociality, but for them the class distinctions were more relevant. Many were Europeanized in their consumption strategies, in their new lifestyle and class distinctions caused by their presence in EU-space and their imaginations about Europeanness, but simultaneously they underlined their national belonging by their Polish conservatism, by not crossing out God. They saw themselves as Europeans, but probably tacitly wanted to subvert the European doxa. In this way, they were ultimately reproducing the European doxa: both in subversion, that only reaffirmed their Catholic and nonmodern status (which is why other Polish Directors laughed about them) and in the reproduction of national distinctions, and nationally perceived class distinctions that were evoked by their imagination about being European (in terms of consumption), and by their presence in EU-space and their desire to become members of the Euroclass. Above all, the EU church brought together people working in the EU institutions and had the atmosphere of the new Polish middle class living in big cities, celebrating and observing their own markers of belonging: through outfits and status symbols (striped scarf), and through the establishment of feelings of shared values. But this did not really culturally belong to EU-space, it did not represent the European doxa. This is similar to the hyper-neoliberal ideas they were accused of representing by people from OMS, but which these NMS people thought were modern and European (as in “fresh approach” example). In this EU church, the community was certainly not only founded on religious and nationally perceived grounds, but also on class, and on shared status practices reproduced daily, and their alleged European lifestyles and their European working environment (EU institutions). It was a good society, and while it may resemble elite environments in Poland, they constituted the new Polish and Europeanized elites in Brussels, reproduced by a particular social and professional position (working for an EU institution). Their allegedly “European Polishness” would rather be reduced to shared outfits and consumption patterns (housing strategies, travel plans, the striped scarf of the successful Polish middle class). On one hand,

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they aspired to be European (at least in consumption terms), but on the other, the shared cultural values of traditional gender roles (with the exception of the British country style wearers) and a restrictive stance on reproductive rights and methods (the anti-IVF petition) distanced them from the European ideal. This Polish EU church shows how EU-space is nationally constructed and evokes the reproduction of national habitus, but it also shows how Europe evokes class distinctions, distinctions that in their reproduction conflate class distinctions from Poland. I also went several times to the Polish mass in the Église de la Chapelle/ Kappellekerk in Sablon/Zavel. Apparently there was a different public in this church, and I think in the great majority it was attended by Polish labour migrants to Brussels. This Polish parish was much older then the one in Foyer. Here I was surprised how many men and women wore black leather jackets and coats; the women were in high heels, some of whom had shiny white or black leather bags. Their high heels stamped loudly on the stone flooring of the old cathedral; many of them had long, blond hair. Some men wore black leather jackets and classic black or dark navy-blue trousers and black shoes, though some wore white sport shoes. During the mass there was no modification in its course and no familial atmosphere, as there was in Foyer. It reminded me of masses from my late childhood: a fixed ritual with a common understanding of social and ritual roles when the active priest is preaching and the faithful are passively and obediently listening to his words, with a shared anonymity. In this church, the sermons were often about do’s and don’ts. Here is what my diary says about a visit to the church in Sablon/Zavel: You can see by the people that it’s more ‘normal’ here; they are more pious (I came earlier, before the mass, they come in, go to the central nave and automatically kneel down for a moment and pray). Those dressed in better quality fabrics, similarly to those from Foyer Catholique, are more visible. More people from the old, postwar Polish immigration to Belgium? There are some people who look a bit like those in the EU church, but in general it’s the feeling of a mass in Białystok. Women in stiletto heels or alternatively high-heel long boots, black leather jackets or coats (leather as a symbol of wealth?) and also nylon jackets. There are almost no small kids under the age of three, children doing the reading, no choir but an oasis15 singing with a company on the guitar, and the awful, unfounded voice of a nun. Children reading very unclearly, so one cannot understand what they are reading. Intentions16 15 Oasis (Polish: oaza) is a form of neocatechumenal religious group most often directed at teenagers. The activities comprise common prayers, singing, pilgrimages, trips and camps, and joint readings. Oasis, for a part of Polish society and for me, stands for exaltation and extreme conservatism. 16 This is a part of the Catholic mass when intentions of prayers are expressed by the community (sometimes by each of its members).

270 | EU- SPACE AND THE E UROCLASS request prayers for Poland and the ‘motherland’, or for ‘Poles who remained in the country and for those on migration’. Here the sign of peace17 is in the form of a mumbling and a nod. At the Dominican church everybody around shakes hands; here in this church fewer people take the communion.

There was a clear difference between the European church and the one in Sablon/Zavel. The church in Sablon/Zavel was more traditional; it represented migration from nonmetropolitan Poland, as the style of people there was not that of the Warsaw, Gdańsk or Poznań young middle class, nor did they aspire to being modern and European in their practices and outfits. Neither did the people there strive to establish some special kind of community, other then the traditional Polish one. However, I met one civil servant in DG SANCO in his thirties, who told me with audible resentment in his voice that he felt “much more Polish” in the church in Sablon/Zavel than in the European church: “I feel there much more Polishness than in this funny ‘European’ church”. The Europeans in the Foyer were seen by some Poles in EU-space as those who had “lost their Polishness”. Such opinions expressed a tacit feeling of distinctive practices that were too obviously aimed at networking and the reaffirmation of consumption practices (middle-class, in their view, European). This “loss of Polishness” voiced by some Polish civil servants was rather an expression of exclusion from the self-referential sociality in the Foyer, from this new and well networked Polish middle class that had established its space in Brussels through its distinctive conservatism and consumption practices hyphenated by the presence of Polish Directors. It stands for exclusion from Polish networks based on class practices, which in the end, as the example shows, were more relevant than national identification. These two churches represented social divisions reproduced from Poland, similarly to those described by Buchowski (2006): in one church were those who performed success and their new elitist habitus, and manifested their ability to take advantage of the transformation. They were manifesting and self-assuring each other of their status and the ability to transform their resources into – in their eyes – relevant forms of capital in the new European context. In the Polish EU church, they were reaffirming this ability and reaffirming their belonging to those with success because of this alleged European lifestyle. On the other hand, they saw a moral obligation as Poles to reaffirm their ethical values – an issue that was also evoked by the powerful European doxa and (liberal) Europe. The Polish mass in Sablon/Zavel represented those who – in the eyes of those successful Europeans – were seen as those who had not kept up, those who had been more or less pushed out by the difficult realities of the transformation, those who had to come to 17 Also a fixed part of the Catholic mass when a sign of peace is exchanged within the community.

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Belgium in search of a better job and a better life (reproducing in fact the dominant in EU-space stereotype about Poles). These churches also differ in their different understanding of what Polish means. The Europeans manifested their ability to perform consumption patterns as imagined Western and modern consumption patterns. In a way, they were trying, to some extent, to represent new Polishness, which in their view means modern middle-class aesthetics. In the Sablon/Zavel church, the consumption patterns and bodily hexis are similar to that of what I know from mid- or small-sized towns in Poland. While in both churches Polishness was attached to the Catholic faith, what made them different was class difference. Those from Foyer Catholique wanted to be similar to Germans, French or Swedes – having modern and wealthy lifestyles and reproducing their imagination about it, but only at the level of consumption (except for older Directors), while their religious practices were more Polish, and I suppose they would claim, more ethical (as the Bible example showed) than the practices of those from Sablon/Zavel, who it seems, want to remain traditional and Polish in their consumption patterns (thick leather jackets like those found in a church in Białystok, as a form of subversion?). I must admit I never went to any social event organized in the church in Sablon/Zavel. However, what is most important in the descriptions of these two churches are the opinions that were aired by these Europeans about those going to Sablon/Zavel church, and in general, what this latter church represented to them. I heard a lot of patronizing and condescending comments about the Sablon/Zavel church among these Europeans, who either made fun of those craftsmen, and, as I once heard, plebs/mob, or were just ashamed of them (with few exception that I mentioned). These two churches were two parallel Polish worlds in Brussels that would not come together, perhaps apart from the moment of boarding a low-cost airplane from Charleroi to Warsaw. The social events organized in the European church, at least during the time of my research, never included the other community from Sablon/Zavel, nor were there common activities organized around the religious calendar, although the Sablon/Zavel church Polish community was older and had its own venues. There was social Orientalizing in this division (Buchowski, 2006), identifiable along parallel idioms: urban vs. rural, educated vs. uneducated and winners vs. losers of transformation (ibid., p. 466). While the Europeans were organizing meetings under the title “how to buy a house in Belgium”, the other group was sharing flats, and sharing trips by car to Poland; the former did not want to have anything in common with the latter. These class divisions among Poles in EU-space and in Brussels ran along imagined and implicit ideas about what modern practices are, and about what a real European and a “European Pole” was and what was not-really-European; this became apparent in lifestyles, way of dress, comments about how the Others lived and what they did (laying tiles, working on construction sites, working as drivers or cleaning personnel), and in their

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embarrassment and perception of them as too traditional and backward. These divisions and, as Buchowski calls them, Orientalizations run throughout Polish society (Buchowski, 2006), and are reproduced in Brussels. One group sees itself, based on their consumption practices and style, as modern and maybe traditional, but in this way also European (which, in fact, is crypto-colonial); however, they also see themselves as socially and culturally superior to the Poles in the Sablon/Zavel church. Polish items Orvar Löfgren shows (2000) how in the 1960s and 1970s, homogenization and nationalization was inscribed in the everyday life of Swedes. In this – as he calls it – “ethnification” of Swedish culture, lists of “typical Swedish” items were produced, the aim of which was to represent some imagined characteristics of being Swedish and belonging to Swedish society: In the media, Swedish culture was reified into lists of favourite culture traits or a certain ‘Swedish mentality’. As Jonas Frykman has shown, the narratives of Swedishness very much reflected the new Zeitgeist (see Ehn, Frykman and Löfgren 1993:155 ff.). The list-making in itself is also interesting. ‘Swedishness’ as a collection of items or traits also tells us about the role of the media and the market in packaging and distributing cultural images. Itemization is also part of a commoditization, and in marketing campaigns of the 1980s, the traits of ‘Swedishness’ became a theme, sometimes with an ironic smile, sometimes as nostalgia: don't you remember those shared moments of being Swedish. (Löfgren 2000, p. 11)

The reproduction of “national trivialities” (ibid.) and of what I call “Polish items” in EU-space as a concomitant of Europeanization and conflated with class distinction was also visible in the interior design of the Polish EU civil servants’ flats. These interiors revealed Polish and European(ized) tastes. While it was funny for my friend to have sacro-kitsch in her bath, and she would see herself as belonging to the Europeans, her European belonging was also visible in other rooms of her flat. In one of them, she had big, old wooden wardrobes bought at a flea market in Brussels, just as my British-Dutch friends did, and a big, modern couch from Ikea. We also laughed about meblościanki (wall units18) and the high gloss polish of the furniture of some Polish people she knew in EU-space and whose flats she and I had visited. Many Poles would buy their furniture in Poland. I saw one such “Polish” interior in an AD official’s flat that was also representative of a particular Polish

18 Meblościanka, a wall unit, has a status of petit-bourgeois furniture in Poland.

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habitus common among Polish EU civil servants, similar to those colourful scarf wearers. This interior consisted of shiny wooden wall units with glass cabinets and halogen lamps inside them (and bottles of expensive alcohol), white (synthetic?) leather sofas and armchairs, and a shiny black glass coffee table in the living room. Next to the sofa and armchairs stood a shiny oak (hardwood) table, shiny heavy wooden chairs with a pastel pattern on their upholstering. These were not typical Polish petit-bourgeois items, but rather those of the nonintelligentsia middle class, and through their design and finish, they manifested that a large amount of money had been spent on them. Many of my interviewees told me that they bought furniture in Poland because they “know the producers and the market better and know what is good quality”, whereas in Brussels they “would have to get to grips with the local furniture market” (Both quotations from an interview with an AD7, Polish, DG ADMIN, 5 years of service), for which they allegedly did not have time (and apparently shipping was not a problem). Their allegedly rational choices can be explained by the habitus structure and taste, which are both, at least in the matter of aesthetic patterns, particular for a new, emergent Polish middle class, but which is seen by some other Poles as tasteless and ridiculous – particularly buying furniture in Poland. However, I saw such furniture only at the houses of young junior ADs. While they were reproducing “Polish aesthetics”, and their point of reference was the interiors and styles of the Polish middle class (similar to the colourful scarf from the EU church), they were also concomitant with imaginations about Europe and the good life, through this they also reproduced nationality in what Orvar Löfgren calls “national trivialities” (Löfgren, 2000), evoked by their presence in EU-space and the work of imagination about Europe (Appadurai, 1998). If EU civil servants from Poland bought houses or flats that needed to be renovated, they would very often hire Polish workers, who would bring building materials from Poland. Sometimes they even hired Polish architects based in Brussels. Poles would choose and bring tiles and fittings from Poland, and sometimes even concrete. Most of them had Polish cleaning ladies and housemaids; they went to Polish shops – at least to buy Polityka (a Polish left-liberal magazine read by the intelligentsia) or Wprost (back then left liberal weekly magazine, now conservative/nationalist liberal) or the Polish edition of Newsweek (conservative liberal weekly magazine). They often had their cars registered in Poland19. My Dutch-British friends bought their furniture at markets, in second-hand shops or just brought them from family from Holland. This was seen as normal, reasonable and tasteful, like the wardrobes bought at a flea market by my Polish 19 One of my interviewees from Germany, an outgoing HoU with a salary of 14.000€ also had his car registered in his home country because the taxes were lower there than in Belgium.

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Europeanized friend. Poles were caught up in playing out distinctions and hierarchies that were seen as legitimate and powerful and, in their view, marking the class of Europeans. But while they performed and reproduced these “national trivialities” and aesthetics, they also reproduced hierarchies built into their imaginations about what is modern and European, imaginations about the Eurostyle – as they perceived these furniture and interior designs as modern, which, in fact, were seen as tasteless or funny. These reproductions of “national trivialities” and class statuses marked their new status. The habitus of these Poles was Polish, but these new European practices (like buying expensive furniture in Poland) were adopted with the aim of presenting this new status; it was, so to speak, to show off. Thus, in the EU context, they were not only performing a tasteless habitus but were also not able to distance themselves from a nationally constructed habitus that was in this case illegitimate in EU-space, marked as unmodern. Poles did not have much with which they could identify themselves as Polish, because it was stereotypically marked as nonmodern (there was not much that was both Polish and modern that they could identify with). They also performed the petit-bourgeois habitus, because they were affected by this new status they were striving to show, and these performances were assessed as petit bourgeois in EU-space. There were no “Polish items” in EU-space (similar to “Swedish items”) but, as I show below, some Poles tacitly detected the potential of and rules for national representation in the face of the European doxa in EU-space. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus presumes its flexibility and dynamic, changeable character, and, as he writes, its agency is based on possession of particular economic and cultural capital that enables one to “perceive and seize the ‘potential opportunities’ formally offered to all” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 124). These potential opportunities were taken up and used by some of the Polish EU civil servants in order to reposition themselves by modifying the stereotype – at least for their own purpose – and producing “items” that were both “Polish” and modern or tasteful. Some of the Polish EU civil servants I came across, tacitly sensed the “opportunities offered” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 124); they were aware – consciously or not – that their capital, as persons from NMS, was devalued and unmodern, not fitting into the dominant aesthetics that conjoins modernity and the real Europe. Thus, they tried to change the meaning of “Polish items” from unmodern to modern. In terms of outfit, it translated into fashionable and on time, according to the dominant local aesthetic, and thus congruent with the Eurostyle, with a modern breach with the past. This is illustrated by a situation I experienced during one of the Polish meetings in Wild Geese. It is a kind of fieldwork snapshot, but I think it mirrors deeply rooted habitus structures and how they respond to powerful cultural criteria; it also shows the kind of cultural norms and values that

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connected people at these meetings (as opposed to other Poles in EU-space, e.g. those who detested these meetings and those supporting the restrictive IVF bill), how these Poles tried to become modern, perform Polishness as modern and European, and through this position themselves anew. By showing their agency they were actually more modern in the sense of the autonomy of a subject to act than those mocking and laughing about religious Poles or those having a moral agenda that should underscore their Polishness (see Herzfeld, 2002; Herzfeld, 2004). I stood at a bar in Wild Geese with someone I had met a few minutes earlier. It was a Polish woman, a junior Desk Officer (AD) at the Commission, and we were having a small talk type of conversation. It was interrupted by her friend, who approached us and said something to her about dancing – a kind of invitation to dance, probably because the DJ had appeared a few minutes earlier and the dance floor had opened. My conversation partner refused politely and told this man that he had a very nice shirt, which sounded neither like a compliment nor an apology or excuse for her refusal, but rather as an attempt to strike up a conversation. The shirt was a white and casual in style, with light red and blue checks, which to me looked like an American/British style casual shirt, the kind you see with the Hilfiger label. He wore it with rolled sleeves, and I can say that this did not resemble any of the stiff or out of fashion outfits stereotypically connected with NMS. The owner of the shirt, a Pole, said: “It’s from Poland! Thank you! Nice, isn’t it?! I bought it in Warsaw for (and he named the price of almost 90 PLZ [around 25€]) on sale in Galeria Centrum20!”. I remember I was astonished by this quick, spontaneous response, which for me somehow did not fit the situation. He emphasized “Poland”, even in the way he spoke the sentence after saying “Poland”: shaking his whole body to the rhythm of the club music, which somehow emphasised his statement and its meaning. He made it very clear that he bought (and is buying) his shirts in Poland, which he finds cool (fitting to the situation and the club music). He positioned himself in opposition to all those buying outfits in Brussels – quite a common practice among those who felt European, among those laughing about outdated, Polish outfits. But 20 Galeria Centrum is located in Warsaw’s city centre, and is the successor to the Domy Towarowe Centrum, established in the 1970s. Domy Towarowe Centrum was a symbol of the blooming socialist economy of the 1970s in Poland. During the transformation, it has lost its prestige and, due to competition from huge, newly-built shopping malls on the outskirts of the city, lost most of its customers. At the beginning of 2000, it went through a major refurbishment and reopened selling “Western labels” as Galeria Centrum (at that time most shopping malls in Warsaw were named “Galeria”) though, in the face of the modern and shiny shopping malls popping up in Warsaw, it never fully regained its previous prestige.

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he also distinguished himself from the colourful-scarf wearers from the church that reproduced fashion from Warsaw. He made clear that he finds and thinks Polish shirts (or rather those brought in Poland) are as good, or better than those bought in one of the shops in Rue Neuve/Nieuwstraat, on Av.Louise/Louizalaan or anywhere else in Brussels or Paris or London, where some of the European Poles would shop. He responded to the stereotype produced by the European doxa, but contrary to those in the Polish church, without any attempt to subvert the doxa based on moral grounds. Given the previously sketched out cultural context within Polish EUspace, he was making a political and national statement by emphasizing his Polish shirt, minus a nonmodern stereotypical religious representation of Poles. The shirt he bought in Warsaw, although it was bought in Warsaw, had a modern and fashionable or on time status. While he was reproducing “national trivialities” (buying a shirt in Warsaw and not in Brussels), this reaction sent a message: “I buy my shirts at a good price in Poland and I don’t spent much money on my outfit” as well as “Polish clothes are also fashionable, fun and fitting to EU Brussels”, and particularly to this Friday evening meeting of Poles with club music (as opposed to the church and as opposed to glossy and heavy furniture brought from Poland). His spontaneous reaction points to (and dismantles) the pervasiveness of the stereotype of the badly dressed Pole in EU-space. He was trying to respond to this stereotype, producing a “modern/fashionable Polish item” and positioning himself in this power discourse in the particular situation of the Polish meetings in Wild Geese. The grey-coloured suits and jackets, thick soled shoes in winter, not always fashionable shirts, being sober and, as I have shown above, middle-class outfits or interiors reproduced from Poland and the bodily hexis in general, were often fertile ground for establishing (self-)stereotypes about NMS in EU-space. The reaction of this person proves that he was at least tacitly aware of the stereotype; he knew that clothes bought in Warsaw did not have the status of those bought in Brussels: they were not European enough. His exclamation about the shirt that he had bought it in Warsaw and his reaction to the compliment of my conversation partner was also a means of saying: Polish clothes can also be good looking, fashionable, and have a good cut and style, corresponding to the Eurostyle, to the style that is up-to-date instead of backward and not reproducing fashions and lifestyles from Warsaw. I also saw his shirt as fashionable and nice, and I claim that given the powerful Eurostyle and European doxa, he was trying to define Polishness anew, produce a “modern Polish item” against the common stereotype, simultaneously reinforcing powerful cultural European aesthetics. However, in the context of the Polish meetings in Wild Geese (as opposed to the church), he was constructing a feeling of national belonging, of shared views and values away from morality and Catholicism, embodied rather in everyday lifestyle, around modern items that are readable and fashionable in EU-space, contrary to the furniture and colourful

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scarves bought and reproduced from Poland. I could observe these strivings to redefine Polishness among some groups of Polish EU civil servants: they tried to define Polish against the stereotype of a backward/distasteful/traditional Poland and give Polish a positive (in this context even fun), legitimate and modern connotation. They were trying to give Polish “national items” a modern, fashionable, meaning, congruent with the Eurostyle, just as Germans would claim their cars as their “national item”, Swedes their design, and Italians their cuisine (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994). These “modernizers” were aware of the stereotypes, but instead of sticking vehemently to their national identifications or distancing themselves from representations of a nationality that was a burden or anti-capital in EU-space, they wanted to change the stereotype and give Polish items a modern meaning. I think these modernizers sensed how to perform the European habitus. Their modernizing, national agenda (although, I would claim, unconscious, and thus pointing to the working of cultural power of the modern European doxa) became more apparent when juxtaposed with the Polish church outfits (except those British country style jackets) and more national EU Parliament and the Polish MEPs there, with their stereotypical, “out of fashion” thick grey or brown jackets and coats, which were seen as being obsolete in cut, and with their haircuts and glasses that did not match the Brussels style. However, their European status was also visible in their strategy not to repulse national identification, as such an action is always deemed a failure and marked as illegitimate.

P RACTICES

OF DESERVING

There were, however, different habitus strategies for coping with the powerful European doxa and the stereotypical Polish representation. While the examples from the EU church show rather stiff habitus structures, because they reproduced class and national practices from Poland that were either pretentious, incomprehensible or, in their response to the European doxa and their moral undertone, crypto-colonial (Herzfeld, 2002), there were also other, false strategies of subjectivization. I show below another stiff performance of habitus, one that did not reproduce practices and class distinctions from Poland, but which responded to the conditions in EU-space through the negation of one’s own national representation, making EU-space its only point of reference, rather then copying trusted practices, as was the case in the EU church or represented by the bourgeois Polish interior. This is an example of a different habitus strategy in coping with Polish stereotypes in EU-space.

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While the sacro-kitsch bath also represents a striving to detach oneself from a negative Polish stereotype that is marked by a lack of modernity, it represents, in contrast to the example below, a flexible and casual performance of habitus (by making fun of the stereotypical Polish representation), an ability to place one’s own traditional-Polish and stereotypical national representation in brackets and manage it, rather than negate it. The example below represents practices of deserving – practices that were aimed at negating one’s national identity due to the backward stereotype and unmodern status it attaches to Poles in EU-space, practices that are aimed at self-reassuring that one belongs to the Euroclass, but which are illegitimate, as in EU-space everybody “represents somebody or something”. Dolling up The practices of some Polish EU civil servants were strikingly similar to those of the colonized, as described by Frantz Fanon in his book Black Skin White Masks, where he describes the process of uprooting a Martiniquan Negro, a black man who has spent time in metropolitan France. Fanon writes: “He no longer understands the dialect, he talks about Opera, which he may never have seen except from distance, but above all he adopts critical attitude toward his compatriots. Confronted with his trivial occurrence, he becomes an oracle. He is the one who knows.” (Fanon & Markmann, 1991, p. 24) To underscore his argument, Fanon refers to D. Westermann: Professor D. Westermann, in The African Today (p. 331), says that the Negroes’ inferiority complex is particularly intensified among the most educated, who must struggle with it unceasingly. Their way of doing so, he adds, is frequently naïve: ‘The wearing of European clothes, whether rags or the most up-to-date style; using European furniture and European forms of social intercourse; adorning the Native language with European expressions; using bombastic phrases in speaking or writing a European language; all these contribute to a feeling of equality with the European and his achievements.’ (Fanon & Markmann, 1991, p. 25)

Practices of deserving are deeds and actions aimed at manifesting one’s belonging to the Euroclass, but which in fact exclude one from belonging to this Euroclass because they are recognized by the real Eurohabitus as tasteless and incongruent with the legitimate Eurostyle or the European doxa. These practices are evoked by deeply internalized feelings of intimidation that cause the repulsion of national representation, which is illegitimate in EU-space. This intimidation, as Bourdieu shows (Bourdieu, 2010), is an intrinsic attitude of the petit bourgeoisie and in fact places these Poles automatically in the lower class, in the class of not-really-

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Europeans, because the European taste will detect them as imitating and not performing a natural and modern or, when needed, self-distanced national habitus. Denying one’s national representation, rather than managing, is seen as unnatural and illegitimate in EU-space, and excludes one from succeeding in the struggle for position within the formal hierarchy21. Writing about stereotypes in reference to NMS men’s outfits (see chapter “The Eurostyle of the Euroclass”), I mentioned that one of the senior German civil servants used a pejorative German expression sich aufputzen (to doll up). This sich aufputzen became clear to me (and revealed my Europeanized position) after I got to know a Polish junior AD official in DG EMPL, who was a neighbour of my friends, the Dutch-British couple. I met him at one of the numerous parties they organized in their flat. It was a good opportunity to ask him for an interview appointment. He gave me his telephone number and email, and I sent him a summary of my research project. When I called him to set up the appointment, he tried to convince me that I had the wrong thesis and that people from NMS did not have a different lifestyle than those from OMS (he had a degree in the social sciences). After he clarified this to me, we finally managed to arrange a meeting, and a few days later, I met him for an interview in his flat. Before I was able to start posing my questions, in a small talk manner, he showed me for about an hour pictures from his scuba diving holiday in the Philippines. His flat was modern – white walls with ingrain wallpaper (Raufaser), and furniture from Ikea. After this, a bottle of red wine was opened, and he told me that he had always wanted to leave Poland and that when he was a child, his father went to America for two years and: “thanks to that I knew that there is an important world out there. It was a bit like the Truman Show syndrome”. To my question about the kind of newspapers and magazines he reads, he told me that he had never bought a Polish magazine because all of them were of “peripheral journalism, journalism of a third rate”, which he “detests” because “it doesn’t interests me at all [the topics in those magazines and newspapers] and it is so shallow”. He reads The Independent because “when I open it, there’s something about orangutans, about deforestation and this is a completely different perspective, this is a world perspective. I prefer to read about development of air traffic and its repercussions for CO2 emission, than that Kaczmarek [Minister of Justice in the Polish government at the time, a reference to a corruption scandal in the Polish government, the so-called afera gruntowa] accused someone of something – this just makes me want to puke”. He also told me that he preferred to read about the ageing of Japanese society than about “the thunder that killed a cow 21 Somewhat similar is the example of the previously described (chapter on Eurostyle) Polish Director that was mentioned by my Irish interview partner who so vehemently rejected any request for help from Poles and claimed that “we never had a tradition of modern bureaucracy”.

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in Suwalskie [a rather poor region in North-East Poland known for its cold climate and in general marked in Poland as peripheral]”. To my remark that it is a general problem of the media – writing and contributing only what increases the publisher’s profit margin – he said: “The great problem is whole peripheral character of this public sphere [in Poland]. This is a country on the periphery of Europe that is slowly finding its way, where the intellectual class is very weak, emaciated, almost at the point of starvation.” (AD7, Polish, DG EMPL) He also told me in reference to Polish Catholicism that it is burdening the society and that the word of a bishop is more important than anyone else’s, and that Poland, through its membership in the EU, has oriented itself “towards the West” and is “leaving this state [of conservatism and Catholicism]”. I also asked him whether he attends the Polish EU meetings in Wild Geese, and he responded that he meets people because he likes them, not because of their nationality. I must admit such opinions about the peripheral status of Poland and its social and economic condition were not isolated among Polish civil servants at the Commission, though not a rule and, as the aforementioned words of the Irish civil servants about being “thrown back to old Ireland of strong Catholicism” show, not specific only to Poles. They depicted generally shared convictions about the “civilizing processes” (Elias, 1982) connected to the EU and Europeanization, but most of all, showed an implicit hierarchy between “more European” and “less European” countries, evidence of what Appadurai calls “trajectorism” (Appadurai, 2012), and which I see, after Stoler (2013a), as imperial debris in EU-space that reproduces the cultural difference and dichotomic order and through that curtails the possibility of agency. As my German gatekeeper said: the NMS are gradually learning how to express their interests at the EU level. However, the words of my interviewee described above show how much he wanted to be different and distance himself from this peripheral Poland. Simultaneously, he was Orientalizing it (Buchowski, 2006) and putting himself in a different symbolic, centred position. I suggest that he represents a habitus of an upward climber; he makes apparent certain dominant, imagined aesthetics in EU-space, which in general reveal internalized stereotypes and imperial cultural power, a dream of the West and of Europe (cf. Fanon & Markmann, 1991). As I will show further, his habitus did not fit into the legitimate way of behaving, and he was stigmatized as “dolled up” because, as Bourdieu writes, habitus produces coherent practices visible in moral and aesthetical choices, but in this case, they were not congruent with the Eurostyle, and this was detected by European taste. The reading of sensibilities of the Eurohabitus marked him as not fitting into the EU-space’s Eurostyle. And here is a story about why this is so. As I came back to Brussels in March 2009 for the second round of interviews, my friends told me a story about an encounter with their Polish neighbour on the

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staircase. The meeting occurred after the Christmas holidays and New Years Eve. They asked him whether he had been in Poland for Christmas. It is quite common in EU-space for people, independent of their nationality, age, grade and place of employment, to go – sometimes with their families – to their country of origin. They told me, he replied almost with outrage and anger that he had not been in Poland, but had gone on holidays to Australia. They also told me, not without amusement, that he wore black leather, English riding boots, riding breeches, a dark cord jacket and a cap, and that he in general “looked like an English dandy”. They were laughing that he still had mud on his shoes, and – I must admit – I laughed with them. We all assumed this was only to show off and, through our laughter and accusations, we actually questioned his real ability to ride a horse. After I have spent some time in Brussels, I could sense that a single young man from a NMS riding a horse on Sundays was a rather peculiar activity (however, not for the aforementioned French, middle-aged female Director from the Commission and her husband, although she “hated” this activity). But my friends’ reaction and mine implies that he was clearly overdressed and was trying to make an impression of being someone different than he actually was: he was “dolling up”. His strivings, though, were unmasked and ridiculed, marked as unfitting to EU-space and to his position, origin and age. His outfit and pastime activity were both seen as not fitting into the imagination and stereotype about NMS and to what Bourdieu describes as a lack of distance to oneself, a lack of unaffectedness that characterizes a person whose habitus, through apprenticeship, acquires the attributes of a distinct class (Bourdieu, 2010). His “dolling up” or his showing off actually represented petitbourgeois intimidation, a practice done with too much precision, representing a lack of distance to the role. And in EU-space this neither fits the Eurostyle of the Euroclass, nor is it the kind of habitus strategy that is legitimate in regard to national representation. These practices of deserving were therefore intended to convince himself and his surroundings about the accuracy of his outfit and pastime activity, in order to position himself as a European, to give him the feeling of belonging to the Euroclass, and sharing their values and lifestyles. But in fact it was sich aufputzen and an expression of this inferiority complex that Fanon has written about, trying to earn the status of European through practices that automatically mean marginalization, the marginalization visible in our laugh. Our taste at that moment revealed our position of defenders of the real Eurostyle, and, referring to Stoler, was proof of a “reading of sensibilities” of cultural “whiteness”. I apparently had been Europeanized and internalized the aesthetic rules of EU-space – a fact that was depicted in my laughter. I played out my Europeanness towards my fellow countrymen just to be on the powerful side of the dividing line between modern/European/West and not-really-modern/not-really-European and East. I had been Europeanized in terms of EU-space, where modernity, rather than being a

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homogenizing process (Löfgren, 2000) in the East, caused and causes divisions (Buchowski, 2006). However, the distinctions and fine-grained differences detected by real European taste guard the criteria for belonging to the Euroclass. My friends’ neighbour performs something I call “practices of deserving”, practices that reflect a striving to acquire European status, but which are dismantled as unfitting and pretentious and “too European”, because they totally reject national representation. Together with the “Polish shirt” explained above, both of these examples show a desire to be modern. The shirt example also shows the Europeanizing process, how subjects are reformed from within in order to gain European status but simultaneously try to retain their national identification. Although it is seen as stereotypically not-fully-modern and not fashionable, they also tacitly recognize the weight of national capital and the rule of representing one’s own country in EU-space. In the second example, the strivings to become European are done with a false strategy that is quickly revealed and ridiculed because this person so desperately wanted to show he was different from other Poles. It shows the power of the stereotypes formed by the European doxa, and our laughing depicted the powerful functioning of taste when lifestyles and details of outfit plus small gestures are detected, assessed and classified (Stoler, 2002, 2008). It also shows the dominant power on the level of the subject, as he is performing his own, imagined and internalized Europeanness, which is in fact marginalizing, because it rejects national representation completely. Everybody represents some nationality in EU-space; everybody has a national label that he or she somehow has to cope with. This is why these modernizers try to change the meaning of Polish in EU-space into legitimate and modern “Polish items” with which they could identify. While the EU church shows a rather uncreative habitus in its reproductions of Polish practices, the shirt example shows a more flexible attitude, a tacit recognition of various forms of capital and strivings to reshape them. Both the shirt example and the dolling up example once again show how national representations are relevant in EU-space. For OMS subjects, particularly those from “Charlemagne’s Europe”, the founding states of the EU, their own European, modern status is unquestionable; their fashion, even that of the MEPs from these countries, was congruent with the Eurostyle (though maybe not their political views). For them it was more legitimate and easy to manoeuvre between the application of national and European representations as capital in the bureaucratic struggle and struggle over prestige exactly because this national capital, being modern, had more efficiency than the national and unmodern capital of those from the NMS, and thus, in effect, French, Swedish, Dutch or Danish was synonymous with European. The anti-EU political views of the MEPs from OMS may have been labelled backward and nationalist, but were also a matter of political discussion, whereas those of the NMS MEPs were not a matter of discussion; they

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merely confirmed a stereotype. NMS have to prove that they are Europeans and modern as shown by both examples above.

P OLISH E UROPEANS

IN

EU-S PACE

I met two individuals from Poland who have made a fast career in the apparatus of the EU. They have both risen in formal hierarchy within quite a short period of time and held either a managerial post within the Commission or a top managerial position in one of the most prestigious EU institutions. They represent legitimate European habitus in EU-space and, as coming from NMS, provide an example of relevant strategies for gathering and managing capital in EU-space: bodily hexis, network capital, management of national representation in the face of the European doxa. While the practices of deserving, modernizing agendas and reproductions shown above are the effect of the habitus performance, the examples given in this subchapter show that some forms of capital have to be managed and manipulated, that the naturalness of the NMS national performance of habitus is not a ticket to making a career in EU-space. Acting légère, relaxation in tension – this is a kind of habitus performance that is necessary to perform the Euroclass habitus, also in terms of national representation. It is the performance of the class habitus of a white, middle-class modern European, the habitus of a self-distanced individual who is aware of the power matrix and European doxa, a habitus that is able to savour and play with convention, with national self-representation, with norms and rules in the EU-space. As Bourdieu shows, these abilities to be self-distanced and to acquire capital, are intrinsic to the bourgeoisie (Bourdieu, 2010; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Both of these successful individuals were men, and both were efficient and able to gather and manage both structural and cultural capital in order to move freely within networks in EU-space (one of them is the British country style wearer in the EU church), which made them distinctive against the backdrop of the stereotype, and enabled their elevation in the cultural and, in consequence, formal hierarchy. They represent what Aihwa Ong has called “flexible subjects” (1999), where flexible means the ability to acquire and use different forms of capital in what she calls a “transnational space”. The flexibility of these “Polish Europeans” was expressed by their presence in “Polish places”, like the Polish EU church or PermRep, performing their attachment to Polishness and the Polish EU community. On the other hand, they were also able to distance themselves in a flexible, nonpersonal and self-distanced way from a negative, stereotypical national representation. They had networks within the Polish community, including people in high formal positions, as these

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represented intrinsic capital in EU-space, but they also nurtured their non-Polish, European networks and status. Their habitus performed the Eurostyle on an everyday life basis in their aesthetic and private choices. “We don’t need to prove that we are camels” In the struggle over position and posts in the formal hierarchy, the “transitional period” and national quotas were formal factors that enabled NMS to place their nationals in senior posts at the Commission and in the EU administration in general. The “transitional period” represented the NMS’ capital stemming from nationality and legal arrangements made in accession treaties. During the time of my research, NMS were constantly underrepresented when it came to middle and upper management posts: positions of Heads of Units (HoU) and above (Directors, Deputy Directors general and Directors General) with grades AD9 and above. At the beginning of 2009, only 37% of managerial posts assigned to Poland were filled (31 posts out of 74 assigned to Poland), which, along with the Czech Republic, was the lowest rate out of all NMS. On my first round of interviews in 2008, Polish Directors at the Commission, except those who had worked previously in PermRep, often complained about a lack of interest from the Polish Permanent Representation to connect and network Poles working in top positions in EU institutions. They also complained about the lack of a Polish agenda – they were actually not able to clarify what that was; however they would claim that the French, Germans or others had one – and this was often derived from the activities of their PermReps and knowledge about the networks that existed among OMS. In EU-space there was a clear division between those Poles working in the PermRep and those in EU institutions. The local gossip among Poles was that all those working in the PermRep were trying to pass the concour and find a job within EU institutions. Those who had already managed such a shift often complained about the bad working conditions within the PermRep, about the unclear rules and stiff hierarchies within it, and not least about the remuneration that accentuated divisions among Poles, giving those working in the EU a better class status in EU-space – yet another line of tension among Poles in the EU-space. When I returned to Brussels in March 2009 and made another round of interviews with the same people, one of my interviewees told me about a meeting that had been organized in the Polish PermRep for prospective HoUs (those who had passed the exam and were on the so-called reserve list) with HoU and managers already working at the Commission – a meeting aimed at facilitating networks in the face of the upcoming end of the “transitional period” (January 2010). I somehow managed to get into this meeting at a modern villa in WoluweSt.Pierre/St. Pieters, where the PermRep was seated at the time (it is now in a

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modern office building just a few minutes walk from Schuman). The atmosphere was quite stiff, and the people at the meeting, both those already working at the Commission and those who had just arrived from Poland, were more focused on observing each other than on talking. Soon one of the organizers appeared: a person working at PermRep and responsible for promoting/lobbying for Poles in posts within EU institutions. She briefly told us about the schedule of the meeting and said that “we are waiting for the ambassador” to arrive. “The ambassador” turned out to be one of the Directors 22 at the EU Commission working in a DG that handled relations with third countries (which was at that time within the so-called “RELEX family”), who had previously been a high-ranking official in the Polish PermRep and in the Polish diplomatic service. We were asked to come up to a different room on the 1st floor, and as I entered it, the ambassador and a woman (as it later turned out was an undersecretary in the Polish Foreign Ministry) were already sitting at a table. One of the organizers made a short introduction, and the ambassador began his speech. He started by saying that after coming to the Commission one has to adapt to its conditions and that this is a “long cultural process”. As an example, he mentioned the Cabinets of the Commissioners. He said that in these places anything could be questioned and that their status and hierarchical system within the Commission in general stemmed from a model of French administration from the 1950s. He mentioned that after the enlargement, a Director General from an OMS had to negotiate with inexperienced young people from a Cabinet of the NMS’ Commissioner and that this often caused irritation. Among other difficulties he mentioned was a generation gap between OMS and NMS, as the average difference between Directors from OMS and NMS was ten to 15 years, and those from OMS had often worked for 15 years or more in one DG (they were excluded from the staff mobility measurement introduced by the Kinnock Reform), so it was expected that newcomers, as he put it, would “do what they are told to do”. He also talked about strong stereotypes that existed within the services (the DGs), some of which are repeated by the press. Here he mentioned the Czech presidency in the Council and the alleged poor conflict management shown during the Gaza crisis (when the Israeli army marched into the Gaza Strip in 2009). He said that “one should not take this too personally and be prepared to handle these stereotypes” and that “we don’t have to prove that we are camels”. “To not to pretend to be a camel” (udawać wielbłąda) is a Polish proverb that means more or less that one does not have to prove something obvious. In this particular context he means that one does not have to prove to everybody around one’s ability to handle every situation perfectly. This expression adhered to the upcoming Polish presidency in the Council, as it was also a topic of this meeting too. A second point 22 At that time, I didn’t know that it is an honorary title one gains for life, and thus this expression “the ambassador” caused my confusion.

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on this meeting’s agenda was the presentation of the Deputy Director in the Polish Foreign Ministry about preparations for the upcoming Polish presidency in the Council (second half of 2011). The Czech presidency (first half of 2009) was scrutinized in Brussels much more carefully than the first NMS presidency of Slovenia (first half of 2008, which was seen as the most developed of all NMS) and treated as a test of the abilities of NMS to preside over the Council. The Czechs’ activities were also watched carefully by other NMS, particularly Hungary and Poland, which, from among the NMS, respectively, took over after the Czechs23. The Director further said, “We should prove what we can do by doing things [well] and not through marketing”. This statement, together with the camel proverb, becomes clearer in the context of what was said in EU-space about the Czech presidency. Apart from the outrage resulting from the lost vote of confidence in the Czech parliament, and the resignation of Mirek Topolanek’s government during the presidency, the opinion about the Czech presidency was that the Czechs were arrogant and unprofessional, and – most of all – claimed success where there was a failure. However, the Director’s statement simultaneously showed several things. He knew the stereotype view of NMS as chaotic, unpredictable and generally not trustworthy, and their tendency to create a “propaganda of success” when, in local terms, there was no success. This showed that he was aware of the national representation of Poles and their performance in EU-space: the existence of “practices of deserving” – their inferiority complex, striving to represent something other than what they are, and shouting about success from the rooftops where there was a failure. What this proverb also entails is a pledge not to engage in the “propaganda of success”, to stay calm, or rather, to retain own one’s self-esteem and not become intimidated by stereotypes and negative judgments. However, what is most important for me here is that through this statement he made apparent that he was aware of both the stereotype and national performing, and that he knew what European and Polish patterns of behaviour were. He made this overt in his call for self-distance, distanced national identification, and “tension in relaxation” (Bourdieu, 2010) instead of “taking it personally”. This one statement gave me the understanding that this person knew the rules of performance in EU-space; he knew what (national) capital was (or was not) valid and knew how to manage it. He knew the legitimate ways for handling both policies and national representations. The ambassador, alongside giving tips on how to develop one’s professional career, also gave warnings against specialization – focusing only on one part of reality, or rather, one EU policy while working in the Commission. He said it was extremely important to see what others were doing, what policies were important now and what was “in the pipeline” in the Commission and in the Council – a fact 23 For a detailed list of presidencies in the Council see: http://www.consilium.europa.eu /en/council-eu/presidency-council-eu/ (last accessed on 20.04.2016)

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that required possession of a wide network of contacts. He admitted that this was time consuming but that it would “certainly pay off” and because of the rotation rule: “at some point one can find oneself in a post dealing with things that one had never dreamed of before”; thus, he knew the rules for and ways of becoming efficient. The ambassador elaborated a list of things that one had to stick to in order to “find one’s way in this environment”: one had to have national networks at every level and in as many DGs as possible, have networks of contacts inside and outside the Commission, and possess expertise in the field one was active in. Here he claimed that “the Southerners” would “rely on informal contacts” and that the Scandinavians and Germans were very formal: one can meet with them only on the basis of, as he put it, “consultations”. Another of his tips concerned the training offered by the Commission. He said that one should make use of them because of their networking potential, but, as he said: “the choice and quality is poor”. He recommended the coaching offered to newly-appointed HoUs and mentoring programmes for Directors. He mentioned that his own mentor “tells me how to live”. The last tip he had was to maintain good connections to the government in Warsaw and to lobby it, because “they are not always familiar with what is going on here, but this will change” and “they have to know when there is a good moment to intervene”. He also said that it was better to search for jobs from within the institutions. This strategy, as the speaker confirmed, while not effective in AST posts (because of advancement rules and the so-called attestation procedure), should be applied at the managerial post level. As the ambassador said, there is not much to choose from, and it is essential to get in and adopt a long-term perspective. He also stressed that while some Polish candidates are very well prepared, they have to face deeply rooted and strong national OMS networks within the institutions, and that this can “spoil one’s life” (zatruć życie). Trouble in finding a suitable job also stems from the belief of OMS managers that newcomers do not have networks within the institutions or outside of them, and thus do not add to their social network, formal and cultural position (prestige), or their potential efficiency. After the ambassador’s long talk there was a question and answer period. Out of some 19 people taking part in the meeting, six were already working in the Commission and according to my own knowledge only four were at the level of HoU or higher (I assume others had passed the internal concour for HoU and were on the list, but not yet in a position). Participants who were still outside the Commission’s apparatus complained about the intransparency of information given by the Commission itself, while the Director replied that this was an intrinsic characteristic of this institution and that one just had to gather information on one’s own.

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The ambassador was present at this meeting not only due to his formal position, but also because he was widely seen in Polish EU-space as “good”, as an efficient and respected civil servant from Poland who had made a career in the apparatus. His role during this meeting was to serve as an example of a real European among Poles; his prestige was valid both within the Polish EU community and in wider EU-space in Brussels, and his speech was a proof of his knowledgeable attitude to the struggle for position in EU-space. Actually, every time I spoke to anyone from Poland and this Director was mentioned, people would always refer to him with great respect. I once asked one of my conversation partners about him, and I was told that this Director (the ambassador) spoke all the working languages (however, as a graduate of German studies, his French, allegedly, was not as good as his German, Dutch and English), that he was reliable, that he was, as I heard from a former employee in the PermRep, “very professional” in the sense that he allowed people considerable freedom and assessed efficiency and achievement against set targets, rather than focus on process, like most Polish managers, who allegedly wanted to control everything and know every detail about the documents they signed, and who did not trust their own employees. Allegedly, as my friend told me, he was capable of differentiating between “pushing and shoving” (Polish: przepychanki) and what was really important. Some said he had a great sense of humour. This long description of what the Director said does not say much about him in relation to the elite habitus of a Director, mentioned in the previous chapter, nor about the forms of capital he possessed and managed in order to reach his status and become a “Polish European”. However, it revealed to me that this person knew exactly how the Commission worked and what discursive and implicit rules were in force (the camel proverb he used), what forms of capital were valuable in this field, and how to navigate this institution. His speech touched upon what was most important for functioning efficiently – as described in previous chapters – in EUspace. It showed that he was, in Bourdieu’s terms, a player: he is able to identify various and valuable forms of capital and possibilities in EU-space and apply them in the competition for cultural status. He applied the capital available to him in a proper, legitimate way. However, while the camel proverb showed the bourgeoisie ability to self-distance and the distinction of a liseur (as opposed to lecteur, Bourdieu, 2010, p. 226), which is a precondition for success in EU-space, it did not point directly to the capital that is important in EU-space, and of which he was in possession: a particular lifestyle and bodily hexis. His bodily hexis, despite his reputation as a European, was something that singled out this Polish Director, not only in the room where the meeting took place, but also in comparison to other Directors from NMS I encountered. He wore a fine, grey suit with a light checked shirt and a plain dark grey tie. He wore black leather

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shoes with a thin sole – a marker often distinguishing men from NMS as they, allegedly, often wore thick shoes on thick rubber soles. Thick rubber soles were, as I was told, a stereotypical marker of people from NMS and some North European countries, where winters, as people from OMS would explain to me, were colder than in Brussels. However, thick rubber shoes among Poles were a distinguishing mark between those who were seen as Europeans in EU-space and those who are seen as not-yet-European. Having thin-soled shoes marked a different status, both within the Polish EU community and in EU-space, particularly as opposed to the numerous national civil servants visible on Rond-Point Schuman and heading to meetings in the Council, in the Justus Lispius building. Thin soles sent a message: I have arrived in Brussels, I buy my clothes here (meaning not in my country), and I am aware of the local fashion style, as opposed to others, e.g. NMS MEPs in the Parliament. A thick and warm outfit (Bourdieu’s oppositions between practical and aesthetical as a parallel to the opposition between petit bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie) was a recognizable mark of people from NMS, particularly those over 45 and from the Parliament or PermReps, and was something that shaped the stereotype about NMS people’s outfits that some wanted so much to escape. Thus, thin shoes marked those who were European, distinguishing them from “nonEuropean Poles” and, together with other forms of capital (language and accent, outfit, facial features, haircut – bodily hexis in general) marked belonging to the Euroclass. However, the distinctions visible in the Director’s bodily hexis were much more subtle. There were others in this room wearing thin leather shoes on thin leather soles, but their bodily hexis was different from that of the Director, and here, again, certain oppositions make this apparent. He and five other men wore cufflinks, two of whom were from the Commission, and one from NATO 24 . While this last person, as I was later told, was seen by some as one who shows off (this description revealed his unfitting habitus. He was marked as “dolling up” by one of the British country style wearers). He also, as the Director did, wrote with a pen. However, again, what was distinctive here was neither the Director’s shoes nor pen nor cufflinks, but his whole body movement (also in comparison to the men from NATO) and the impression he made. He was rather young, though not too young for a Director (young people working in the EU institutions was a stereotypical representation of NMS, in which young had an undertone of inexperienced, unprofessional and often neoliberal). However, he was still old enough to be taken for a person from an OMS. He was slim (which is also, together with a 24 It was the same man who sat in the front rows in the Polish EU church. I learned later that this man was from NATO, but it remained unclear to me whether he was also on the so-called reserve list; thus, the reason for his presence on this meeting also remained unclear to me.

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stereotypical unmodern and Eastern outfit, a rather distinctive feature among men over 50 from NMS), had a full, salt-and-pepper, trimmed head of hair and wore fashionable black glasses. He also spoke in a different way from the others in the room (the difference was particularly visible in comparison to the Deputy Minister from Warsaw). He used simple but polite language; his voice was steady, the intonation was that used in conversation rather than when making a speech, when people tend to raise their voice and speak fast. He sat up straight, leaning slightly forward with his arms on the table, and slowly played with the pen in his hands – he looked relaxed while speaking (not speaking quickly – contrary to the female Deputy Minister from Warsaw) and his eyes wandered around the room (the woman from Warsaw either looked at the floor or stared at the projection screen while she gave her presentation25). The Director looked relaxed, though not bored. Through the content of his speech (revealing stereotypes), and through his language, word choice (not too official) and diction, he made an approachable impression, although his calm, unconstrained gestures also gave a message: I am confident; I know the state-of-play here. However, when referring to negative observations like discrimination, he sought to express himself in a positive, clear and unconcealed way, naming things directly and giving direct answers or explanations instead of descriptive and concealed expressions. This distinguished him; he did not pretend that there were no stereotypes about Poles, but treated this as a fact. He did not elaborate on it, thus remaining loyal towards the Commission, although in this particular moment he was playing the “Polish card”. He used positive language and tried to offer solutions or at least acknowledge that such things happened, and that this was “normal” so “one shouldn’t take it personally”. He used rational, positive (as opposed to blocking or intimidated, as in the “sigh of relief” example), but also self-distanced language (self-distanced because he neither complained about stereotypes, nor about “how badly we are treated”26) – language that is legitimate in EU-space. In this way, he performed something that Bourdieu sees as “ease” and “unaffectedness” (Bourdieu, 2010), which is visible in the Director’s means of expression. His reference to the camel revealed that he is able to distance himself from his nationality (national loyalties), look at it critically and from a European stance, and reflect on it – something that one should perform in 25 The first part of the presentation was based on the results of a survey made for the Polish government among EU civil servants and conducted by a hired PR agency. The picture on the projector showed bubbles with short statements from interviews made among EU civil servants, describing Poland and Poles as mean, quarrelsome, and dishonest, who were bad administrators and bad negotiators. 26 This expression stems from an interview with one young Slovak AD official in DG EMPL. At the beginning of our conversation he said: “so you want to know how badly we are treated here?”

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EU institutions. This reference to the camel, (“we don’t need to prove we are camels”) displays his awareness about the rules in EU-space: not to pretend to be someone you are not, because this will be revealed. Pretending, or practices of deserving and imitating performance, as something unnatural in EU-space, is immediately unmasked, as was visible in my laughing with my friends about their Polish neighbour. It places people in what Bourdieu described as the class of petit bourgeoisie, of those who are marked by, to quote Bourdieu: […] the embarrassment of someone who is uneasy in his body and his language and who, instead of being ‘as one body with them’, observes them from outside, through other people’s eyes, watching, checking, correcting himself, and who, by his desperate attempts to reappropriate an alienated being-for-others, exposes himself to appropriation, giving himself away as much by hyper-correction as by clumsiness. (Bourdieu 2010, p. 205)

The unaffectedness of the Polish Director made him distinctive both in the PermRep and in the Polish community in Brussels, but also, together with his bodily hexis, in EU-space in general. He was performing the habitus of the Euroclass, and of a higher manager from an OMS at an EU institution, and against the backdrop of a negative, unmodern Polish stereotype, he was distinctive, which provided him with additional capital. He acted similarly to the Irish Director at the SG and the German Member of the Swedish Cabinet I interviewed. I never had the opportunity to interview the Director, but in an interview with one of the biggest Polish magazines, he said that he regretted not having learned during his youth how to ski and sail. While skiing might not be the most distinctive sport at the Commission (it is very common that a civil servant at a different AD post would go to the Alps each year. Some of them I knew, single males, would go even on weekends), sailing was rather something that Brussels EU elites would do. This was not the kind of sailing meant for a vacation in Greece or not even in the Adriatic or Caribbean, but in Holland, Belgium or France, as the previously mentioned Irish manager did. The Caribbean was rather for those climbing up the hierarchy ladder, young NMS AD civil servants who in this way tried to manifest their belonging to this class of cosmopolitans, allegedly engaging with the Other (Hannerz, 1990) and through their lifestyle, marking their class status in EU-space. Here again a colonial genealogy of cosmopolitan becomes visible (Pollock et al., 2002). Rather than showing photos from the Philippines, as the Polish AD official had, it was holidays in the South of France, or in Italy, about which nobody would talk about with excitement. While this meeting took place at the Polish PermRep, and there were only Poles among the participants, I describe it here because this small situation is set within the bigger context of EU-space. Unlike other older colleagues who had also worked

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at PermRep previously and were now Directors in EU institutions, he did not distance himself from his former employer and remained in touch (his presence at this meeting in PermRep was evidence of that). Apparently, unlike some of his older friends who were already in top positions, he, being younger, could still gain something from making himself visible in this context – like the others from the Commission who came to the meeting (I was repeatedly told that you need support from the PermRep when you want to reach higher positions in the EU apparatus). His presence strategically marked his belonging (similarly to British country style wearers in the Polish EU church). At the same time, his bodily hexis marked a person who had a certain distance to his own role; he did not match the common representation of a person from a NMS, and belonged rather to the Directors’ class, which was distinguished by “savour” and “unconstraint”, marked by a habitus that, according to Bourdieu, develops through “apprenticeship”. I see him as one who was accepted into this elite Directors’ class I was told about, and his current top position in EU-space somehow confirmed that. While I was aware of the different statuses of the persons attending the meeting in the PermRep (already in the Commission or already in managerial posts, on one hand, while on the other were those trying to find their way into the Commission, employees of the PermRep, and the undersecretary from Warsaw), the distinctive performance of the ambassador becomes apparent not only when you compare his bodily hexis to that of those who came from Poland, but most of all, in comparison to those who were also in the Commission but who said nothing or who had a more demanding tone. One of them voiced a demand, expecting more engagement from the PermRep in the information gathering process, or was perhaps merely “showing off”27. This last person, while I saw him/her in many other different Polish contexts in Brussels (Polish EU church and Wild Geese, as he/she was apparently working on his/her Polish network) had a different bodily hexis, which stood in contrast to that of the Director. He/She made a tense impression because of his/her nervous 27 During the meeting in the PermRep, a list of Polish nationals in managerial posts was handed out to the participants. One of those already employed at the Commission, who had passed the HoU concour, said that one of the Directors with an Italian family name and origin, one of whose parents were Polish and who spoke Polish, should also be listed. This person was showing openly that he/she knew who is who at the Commission, that he knew people and had networks. Moreover, he/she was pointing out the shortcomings of the list and thus questioning the professionalism of the PermRep. The intonation and voice this person used – stressing the pronunciation of the name of this Director and the word “should” (Polish: powinien!), was remarkable in his/her intervention. This showing off was not only connected to the content of this statement, but also to the form, to the intonation and voice he/she used and the bodily hexis: stretched as if he/she needed to be sure that everybody heard him/her.

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look and in manner of speaking: while speaking, he/she sat up straight and lifted his/her head as if to make sure that he/she was audible in every corner, looking hastily around the whole room. Together with the Irish senior official in SG, and the German Member of the Cabinet, the ambassador performs the Eurostyle in its elite version – habitus performance, body regime, consumption regime and efficiency (this last I can only assume as I don’t have examples, but he made a brilliant career within the apparatus) in their professional life in EU-space. His distinctiveness, his being European, instead of being solely Polish, or reproducing middle-class aesthetics from Poland, or being “over-European” performing practices of deserving, marks the capital connected to body performance that is part of the Eurostyle. However, he also marks the difference between the level of HoU and of a Director, making the class differences connected to formal hierarchies apparent in his habitus, in being more distinguished, relaxed and self-distanced than those lower level officials and proving the existence of the spectre of an old EU elite in EU-space. His example, his distinctiveness, shows how nationality is also connected to class in EU-space, how the global hierarchy of value is applied and how some member states, due to stereotypes, on one hand, and national habitus performance, on the other, have more cultural power. It also shows how distinctive class practices and performances are connected not only to national representation, but also to class distinction, which runs also along the lines of the formal hierarchy of the EUapparatus. Polish European British country style At that meeting in the PermRep there was another person who had been successful in the EU apparatus: it was a Polish AD9 official, who, between my first and a second fieldtrip, skipped from grade AD7 to AD9 and to the position of HoU in one of the DGs dealing with EU internal policies. As the Director had done, this person, in my last interview in March 2011, voiced concerns about the strivings of Poles to sell things for what they were not when we talked about the Polish presidency in the Council. During the meeting in the PermRep, he spoke up and stressed that the transition period is the only moment to deliver “fresh blood into the system”. He was trying to somehow justify the functioning of the Commission by saying that intransparency in appointing people from NMS (of which the Commission was widely accused) is due to the fact that DG ADMIN (now DG HR) is concerned only about filling general quotas. The decision about which post is going to go to a NMS or not is taken within each Directorate (e.g. whether it would be a political or horizontal post and what competencies would be designated to a given post). With this information he was playing the European card; he was sharing his insider

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knowledge and defending the Commission and its procedures, questioning the alleged intransparency of the Commission. Simultaneously he was giving positive information to the people attending the meeting: a hint to search for jobs directly in a given DG of the Commission and not centrally through DG ADMIN. He was playing the European card, acting like a person who was “in” but not “showing off”, and trying to help those who were outside the system. As a person from a NMS, to be a player in the EU apparatus, one has to play both cards, Polish and European, and be a flexible subject (Ong, 1999). One has to manoeuvre between European and national capital (and burdens), and apply them at the proper moment and in a proper way: emphasizing insider knowledge, performing the Eurostyle in consumption and life strategies, and making yourself visible in the Polish context – just as he did. I met this Polish HoU for the first time when he was an AD7 fonctionnaire working in one of the RELEX-family DGs. When I came to Brussels the second time, he was already a HoU in a prestigious DGs dealing with EU internal policies. During the first interview, in my introductory questions I asked him about his social background, education and professional experience. I learned that this person grew up in a family of academics in one of the old intelligentsia districts in Warsaw (something that is distinctive in Warsaw’s context – he knew I was grew up in Warsaw). He also told me that he had studied in the UK at one of the prestigious schools (this university is also seen as prestigious in EU-space), and that he had previously worked for a big international organization and in an international foundation in Warsaw. As a result, at the age of 38 he could show profound professional experience at an international level and could prove a habitus suitable for an “internationally experienced” person, of someone speaking Polish as a mother tongue, but also familiar with institutional and international structures and contexts. I remember I asked him about stereotypes about Poles at the Commission, and he told me that one has to turn them into jokes and try to be relaxed about it (which also implicitly means that they were humiliating). Among these stereotypes there was one about the irrational Russophobia of Poles (and of people coming from the Baltic states). In order to escape this label, to show to the surroundings that one was different and did not act like a “typical” Pole, he told me that he was trying to soften some wordings on the situation in Russia (he was handling aspects of external policy that also dealt with Russia) in the Commission’s papers when he was working on the EU position towards Russia. He did that, as he told me, to show his colleagues and hierarchy that he was not a stereotypical Polish Russophobe. Thus, he was aware of the stereotype and aware of the rules in EU-space; moreover, he knew how to make himself distinctive in comparison to other Poles. As he told me, such actions would not change his critical opinion about what is going on in Russia, but would send a signal to the others that he was rational, not a Polish

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Russophobe. Thus, he was making himself a European, consciously playing the European card here, positioning himself and performing self-distance and rationality. During my second visit (in 2009), when I came to see him, after he had become HoU, I was picked up by his secretary from the lobby, and as I walked the long corridor with her, he came from the opposite side and greeted me at the entrance to his office. It was a warm, sunny day in March, and he was already wearing a light brown trouser suit and a white, finely checked shirt with red stripes. He had no jacket on and had dynamic, almost hasty movements that gave the impression he was stressed out. He received me in his office, which was simultaneously a spacious meeting room. After we started the interview (where I asked him about his path to his current position), one of the Desk Officers in his Unit knocked and asked whether she could interrupt. Apparently, it was something urgent; for a short moment, they discussed what to do in my presence. I offered to wait in the lobby of the building, but he said that I should stay seated and wait. The woman sat next to me, and they started to work over wordings in some document making amendments directly on the paper. I listened for a short while before I realized that I did not have any clue what they were talking about. However, I was very much surprised that I was allowed to stay in the office and, in fact, see what they were writing and discussing. In a similar situation, as I was once interviewing a Director in DG RELEX, I was asked to leave the room, as either “the Commissioner is on the line”, or, in a different situation in DG Energy while interviewing an efficient British HoU, there were “important issues to discuss” on the phone. The person I was interviewing now apparently had a strategy to come across as an open person. He knew what I could hear and what not; he felt self-confident and treated me without fear or constraint – contrary to many others both from OMS and NMS. My conviction about his conscious strategy of performing openness was confirmed in a further part of the interview when he told me that he had encountered a very mean way of omitting him in the information flow in the Commission (something that I heard very often from NMS people, particularly in DGs of the former RELEX family). When I asked him how he coped with this, he responded that he did exactly the opposite – he shared information with as many people as possible and showed how much he knew and displayed, as he said, “openness”. He was performing transparency, which served to show how much he knew and how modern in this openness he was, simultaneously implying what networks he had in order to retrieve the information he was sharing. This was alleviating his prestige as a person from a NMS, particularly towards his boss. This situation shows how he had an idea about how to act in the Commission and how to make himself distinctive in a given frame (by performing openness and transparency, but also by showing how much he knew and what networks he had). It also shows the ability of

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his habitus to adapt, be creative, and apply capital, although he was in a subordinate position (at that time, both formally and culturally). I also asked him to tell me the story of how he reached his new position. He told me that there were formal criteria he had to meet (passing a concour at the HoU level) and that he had a German boss, a person whom he apparently respected greatly (“he is a great man”), who helped him with advice and told him “you are different, you have the potential and have to use it now” (before the end of the transitional period). Was that also a German who appreciated transparency? As with the ambassador described above, due to his capital management, I refer to this HoU as a player. However, he had a different bodily hexis than the ambassador, and here differences between the habitus of Directors and lower level officials becomes visible, as well as how constellations of different capital make a difference. The last time I saw the HoU was in March 2011, and it was for an interview that took place during his lunch hour. We ate some pizza at the only pizzeria I can think of in the EU District that looked like one in Berlin – good fast food for little money, with nonwhite personnel. He had visibly gained weight and made an impression on me of being stressed out – eating fast, as he probably had little time. I remember I was surprised by his worn-out shoes and his somewhat outof-fashion, grey autumn coat. His outfit was not as impeccable as that of the Director, but also his body performance, his bodily hexis, was different. This Polish HoU somehow did not pay so much attention to his outfit, and his gestures were similar to those of the efficient British HoU, or rather, they were not a kind of performance of “relaxation in tension, ease with restraint” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 312) as those of the Director in the PermRep. Here the oppositions in habitus performances made the difference visible: while the Director was unconstrained and “naturally” performed relaxation, these HoU (both, the one I am describing here and the efficient British HoU) “naturally” performed hastiness. They both either had hurried movements, they often made silent pauses after my questions, and their faces revealed tension and fatigue. They both were, however, in my opinion, efficient (as both advanced in the hierarchy ladder) and performed, as the Polish HoU, the ability to openly distance from their own nationality, and thus performed a lower version of the Euroclass elites, or blended the constitution of modernity in a smart and hidden way in order to reach a higher position within the apparatus – as the British HoU had. The Polish HoU maybe not have had the habitus of a EU Commission’s Director, but he was able to detect (and afford) other aesthetic and lifestyle factors that were relevant in EU-space – something that also made him distinctive among other Poles, and made his choices closer to those of OMS people, to those of the Euroclass. He bought a house near to where I lived, close to Parc Cinquantenaire/Jubelpark and Schuman, in a quite expensive area, unlike those

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Poles who bought homes outside of Brussels, as I was told by many, due to their prices and not because of the charm of the suburbs or any particular attachment to suburban ambience. He rode a bike to the office, and as we were neighbours, I could see him sometimes in the morning. This bike riding to the office seemed like something a young Polish official (under 35) or people from OMS (of any age) might do, though not an HoU of his age from a NMS. He also sent his kids to a local, Belgian school (and in his area the schools were predominantly white and seen as good). He told me that it would have been ridiculous to send his children a Polish section in a European school (where they would learn in Polish), since “they can go to local schools, receive a good education and learn the two local languages and an additional one”. These details show that he played the Euroclass card. But he also played the Polish card, as he also belonged to the British country style wearers in the Polish church. In this way, he also marked his belonging to Polishness, as through his outfit, life strategies and performance he made himself visible and distinctive in the Polish context. By attending this “European mass” and the meeting in the PermRep, he manifested his belonging to Polishness, as opposed to those Poles who laughed and condescended to those attending “the European mass”, which was marked as being “like in a small village, where everyone knows each other” (from an interview with a Polish AST2 official). He strategically gathered and applied capital in order to elevate himself in the formal and cultural hierarchy. He told me once that he would like to spend more time with his children and that he planned to go to the Polish countryside with them in order to show them the country and spend time in nature. I was told the same thing by his friend, also a British county style wearer and frequent churchgoer who worked in the Cabinet of the Polish Commissioner. They were spending time with their kids in their country of origin, teaching them Poland and showing them “national landscapes”, inscribing these landscapes into the lifeworld experiences of their children (Löfgren, 2000). This can be seen as cultural nationalization (ibid.), but spending vacations, often with wider family in a summerhouse, was something that older OMS civil servants told me they would do in the summer – particularly those from South Europe. Thus, while this HoU, on one hand, reproduced “national trivialities” and marked his Polish belonging, he also, by the same token, reproduced the class habitus of OMS senior civil servants, the aesthetic practices of the Commission’s Euroclass, which in fact were bound to their country of origin and manifested this through the shaping of their holiday plans. He reproduced Euroclass consumer’s conservatism, or, reproduced a European and EU-space parochialism (as opposed to those reproducing practices and imaginations about Europe from Poland) and in such a way tried to achieve cultural and class affiliation with the Euroclass or EU elites. His habitus, thanks to

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his background and education, enabled him to detect proper and tasteful practices in order to become part of the Euroclass. He performed this Euro-middle-class habitus, which is similar to the middleclass habitus defined by Bourdieu. It is a habitus in which ethical and aesthetic choices are congruent (distinctive, European, British country style outfit and a European OMS place of living) and form a European lifestyle. His ability to play both the Polish and European card was similar to that of “flexible citizens” (Ong, 1999), which “[…] refers to the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions” (Ong, 1999, p. 6) and refers to subjects who are “[…] acquiring a range of symbolic capitals that will facilitate their positioning, economic negotiations and cultural acceptance in different geographical sites” (ibid., p. 18). This does not, as Ong remarks herself, suspend the cultural power of the Western lifestyle: “When the world is the arena of strategies of accumulation, subjects coming form less privileged sites must be flexible in terms of the cultural symbols they wish to acquire. To put another way, Euroamerican cultural hegemony determines and judges the signs and forms of metropolitan status and glamour.” (ibid., p. 89, see also Dunn, 2008; Vonderau, 2010) Performing the Eurostyle means performing Bourdieu’s distance to necessity: to place “in brackets” your own national identity, which is seen in EU-space very stereotypically, and to see it and treat it as one variable in a detailed story about a given country. It means managing it as capital or a burden, by distancing oneself from one’s national representation or praising the European and/or modern status of a given national representation in the struggle over visibility and place in the cultural and formal hierarchy. The EU habitus that performs the Eurostyle, apart from a particular class taste, applies nationality as a tool in the struggle for position in EU-space. The application of this tool is the evidence of whether you act like player or not, how you fill the representation of a nationality with meaning, and it depends on your ability to assess and apply suitable capital (Ong’s flexible citizens), adjust to the European doxa, and detect the rules of the struggle, transforming and gathering capital into applicable (national) representations in EUspace. It means the ability to perform the modernity of the moderns, simultaneously being efficient, and thus blending the guarantees of modernity in one’s networks and in the political process within them. This is the cultural meaning of nationality in EU-space (particularly at the level of policy making – it marks those who understood the rules from those who did not) and this delimits the class of players from the class of bystanders among those from NMS. And this, in turn, shows the hierarchies in EU-space.

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The complete abandonment, the negation of one’s own national status and representation is the wrong strategy at the Commission. You may want to change the stereotype and the representation of your nationality; you may feel ashamed of it, but abandoning it is not legitimate – in the end everybody comes from somewhere and, as one of my interviewees told me, “you always represent someone or something”. Most of all, such a strategy blocks advancement, both because of its illegitimacy and because of the necessity of national support at higher levels of the EU bureaucracy. The nation-state is still relevant in EU-space, although it is diluted and hidden behind the powerful modernity discourse. Performing efficiency and the European language (as described in the chapter on the Eurostyle) at a certain level of policy making (the efficient British HoU) shows that national representation is only one factor among others, and it is conjoined with cultural and network status. NMS, as the case of Polish EU Brussels shows, in most cases have not found a legitimate language for national representation, are lacking in capacities (networks and knowledge), or have not discovered the rules of the struggle (self-distance), and do not know how to manage their national label – they either deny it or stick to it too strongly – both performances contradicting the legitimate performance of the Eurostyle. The production of, reference to, and management of national representation is constant in EU-space and dependent on outside political events and on the stakes in the political struggle. It is also dependent on the performance of subjects, on their ambitions as actors in EU-space. These representations of the national take place in working space and in private life. In this constant reproduction and performance, economic status plays a significant role, which is particularly visible in the status that is given to the place one lives, what house one can afford, where one eats and goes for vacations and, finally, what formal status one has. National capital and status in the cultural hierarchy influences one’s efficiency in the struggle and the ability to climb the hierarchy ladder and “push things through”. Besides “pushing things through”, efficiency is based on the ability to smartly manage national images and representations, and to refer to them in a certain moment and in a smart way. Even if one is not in a high position but wants to climb the ladder, if one wants to be a player, at some point one will be confronted with a national stereotype, with a story that is retold representing a given nationality. In that moment, one is being checked: how much is he or she distanced to this nationality (and hence become European); how one will use the representation and the stereotype, how will one manage this nationality in the struggle.

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W HO IS P OLISH IN EU- SPACE ?

AND WHO IS MODERN AND

E UROPEAN

The cultural struggles described in this book, strategies that mark one’s being notEuropean-enough or becoming a European, delimiting the Eurostyle of the Euroclass in EU-space in Brussels, and becoming a member of this Euroclass, all show how modernity and nationality is historically shaped and constantly reiterated and reapplied in different constellations and situations to mark social and cultural terrain and to distribute power. Postcolonial theory and Bourdieu’s analytical concepts have helped me show how powerful mechanisms of cultural differentiation and the reproduction of hierarchies are visible in the production of space and class in EU Brussels, and run along the lines of the “old” and “new” divide, along the West and East division within the EU. These mechanisms, so visible in the everyday life of the EU civil servants, shape their efficiency and presumably impact their influence on the decision-making processes, and thus reproduce broader cultural divisions in Europe and reflect the working of imperial formations (Stoler, 2013a) hidden behind the meaning of Europe. European and Polish in EU-space are constructed cultural entities that are produced according to needs and within modern cultural frames. There is no single meaning of European because it is a variable effect of distinctions and performances. There is no fixed and definable European in EU-space because it involves the constant application of social and national representations (as capital) and manoeuvring between variably coded nationality and modernity. However, what is seen as real European, implicitly and ideologically means modern (as in Latour’s modernity) in its many varied more explicit and embodied forms and enactments, and is usually as defined by the OMS. NMS are often seen as being in a weaker position in this manoeuvring, because they are “too late” and come from the past (Fanon & Markmann, 1991), and their national representation, due to historical processes and the working of imperial formations, is seen as unmodern and concomitantly relegates them in most cases to a lower social class. Poles are keen on repositioning their status within EU-space, but they do so by imitation or the reapplication of imperial tools of power (see Drążkiewicz-Grodzicka, 2013; Herzfeld, 2002). The above examples show that there is no one type or essence of a Pole, but their status, prestige and power in EU-space is reflected by their ability to position themselves in the modern and European frames of EU-space, by the ability to balance between European and Polish (or national) and manage their national (and other) capital, leading to success. Löfgren remarks that in the 1960s in Sweden, national and being national was an outdated project. “Being modern and international was being sophisticated, and sophistication among other things meant having an ironic distance to the emotional

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national project.” (Löfgren, 2000, p. 6) EU-space has been historically constructed of such modern nationalities. These national representations, together with a postcolonial, imperial heritage, have led to the emergence of the European doxa in EU-space that is reproduced by a specific white middle class, Western (national) and capitalist habitus and its distinction from not-really-European. Such an Eurohabitus applies distinction practices similar to those described by Stoler, when in European colonies belonging to “white European” meant a “[…] reading of sensibilities more than science, on a measure of affective states—of affiliations and attachments—more than origins” (Stoler, 2008, p. 352) and was, with time, less and less attached to skin colour, and increasingly a matter of proper performance. These colonial and imperial genealogies are resuscitated in EU-space and enable the OMS to constantly and anew distinguish themselves from the newcomers to the EU. In such way, a specific European modernity is reestablished, including by the application of the Latourian constitution of modernity in EU-space. A purification of discourses about transcendent nature, constructed society and politics and a crossed-out God are performed “officially”, but in networks these discourses are blended in order to retain a modern status and guarantee the preservation of interests. The Eurohabitus performs an open purification of discourses about nature, society and a crossed-out God, and requires this purification from Others or newcomers. However, it also blends these discourses in a concealed way and in such way defends the constitution of modernity. Modern-Western national interests are negotiated behind closed doors, within networks and policy clusters in which a concealed hybridisation of discourses about God, society and nature is performed, giving them a European meaning and making both – the real modernity and the real European – out of reach of people from NMS. A real European is modern and Western-national is enacted in particular lifestyle, in moralities and worldviews, in consumption culture. But such a European reveals imperial dynamics that are constantly reproduced – in habitus and class distinctions linked to national representations, and in the ability to apply the constitution of modernity (Latour, 1993; Stoler, 2002, 2008, 2013a). Belonging to the Euroclass, a class of people usually coming from “Charlemagne’s Europe”, is guarded by the classifications of everyday life representations of nationalities of people coming from NMS. The national representations of those belonging to the Euroclass somehow dilute in various ways the performance of modern and European practices, and lifestyles, bodily shaping and makings that are, according to the needs and current context, labelled as national (like particular national interests, but also the national stereotypes of e.g. the convivial Irish or the well-mannered and well-dressed –“it’s a big culture” – French and Italians) and often simultaneously rational (cf. Thedvall, 2006) and modern, when NMS are in the picture. In a world where the balance between things

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handled in official and unofficial way is – as a Member of a Cabinet mentioned – 50:50, such legitimizations of national and European have significant meaning for one’s ability to represent interests. Polish dilemmas in EU-space What is the Polish response to such power tools and power constellations in EUspace? What is the response to an nonmodern stereotype, and what subjectivization strategies are useful for becoming a full and complete actor in EU-space? The discursive and structural position of NMS in EU-space is shaped by doxic norms that imply less capital that can be convincingly sold in the global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld, 2002, 2004), capital that maybe not even be particularly modern, but is at least specific and recognizable, as in stereotypes about the “big culture” represented by the Italians or Spanish in their cuisine or fashion design, Irish conviviality (plus the very modern – at least till 2009 – stereotype of the “Irish economic tiger”), and even Finnish nature or the welfare-state (plus the very modern stereotype of high-tech industry, subsumed – at least until the end of the 2000s – by the Nokia label). Historical developments and their discursive consequences make it difficult for Poles to draw on national capital, which is a natural and legitimate way of acting in EU-space, and which are for OMS modern – particularly those North-Western. Poles for a long time were unable to say: “we have good motorways and cars” (as Germans stereotypically could) or “we have good social security” (as Swedes could, see Thedvall 2006)28; their cultural capital and resources were scarce, as there was no modern nationalism with the nationstate welfare that developed during the 1960s and 1970s (Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994). Moreover, because there is no collection of widely recognized “Polish items” that could be modern, like “Swedish items” (Löfgren, 2000); it makes visible that divisions expressed in everyday lifestyles and class reproductions are nationally coded and simultaneously evoke common, Western and modern genealogies – visible in these modern national items and positive stereotypes. In consequence, the shared experiences of the modernity of the West perpetuates imperial dynamics and excludes those from the East, often positioning Poles into the space of tradition, and a self-perceived better morality (IVF/Polish EU church examples), or to nonmodernity, denoted by their bodies and lifestyles. While Staff Regulation reject any kind of discrimination, and EU officials in conversations swore to their tolerance, I show that what is locally seen as modern and European 28 In fact Swedes, Danes and Brits, as allegedly the only nationalities that would sometimes resign from a status of EU civil servant and go back to their countries, were enjoying a high symbolic status in the EU-space (from an interview with senior official from Germany, AD14, DG ECFIN).

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becomes part of what A.L. Stoler calls “imperial formations” that “[…] harbor those mutant, rather than simply hybrid, political forms that endure beyond the formal exclusions that legislate against equal opportunity, commensurate dignities, and equal rights” (Stoler, 2013a, p. 11). Poles seem to suffer under such imperial formations in many ways. They are excluded discursively and through everyday classifications of their practices. Moreover, imperial formations cause divisions among them, into those who think they are modern Europeans (me, the horseback riding official) or Poles – with all the consequences and performative shades of these two notions. The workings of these imperial formations weaken (Polish) national networks and, together with the nonmodern stereotype, decrease both an individual’s efficiency and the collective national prestige and power of Poles (because the country is seen then as playing “below it’s potential”). In such a discursive setting, Poles often try to escape their national identification, even though their habitus, like those of many others, reproduce national practices. These practices however are placed lower in the hierarchy than those from the West, lower than modern practices and lifestyles of a habitus structured in modern, Western nation-states. Many Poles in EU-space enjoy high social and economic status, late-capitalists everyday consumption patterns, and an allegedly cosmopolitan lifestyle. However, they also often habitually represent the struggle for belonging to the Euroclass, striving to perform and comply with modernity (or what is imagined as modernity) and cosmopolitanism in Europe. In such a way, they struggle to become a subject in EU-space (against the cursing stereotype of a backward and poor Poland in EU-space and beyond), many of them struggle to convince (themselves?) that “we are the same” and push the cultural boundaries within EU-space. As I have shown, in face of the doxa, these practices are often “practices of deserving” – not ennobling but through the particular, overexaggerated way they are performed rather degrades them to a lower class, to being a not-really-European petit bourgeoisie. They mark something that Bourdieu has called a constrained and affected attitude as opposed to the unconstrained and unaffected one of the bourgeoisie, which, thanks to taste, immediately detects the illegitimate, pretentious practices of the NMS. In fact, the practices of many Poles contradict the rather entrenched and placid outlooks of the Euroclass’ elites, on one hand, while, on the other, because they are performed without distance, prove that one is not familiar with being a legitimate flâneur (Featherstone, 1998), and a cosmopolitan that can enjoy cultural diversity (Hannerz, 1990, 2005). Many Polish EU civil servants copied local, habitual patterns in EU-Space, living a “conservative” white, middle-Euroclass life (similar family, educational, and housing strategies in Brussels) that was only seemingly congruent with the Eurostyle of the Euroclass. It was rather the imagined Europeanness of the conservative Polish middle class, reproduced from Poland and which helped

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reproduce the “sociality” and nationally constructed “Polish values” in the EU church. However, these practices and values represented worldviews and (life)styles incongruent with the European doxa, both in ethical (sticking to “Polish values” and the Catholic Church) and aesthetic (colourful scarves) terms. These Poles made their particular morality and faith distinctive – as Herzfeld shows, such practices often reflect crypto-colonial strategies that should elevate Polish in a global hierarchy of value, but in fact freeze the image as nonmodern and lower their prestige. The Euroclass is, in fact, also quite conservative, but minus the Church (which is why members from OMS laugh about the Church and the Catholicism/faith of Poles or those from NMS, and make this such an important element of difference), but in such a way some Poles contribute to the reproduction of hierarchies set out by the dominant Euro-white-middle-class of the OMS. The Poles building sociality in the Polish EU church are striving to have a similar and congruent lifestyle and consumption patterns, but as I show, it is the unskilled execution – or subversiveness – of their habitus in detecting Euroclass’ taste and distancing themselves from “national taste”, their illegitimate European imaginations, and illegitimate, nonmodern national identification (connected to Catholicism) that are not modern enough and visible in details that impede their belonging to the Euroclass. Those more national-conservative Poles, who subconsciously reproduced aesthetics, moralities and lifestyles from Poland, at the same time, performing their own imagination about the West and Europe and imitating the Eurostyle, and making the church and IVF their national distinction, possibly wanted to subvert the dominant, modern-liberal and secular notion of Europe (exactly in and with this church). However, there were also others who stuck together in national Polish groups out of the church – like those in Wild Geese or the Polish players. Through such positioning, they often showed more agency in their strivings to change the stereotypical and class-making meaning of Polish, and their efforts to modernize it showed a greater capacity to act. They reproduced the modern cultural criteria of the Euroclass, but also stuck to their national groups, and through this, marked their belonging. They often reproduced “national trivialities”, but were not ashamed of it and were capable of managing it (turning into a joke or trying to change it into something modern or capitalize nationality). In such way, they were able to retain good contacts in national networks and secure more social capital that lead to greater efficiency. The other strategy was to apply neoliberal discourse about the inefficient EU bureaucracy (and Poles alleged ability to see things with a “fresh eye”) in order to elevate oneself in the EU-space’s hierarchy, but this often resulted in marginalization, because this neoliberal discourse was produced for the world outside of the Commission in the form of (economic) regulations and law, but in

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fact was not the way networks and the world within EU-space ideologically functioned. This neoliberalism, produced as a discourse for the outside world, causes an individualization that decollectivizes and thus weakens networks and causes a weak representation of national interests in the decision-making process among NMS. However, it is seen by newcomers as European, and as an emanation of the open purification of modernity, but in fact it enables and facilitates decisionmaking that excludes NMS. In EU-space, transparency is requested, nontransparency practiced; modernity is publicly claimed, but in networks, the entities of modernity are mixed and geographically distributed. The proper strategy, as shown in the example of the efficient British bureaucrat or the Polish players, is to perform transparency with a simultaneous presence and activity in national and other networks, in particular places and spaces in order to mark one’s belonging – but to do so in a particular, stylish way. The British country style wearers among Poles, the players, were apparently already performing Europeanness, because they performed this self-distanced, relaxed and légère lifestyle and national belonging – not taking stereotypes too seriously, but rather, trying to squeeze out of their national label as much as they could. They played within given frames, where nationality was still very important, hence their presence in the Polish EU church and PermRep, their ability to use the “transitional period” and to stand out against the background of stereotypical discourse about and representations of what was Polish: they were able to use their nationality as capital. But they were also able to perform the Eurostyle through their bourgeois habitus and to apply the constitution of modernity (transparency as a strategy used by a successful HoU). They thus recognized the rules of the game and knew how to balance Polish and European/modern in a legitimate way. In EU-space success is dependent on the grade of Europeanness of one’s habitus, and in the Polish case, this meant the ability to situatively and situationally cope with and manage the powerful, singular, but variable story of the nonmodern and not-really-European-East (These Polish players, as exceptions, reinforce Bourdieu’s argument about the habitus’ firm structure and the reproduction of the social order, as they had gained their education in the West). Such power settings, however, resemble colonial history and in this way the Eurostyle strikingly resembles ways of cultural distinction described by postcolonial scholars (Stoler, 2002, 2008). Thanks to these considerations, my research reveals a European doxa that in many ways resembles imperial formations in which “[…] rather than empire per se, the emphasis shifts from fixed forms of sovereignty and its denials, to gradated forms of sovereignty and what has long marked the technologies of imperial rule – sliding and contested scales of differential access and rights“ (Stoler, 2013a, p. 12).

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Poles can hardly refer to a modern narration of the nation-state (Borneman, 1997), nor to a Polish lifestyle and “Polish items” (Löfgren, 2000; Löfgren & Hannerz, 1994) that they could draw upon and apply, although they reproduced a modern narration about Europe (Borneman & Fowler, 1997; Keinz, 2008), which they tried to identify with. Many of them resisted crossing out God: moreover, they emphasised it, but in such way, as not to demonstrate their ability to apply the constitution of modernity. These practices caused many Poles in EU-space to be caught up in a double exclusion: when they perform Europeanness, they are either dismantled as being not-European-enough or, on the flip side, often exclude themselves from national networks, even though national networks and their cohesion are crucial in many decision-making processes, particularly when filling a position. Alternatively, they were performing a European habitus that was not discernable as European in EU-space (a colourful striped scarf). However, when performing their Polishness, they are marked as being not-modern-enough, and incongruent with the modern European doxa. Either because their habitus does not represent a middle-class, capitalist and European lifestyle, visible particularly in their bodily hexis. Or they do not have an (ironic) distance to their national project, and in this stance, resemble Bourdieu’s intimidated petit bourgeoisie, who manifests nationality in an illegitimate, nonmodern way. This lack of irony or of self-distance and the will to be more dignified and elevated in the global hierarchy of value point to the rather crypto-colonial way in which they perceive their nationality. Moreover, the constitution of modernity enables them to be marked as applying allegedly emotional arguments often connected to faith, and thus representing nonmodern nationality and openly mixing purified discourses, particularly about God. My examples thus show that modernity becomes a decisive element of hierarchy building in EU-space. The application of the constitution of modernity is a tool for the self-reproduction of class, which simultaneously perpetuates the division between NMS and OMS in EU-space, between East and West, between Europe and not-fully-Europe, and among the nationals coming from the NMS. The modernity of the moderns is a powerful ideology that constructs European subjects in EU-space. It functions like modern and “white” did in the colonies (Stoler, 2002); it is vague, once more explicit when purification is demanded, other times more implicit, when hybridisation is performed. It is a disseminated and selfdisseminating ideology that is reproduced in oppositions, positioning, and selfmaking, and enacted in interactions, practices, bodies and language. It presumes a certain modern habitus and a modern way of living, represented in bodily hexis and body shaping, gestures, haircuts, outfits, and in one’s general lifestyle, all of which are set out by real and modern Europeans. Such an application of modernity has a similar ideological and political meaning and relevance as that of modernity in

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colonial rule in European colonies and beyond (Cooper & Stoler, 1997; Stoler, 2008, 2013a). Nationally structured Europe in EU-space and its imperial heritage The majority of Poles I met in EU-space applied nationality literally and performed non-self-reflexive attachment to their – according to the doxa nonmodern – national representation. This often limited their ability to compete for social/cultural prestige and formal hierarchy in EU-space. Alternatively, they either distanced themselves in various way from their nationality or denied it, like my friends’ Polish neighbour who rode horses. But this latter attitude points also to a literal understanding of nationality and shows both the prevailing, implicit Western power and its standards, and in effect, desubjectivization in EU-space (“you always represent somebody or something”) which lead to a weakening of national networks and, in consequence, to a person’s low level of efficiency. A successful strategy is that of the players, those wearing the British country style. Theirs is a strategy of functioning on both registers and on both teams: Polish and European, a strategy of flexible subjects (Ong, 1999), performing the Eurostyle in one’s body, bureaucratic practices, and lifestyle, and putting Polishness into brackets, but not escaping or negating it, but rather seeking to apply it as capital in the struggle for position. Previous research has shown that nationality and national stereotypes are relevant in the EU bureaucracy. My research shows how these national ascriptions, particularly when NMS are in the picture, create distinctions and position individuals within EU-space. In striving to become European and a subject in EUspace, and trying to escape a backward stereotype, Poles also unconsciously internalize and reaffirm the liberal discourse of the European doxa as a distinction from their Polish, stereotypical, conservative and unmodern background. Such a practice of subjectivization shows that this national background remains an important point of cultural reference. It shows how nationality is culturally and socially relevant in EU-space. It reveals the cultural power and negative potential (burden) of national representations in EU-space for newcomers. My examples depict how Poles and NMS cope with such a burden in the struggle over prestige and power. However, a strategy of subjectivization that completely negates one’s own national belonging is illegitimate in EU-space, and this rule becomes more relevant as one rises in the formal hierarchy and in terms of ambition – it can blatantly exclude one from advancement, because national networks are more crucial the higher one climbs. One could claim that the practices of Polish EU civil servants were on one hand Europeanizing because they had to position themselves in the context of the

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European doxa. As Zabursky once described it, “People mixed and matched their taste, ingesting and incorporating each other’s essences leading the way to a kind of unity.” (Zabursky 2000, p. 193). They had to adjust to the new realities of EU Brussels: of being a EU civil servant and coping with European policies, taking advantage of it in the form of European schools and EU crèches, tax reductions for new cars, European social security and exceptional contract conditions, language courses – most of them free – provided by the employer, special European car plates, etc. But such perspective on Europeanization glosses the picture on the cultural dynamics within EU-space, because the micro-political and cultural meaning of these practices becomes visible only in detail, in the way they are performed and in constellations and combinations of habitus performances. Most of all, such a view erases the details of the hierarchy and class building in the process of Europeanization that so often is defined as integration and modernization, thanks to which it becomes a tool of imperial power resembling the previous colonial classifications. However, if we look at Europeanization from such a perspective, we can see that it also evokes nationalization in EU-space – particularly among those marked as being not-yet-European-enough. These practices and the strategies of Poles were nationalizing and reproducing lifestyles, bodies and social categories and statuses from Poland, adding to their self-perceived social status in EU-space, but not really fitting into the modern cultural codes of EU-space. Given such a nationalized structure of EU-space, on one hand, and the modern and simultaneously hierarchy-building and imperial character of Europeanization, on the other, I would claim the nation-state is still the source of modernity in practices and everyday life, but also gave legitimacy to ideological, cultural and political project of Europeanization in a culturally expansive/imperial and rather unreflexive way (see Argyrou, 2003). It is the nation-state with its many different Western versions of modern national habitus that, due to historical processes shared in some countries of the West, provides the framework for this powerful cultural and social homogenization, for the alleged Europeanization. In EU-space this is actually reduced to distinctions and productions of social class, reinforced by differentiation from the local (Brussels and Belgian) context, and from the new political reality of Europe in EU-space – the presence of the NMS. And in such a way, Europeanization is an imperial formation (Stoler, 2013a), that is, defined by a difficult to grasp but durable and historically constructed power of postcolonial aftermaths (modernity), and it continues to subtly shape the lives of people in EUspace and possibly in wider EU Europe.

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European parochialism in EU-space Europeanization, with its modernity and imperial legacy reproduces a modern and Western way of national belonging within the international EU-space. On the other hand, the reproduction of collective, class-making distinctions and a modern EU lifestyle – with the accompanying struggles, intrigues, personal networks and networking, jealousy, marriages within EU-space, traditional family structure – represents a rather bourgeois, capitalist and, in fact, parochial way of life in EUspace, according to the motto: everybody/we know/s each other (see Kaschuba, 1993; Stoler, 2002). My research shows that the Eurostyle and Eurohabitus in EUspace are quite modern (as opposed to postmodern); its progressiveness and distinctive character is associated with faith in and performance of liberal, rational, white-cosmopolitan discourse, and the modern values of the European doxa, which functions in opposition to nationalistic and nonmodern or nonrational. People in EU-space, whether players or bystanders, whether from OMS or NMS, tend to think of themselves as those “thinking outside the box”, because they work in an international environment and deal with many nationalities daily, and – if they want to be players – have to be flexible, like the “European Poles”. However, I show that, at the end of the day, their lifestyles are strikingly similar, reproducing bourgeois values: praising their white middle-class cosmopolitanism that always knows where the exit from other cultures is (Hannerz, 1990, 2005) and reproducing discourses of diversity as progressive, democratic and European, which is applied to make them(selves) distinctive and tolerant in the eyes of all those living outside of EU-space and Others within – the NMS (as in the Bible example). Europeanization is connected here to a particular bourgeois worldviews and lifestyle that coproduces particular places and spaces, that represents rational and even “open” notions and everyday practices, but does not really engage other classes or unfamiliar cultures as long as they do not represent a middle-class lifestyle and the ideology of real modernity, or at least represent ambitions to become modern. Moreover, the legitimate way of performing the Eurostyle, and the meaning of efficiency shows that these “international” or European subjects in EUspace in fact act very locally – their success is dependent on local knowledge about who does what, on their local social networks, through which they acquire expert knowledge, and social and formal position that provides the capacity and capital to act within EU-space. Even if one takes into account that they draw capital from different spaces and different cultural contexts (member states’ governments), the application of this capital is very local and aimed at changing actors’ status in the local context (the “sigh of relief” example and the modernizing agenda in the shirt example). Thus, the lived and performed modern Eurostyle of the Euroclass is parochial and based on very predictable, rather myopic and classist worldviews and

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lifestyles. The Euroclass embodies a self-perceived and produced cultural superiority rather than the cosmopolitanism one described by Bhabha or Werbner (Bhabha, 2000; Werbner, 1999) or proposed by Römhild (Römhild, 2010). It lives and embodies the distinctions between “European Others” and racialized minorities (see El-Tayeb, 2011) in Brussels, becoming so visible in the lack of representation of people of colour in the EU bureaucracy, against the background of Brussels’ racially diverse social and cultural settings; but also in distinction to nonmodern and stereotyped NMS that do not fit into a modern national representation. The reproduction of superior positions in lifestyle, in strategies of performance (of the Eurostyle), show the intrinsic parochial and simultaneously imperial character of EU-space, which has further consequences for the whole EU project. The modern and rational Euroclass, with its universalistic and universal ambitions and claims has little to offer in the face of growing cultural and social diversity in Europe, and growing nationalism and resistance towards the EU project is just one of the symptoms here. These performances and dynamics challenge the old definition of a cosmopolitan – a person who is characterized by their detachment from local constraints and local contexts (Hannerz, 1990, 2004). According to this definition, being a cosmopolitan describes the ability to distance oneself from one’s immediate surroundings, and to be “objective”. By having knowledge about other worlds then “this local”, they, the cosmopolitans, should also allegedly be able to take their knowledge elsewhere (as in Hannerz’s cosmopolitans). The universal knowledge that the cosmopolitans allegedly possess, presumes its applicability in many different contexts; hence it assumes either common cultural conditions/understanding with those the cosmopolitans are travelling to, or the same class and cultural belonging of these Others, or imposition of their own knowledge on Others as universal knowledge and “[…] a less direct but ostensibly more liberal assumption that some ways of doing things are simply more decent or useful then others” (Herzfeld, 2004, p. 3). This means symbolic violence and the reinforcement of the cosmopolitan’s own concepts and competencies, and in fact, cultural colonization. Cultural processes that are taking place in EU-space after the enlargement of the EU in 2004 and 2007 resemble the workings of imperial formations in this Europeanization (Stoler, 2013a). I assume these players in EUspace performing the Eurostyle would also be able to apply their strategies elsewhere. Their habitus would adapt quite quickly in other international, postCold-War organizations such as the UN (Coles, 2007), and, at least in Poland, they would probably also emerge as efficient bureaucrats. This shows how the international system of institutions perpetuates colonial and imperial dynamics – not the least, those emerging in the Euroclass. It also shows that it is not solely expert knowledge that is cosmopolitan and applicable in different cultural contexts

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(although, as an aspect of the one’s proper Western and enlightened ontology, it has a universalizing tendency), but the habitus and its skills and strategies and their powerful, European and colonial performances that transports such modern and ostensibly liberating knowledge, simultaneously however producing constantly divisions and differences that curtail agency.

O UTLOOK In EU-space people may be mobile and tolerant and see themselves as cosmopolitan, but not in their class assessments and not in the way they perceive other cultures, national representations and produce hierarchies. Bauman’s claim about mobile cosmopolitans, who are mobile and live an international life, and who thus mark their class belonging, as standing in contrast to the immobile poor and uneducated (Bauman, 2000) is contradicted here by the parochial, placed and placid white middle-class cosmopolitanism of EU elites in Brussels. Their parochialism is visible in little details, such as the white middle-class areas where they dwell (Woluwes and Auderghem, Uccle), their late-capitalist consumerist, middle-class and pigeon-holing way of coping with stereotypes and representations of different cultures: in their assessment of holiday plans, in the things people wear, and the ways they construct their bodies. This shows that EU-space is far from being a cultural, cosmopolitan space where cosmopolitan Europe emerges as a third quality (Beck & Grande, 2007), or as an effect of engrenage (Shore, 2000). It is rather the Europe of the cosmopolitans as described by Bhabha, Breckenridge, Pollock and Chakrabarty, cosmopolitans with their Western liberalism, “[…] where genuine desire for equality as a universal norm is tethered to a tenacious ethnocentric provincialism in matters of cultural judgment and recognition […] the fetishization of liberal individualism has, in the past few years, created a cosmopolitan imaginary signified by the icons of singular personhood” (Pollock et al., 2002, pp. 4-5). Europe in Brussels has a meaning of middle-class production: an ostensibly modern discourse of rationality, liberalism, secularism and tolerance (Brown, 2008; Mahmood, 2015) and the modern consumer, late-capitalist practices, plays out the ambiguity of a modern constitution to retain European middle-class privilege. Rather than producing a new, cosmopolitan Europe, where plurality flourishes (Beck & Grande, 2007), EU-space is a stage of constant struggle over who is going to outplay whom, which (national) interests are going to win due to their more modern status – and this play is very much mirrored in everyday life and is based on such capital as networks and knowledge of EU-law and the performance of a particular habitus: the Eurohabitus. Such a meaning of Europe is colonial and imperial, with one ambiguous modernity of the moderns, which positions and

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orchestrates those who do not fit or are unable to perform this constitution, of which Europe is an essential owner and producer.

Glossary

AD

AIDCO AST CAB CDR CDU CEPS Concour DDG DG

DG ADMIN DG AGRI DG CLIMA DG COMM DG DEV DG DIGIT DG EAC DG ECFIN DG ELARG

Administrator, grade in the EU civil service (university degree required) AD5 is the lowest rank, AD16 is the highest (the last one corresponds to the position of Director General) Europe’s Aid and Cooperation Office, now DEVCO Assistant, grade in the EU civil service (secondary education required), AST1 is the lowest grade, AST5 the highest Cabinet of a Commissioner Career Development Review Christilich Demokratische Union – Christian Democrat Union, a political party in Germany Centre for European Policy Studies – a think tank French local term for the personnel selection process for a position in the EU civil service Deputy Director General Directorate General – administrative unit in an EU institution, similar to ministry/department in national government, DG is also the abbreviation for Director General – the person heading a Directorate General DG for Administration and Personnel, now DG HR – Human Resources DG for Agriculture and Rural Development DG Climate Action DG for Communication DG Development DG Informatics DG Education and Culture DG Economic and Financial Affairs (ECOFIN) DG Enlargement

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DG EMPL DG ENV DG HR DG JLS DG MARE DR MARKT DG REGIO DG RELEX

DG RTD DG SANCO DG TAXUD DG TREN

EC

ECHO ECJ EEA EEAS EEC EFA EP EPSO EUROSTAT EU10 EU15 EU2 fonctionnaire GDR GHG

DG Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, now DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion. DG Environment Directorate General Human Resources (previously DG ADMIN, Personnel and Administration) DG Justice, Legalite et Securite. Now divided into DG HOME and DG JUSTice. DG for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries DG Internal Market and Services DG for Regional Policy DG Relation Exterieur, DG for External Relations, former DG of the EU Commission that dealt with relations with third countries. Under Lisbon Treaty transformed into the “EU diplomatic corps”: the European External Action Service (EEAS) DG Research and Innovation DG Santé & Consummateurs, DG for Health and Consumers DG Taxation and Customs Union DG Transport and Energy, now, after division, split into DG MOVE – Mobility and Transport and DG ENER – DG for Energy European Commission, locally also known as just “the Commission” – an expression that I also use in this text. Alternatively EC stands for European Communities (before the Maastricht Treaty from 1992) European Commission’s Humanitarian Office European Court of Justice European Environment Agency European External Action Service European Economic Community European Free Alliance – a faction in the EP, together with the Greens European Parliament European Personnel Selection Office European Office for Statistics EU member states that joined the EU in 2004 old EU member states (joined the EU before 2004) EU member states that joined in 2007 (Bulgaria and Romania) a local French term for the EU civil servant German Democratic Republic Greenhouse gas

G LOSSARY

GMF

HoU

ILUC IAS JRC MEP NGO NMS OMS OLAF PermRep RED SG

SJ

UN WTO

| 315

The German Marshall Fund of the United States – a “nonpartisan American public policy and grantmaking institution” (www.gmfus.org) Head of Unit; middle management position in the EU administration. A Unit is a basic administrational unit in an EU institution where policies are developed and managed in detail. Indirect land use change – change of land use caused by extensive biomass production utilized to produce biofuels Internal Audit Service – a DG of the EU Commission Joint Research Center – a DG of the EU Commission Member of the European Parliament nongovernmental organisation new member state/s (EU member state after 2004) old member state/s (EU member state before 2004) Office Européen de lutte antifraude, English: European AntiFraud Office, an office of the EU Commission Permanent Representation of a member state to the EU Renewable Energy Directive Secretariat General of the EU Commission, an institution under the President of the EU Commission. It steers the legislative process within the Commission and negotiations within it and between other EU institutions. Service Juridique, DG Legal Service – a Directorate of the Commission providing it with legal advice. It gives legal advice to the Commission at all stages of the political process. United Nations World Trade Organisation

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