Whiteness is inherently unstable, heterogeneous, and impure.Footnote ¹ So is “eastern Europe.”Footnote ² Making matters worse, the moral-geopolitical construct of a hyperreal “Europe,” rampant in post-WWII western Europe, has come to connote a claim to two global monopolies.Footnote ³ One is an increasingly exclusive entitlement to “racial whiteness.”Footnote ⁴ Another, a claim of unique, essential “goodness.”Footnote ⁵ The reverse-synecdochic practice of labeling (putatively both white and benign) western Europe as “Europe” serves to conceal the many falsehoods, contradictions, and conflicts that inhere in that monopoly claim.

Given all that, May 1, 2004—the date of the diffident but resolute “accession” of eight erstwhile-state-socialist “east European” states to the European Union—definitely spelled trouble.Footnote ⁶ Thirteen of the fifteen established member states of the EU announced that access to their labor markets for citizens of the new member states would be delayed by seven years after “accession,” signaling some of the complications that lay ahead.Footnote ⁷ The economic grounds for such temporary restrictions on labor inflows are widely known to be shaky at best: there is near-consensus in the scholarly literature that “[t]he highest [national economic] gains from post-accession [movement of east European labor] were achieved by the United Kingdom and Ireland, which opened their labor markets for mobile workers from [the new member states] already in 2004.Footnote ⁸ That of course has practically no bearing on west “European public opinion”—a body whose members are, for the most part, supportive of “their” governments’ delaying tactics.Footnote ⁹

Meanwhile, the removal of the recently-attained formal sovereignties of the former-state-socialist-”bloc” societies—a generic requirement for membership in the “sharing and pooling” of sovereignties that the EU represents—began a good ten to fifteen years earlier, in the early nineties, at the point where their freshly post-state-socialist political elites made a commitment to pursuing full membership in the European Union.Footnote ¹⁰ Given the powerful emotive significance of having been “robbed” of sovereignty by the Soviet-centered geopolitical project, the “handing-over” of formal sovereignties to the EU was bound to be a political minefield. The current success of the nationalist Right in east-central Europe can be seen as a consequence—at least in part—of the widespread critique, if not demonization, of the liberal governments that managed the accession process.

It is in this context, seven months after “accession” and almost six and a half years before the expiry of the “transitional arrangements” barring east European labor from the right to employment in the earlier fifteen member states of the European Union, that the French magazine Charlie H ébdo published a satirical article by Philippe Val.Footnote ¹¹ The article proposed the ostensibly hilarious and bizarre idea that “a Polish plumber or an Estonian architect could move to other [member states of the EU] to offer their services” at prices that would presumably undercut local markets.Footnote ¹² Indeed, as Philippe de Villiers, a spokesman for and unsuccessful presidential candidate of the French xenophobic right put it in a subsequent interview in Le Figaro, the fear was that they would do so “at the salary and rules of social protections of [their countries] of origin.”Footnote ¹³ De Villiers did not bother to explain why he thought east European businesses would not adjust their prices and salaries upward, to approximate those prevailing in the French market. Nor did anyone seem to pose that question to him.

A relatively jovial public give-and-take followed, including an intervention by former EU Commissioner Frits Bolkenstein, who committed the faux-pas of openly contemplating the possibility that even he might hire a Polish plumber to do some work in his house in northern France, given the difficulties of finding a good professional locally.Footnote ¹⁴ Bolkenstein seemed to be making an abstract, properly EU-“liberal” point by highlighting a set of possibilities that nonetheless appeared to have been largely hypothetical at the time.Footnote ¹⁵ The subsequent referendum, held on May 29, 2005, on the European Union's Constitutional Treaty that proposed de-nationalization of hitherto member-state-level authority to regulate services, was defeated in France as it was seen a threat to the “French (and ‘European’) social model.”Footnote ¹⁶ It was likewise defeated in the Netherlands three days later.Footnote ¹⁷ It would seem that the trope of the Polish Plumber played quite a historic role in holding back the post-“nation-state” transformation of western Europe.Footnote ¹⁸

It would be easy to claim that, in the French debates, the Polish Plumber served as a “symbol of wild liberalization and of the invasion of hungry and underpaid workers, willing to work at any hour of day and night in order to earn a few Euro.”Footnote ¹⁹ However, is that reading—condescending and disparaging as it is of “Poles” (indeed, by extension, of “east Europeans”) along class, gender and ethnic lines—exhaustive of the culture-productive capacity of this trope?

The response of the Polish government that followed the French discussions would seem to suggest otherwise. We focus here on the two versions of a poster that the National Tourist Office of Poland published in this context.Footnote ²⁰ Both depicted a handsome, blond male model posing with plumbing equipment in front of some of Poland's iconic tourist sites. One read “Welcome to Poland.”Footnote ²¹ The other announced, “I'm staying in Poland—come in large numbers!”Footnote ²² (See Figure 1 above.) Having “reversed,” so to speak, the thrust of the French anxiety over the “invasion” of Polish working class men, the poster thus acquired a life of its own on social media, and seemed to diffuse, with humor, the tension that inhered in the French discussion. Soon, the matter seemed to subside into a more general discussion about nationalist versus liberal conceptions of statehood and the place of France in the European Union.

Figure 1.

“I'm Staying in Poland. Come in Large Numbers.” Travel advertisement, produced, and reproduced here by permission, by the Polish Office for Tourism. Source: http://media3.s-nbcnews.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/050629/050629_polish_hmed_330a.grid-6×2.jpg (last accessed February 3, 2017).

But let us take a closer look at the terms in which this “turning around” of the discourse was affected. How might we read what the figure of the Polish plumber evinces in these posters? One striking feature is of course his unmistakable blondness, eerily reminiscent of the “Aryan” male figures in the propaganda pamphlets from 1930s Germany. Read in this context, the message of the second poster—“come in large numbers”—is similarly disturbing, harkening back, perhaps unwittingly, to a very different European “union” (the appropriately color-coded Plan Weiß—the Nazi German military code name of the invasion of Poland) not so long ago.

Perhaps the more obvious message that the Polish Government intended to highlight through these posters was the allure of working class Polish maleness—robust, self-confident and brawny, reminiscent even of the title of Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron, but now clean, blond, and most importantly, inviting. Seen from this vantage point, the poster's message—“come in large numbers”—is suggestive of yet another kind of possible union; the strategic placement of multiple phallic objects on the posters’ visualscape underscoring the sexual innuendos inherent in the message. And through this sexualization of the working-class male subject, expression of ethnonational pride (“I'm staying here”), and the “Nordic” self-representation of Polish maleness, we get a glimpse of the reactive formation of a particular kind of east European subjecthood: inviting, ready for consumption, west-compatible, and “White.”

Needless to say, the matter did not end there and, in due course, the allegorical figure of the Polish Plumber crossed the English Channel. During the entire period from the formal “accession” of the eight erstwhile-state-socialist states to the EU on May 1, 2004 (and the birth of the Polish Plumber in Paris later in the same year) to the “Brexit” vote of June 23, 2016, the increasingly demonized figure of the east-European-worker dominated discursive space about labor policy, social rights, and eventually, European Union membership. All that culminated in the “Brexit” decision, causing the collapse of the Tory government, possibly foreshadowing Scotland's secession from the UK, and unleashing a crisis of governance both in London and Brussels. The tone of the British conversation was considerably more ferocious than the French.Footnote ²³ The frequency of acts of physical violence against Poles increased dramatically.Footnote ²⁴ A single-cause political party was built on anti-east-European-“immigrant” rhetoric, and significant portions of otherwise non-extreme-right-identified voters were persuaded by it enough to sacrifice their unrestricted access to the large space of the European Union for the dubious comfort of seeing the “Polish Plumber deported.”Footnote ²⁵

The presence of European labor in the British labor market since 2004—again, the UK was one of the two EU-member states that did not delay opening its labor market to citizens of the new member states—has unleashed multi-dimensional processes of racialization. As Jon Fox, Laura Moroşanu, and Eszter Szilassy argue very usefully, racialization is “the socially constructed contingent outcome of processes and practices of exclusion” wherein “the category of ‘race’ is invoked and evoked in discursive and institutional practices to interpret, order, and indeed structure social relations.”Footnote ²⁶ To be clear, as Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy point out further, “the nominal absence of somatic difference does not get in the way of xenophobic racism; it turns out racialized difference can be invented in situ.”Footnote ²⁷ The Polish poster featuring a “Nordic” Polish Plumber can only go so far in “fixing” the “race” doubts about east Europeans in the British context. If anything, as the analysis here suggests, it may well have been wishful, even audacious, thinking.

At the heart of the issue lies, of course, the question of the “content” of whiteness in contemporary western Europe. Previous work on the historical dynamics of whiteness has shown that its borders are semi-permeable for groups construed as “just outside” of it. Based mainly on stylized representations of collective “single-ethnicity” stories in the United States, a considerable literature has sprouted around the notion of “becoming White.”Footnote ²⁸ However, the migration within the European context is somewhat different from the history of European immigration to the US: for, in the EU, both the “destination” and the migrant-emitting societies share membership in the same public authority, which provides them at least nominally equal rights to travel, work, study, relocate to, and live anywhere within that shared space.

As a matter of fact, questions can be raised about the very applicability of even the term “(im)migrants” and “(im)migration” with respect to Europeans moving within the EU. This is not a pedantic, scholarly quibble: at a press conference held jointly with then British Prime Minister David Cameron in Budapest in January 2016, Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán repudiated a journalist who referred to Hungarians working and living in the UK as “migrants”: “For us, it is very important that we are not considered as migrants.Footnote ²⁹ Words matter here. We would like to make it quite clear that we are not migrants into [sic] the U.K. We are the citizens of a state that belongs to the European Union who can take jobs anywhere freely within the European Union.”Footnote ³⁰

As in the Polish Plumber discussion in France and (even more so) in the UK, there seems to be a palpable element of “racial” downgrading inherent in the label “migrant,” and the Prime Minister seems keen to extricate the ethnonational category he represents (“Hungarians”) from that discounted, racialized location that it has been assigned in at least some influential west European discussions of EU policy on the ostensibly “free movement of persons.” The need for such distancing seems to be even more urgent today in the post-refugee-crisis context in Hungary, where the word “migráns” (“migrant”) has acquired particularly negative overtones.Footnote ³¹

In the early spring of 2015—when the news of the imminent arrival of large groups of people displaced by the west Asian wars reached Europe—the governments of eastern Europe were deeply mired in a complex set of asymmetrical relations with their west European partners and the EU as a whole. A pervasive sense of economic, political, and cultural dependency (including direct economic dependence on worker remittances from the western EU, not to mention an almost total dependence on the EU for infrastructural development funds) was already a fact—but perhaps most challenging was the widely felt, implicit lack of acceptance as equals in all matters European. In this sense, Poland is only one—albeit, in terms of its population, the largest—of the racialized and degraded east European entrants to the EU-sphere. Partly due to linguistic reasons, partly because of the UK government's early decision not to qualify their access to the British economy, a large part of east European labor has been in the UK for several years—the country where the racialization of east European foreign labor has taken most explicit forms recently.

It seems, therefore, that there is something to be gained in trying to situate the widely noted and deplored negative positioning of the government of Hungary with respect to the refugee influx within the racialized context outlined above. For the arrival of relatively large numbers of displaced people seems to have provided an excellent opportunity to the governments of eastern Europe to stake out their claim, once and for all, to essential, unquestionable whiteness. The expectation seems to be that the discursive denigration of the “Arab,” “Muslim” “migrants” (as well as the institutional indifference to their suffering) would somehow shore up the essential whiteness and Christian-ness of Hungarians (east Europeans). Certainly, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's performance—his own “peacock dance”—as a pan-European white supremacist appears, in this context, as a strategy devised to enhance his and his government's “whiteness” credentials.Footnote ³² It is possible that this reading explains in part the overwhelming support Orbán's anti-refugee, anti-human-rights policy seems to enjoy among the Hungarian public.

Being treated with ambiguity, being kept in liminal, borderline status, and being constantly questioned, let alone accused of lacking certain essential “European” cultural qualities along “racial” lines is of course a shared experience for a great majority of humankind. Whiteness is a key instrument for the propagation of that cognitive schema. What is somewhat unique about the position of eastern Europe in the world today is that, as citizens of EU-member states, many inhabitants of the region perceive the European Union, rightly or wrongly, as a resource that offers them an opportunity to boost their “racial” credentials, that is, a chance to proceed “upward” on the scale of privilege in an obviously unequal, oppressive and discriminatory system. Hence, they cheer and applaud their Prime Minister's “peacock dance” around “race,” without considering the genocidal “downside” of their positioning. The alternative—taking an anti-racist, system-critical position regarding the world—appears to be unthinkable in a post-state-socialist context, exorcised of the supposed evil of progressive, Left politics.