The Politics of Becoming European: A Study of Polish and Baltic Post-Cold War Security Imaginaries

This book weaves together perspectives drawn from critical international relations, anthropology and social theory in order to understand the Polish and Baltic post-Cold War politics of becoming European.

Approaching the study of Europe’s eastern enlargement through a post-colonial critique, Maria Mälksoo makes a case for a rethinking of European identity. Drawing on the theorist Edward Said, she contends that studies of the European Union are marked by a prevailing Orientalism, rarely asking who has traditionally been able to define European identity, and whether this identity should be presented as an historical process rather than a static category. The central argument of this book is that the historical experience of being framed as simultaneously in Europe - and yet not quite in Europe – informs the current self-understandings and security imaginaries of Poland and the Baltic States. Exploring this existential condition of ‘liminal Europeaness’ among foreign and security policy-making elites, the book considers its effects on key security policy issues, including relations with Western Europe, Russia and the United States.