Description
This paper reconstructs a conversation with local Polish border guards who experienced and effected the shift from the military structure of border security under the socialism regime to the law enforcement setup of integrated border management under the EU Schengen regime.
The aim is to contribute to ‘provincializing’ liberalism as an ideological formation by probing its paradoxes at the psychosocial level where the affect and social structure are intertwined. In order to do so, the paper takes an interpretive approach to making sense of the legacy of EU liberal transition as narrated by two casts of post-transition characters which seemingly epitomize contrary views on freedom: border guards as protagonists of exclusion and the researcher as a vocal advocate of inclusion. There are two tropes in particular which bring these parties together despite their fundamental differences: (1) the continuous traversing of the sense of emancipation and paternalism in the process of ‘becoming’ a European border guard and a European critical scholar; (2) the entrenchment of militarism in both the border guard and the researcher. While the latter seems almost commonsense with regard to a border practitioner, the close-up on affective struggles with militarism illuminates the practice in ways which are rarely explored in the literature. Regarding the researcher, militarism reveals itself in the “will-to-know” as a form of authoritarianism that pervades liberal knowledge production.
The historical, affective, and localised insights from this conversation are fed back to a reflection about particularities of the relationship with liberalism in Central Europe.
