Building Fortress Europe Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 10:55 PM DEMOCRACY, CITIZENSHIP, AND CONSTITUTIONALISM Rogers M. Smith, Series Editor Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 10:55 PM Building Fortress Europe The Polish-Ukrainian Frontier Karolina S. Follis UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS PHILADELPHIA Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 10:55 PM Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Follis, Karolina S. (Karolina Szmagalska-) Building fortress Europe : the Polish-Ukranian frontier / Karolina S. Follis.—1st ed. p. cm. — (Democracy, citizenship, and constitutionalism) ISBN 978-0-8122-4428-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. European Union—Boundaries. 2. Immigrants—Poland. 3. Immigrants—Ukraine. 4. Polish people—Ukraine. 5. Ukrainians—Poland. 6. Poland—Boundaries—Ukraine. 7. Ukraine—Boundaries—Poland. I. Title. II. Series: Democracy, citizenship, and constitutionalism DK4185.U38 F65 2012 943.8'6057—pcc 2012008452 Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 10:55 PM To my parents Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 10:55 PM This page intentionally left blank Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 10:55 PM Contents 1. Introduction: Rebordering Europe 1 2. Civilizing the Postsocialist Frontier? 26 3. I’m Not Really Here: The Time-Space of Itinerant Lives 54 4. Seeing like a Border Guard: Strategies of Surveillance 88 5. Economic Migrants Beyond Demand: Asylum and the Politics of Classification 117 6. Capacity Building and Other Technicalities: Ukraine as a Buffer Zone 142 7. The Border as Intertext: Memory, Belonging, and the Search for a New Narrative 171 8. Conclusion 204 Appendix: Methods 213 Notes 217 Bibliography 251 Index 275 Acknowledgments 281 Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 10:56 PM This page intentionally left blank Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 10:56 PM Chapter 1 Introduction: Rebordering Europe We are like travelers navigating an unknown terrain with the help of old maps, drawn at a different time and in response to different needs. —Seyla Benhabib The expansion of the European Union on May 1, 2004, to incorporate eight new member states in postsocialist Eastern Europe, and its second act of including an additional two in 2007, have been the latest in the centuries- long sequence of border shifts in Europe.1 Contours of European maps have usually changed in the aftermath of wars. This time, however, the shift was peaceful, and the territorial outlines of the countries involved remained un- touched. Instead, their borders were refitted for a new purpose. Where the new members bordered on each other, or on old EU member states, fron- tiers became the open “internal EU borders,” as, for example, between Poland and the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, Hungary and Austria. Where they touched countries that so far have not received the invitation to join the European Union, the boundaries became “external EU borders” and thus subject to a whole new order of regulation and policing (for example, Poland- Ukraine, Poland-Belarus, Slovakia-Ukraine, Estonia-Russia). Between 2003 and 2008 I returned to Poland and Ukraine regularly to study the human consequences and political implications of this peculiar shift. It affected the daily routines of state practice— border control and po- licing, traffic, and immigration bureaucracy— as well as the larger issues of geopolitics and foreign policy. The changes insinuated themselves also into Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 10:11 PM 2 Chapter 1 Figure 1. Map of the enlarged European Union. © European Union, 2011. the lives of many people— Poles, Ukrainians, and other non- EU citizens, in the borderland and beyond. Among such people were Anna Sadchuk and her family and friends.2 Anna was an itinerant Ukrainian worker in Warsaw. She was twenty- nine years old when I first met her in 2005, through a chain of encounters with other itinerant workers. Anna went to a vocational school to become a hair stylist, but in Poland she worked as a cleaning lady. She was a petite brunette with freckles and spoke in a soft voice that made her initially Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 10:11 PM Rebordering Europe 3 seem shy. That impression, however, dissipated halfway through our first conversation, at a café in her neighborhood one spring afternoon. She was a cheerful person with a penchant for telling stories, many of them having to do with the hazards and tricks of negotiating the border between Ukraine and Poland, the EU-imposed visa requirements, and the day-to- day perils of being an illegal migrant worker. “People here need us,” she told me, everyone in Warsaw has their Ukrainka, to do the work they don’t want to do. Polish women work in nice offices, wear nice clothes, they don’t have time to clean and cook. And so what are these visas for? Everybody knows that we’re going to come anyway. If we have to pay [bribes] we pay. If we have to lie [to the officials], we lie. They [bor- der guards] are not so stupid to think that we are coming on vacation. They know why we are here. They must check the visa, we must show the visa. And what? It changes nothing. Anna, her brother, his wife, and her sister all come from a small town in the Lviv oblast’ (district) in western Ukraine. Together with two more female friends, they share a couple of boarding rooms in the attic of a neglected building in a centrally located neighborhood in Warsaw. Every morning they commute to their multiple, ever- changing, and unauthorized jobs all over the city. Anna was the youngest; her brother Dima was the oldest at forty. She has lived and worked in Poland intermittently since 1998, when she came for the first time with her brother to look for a job. Dima, like most male Ukrainian workers, has held mostly short- term jobs in construction. She started out picking and canning fruit and with time moved to better- paid urban house- cleaning jobs, where she was able to earn up to six hundred U.S. dollars per month (in 2006).3 Anna and her roommates, like thousands of other Ukrainians from their region and beyond, could not make ends meet back home. This has been due to persistent high unemployment that has marred the region since the col- lapse of Soviet- era industry and collective agriculture (official figures in 2008 were 8.3 percent for Lviv oblast’, but it is thought to be higher).4 The partial attempts at economic reform undertaken since 2005 have failed to address an overall scarcity of economic opportunity, felt acutely particularly in the rural areas of western Ukraine. Therefore, thousands of Ukrainians, primarily from the west, have been relying on the Polish szara strefa (gray zone, i.e., shadow economy) for employment. They come, because, as Elżbieta Matynia wrote Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 10:11 PM 4 Chapter 1 in 2003, “even within ‘the East’ there is some place more west . enjoying relative economic success, proximity to the European Union, higher density of international transit on major highways, or greater strength of the local currency in relationship to the Euro” (Matynia 2003: 501). The precise number of such migrants is subject to some dispute, but in- formed estimates range from 300,000 to 500,000.5 Poland’s young capitalism generates demand for cheap labor, especially in agriculture, construction, and private households.6 Because of its proximity, coming to Poland does not re- quire the personal investment, risk, and expense that migrating farther west would entail.7 Yet Anna and others still negotiate a border regime which has thickened on EU’s eastward expansion, and which is built on the assumption that every non- EU traveler is a potential undesirable migrant. But Ukrainian workers continue to cross the border.8 They adjust to the increasing constraints imposed by border regulations, but they also subvert and resist them. They exploit the economic opportunities enhanced by EU’s closeness, simultaneously connecting the Polish and Ukrainian societies through a web of relationships that are asymmetrical, but vital to both sides. At the same time they develop new ways of living away from their families, yet in permanent connection to a home where they cannot be physically present. “Every time I come here, I hope it’s the last time,” Anna told me one Saturday night when I visited her and her three roommates, Halyna (her sister-in- law), Nadia, and Ola. Permanently settling in Poland is neither their desire nor a real possibility. Ultimately, the objective is to go back to Ukraine, for Anna, her friends, and the vast majority of other itinerant workers. As we drank inexpensive Moldovan wine and ate Ukrainian cookies, the women told sto- ries of their repeated border crossings and the scary, unpleasant, and funny things that happened in the course of their journeys. They recalled hustlers who hang out at border crossings and bus terminals and sign up women for “prestigious” jobs at nightclubs and escort services; all four women dismissed the possibility of ever doing such work, but they claimed to have had acquain- tances who did.