Nothing Changed, Nothing Gained? Emotional Responses towards European Integration in the Memoirs of Polish Farmers

Abstract

Accession to the European Union (EU) aroused diverse emotions in public debate among citizens, but the everyday experience of being an EU member is much more difficult to narrate than by relating to two contrasting views for and against European integration. The situation becomes more complicated if we analyse the emotional responses of Polish farmers, for whom joining the EU has been one more change in the last two centuries: the fall of feudalism, the agricultural reform after the Second World War, and the post-1989 political transformation. We aim to analyse personal narratives while observing how feelings about the EU have become embedded in everyday life experience narratives and how they are expressed and managed in a socio-cultural context. The presence of contradictory views was expected, as was the appearance of a combination of emotions and indifference, and, finally, the use of emotions as resistance. Based on the analysis of 55 memoirs from 1918 to 2018, we have determined the possible types of the integration experience; firstly, Poland’s accession to the EU meant change and was associated mainly with positive emotions, secondly, with negative emotions, thirdly, it meant change, and was associated with ambiguous emotions; and lastly, it did not mean a change. We noted not only the contrasting positions e.g. hope and fear but also the mixture of emotions and various paths of resistance that included demonstrating the inadequacy of the master narrative to personal experience or neutralising it but also filling the intermediary space between two opposite views and finding a way out from this opposition to the higher level of division and thus narrating non-change. It is the sense of personal dignity and permanence that negates the perception of accession as a change.