Abstract
This paper draws on original empirical research to investigate popular understandings of prejudice in two national contexts: Poland and the United Kingdom. The paper demonstrates how common-sense meanings of prejudice are inflected by the specific histories and geographies of each place: framed in terms of ‘distance’ (Poland) and ‘proximity’ (United Kingdom), respectively. Yet, by treating these national contexts as nodes and linking them analytically the paper also exposes a connectedness in these definitions which brings into relief the common processes that produce prejudice. The paper then explores how inter-linkages between the United Kingdom and Poland within the wider context of the European Union are producing – and circulating through the emerging international currency of ‘political correctness’ – a common critique of equality legislation and a belief that popular concerns about the way national contexts are perceived to be changing as a consequence of super mobility and super diversity are being silenced. This raises a real risk that in the context of European austerity and associated levels of socioeconomic insecurity, negative attitudes and conservative values may begin to be represented as popular normative standards which transcend national contexts to justify harsher political responses towards minorities. As such, the paper concludes by making a case for prejudice reduction strategies to receive much greater priority in both national and European contexts.
Highlights
We are living in an era characterised by the rapid growth of migration, which is producing unprecedented population change – dubbed ‘superdiversity’ by Vertovec (2007) – in cities across Europe
In this paper we address this neglect by comparing the two very different national contexts: one a former colonial power in Western Europe – the UK, the other a post-communist state in Eastern Europe – Poland, recognising that, while the question of how to develop the capacity to live with difference is one confronting all countries of the European Union, the extent to which national communities are currently characterised by supermobility and superdiversity varies
It has shown how everyday, common-sense understandings of the meaning of prejudice in both Poland and the UK are inflected by the specific histories and geographies of each place: framed in terms of distance and proximity respectively
Summary
We are living in an era characterised by the rapid growth of migration, which is producing unprecedented population change – dubbed ‘superdiversity’ by Vertovec (2007) – in cities across Europe. (Female, white British) Here too, the UK interviewees, like the Polish interviewees, readily admitted holding and acting on their prejudices, justifying this by reference to material circumstances and social relations that extend beyond the spaces they occupy, and over which they feel they have little influence or control.
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