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

Abstract

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