Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Read Online Free PDF

Orban’s government threatened the EU with a ban on imports. The message is clear – we won’t mess or take interest in your politics, even if it clearly abuses any notions of “democracy”. But we will interfere, if our financial fluidity through Europe is put in danger.
    With the present crisis in the UK, watching Tory politicians attempting to make Britain, with its current unemployment, a “competitive”, low cost economy, we can see Britain in a ‘transitional phase’, similar to the early 90s Eastern Europe. If they force down wages enough, maybe Britain will be as successful as Poland. Of course, the privatisation and asset stripping we learned from Britain’s blatant 80s.
    The period since EU accession has seen completely new patterns of trans-European migration – but today it’s economic criteria, that decide about who leaves the country, not political. When Poles left the country in late communism, it was dictated byMartial Law, and often there was no hope of return for them. Today, there’s no problem with obtaining a passport and all borders have disappeared, except for the economic ones. These seem to be more important though, given that more people have left Poland in recent years than even during the darkest years of Stalinism or the late PRL. At the moment, around 1.5 million to 2 million Poles are on an over-a-year emigration. They get married, have children. Only last year 100,000 people left Poland and numbers are growing. All this in a situation when in their own country the young are bombarded with culpability for the low birth-rate.
    What is linking us together now, despite the still enormous differences in our economy, is the landscape of post-Fordism. In his under-appreciated film
It’s a Free World
(2006), Ken Loach tells the other story of the “New Europeans”. Now coming legally, Poles have a better situation than illegal political refugees from Iran, or the migrants from Ukraine. A young working class woman runs a company that hires (mostly Polish) migrants for building and factory jobs. But raised in a completely neoliberal world, she completely internalizes its methods and mentality: if you won’t do it, it will be done to you. If you won’t exploit, you’ll be exploited. Sacked after being sexually harassed in her job with an Anglo-Polish employment agency, she next, with a help of a friend, organizes groups of workers to work for almost nothing (and frequently not getting their wages anyway, as, under pressure she regularly cheats them and takes their part of the money). If for a moment we believe she begins to understand, as when she helps falsifying a passport for an Iranian refugee, when unpaid workers attack her, she reacts sharply. In the last scene, we see her going one step further, continuing the same ‘colonization’ east of the EU’s border, in Ukraine - now in the illegal business, giving them false papers. Loach perfectly describes how the weird circuit of capital in the modern world subjugates individuals.
    There are few things more unpleasant than crossing the UK border. Since I really began to travel here regularly in late 2009,Poland was already in the EU and it would be really cheeky to complain, knowing what people from non-EU Europe, the Americas and rest of the world have to go through to be able to get into this country. We are the Wizzair generation: beneficiaries of the accession of the lesser Europe to the First World, who rushed there as soon as they could leave their jobless and miserable countries. A typical traveller to London from Eastern Europe is a working class unskilled person, who hopes to earn some money in care or cleaning business, along with skilled workers with families and more rarely, specialists, like doctors. In this way Polish has become the third most spoken language in the UK after English and Welsh.
    Queuing with dozens of my compatriots, who feed the financial power of all the Wizzairs, Ryanairs and Easyjets of this world