The concept of ‘trust’ as a fundamental component of human actions has recently been attracting growing attention from social scientists of various disciplines.¹ One of the reasons for this interest devolves from the role trust plays in getting people involved in their communities and, by this token, increasing the level of social capital. In the oft-cited words of Robert Putnam: ‘When trust and social networks flourish, individuals, firms, neighbourhoods and even nations prosper’.Reference Putnam² From a European perspective, one could also add that this not only holds for nations, but for supranational cooperation and organisations too.

Contemporary Europeans live in a progressively diverse world where the radius of trust is constantly expanding and can no longer be confined to family, kinship, friends and acquaintance groups. One of the reasons for this increasing cultural and social heterogeneity lies in the recent waves of migration within the enlarged European Union. Polish pendulum migrants travel thousands of kilometres to find better paid jobs. Belgian hosts employ them in order to maintain their standard of living, or to secure the prosperity of their businesses. These pragmatic needs bring about the transgression of national boundaries and social networks independently of national identifications. But economic advantages are not the only shared benefit stemming from European integration. What is also at stake is a social process, which triggers the creation of new webs of interaction among the citizens of member states of the European Union. There are many reasons why one should worry about the personal contacts of Europeans. The outcome of these personal interactions is extremely important for ordinary citizens but also for supranational political structures, too often perceived as being too far removed from people’s experience. The presence of migrants who are usually perceived as ‘others’ increases diversity and, by this token, contributes to higher levels of everyday unpredictability, uncertainty, anxiety and risk. Such emotions find their expression in anti-immigrant sentiments and support for populist political parties that blame immigrants for all of the world’s evils. No wonder then that migrants are usually portrayed in public discourse as a threat to social cohesion.Reference Vertovec³ Conflict theoriesReference Blalock⁴ indicate that growing differences strengthen in-group solidarity and increase social distances between ‘us’ and ‘them’; in this case, the so-called ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europeans. As a consequence, it poses a threat to trust in the policies of the European Union and specifically to the decisions leading to the most recent enlargement of the Union and the resulting progressive opening up of its labour markets. The presence of migrants from Central Europe has already stirred public debates in other European countries that had decided early on to completely dismantle the barriers for access to their labour markets. The anxieties surrounding the ‘Polish immigrant plumber’ taking away jobs from his counterparts was an important factor behind the ‘no’ vote in the referendums on the EU constitution in France and the Netherlands.Reference Commander, Heitmueller, Tyson, Giddens, Diamond and Liddle⁵ On the other hand, Polish migrants in Belgium may also have been disappointed with the benefits of joining the European Union. The labour market is still closed to them and they may feel unjustly excluded from consuming the fruits of European integration, perceiving themselves instead as objects of exploitation. Such a macro-structural conflict of interests endangers the eagerly awaited process of the dismantling of national and ethnic boundaries which, it is hoped, will help bridge the gap separating European citizens from one another.

However, the presence of migrants may also create a genuine basis for the eradication of stereotypes and prejudices felt towards them. The most common features of these stereotypes emerged in the period when Poland was presented in Belgium through a prism of constant economic and political crises, which largely contributed to the perceived civilisational otherness of Central and Eastern European countries. The eradication of these stereotypes and prejudices could support the formation of a solid base for the construction of more Europeanised identities: identities that are based not only on economic and political interests, but also on grassroots knowledge of other nations and their cultures. What underlies the acquisition of such knowledge is mainly mass media representations and personal contacts. The former are very often biased, and based on severe simplifications and unjust generalisations. Hence, the image of different nations is usually distorted and amplified along lines that lie at the heart of the logic of the mass media, the pursuit of superficial sensations and abnormalities. The latter are more direct and multidimensional, allowing the construction of a more individualised picture and helping to examine and revise judgments laid on indirect premises. This is the least that one could expect from contact theory, which assumes that the more contact we have with people who have a different nationality or are from another ethnicity, the more likely it is that we will overcome our negative attitudes and begin to trust one another more.Reference Allport⁶

This article aims to show that the effects of the presence of pendulum Polish migrants in Leuven (Belgium) might be positive in stimulating a culture of trust between both hosts and guests: employers and employees. The findings are based on research conducted in this Flemish town in 2007. What was innovative about the project was the fact that it was able to capture two perspectives, hosts and guests, simultaneously. The research consisted of 40 semi-structured in-depth interviews with Polish migrants of all ages and social classes, dozens of informal conversations and one month of participant observation. Additionally, 32 semi-structured in-depth interviews with Belgians who employed Polish migrants were conducted.

Piotr Sztompka defines trust as: ‘a bet about the future contingent actions of others’.Reference Sztompka⁷ The situation of migrants is definitely this sort of situation, where such bets are often wagered and their stakes much higher than those made by the hosts. The question is how this experience re-defines the role of trust in everyday life. Trust may be considered as an individual trait that is an effect of proper socialisation and a favourable environment in which particular persons grow up and live. Those who were cheated, harmed or exploited will be probably less trustful then those who have never encountered unfair situations in their lives. But the level and form of trust can be also determined by specific social conditions. Most of the Polish migrants who live in Leuven come from a cultural background characterised by a very low level of trust. The reasons for this poor shape of trust in their habitus Reference Bourdieu⁸ differ. One argument says that there are a number of constraints under which Polish civil society has developed, which must be taken into account, namely the lack of legitimised political structures in the 19th century, because of Poland’s partitions, and in the 20th century because of the lack of democracy and full sovereignty. As a consequence of these long-lived determinants, all kinds of authorities have been seen by generations of Poles as outside forces representing the interests of foreigners, and civic engagement and political activities were perceived as collaboration with the enemy. The idea of a civil society voluntarily cooperating in the creation of a national community had little importance and, instead, what lay at the heart of ‘Polishness’ was mainly ethnic characteristics such as: language, religion, culture and descent. Hence, little trust was shown towards political structures, which were perceived as alien, with family and friends deputising for the corrupted public sphere. The distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was constructed as a boundary between the private and informal sphere and the public and the formal. This lack of intermediating social structures was described by the distinguished Polish sociologist Stefan Nowak as a ‘sociological vacuum’.Reference Nowak⁹ This vacuum constituted a chasm between the level of identity derived from primary groups such as family and friends, and the level of national identity, which was derived from a very abstract notion of the motherland, imagined and expressed as a spiritual and cultural phenomenon. Another line of thought says that the answer has to do with the fact that most of the Polish migrants that live in Leuven and Belgium come from rural communities located in the North East of Poland. It has been provedReference Mach and Niedzwiedzki¹⁰ that this kind of community shows a very low level of out-group trust, confirming the seminal research by Rubert Putnam in Italy, who argued that his research showed that the least civic areas are not the northern urban metropolises, but traditional southern villages.Reference Putnam¹¹ What characterises such communities is a high level of trust and social capital, but directed specifically towards people who belong to the closest circle of social relations. This kind of trust is described as a ‘bonding’ one, because it is inward-looking and generates trust that is particularistic and limited to family or other primary groups. Such a kind of trust reinforces exclusive identities and exclusivist practices. This kind of trust has nothing to do with another type of ‘trust’, which is called ‘bridging’ trust and links heterogeneous groups together. The third argument claims that Polish society has endured a series of almost revolutionary social, political and economic upheavals after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. One of the consequences of the transition from state socialism to a free market economy was connected with the rapid deterioration of conditions of life in the most vulnerable regions, and those who moved to Belgium were predominantly the victims of this painful process.

The very problem of the lack of trust in other people and public institutions is recognised as one of the most striking weaknesses of Polish civil society at the beginning of the 21st century. Numerous international and Polish surveys have shown that not more than 12% of Poles trust other people, which is the lowest level among EU states.Reference Czapiński and Panek¹² In these terms, what migrants have found on the other side of their journey lies at the completely opposite pole of social life. Leuven could be regarded as a pristine example of European ‘civicism’. The city has hundreds of years of tradition in municipal self-government and a strong bourgeoisie which, during the 20th century, transformed itself into an affluent, well-educated, contemporary middle class that completely dominated the social landscape of this cosmopolitan city. There are virtually no rundown areas, no signs of unemployment, poverty or social disorder. Two big squares in the very centre organise a public sphere that is open and accessible for newcomers of different origins. The dominant position of the best and most internationalised Belgian university makes this sphere even more multicultural. One of the most significant effects of the migration from the social environment with the poorest culture of trust in Europe to a reality that stands closer to the ideal of the European DreamReference Rifkin¹³ is the fact that their experience in Belgium has given the Polish migrants the opportunity to discover, and to learn how to make use of, this vital element of social capital.

Eric Uslaner wrote that trust ‘provides the glue that binds people together in the absence of enforceable contracts policed by external agents’.Reference Uslaner, Van Deth, Marffi, Newton and Whiteley¹⁴ It would probably be difficult to find a better social laboratory that reflects this assumption. It is important to bear in mind here that Belgium has not decided to open its labour market to the citizens of the new member states, and that nearly all pendulum migrants work and live there in the so-called ‘grey sphere’, where all relations between employers and employees are regulated and protected by informal norms. This has meant that their relations with their hosts and employers have been based solely on the condition of trust between them. No wonder that the question of trust appeared spontaneously in almost all of the responses of interviewees, without any prompting. Nearly all the Polish respondents indicated that trust in everyday social relations has no equivalent in Poland. These significant divergences between cultures of trust concerned different dimensions of everyday life.

What was probably most visible for Polish migrants was a common sense of security. Respondents often expressed their surprise that houses are not necessarily surrounded with fences, that they are not protected with advanced technology or security companies. Most domestic workers were usually shocked that their employers left them keys to their houses without taking special security measures such as copying passports or writing down personal details. A ‘Your word is enough’ attitude was astonishing for most of them. One respondent asked the rhetorical question: ‘Would a Pole leave his whole house to some unknown migrant from the East?’ A more subtle indicator of openness, transparency and the sense of security was another characteristic thing related to houses, namely the lack of curtains in windows. Something that probably goes unnoticed by the inhabitants of the city is, for many Poles, a complete novelty. A novelty that, while initially treated as an element of the alien culture, became with the passage of time for some so natural that they decided to organise their houses in Poland in a similar vein. Such a delicately woven fabric of very soft social characteristics has created in Leuven a distinctive social milieu. This distinctiveness was sometimes described as an element of the predictability and controllability of social order and was perceived by older Polish respondents as a mythical value lost during the last three tumultuous decades in Poland. For people who spent most of their adult life undergoing perpetual traumatic social change connected with the implosion of real socialism and the subsequent introduction of market reforms, the capitalist reality of late modernity appears almost bucolic in comparison. Very symptomatically, one respondent expressed this impression with the words: ‘I suppose it used to be like that in our villages’. This is particularly important because such an experience contradicts those discourses in Poland that try to present western societies as atomised, morally corrupt, and riddled with social anomy and decadence.

Another dimension where trust was discovered by Polish migrants had to do with the broadly conceived civic attitudes towards public institutions and state apparatus. As was mentioned earlier, the historical circumstances under which the social capital of Polish society has been developing brought about a situation where the state and its representative institutions were perceived by the majority of the population as external forces working against society. They were rather treated as an oppressor’s hand and not as an outcome of the collective cooperation of free citizens. Hence, positive attitudes towards them were not only rarely rewarded, but rather treated as an act of collaboration and betrayal. The most common role model in Polish national mythology was not the law abiding citizen, but the rebellious subversive. Thus, for many respondents, the cooperative attitudes of Belgian citizens towards institutions representing power and state brought to light the deficiency of trust towards public institutions and authorities in the Polish social reality. Many Polish interviewees underlined that they encountered in Leuven appreciation for such values as a care for the common good, genuine respect for law and power, and the observance of common rules. They were astonished by the lack of hostility between ordinary citizens and the police. They were surprised that the police were perceived by the inhabitants of Leuven as a fully recognised agent that supported the flawless operation of everyday life and not as an alien intruder bringing additional hassle and threat to their social relations.

The third sphere where the value of trust was discovered was that of economic activity. The most spectacular example was a young man who had previously worked as a salesman in Poland and did a similar job in Belgium. He used the word ‘trust’ 16 times during a single interview, mostly contrasting the reality in Poland with the practices of his Belgian colleagues and business partners. He explicitly acknowledged that the fact his discovery of the role of trust is probably the best investment in his professional career. All Polish respondents readily appreciated the trustworthiness of their employers as far as financial matters were concerned. The fact that nobody had ever been left with unpaid work contributed additionally to the level of security felt by migrants who worked in Belgium in the ‘grey sphere’. Even those migrants who were sceptical about other dimensions of Belgian society acknowledged that the honesty and fairness of their Belgian employers was never in doubt. This was in stark contrast to the working conditions offered by companies run by their Polish compatriots. Examples of brutal competition and exploitation were commonly mentioned with relation to in-group business ventures. Belgian employers were so highly valued that the infamous and nefarious practice of buying and selling jobs has developed among some Polish migrants. What was very shocking was the fact that, upon returning to Poland, migrants sold their vacancies via informal auction not only to anonymous compatriots but even to acquaintances and friends. However, this habit was also commonly condemned by the interviewees, who usually stressed that it had been already completely abandoned amongst the members of the Polish community in Leuven.

Finally, there is something that provides a good example of trust building on a very micro scale. It has to do with the appreciation by Poles of small aspects such as shared meals and the use of first names between employers and employees in small companies. These techniques are usually described as ‘pseudo familiarity’ or ‘pseudo gemeinschaft’ in sociological literature.Reference Boslego¹⁵ Their main goal was to build a sense of community and mutual trust and, although these techniques might seem a bit naïve, the very fact that they have been taken over and practised by the majority of Polish migrants, almost unconsciously, shows that experiencing migration may be something that significantly alters people’s habitus.

A bet on the contingent actions of others is also taken by host employers. The issue of trust is of crucial importance for hosts as far as employing domestic workers is concerned. They leave their houses to guests, despite the widespread stereotype, which portrays Poles as more prone to criminal behaviour than the citizens of ‘old’ Europe. Actually, most Polish women who live in Leuven perform this sort of occupation and the fact that there are more migrants on the labour market changes the character of help available for those families where both parents are active professionally. Affordable domestic workers offer the opportunity to free these families from so-called informal out-sourcing, where relatives, friends, or neighbours can be asked to perform certain tasks for households.Reference Ruijter, Lippe and Raub¹⁶ This kind of social independence opens up new opportunities in utilising work and leisure time and lightens the burden of daily routine, meaning that employers can allocate more of their time and energy to their professional work. The less effort one has to invest in unprofitable activities, the more time and effort can be spent in highly specialised occupations. Having a domestic worker is also a symbol of prestige and of occupying a higher position in the social hierarchy. This creates a situation where the employment of housekeepers becomes a part of social standards, which in turn stimulates additional demand for domestic workers. This kind of out-sourcing support is no longer embedded in a social relationship based on unconditional trust stemming from trustworthiness ascribed to members of primary groups. This engenders new dilemmas related to uncertainty and risk that such formal out-sourcing will threaten the integrity and security of private and personal life.

Dependence on professional domestic workers puts employers in a situation where they become contingent on people who have no informal links to them in their private sphere. Furthermore, the fact that they are pendulum migrants and come from a different cultural background means that their relationship with employers is usually weak and transient. This uncertainty is present in nearly all of the interviews. The stereotypical picture of Poland and the Pole is limited to quite a few negative traits. Very few of the respondents had any knowledge about Poland and its culture before employing a Polish worker. Most characteristics had to do with severe poverty, a high level of criminality and excessive drinking. Such an image definitely does not correspond positively with a person to whom one would wish to entrust one’s most private and intimate place, with all its valuables. This factor obviously conditioned first contacts between employers and employees. The Flemish respondents admitted that, initially, they were very suspicious about employing Polish migrants. To reduce the risk, they all relied on their informal networks as far as recruiting domestic workers was concerned. This mode of recruitment decreased the cognitive dissonance that could come from the stereotyped picture of Poland as a country with a high level of criminality.

Out of 32 respondents, only one turned to a specialised agency for help in looking for a housekeeper. Everyone else sought the first employee through a network of relatives or friends. Only the positive recommendations from trusted people caused a job-seeking migrant to be employed. Most of the respondents also admitted that they were very cautious at the beginning. Heightened vigilance accompanied most relations during the first stages of employment, but this period of trust-building was relatively brief. The overwhelming majority of interviewed employers acknowledged that Polish women immediately dissipated their unfounded fears. This change of emotional state built on prejudices had a measurable indicator. The employers gave their workers keys to their houses, told them secrets about alarm codes: in a word, handed over all the security measures related to their houses. Obviously, there were instances of petty thefts (only two), but what is very telling is the fact that it did not discourage those unfortunate employers from employing other Polish women. What made domestic workers so trustworthy was usually connected with their work ethic and cultural similarities. The most frequently used adjective in descriptions of Polish migrants was hard working. In one case, an employer even compared this hard-working attitude to the Flemish way of life. The work they did was evaluated as being of very good quality, and employees were praised for their punctuality, solidity and reliability.

With regard to cultural similarities, the employers discovered there were no significant differences in everyday contacts between them and their employees, especially in the case of women, who demonstrated such things as wearing similar clothes or utilising similar ways of expressing their femininity. The most important difference was religiosity, or rather devotional behaviour, but this attachment to religion was not perceived as something completely alien. On the contrary, it evoked Flemish memories and made some reminisce that it resembled religiosity in Belgium 50 years ago, in a subtle allusion to the presumed civilisational backwardness of the migrants. For some employers Christianity also played some role in defining social distances towards different ethnic minorities. A shared religion worked in favour of Poles against Muslim minorities.

In a number of cases, purely professional relations gradually developed into more familial ties. There were many banal examples of cultural exchanges, ranging from introducing a Polish cousin through invitations to spend Christmas together, to visiting the employee’s houses in Poland. It was particularly surprising that Belgians were more familiar with the cuisine of many African countries than with Polish ones. Some respondents were even afraid to taste Eastern European food products before they met people from these countries. Thanks to these relations, Belgian employers admitted that they more often paid attention to media news related to Poland or other sources where Poland was mentioned.

Regarding other occupations, there were also examples of distrust shown towards males working for Belgian employers at the beginning of their contacts. This often had to do with doubts about their competence, and often frustrated Polish employees, especially younger respondents. Polish workers most frequently mentioned situations where their Belgian employers were very suspicious about their professional skills. This was because the main mechanism of the reproduction of inferiority–superiority relations comes from the stereotypical picture of Poles. Such a feeling is often strengthened by the conscious maintenance by some employees of this distorted picture of their homeland in order to exploit their employers’ compassion to the maximum in the hope that it will give them extra financial or material rewards. What is very important was the fact that such contentious situations often gave employees the opportunity to correct the patronizing attitudes of their bosses and change their broader view on their abilities and professional skills. However, it seems that growing recognition of their professional competencies can lead to double-edged consequences. On the one hand, it can facilitate their promotion in the occupational hierarchy. On the other, it creates a situation of growing competition and rivalry in the labour market of the host society, already harbingered by the personalised image of the ‘Polish plumber’. In addition, attempts to renegotiate inferiority–superiority relations have not always brought positive solutions. Most respondents knew a story about some Polish couple employed by Belgians. After a few years of collaboration they had established such close relations that the couple invited them to the wedding of their daughter back in Poland. The employers were completely astonished at what they saw there. The affluence of their houses in Poland and the standard of living of their families seemed to them so lavish that they decided to make them redundant immediately. It is very difficult to judge whether this story is real or a sort of myth spread among migrants in order to legitimise and justify the reproduction of the patron–client relations. Nonetheless, it is common wisdom among Polish migrants that they should not boast about investing in property or their more luxurious purchases to their employers.

The contacts between Belgian employers and Polish employees have profoundly contributed to the confirmation of the civilisational sameness and cultural similarities of the two nations. Despite the fact that initial relations were often burdened with distrust and suspicion, they were very quickly overcome and sometimes even developed into more familiar ones. Intensified contact has not confirmed those views that refused to give the recently accepted citizens of the new member states trustworthy European credentials. Polish migrants in turn discovered that, contrary to negative discourses in Poland, the concept of ‘western society’ has nothing to do with a lack of solidarity, atomisation and the atrophy of social ties.