Everyday Milieux and culture of displacement: a comparative investigation into space, place and (non)attachment within the German-Polish twin city Guben/Gubin.

Resume

Alors qu'au sein des sciences humaines il existe une supposition implicite que par la culture urbaine nous faisons reference a la culture metropolitaine, ce texte tente de promouvoir dans une veine differente la "culture des villes". Il aborde le probleme dans un contexte d'experience post-socialiste quotidienne d'un peuple demeurant dans une ville jumelle allemande-polonaise dans la peripherie de la vaste region de Berlin-Brandenburg. L'article releve une culture de deplacement de longue-date dominante pour cette region, et se questionne dans quelle mesure cette region plutot "peripherilisee" est equipee pour se rendre compte des options et pressions de la mondialisation et de l'integration europeenne. S'appuyant sur le concept du "milieu", cet article fourni des elements de preuve pour de nouvelles dynamiques de l'espace, de lieu et d'attachement dans le cadre des "voies de transformation" post-socialistes. Il se poursuit en demontrant l'impact que cela a cree tant sur les symbolismes d'appartenance que sur les tentatives transfrontalieres de gouvernance urbaine. L'article conclu en arguant pour une reaccentuation sur le niveau d'analyse mesa- ou regional dans les etudes urbaines.

Mots cles: Milieux; Culture urbaine; Transformations post-socialistes; Vision du monde; Region limitrophe allemand-polonais.

Keywords: Milieux; City Culture; Post-socialist Transformations; World Views; Life-world; German-Polish Borderland.

Abstract

While there is in social sciences an implicit assumption that by city culture we refer to metropolitan culture, this article attempts to shed a different light on the 'Culture of Cities.' It approaches the issue from within the post-socialist everyday experience of people living in a German-Polish twin city on the outskirts of the larger Berlin-Brandenburg Region. The article outlines a longstanding 'culture of displacement' as dominant for that area, and asks to what extent this rather peripheralized area is equipped to come to terms with the options and pressures of globalization and European integration. Drawing on the concept of milieu, the article provides evidence for new dynamics of space, place, and attachment in the context of post-socialist pathways of transformation. It goes on to show the impact this has both on the symbolisms of belonging and on attempts at cross-border urban governance. The article concludes by arguing for a renewed emphasis on the meso- or regional level of analysis in urban studies.

Introduction: 'Cultural Laboratory' Guben/Gubin

This volume is concerned with the 'Culture of Cities.' While there there is in social sciences an implicit assumption that by city culture we refer to metropolitan culture, our article attempts to make a contribution from a rather different perspective. It is concerned with the everyday culture of a small industrial town of 33,000 inhabitants in the German-Polish borderlands belonging to the outskirts of the Metropolitan Region of Berlin-Brandenburg. To be more precise, it refers to a town that since 1945 is divided into the German part, Guben, and the Polish part, Gubin, with the border that runs through the middle of town also functioning as a frontier between an EU and 'not yet' EU country. This is, we believe, why the everyday culture of this rather unique setting can make very interesting reading as far as the dynamics of space, place, and attachment within larger processes of globalization and Europeanization are concerned. We would agree with those who argue that for the purpose of detecting the new pa tterns of culture within the shifting landscapes of an emerging global cultural economy, metropolitan regions and borderland regions are of similar significance. Without neglecting some crucial differences between 'literal' and 'metaphoric' border settings, both borderland and global city regions are vivid embodiments of a socio-cultural order in which territorially bounded cultures become increasingly eroded and replaced by multiple forms of 'in-betweenness' (cf. Wendl and Rosler 1999: 11; Scott et al. 1997: 4f.) and hybrid mixtures of place and space (Eade 1997; Anderson and O'Dowd 1999; Matthiesen 2002).

The significance of Guben/Gubin extends both into the past and the future. Its current socio-cultural make-up displays a 'culture of displacement' (Kratke 1999: 638f.; cf. Gruchman and Walk 1997: 177f.) that goes back to the resettlement policies on both sides during and after World War II. As far as trust relationships and the concrete interaction structures within the border milieux are concerned, Guben/Gubin can be described as a 'difficult neighbourhood.' Many people who have lived in these areas during the past 50 years came into the region as a result of forced postwar population displacements. On the Polish side, this occurred mostly by way of removal from what are now Russian territories. On the German side, too, the number of new inhabitants that came from 'elsewhere' is considerable. Many came from what are now Polish parts of pre-war Germany (cf. Jajesniak-Quast and Stokosa 2000). In addition to this, the border is marked by one of the most pronounced language barriers in Europe. Especially on the German side, Polish language competence is still extremely rare, to put it mildly.

At the same time, the softening of the political border between the two parts of the city in anticipation of the upcoming EU-East-Enlargement has revitalized issues of place, attachment, and cross-border contacts as crucial dimensions of everyday life. This in turn has to be seen in the context of the attempt to generate a competitive pan-European socio-economic space within a global economy, effecting a radically new spatial distribution of regional centres and new peripheries within that space. However, for the German-Polish border region, this could well imply being 'leapfrogged' by new patterns of trans-regional cooperation (Kratke 1999: 632; Matthiesen 2001). In the case of Guben/Gubin we can talk of a 'double peripheralization.' The Berlin-Brandenburg region lies at the margins of consolidating EU-European industrial spaces, both geographically as well as in terms of growth dynamics resulting from such a consolidation. Guben/Gubin, in turn, is at the very margins of that Berlin-Brandenburg region. Even though there is only a distance of 70 kilometres between the administrative boundaries of Berlin and the German/Polish border, Guben/Gubin neither functions as an 'edge city,' nor is it a 'dormitory town.' This is mainly due to the extreme socio-economic as well as infrastructure differential between Berlin and its periphery. Observers talk of a narrow and discontinuous 'bacon belt' that intersects rather abruptly with notorious 'black holes of marginality' (cf. Matthiesen 2002: 25ff.).

Thus Guben/Gubin finds itself as part and parcel of what Lash and Urry (1994) have described as a new mix of 'wild zones' and 'tame zones' within the global social economy of disorganized capitalism. The restructuring of the mainly traditional industrial base with emphasis on clothing, textiles, furniture, and steel, has come mainly in the form of closures or drastic reduction in staff. Subsequently, unemployment on both sides of the border, oscillating somewhere between 15 to 20 percent across and along the border corridor, is higher than the national average(s) (cf. Gruchman and Walk 1997: 178ff.; Kratke 1996: 657). As a result, particularly on the German side where there is the prospect of joining the growth regions in Western Germany, out-migration has become a serious problem for the border region, slowly undermining its urban structure and demographic base. Of 25,000 initial inhabitants, more than 8,000 have left Guben, the German part of town.

In light of these developments, it seems plausible that the local council(s) should grasp the discourse of 'Europe' and 'European integration' as a great chance, and perhaps last chance, to counteract a further peripheralization of the twin city. In 1990, the two neighbouring cities signed a friendship agreement. Three years later, both municipalities joined the recently founded 'Euroregion' Spree-Neisse-Oder, linked to the EU regional policy objective of promoting cross-border initiatives. The mutual aim was to facilitate a whole set of institution-building processes across the river, and both cities participated in the World-EXPO 2000, developing six model projects. These projects have the prestigious title "Euro Town Guben/Gubin," and focus on "the political will of both towns to bring their own structures gradually closer" (Modellprojekt Expo 2000).

Against this background, Guben/Gubin can be identified as a 'cultural laboratory' in at least four ways. First, and at the most general level, as a place at the intersection of global and European transformation processes, this German-Polish twin city is a hot spot of intense processes of dis-embedding and re-embedding. Whatever way one might look at the likely outcomes of these developments, they will have a contesting impact on closed identities and national cultures (cf. Appadurai 1992; Hall 1996: 299ff.). Second, with its immediate encounter of Polish and German culture in what is effectively a single urban environment, Guben/Gubin provides a unique setting in terms of its inhabitants having the chance to experience the 'new' Europe as a lived place. This should make it the ideal laboratory for the development of an urban trans-boundary culture that is inclined towards 'cosmopolitan place' and 'cosmopolitan citizenship' (cf. Entrikin 1999; Held 2000: 402f.). In this way, the German-Polish border region ha s become a true testing ground for new trans-border networks as well as new forms of barriers to interaction. However, so far there is little evidence of a bottom-up Europeanization of Guben's everyday culture. Thirdly, this suggests to us the need to get at the dynamics of local culture, that is, the interplay between space, place and identity as it is realized in people's everyday life milieux. Cultural closure, surfacing in 'island mentality' and a generally suspicious attitude towards 'the other' can be read as indications of a far-reaching loss of 'ontological security' (cf. Giddens 1993: 35ff.). Territorial transformations and demographic loss over the last decades, particularly since 1989, have had a strong impact on the embeddedness of local milieux in the twin city. Thus, the reproduction of spatial loyalties and attachment to place is an issue that defines and frames the culture of this twin city. Finally, and crucially, in a post-socialist setting like Guben/Gubin, local dynamics of space, place, i dentity and (non)attachment are often not sufficiently grasped with recourse to the current formula of global/local dialectics. For a locality like Guben/Gubin, the respective embeddedness in nationally and regionally defined 'pathways of transformation' (Stark and Bruszt 1998; Matthiesen 2002) from a socialist to an open society is crucial for the dynamics of individual and collective attachment to locality and place. Taking into account the dynamics of 'path dependency' helps us to understand the way larger global and European developments take hold or not.

We believe that the unprecedented encounter of two different pathways of post-socialist transformation in one and the same city offers some interesting reading for transformation theory in general, and for the discourse on place, space and identity in particular.

Setting and Method: The Appropriateness of Comparative Analysis

We agree with Silverman's (1999: 144) suggestion that work in social sciences becomes scientific not by vigorously applying either quantitative or qualitative research methods, but rather "by adopting methods of study appropriate to the subject matter" (our emphasis). 'Normal,' that is, urban policy-oriented research in spatial development and local planning is certainly correct in relying mostly on quantitative research methods and large databases. However, these methods have their shortcomings when trying to get at newly emerging socio-cultural dynamics of space, place and identity as they surface within the configuration of globalization, Europeanization and post-socialist transformation. Accordingly, in a setting like Guben/Gubin, it seems wiser to rely on non-standardized qualitative research practices.

Amongst the variety of analytical techniques within 'grounded theory' and qualitative theory building approaches, comparison is the staple diet of the qualitative researcher (Strauss and Corbin 1998: 78ff.). Comparison as a strategically applied method of case-to-case analysis is a way to generate empirically sensitive questions and concepts. But there is another crucial advantage to this approach beyond its heuristic drive. Contrasting analysis can be seen as a strategy to avoid jumping to easy conclusions, and to make issues of validity and reliability relevant for qualitative research (cf. Silverman 1999: 144ff.).

It is the challenge, and at the same time the advantage, of our research setting that the twin city Guben/Gubin has one contrasting mechanism 'naturally' and essentially built in already. Contrasting cases from the two parts of the city across the border is one crucial way of 'maximizing differences.' In other words, our case study ping-pong across the border can be regarded as the spatial realization of the 'flip-flop technique' (Strauss and Corbin 1998: 94). However, our attempt to ground our analysis in what Wendl and Rosler (1999:7) have aptly named the "local border discourse" further deepens the contrastive analysis by maximizing differences beyond their mere allocation within the respective city halves. Through engagement with the spatial and other narratives of two 'borderlanders' we might get a better understanding of the configuration in which rather different pathways of post-socialist transformation, shifting local and personal identities and (non)attachment to place are managed and balanced in pe ople's everyday lives across the border.

We follow the assumption that individual narratives reveal (some of) the social structures in which they are embedded. Narratives about one's own milieu 'talk' about the individual's social environment as much as they reference the self. Drawing on Miller's (1998: 16ff.) argument here, we would agree with the assumption that, in contrast to narrative ethnography, narrative material can be aimed at identifying certain cases as examples and embodiments of more general (meso, macro and global) structures and configurations. Thus, the two milieux under consideration here are not selected in order to represent similar cases. In the context of 'structural hermeneutics,' they are considered to provide readable' patterns of social configurations (cf.Wernet 2000: 19ff.). They serve to get at new forms of action and practice, and to reveal the coexisting and conflicting logics of meaning and action behind people's milieux (cf. Miller 1998.). Milieu in this context refers to a relatively stable configuration of action a nd meaning in which people maintain a distinctive degree of familiarity, practical competence and normalcy, based on the continuity and consistency of everyday dispositions and routines, and relatively stable patterns of interaction (cf. Grathoff 1989:344 and 434).

Initially our two case studies identify a 'loser' and a 'winner' milieu with regard to the overall socio-economic situation in the process of European integration and wider processes of global socio-economic restructuring as they manifest themselves in the Guben/Gubin locality. In the cross-border comparison it will quickly become obvious that these distinctions become blurred when looking at the ways in which the dynamics of living next to the Polish-German border provide each milieu with additional options and constraints at various levels of identity formation and symbolic re-embedding. Thus, the first part of the paper will pay special attention to the ways in which the two milieux under investigation develop and maintain respective strategies of local de/a/ttachment under the conditions of postindustrial mobility and post-socialist transformation. The following section will then look at the various ways in which Europeanized border space is being (re)appropriated by everyday life practices, thereby givin g the respective milieux further options concerning strategies of re-embedding. This section should also give some clearer idea of the complexity behind processes of setting and maintaining social and cultural difference in the face of a semi-permeable political border. A final section will then draw out the structural consequences of cultural closure for an (non)emerging border culture in general, and the local political culture in particular.

Attachment to Place in a City without Attachment

Both Olga Kowalik (on the Polish side) and Paul Geiger (1) (on the German side) own the houses in which they live. Both refer to this circumstance as a reason to stay on in a crisis-stricken border town. But this is where the similarity between the two milieux ends, as far as their respective patterns of situatedness are concerned.

Paul Geiger, our case study on the German side of town, is a Gubener by birth. At the age of 57, and unemployed since 1999, he considers himself lucky to have recently obtained a temporary job in the state-sponsored 'second labour market' which, in all likelihood, will tide him over into early retirement. This is a biographical pattern that overall reflects the Eastern German 'pathway of transformation' with its dependence on make-work programs and resource transfer from the West. It is even more reflective of the situation in Guben, a town with higher-than-average unemployment in the wake of radical de-industrialization. Still, being a property owner sets Paul apart from most of his fellow Gubeners, for living in council houses was the norm for the majority in a newly industrialized socialist town. Home ownership certainly sets him apart from those 8,000 that have left Guben since 1989. As he himself explains: "Packing your bag is easy, but not if you own a house."

What Paul reveals here is a basic life-world formula of situatedness: 'owning your house' vs. 'renting a flat in council housing' equals 'staying' vs. 'leaving' equals 'real Gubener' vs. 'incomer/outsider.' Paul's rootedness in the locality is thus mediated by attachment to a particular place. Three layers of attachment can initially be observed. There is, first of all, biographical attachment. Paul, by his own account, has lost so many nerves, put so much work into the place that he just can't face leaving it. Everyone who has had any experience of building or maintaining a house under the conditions of a socialist economy of short supply can testify to this feeling. However, on closer inspection, generational ties between family and property come to the fore. We learn that the family of his grandmother built the house in 1928, and that the property has stayed in the family since then, passed on from generation to generation. These ties between family and property even survived the upheavals of World War II and after, when Guben was heavily affected by the resettlement policies of the respective war parties on both sides of this harsh border between socialist brother countries. Finally, in a roundabout way the property is anchored in the longstanding local tradition of textile industry and craftsmanship, in that his grandmother could only afford to build and maintain such a property through the security of life-long employment in the Gubener Hute, the famous Guben hat manufacturer. To leave the house and move on would mean to break from this tradition which intertwines individual and collective memories.

Thus, at first sight, Paul's attachment to place seems to be rather straightforward, namely defined by tradition. Only on second reading does another dynamic of dis-embedding/re-embedding reveal itself in the attachment to the house. The house serves as a shelter, both metaphorically and literally, from a socio-economic environment that increasingly displays the characteristics of a postindustrial society. Paul reflects on the ambivalence concerning the increased levels of mobility and flexibility within this society on the one hand, and the need for local attachment on the other, when he says: "If it wasn't for the house, I would be gone too." He knows very well that at the age of 57 he is too old to make a fresh start elsewhere, however much he might feel the need to comply with the implicit demands and standards of a society which, as he readily admits, at the end of the day he does not understand anymore, perhaps does not want to understand anymore. The recourse to local and family tradition thus serves a s a legitimizing discourse that centres around the assumed responsibility for the house.

This retreat of a milieu into the symbolisms of belonging is neither dramatic nor is it peculiar to the twin city caught in a spiral of downward development. Instead, it reveals a general tendency in postindustrial society. As Sennett (1999: 14f.) points out, the celebration of place could play an important role in separating one's sense of self from one's fate at work, where late capitalism increasingly implies a culture of (personal) failure and dislocation. This would imply the promise of an ideal city with an ideal urban culture, where urbanity helps to preserve a sense of self-worth. However, as Sennett (1999: 23f.) is also quick to point out, the reality looks less promising. What we see is in fact a tendency towards people indeed celebrating place, but 'on exclusionary terms,' that is, the celebration of 'place as a closed system.' It is precisely in this sense that Paul G. has turned his house increasingly into the centre of a protective cocoon (cf. Giddens 1993: 129). Well-ordered daily routines and spatial arrangements become a means for radically drawing a line between the familiar 'world inside' and a hostile 'world outside,' largely excluding any public space and neighbourly relations. Even the contacts with the Polish relatives are in this respect one-sided, with the Polish family "hardly ever" coming to visit. In consequence, a pattern emerges that began as a 'niche culture' typical of socialist society (cf. Nissen 1992: 14f.), and now manifests itself in a daily life that has significant features of an 'escape milieu' with rigidly drawn borders:

Well, my wife and I live a fairly secluded life, in a sense we have done that also when the GDR [German Democratic Republic] was still there, we got home from work, had our coffee, and then the world was outside, and we were inside, the door is locked, whom we want to let in we let in, whom we don't--we don't, and today it's just the same...

This might be a suitable arrangement for Paul's milieu. But the implications of this 'my home is my castle' attitude for Guben, not just for its urbanity, but also for its civic culture, are not to be underestimated. For this attitude is not confined to Paul G. and his milieu. Guben only recently became famous for all the wrong reasons when Omar Ben Noui, an Algerian asylum seeker, was chased and killed by a gang of German youth in the middle of town, with citizens making no attempt to intervene (cf. Suddeutsche Zeitung 14.11.2000).

It could be tempting to account for this retreat into the home-based private sphere with what Castells (1996: 402) has described as the 'defensive spaces' generated by those excluded from an accelerating postindustrial society. However, we find it too simplistic to make up the usual dichotomy between mobilized/globalized and traditional/localized milieux (cf. Giddens 1994: 100ff.). There are two issues, we think, that make it more appropriate to refer in this instance to a "modern-countermodern milieu" (Keim 1997: 391) and to the concept of "hybrid forms of post-socialist everyday cultures" (Matthiesen 2002: 333-357). First, Paul G. cannot withdraw into a functioning local community. He retreats into a monad-like existence, in which there is no space for the other, not even the neighbour or the Polish relative. Second, Paul G.'s withdrawal is not steered by affect or emotion. His decision is based on a fairly reflexive account of the opportunity structures offered by wider society and the locality. And so far , staying, even under deteriorating conditions, has paid off. Thus, coming back to Keim's argument, what we can observe here is a hybrid version of milieu, balancing out the demands and options of a radicalized modernity with accessible forms of traditional local embeddedness. Moreover, as the following narrative sequence indicates, the (uneasy) balance between mobility and local rootedness, which he has found for himself, is under ongoing reflexive revision: "Whether it's ok how I do it, I don't know, but so far I have muddled through."

If, as Keim's (1997) and Matthiesen's (2002) argument seems to suggest, hybrid milieux between mobility and local rootedness are typical for post-socialist societies, which have been rather suddenly exposed to the dynamics of a globalizing world economy, then we should not be surprised to detect a similar balancing out of mobility and local embeddedness in Olga K.'s milieu, namely our case study on the Polish side of town. Although she is convinced that in the context of industrial restructuring and demographic loss "the town is going to die," Olga has decided to stay. On closer inspection, however, we will see that the socio-cultural dynamics behind that decision differ quite drastically from those revealed in Paul G.'s case. Accordingly, attachment to place here has a different function, and the symbolism of belonging is framed by a discursive field that reflects the specificities of the Polish pathway of transformation. Olga K. is a social climber, and her milieu reflects the entrepreneurial element of the Polish pathway of transformation, a pathway that, with its market-oriented approach, has also led to an increasing polarization of Polish society. Within Gubin's local society Olga would have to be counted amongst the "winners" in this polarization process.

In contrast to Paul G., Olga K. is not a Gubiner by birth. As a social climber, local embeddedness for her is mainly defined in the context of career and family planning. She came to Gubin mainly because of the company flat which was offered to her with her first job. For a university graduate in socialist Poland, this was an offer too good to refuse. But Olga never intended to stay. Gubin was meant to be a stopover until something better came along. However, the family settles in, the job prospects develop, and Olga learns to appreciate another advantage of life in a border town: shopping trips across the border become crucial for the family during the supply shortages experienced in Poland during the 1980s. Living at the border in a marginalised town like Gubin turns out to be a locational advantage in comparison to more metropolitan places like Warszaw and Poznan.

But particularly in the first couple of years after 1989, living in Gubin is like winning the lottery. The border setting, combined with the encouragement of an entrepreneurial spirit in the context of the Polish pathway of transformation, encouraged the development of a bazaar-economy in Guben/Gubin (cf. Kratke 1998: 256f.) This also meant big business for Olga K. and her tax-advising bureau. Participation in the "Gubin-Eldorado," as she calls the developments during the first half of the 1990s, allows her after five years to build a house without taking out a mortgage, and to give that house a state-of-the-art interior. For Olga, this house is both a status symbol and an investment in the future. Feeling that she only got what she deserved by working hard and being clever, she proudly announces: "Our position allowed us to build a house, and this is what we did!" She knows that this house sets her apart from the "slum," as she calls the housing estates that grace Gubin even at its centre. Furthermore, the h ouse is a means of cross-border comparisons of socio-economic development. She believes that she and many of her well-off acquaintances have reached the, in her own words, "normal standard, the German standard." This indicates that her attitude toward this achievement is not that of my home is my castle.' Olga does not attempt to shut out the world outside, as Paul G. does. On the contrary, she invites the world into her home. For Olga, the self-employed entrepreneur, work and home are hardly separable anyway. But friends and relatives from Gubin and elsewhere in Poland are also invited regularly for barbecues, etc.

There is another element of socio-cultural embeddedness that provides Olga K.'s milieu with a crucial layer of local attachment. Her transformation from a manager in a state-owned plant into a businesswoman and social climber is not entirely due to her own initiative. She freely acknowledges the importance of the so-called znajomosci networks. These are a unique feature of Polish post-socialist society in transformation. The term refers to the informal networks of the elite in society, necessary to secure status across the boundaries between the political and the economic, between the public and the private spheres (cf. Staniszkis 1998). In Olga's case these networks reach from old acquaintances within the state-owned plant where she worked before 1989, right up to the realm of local and regional governance. Olga, for her part, has managed sufficiently to engage with these znajomosci within the locality. This is another reason for her to stay in Gubin instead of moving elsewhere. She explains: "Especially wit h Guben being such a relatively compact settlement and yet not exactly a real town, I have managed to build up these networks for myself here." Embeddedness in these znajomosci remains crucial now that the socio-economic fate of Guben/Gubin hangs in the balance. Though znajomosci are not found exclusively in urban places, it is, in this case, the ideal combination of these elite networks and the compactness of the small town that allow a maximum of socio-cultural resource mobilization. Olga doubts very much that she could rebuild those networks elsewhere.

In preliminary conclusion, we should not be surprised to observe with respect to (non)attachment to place and locality in a town like Guben/Gubin similarities to the tendencies of dis-embedding/re-embedding normally associated with global postmodern cities. As localities become increasingly open and vulnerable to outside influences, this can imply the undermining of local identity and a severing of traditional links between locality and collective, as well as personal, identities. This, however - and therein lies a seeming paradox - increases the symbolic significance of place. Our two case studies testify to that. While both subjects have considered leaving the 'dying city,' it is attachment to place in the narrower sense that is holding them back and providing crucial elements of situatedness. However, while place keeps its significance in a mobilized and transitory world, the meaning of place within these circumstances has changed. Harvey (1996: 316f.) points out that, rather than being defined through c ontinuity and authenticity of locality, place increasingly becomes "the intense focus of discursive activity." Place, then, is no longer a given, but something that has to be actively generated in relation to other localities and the opportunity structure of wider society.

One City Two Cultures? Milieux Across the Border

The specific history of the border setting of Guben/Gubin manifests itself significantly in Paul's milieu. Since 1973 he has been married to a Polish woman and the couple have a 28-year-old daughter. The 1970s were a time of relative openness at the German/Polish border. For example, Polish workers were recruited for the industries that developed on the German side of the border. Daily commuting to work across the river became a normal feature of everyday life, and many Polish-German marriages developed out of this scenario (Jajesniak-Quast/Stoklosa 2000: 155ff.).

One would assume that out of this setting a seedbed of cosmopolitan trans-border culture would develop, with 'cosmopolitan' here referring to Held's (2000) wider usage of the term; that is, showing genuine interest in 'the other' and in perceiving the trans-boundary situation as one of a shared 'relevant community.' And indeed, on the surface it would seem that way. Paul G. speaks fluent Polish. At home, Polish is spoken as much as German. Paul and his wife favour the sophistication of Polish cuisine, and they also pay frequent visits to his wife's extended family on the other side of town (and the border).

However, looking deeper into the cultural dynamics of Paul's milieu and the ways in which these are interlinked with living in a twin city, the picture becomes more complex, and certainly a bit more sobering. For a start, Paul makes a clear-cut distinction between the Poles inside his milieu, i.e. the extended family, and those outside it. While he talks amicably about his wife and her family, he distances himself as far as possible from 'the' Poles, especially those with whom he practically shares his town. Most significantly, this sentiment is expressed when he states that Poles in the German part of town should feel as "guests," or "foreigners":

Well, I have to say, when I see some of the guests here from Poland, you know, when they come shopping here, they should behave as 'foreigners' in Germany, whether they like it or not, they are guests here, and accordingly they have... (struggling for words)...., well let's say, I can't go to Saudi Arabia or somewhere, and not adjust to the local customs, I have to behave like a guest.

What is symbolically constructed here is hardly a town with a shared urban culture, but a world in which Guben and Gubin are as far apart as Germany and Saudi Arabia, two cultures with supposedly rather different sets of assumptions and cultural codes. Spatial proximity is deliberately reversed into symbolic distance.

Yet while this could invite the interpretation of a straightforward symbolic reinforcement of 'here' and 'there', 'them' and 'us,' according to territorial borders, the actual interplay which generates social boundaries and spatial practice in Paul's milieu is rather sophisticated. For all his latent unease about 'the' Poles coming into his part of town, Paul himself is a relatively active border and boundary crosser. At least once a week the family goes shopping on the other side. He and his wife pay the extended family a visit almost every weekend, and events like birthdays and Christmas are exclusively spent 'there.' The benefits Paul gains from this border crossing are manifold. On the surface there is a straightforward utilitarian aspect to the situation. The difference in prices allows Paul to stretch his comparatively low salary to a comfortable standard of living. At the same time, he benefits from the -- as he sees it -- "unbelievable hospitality" of his wife's Polish relatives, who "simply know how to celebrate."

More important, however, is the multiple symbolic upgrading of his milieu in this process. Each time he crosses the border he can exclaim in a strange sort of sorry relief, "They are worse off than us!" And this, for Paul, implies more than an indirect upgrading of his material situation at home. It allows him, someone who is comparatively badly off by German or even Eastern German standards, to "play the rich uncle" (den dicken Max markieren) for a while. He drives up in a second-hand Audi, the ultimate symbol of German engineering, and he and his wife always bring some expensive consumer goods such as coffee. By his own admission, this gives him the feeling of being "just like a Wessi (2) in those days when they came over to the GDR." He further explains the "rich uncle from the West feeling":

They always enjoy it when I come, well, we always bring quite a few things, don't we, it's just like the Wessis in those days... And they are grateful I must say, they give the shirts off their backs when there are festivities, or even when you come unexpected, they are just great at creating something out of nothing, they are much better than us in this. So, I mean we are welcome there, and they really dish up, I tell you.

What can be observed here is a double gain on Paul G.'s part as far as material and non-material aspects of embeddedness are concerned. He has the advantage of living in the society with the better functioning welfare system, while across the border, in the same town, he has access to a life-world which in some ways still resembles features of a socialism-generated type of coziness. Going to visit his relatives is like temporarily regaining a small piece of a lost life-world. Moreover, he participates in the, by comparison, considerable material affluence related to the Eastern German pathway of transformation, while making up for lost personal prestige with his weekly adoption of the role of the 'rich uncle' in Poland. In other words, Paul has generated a comfortable niche for himself in a peculiar border setting that allows him to have the best of both worlds. At first glance a 'loser' within the context of far-reaching restructuring processes across Europe, Paul actually turns out to be a 'winner,' benefit ing from the opportunity structure as it is provided by the border situation in the German-Polish twin city: "Ok, you could say: breathing German air - eating Polish dishes, well, I suppose I could say I like it this way, couldn't imagine it any other way actually... (thoughtful)... or perhaps up to now I didn't have to [imagine it any other way]." As this narrative sequence indicates, Paul is quite aware of the impermanent nature of the border arrangements, and therefore his own boundary arrangements, with Poland's EU entry envisaged for 2004. He intuitively gathers that the material as well as symbolic buttress, effectively represented by the 'little cozy Poland' of the extended family behind the border, could break away in the process of the EU East enlargement.

In light of these future developments, Paul's relationship with his extended family, which looked quite amicable initially, becomes clearly relativized. For example, he says with reference to the future that "we [he and his Polish relatives] get on with each other," but "at the end of the day everyone has to look after one's own, you can't really be bothered about other people's lives." Thus, even the relatives from the other part of town turn from 'nearest' others with whom he enjoys partying and Christmas celebrations, into 'distant' neighbours who have to live their own lives when it comes to staking a claim in the future Europe. When it comes down to the socio-economic future of life in the border region and the twin city, Paul does not exempt his Polish relatives from the rigidly applied line drawn between 'them' (the Poles) and 'us,' the 'haves' and the 'have nots,' a line which for Paul divides the town.

That Paul is prepared to put his amicable relationship to his Polish relatives more or less on the line in the face of EU enlargement indicates that he considers this same process to put his own existence on the line. The EU enlargement is perceived as a process by which he, as someone who so effectively played the opportunity structure generated by the EU border running through the city and the extended family, can only be a 'loser' again. Paul sees the EU enlargement in his life-world perspective very much as a tidal wave of declining living conditions, moving in the opposite direction of the bureaucratic and administrative Eastwards enlargement. What this implies for a border city like Guben/Gubin is, in his words, the prevalence of a "Polish state of affairs" ["Polnische Zustdnde"].

Thus, for Paul the strategy for the changes ahead is quite clear: avoid those conditions (of the "Polish state of affairs") by all means and for as long as possible. He has even drafted a time frame of roughly two decades for his strategy to avoid a European 'land under water' scenario: "Well, I assume in 10 or 20 years things will be the same here [as in Poland], it won't take long." Not a long time, but perhaps long enough to cover most of his time in retirement.

Whatever else Paul means by a "Polish state of affairs" we do not know. What is quite clear, however, is that the small river that divides the two city halves in Paul's narrative becomes transformed into a moving 'frontier' (cf. Wendl and Rosler 1999: 3f.), meeting point between order and disorder, the latter in this case materializing in the form of a "Polish state of affairs" that is relentlessly encroaching on the territory of well-ordered and regulated EU- and German welfare regulations. Paul's narrative about the EU enlargement ('land under water') thus reveals in extreme form the most basic anthropological pattern of maintaining a milieu: 'order' versus 'disorder' (cf Douglas 1995).

In summary, we could describe Paul's milieu as a closed milieu across the border. This seems to be a paradox, but displays exactly the well-balanced contradiction between spatial mobility across the border and rigid cultural closure toward the Polish 'neighbour.' We also saw that this contradiction is affected by the border setting being caught in the transitory process of EU enlargement. Paul knows that the embeddedness lie has gained through these rather comfortable border arrangements lives on borrowed time. The approaching entry of Poland into the EU and its social consequences for a town like Guben/Gubin will throw these arrangements into question. To maintain under these circumstances a sense of self-determined 'order' with regard to 'inside' and 'outside' becomes crucial to Paul. Thus, his milieu in the German-Polish border city setting reveals in extreme form the provisional and ambiguous nature of borders and boundaries that Simmel (1994/1908) refers to: the more the political border becomes a 'bridge,' the more Paul actually closes the 'door' on his neighbours, both in a metaphorical and literal sense.

By contrast, our case study on the Polish side of town displays a hybrid mix of cultural closure and openness that very much reveals its embeddedness in the Polish pathway of transformation. Though several years younger than Paul, Olga K., at 44, has lived in Gubin long enough for her milieu to show sedimentations of the developments at the German-Polish border after 1945. Like the eastern border region of the GDR, Poland has attempted to (re)develop the industrial infrastructure of what is now its western border region. In this context, CARINA, a shoe manufacturing plant, became a major employer in the Gubin area. However, to get people, especially qualified people, to settle in what was effectively still a disputed territory, was not easy. Accordingly, Olga, as a kind of reluctantly recruited worker, reflects the 'culture of displacement' that characterizes the socio-cultural geography of the German-Polish border region (cf. Kratke 1999: 638f.).

Subsequently, however, Olga learned to value the benefits of living next to a border, which might be opened and closed by political decisions, but remains permeable for the locals and their inventiveness. The bazaar economy that was booming throughout the 1990s is a case in point. Olga clearly states that the living standard of some segments of Gubin society, including her own, is directly linked to the semi-legal money flows from the German side:

You know, I honestly think, that if they hadn't opened up the border, not all these businesses would have developed. And this in turn gave us an existence. There is no kidding yourself, if it wasn't for the border, some people certainly wouldn't live the life they do, you know, those who have built their houses etc.... As far as we are concerned, we have definitely improved our status, only because of that we could build this house, ok? Our bureau profits from the fact that many of our clients have based their businesses on German customers. So when they develop, I develop too.

However, the wage differential along the border, which made possible the Gubin bazaar economy, is at the same time an indication of a continuing power imbalance between the border communities. This socio-economic difference affects the conditions for direct social interaction across the border. Olga's suspicion is that prospective access to the EU will not necessarily generate a level playing field in this respect:

Of course, entry to the EU is a chance, in some ways. In the EU countries you can choose where to work, there will be less black market, I guess. But the Poles need to realize that they will have to speak German, for the Germans won't learn Polish, will they. We have to learn German, that's the truth, isn't it? Anyway, the German partner is richer, stronger, thus they can make certain demands. There is no kidding ourselves, such is life.

Thus, the socio-economic power differential at the German-Polish, and EU, border generates an 'affective field' (cf. Waldenfels 1985: 195ff.) that, more effectively than a physical barrier it would seem, blocks the cultural encounter between the neighbouring communities. Perceived language asymmetries are only one indication of that. This is by no means a new pattern. The GDR and Poland were unequal 'brothers' in the past, and Olga remembers being treated with arrogance and suspicion back then, too, when she went shopping in the slightly better equipped shops of Guben. However, it seems that the softening of the political-administrative border has brought these socio-cultural blockages to the fore. For Olga, a socio-economic 'winner' in the Polish transformation, this ironically means that due to her feelings of language inadequacy and the condescending behaviour toward Poles on the German side, she has drastically reduced her shopping trips to the German part of town. Though she is well aware of the effort made by single individuals to correct these distortions, she freely admits to having deep-seated and long-standing 'complexes' in this respect. These are reinforced each time she crosses the border and encounters the German customs officers:

I remember one episode when I was in a beauty shop. The sales person there wanted to wrap something up for me really nicely, but I was afraid of getting involved in that situation, I said no I take it like it is, I can wrap it myself at home. Can you imagine, I was afraid of getting involved with her in a conversation, I felt ashamed because I don't speak German, and I was so surprised by her obligingness. But then it's back to the border, and it brings you down to earth with a bump... And of course, we Poles, we always tend to think he [the customs officer] treats us like dirt.

The contrast between the 'loser' and the 'winner,' with the border effectively operating as a segregating 'affective field,' could not be more striking. While for Paul crossing the border induces feelings of elevation and high self-esteem, Olga speaks of the border experience in terms of shame and inadequacy -- even though on another level of biographic aspirations the globalized westdrift of her worldview is very distinct and very modern. One could say that direct encounter with the border effectively devalues the social status Olga has achieved for herself. However, while because of that Olga, more so than Paul, refrains from engagement in a 'border culture' of mutual direct interaction, it is her comparatively high socio-economic status within Polish society that allows her to nevertheless engage with the German neighbour in a more abstract, or 'disembedded,' way. Olga might not have personal contacts with Germans on the other side of town, she might loathe shopping on the German side, and she might hate the German customs officer, but she admits to liking the 'German style.' Accordingly, much of the interior design and equipment in the newly built house is from Germany. Relying on 'abstract systems' (cf. Giddens 1994: 80) in the form of a VISA card, the Internet, and two big German catalogue retailers allows her to facilitate the transfer of a standardized 'German style' from 'there' to 'here' without having to overcome cultural boundaries. Thus, being able to circumvent the border experience via 'abstract systems,' she has turned proximity into a technical rather than socio-cultural issue.

This transfer of 'German style' as practiced by Olga turns out to have a wider significance than simply being a question of taste. It expresses an appreciation of certain aspects of German culture, such as order and orderliness. However, very much in line with the narrative structure so far, Olga, even when referring to direct encounters with that culture, alludes to the transfer of abstract principles of German culture; not, however, to interaction with its members:

I mean if you live so close to the German border, so close to a certain culture, you learn to appreciate some of their culture, their culture of orderliness especially, I mean you can't adopt everything, but their order I like, you sometimes feel ashamed when it's dirty here and over there it's so clean, well, that somehow motivates [our emphasis].

To what extent this narrative sequence also indicates an 'inferiority complex'-induced readiness to succumb to stereotypes, we do not know. But it is worth pointing to the fact that Paul, from a very different point of view, brought up the issue of 'order/orderliness' as well, with reference to the (daunting) prospect of 'Polish conditions' sweeping across the border and into 'his' Europe. In this light, then, it would seems plausible to regard Olga's attempt to transfer a 'culture of orderliness' into her milieu as an indication that the life-world has implicitly generated its own acquis communautaire. (3) Could it be that 'German orderliness' across the border here symbolically stands for 'European order'?

What we can observe in Olga's milieu, then, is a 'West-enlargement' of her life-world that complements the upcoming institutionalized 'East-enlargement' of the EU. However, this is perhaps not sufficiently captured by the narrative of a 'return to Europe' (cf. Sztompka 1993: 86f.). In Olga's case the repositioning of her milieu according to her improved social status requires more than just filling her house with 'German style.' Perhaps not surprisingly, the ideal that Olga, the (largely) self-made social climber, aspires to is the American way of life. Her son has just returned from a gap year in the United States, and has already lined up a place there to study banking. Notably, there is an attempt to generate social interaction across the Atlantic. The son's American guest parents are invited to Gubin for the summer. The most intriguing aspect in all this is that the Americans tend to replace the German 'neighbour' when it comes to a direct comparison of living standards and to measuring achievement. Thus, the symbolic frame of reference for situating house and social status is outwards-looking, reaching beyond the immediate locality and out into the wider world. Pictures and stories from the son's gap year in the United States become a benchmark for measuring one's own success, right down to numbers, as the following narrative sequence might indicate:

I mean, if I compare their status to ours, as far as you can do that by the photos of their house, and then look at our house, I would say the achievement is comparable, in favour of the Americans, of course, but by no means do we have kind of 20% or 30%, but more like 80% I would say.

That Olga's visions for house and family clearly reflect her own affinities for the American way of life as opposed to the (neighbouring) East German pathway of transformation is not overly surprising. As a person with entrepreneurial spirit and her own business, the 'soft' and welfare-state-embedded structures she encounters on the other side of town must feel rather suspect to her, notwithstanding her affinity to some aspects and principles of 'German style.'

Olga K.'s milieu can thus be described as an open milieu next to the border. It is open to a globalized social landscape and to the German 'neighbour' via abstract systems, while at the same time being blocked in its direct engagement with the (German) society on the other side of town due to the longstanding and re-enforced barriers of German-Polish stereotyping (cf. Dolinska and Falkowski 2001). In this regard, however, it is important to return to Olga's uncomplicated and easy use of 'abstract systems,' which we referred to earlier. There is a wider dimension to this system as well, in that it points us to the interplay between the transformations taking place in Eastern-Central Europe and wider processes of globalization. Olga is a vivid example for the thesis that globalization implies access to extended opportunity spaces and frames of reference for some, while increasing the polarization within society as a whole (cf. Bauman 1998).

'Eurotown' vs. 'Dead City': Disjunctures Between Symbolic Politics and Everyday Life

From the evidence gathered so far, it is certainly no exaggeration to say that the dynamics of globalization and Europeanization, which so forcefully have caught on in the German-Polish twin city, have not helped to generate a common European or cosmopolitan culture in Guben/Gubin. In fact, quite the opposite has occurred. The two city halves and their respective everyday life cultures seem to drift culturally apart despite spatial proximity. The only truly shared communicative horizon is the discourse of the 'dying city,' which is prevalent on both sides of the border. Attempts by the local political and regional elite to counteract this development via symbolic politics geared towards the meaning-making project of a 'Euro Town' have so far not been very successful. The project has turned into a self-sustaining supra-local political process without ever gaining the necessary grassroots support from the everyday cultures on both sides of the border.

As a result, there is a danger of the laudable European approach in institutional politics increasingly becoming emptied out and turning into a carrier of a local 'festivalization of town politics' (cf. Hau[beta]ermann and Siebel 1993). That is, 'European integration' and 'EU East enlargement' become the semantic toolbox of local 'symbolic politics.' This becomes even more obvious when one recalls the symbolisms of this governance approach. Guben received a Europe-Medal in 1996, a Europe Diploma in 1996, and a Europe-Flag in 1998. In 2000, the city proudly figured as 'Model Experiment Euro Town Guben/Gubin' at the World Expo 2000. Accordingly, today's Guben flirts heavily with its official 'Euro Town' status. There is also significant referencing to its location at the heart of a 'Euroregion,' and the potential qualification for various types of European funding attached to this (cf. www.guben-online.de; www.guben.de). While this emphasis on the symbolic discourse of 'Europeanization' is aimed at attracting m ajor investors to the area, these have so far shown very little enthusiasm in regarding the twin city as an attractive location. Furthermore, the self-promoted image of Guben/Gubin as a 'Euro Town' stands in stark contrast to the self-perception of its inhabitants, who see themselves as living in a dying and forgotten town. Thus, in the face of a lack of tangible results, it becomes vital for this discursively inclined type of urban governance to loosen the tensions between expectation and result via occasional populist measures. Accordingly, the twin city's Expo activities were accompanied by a cluster of well-staged and wellattended cross-border festivals, with plenty of folklore, drink, and food. Examples of 'good practice' such as German-Polish schools, associations and clubs involving music groups, ornithologists, anglers and philatelists, tend to become distorted in this context. These laudable attempts by local cross-border activists to foster a cosmopolitan-inclined urban culture appropriate for a twi n city tend to be pushed into the limelight during the well-staged events of Europeanized symbolic politics, but otherwise have to work within a culture characterized by latent 'Europhobia.'

Thus, there seems to be a growing disjuncture between the claims of symbolic politics and the harsh reality of the border region setting. It has to be stressed again at this point that these closure procedures are twofold. On the one hand, there are the longstanding animosities between the two everyday life cultures. Increasingly, however, this is complicated by a growing disjunction between everyday life and the political discourse. Not by accident do we find evidence for this claim in our two case studies.

As we have seen already, for Paul G. the prospect of having to share some of the western European prosperity and welfare radically obstructs the realization of being in a community of fate with the Poles on the other side of town. Paul's argumentative attempt to legitimize his point of view operates on several discursive levels. On the one hand, he attempts to keep the issue on a rather abstract level when arguing in (tabloid?) newspaper style: "The Poles are thinking that the millions will be just pouring in when they join the EU, they think they can fill their pockets, but for the man in the street this won't happen, I can assure you." On another level, in reference to local politics and policies, the following observation gives explicit evidence of the otherwise 'humming tone of discontent' (cf. Matthiesen 2001) between the local political elite on the one hand, and Guben's everyday culture on the other. There were already longstanding rumours in Guben that most of the EU-funded infrastructure work would o ccur on the Polish side and would be carried out by Polish businesses, when things came to a head with an alleged city council proposal to come to a practical ad hoc cross-border arrangement with respect to empty housing in Guben and a housing shortage in Gubin. Paul is quite clear where his loyalties lie in this respect:

When I see all these tossers there in the city council, for goodness' sake, I ask myself, you know, nothing against national pride, but that is too much. Of course it's tougher for them [the Poles], but... (struggling for words).... you can't just always support them, you know, giving them all these lucrative [business] contracts and all that, I don't know, I just don't like that. I mean if you take the whole housing estate business, that seems to be quite logical ok, but, for god's sake, do they want to pay the rent for them too?

Olga, as a member of the local administrative and business elite, has a more objective view on things, at least as far as economic interconnectedness goes. She knows that the city in many ways is interconnected in its socioeconomic circuits. As an employee of Gubin City Council with access to the relevant economic figures, and in her second job as a private tax advisor, she knows that the "Eldorado of Gubin is over." In other words, Olga gathers from involvement in the local (bazaar) economy what economic geographers have recently underlined for the border region as a whole (cf. Kratke 1998: 257). Accordingly, the Polish part of town is increasingly affected by the downward economic and demographic development of Guben:

There is no doubt trade has gone down. I mean, there is trade, and then there is trade, but in Gubin it is all geared towards German customers, there is no reason to kid ourselves. But people over there are leaving, there is no industry left. If something would develop there, some new industry, a new plant or something, something would be happening here too. It is all connected with each other.

This statement strongly suggests an attitude compatible with a developing cross-border community of fate. And indeed, as an employee of the city council Olga conjures up the joint EU strategy of the two city halves, which has shown success in several infrastructure projects such as the water refinement plant, -- only then to dismiss the whole EU funding business and its outcomes as 'just propaganda."

In Olga's milieu there is a deep divide between the level of symbolic politics and political discourse on the one hand, and life-world as far as cross-border interaction and cooperation are concerned, on the other. As a representative of the city council she describes the relationship between the German and the Polish part of town strategically as a "marriage" in which "it can't always be all nice and cozy (laughs)." She knows the German officials quite well, and has been to the traditional New Year's reception of the Mayor of Guben a number of times. And on a personal level? The answer is brisk and clear: "I don't have any contacts, I don't speak the language."

What Olga refers us to here is not just a language problem in a technical sense, but an issue concerning attitudes. Guben/Gubin is on the one hand 'a community of fate' to which the metaphor of a 'marriage' readily applies. At the same time, it is an alliance between very unequal neighbours, embedded in the rather different German and Polish 'pathways of transformation' (cf. Matthiesen 2001).

The picture we get from these narrative sketches reveals the overall dynamics of cross-border interaction on the one hand, and interaction between political discourse and everyday life culture on the other. This account of a discrepancy between Europhoria and Europhobia as a first approximation to the overall situation in Guben/Gubin has been further refined by Matthiesen's and Burkner's (cf. Matthiesen 2002; Burkner/Matthiesen 2002 forthc.) overall assessment of trans-boundary interaction in this model town setting as it has developed over the last few years (see Figure 1).

Burkner and Matthiesen distinguish between three levels of trans-border interaction: cooperation within and between formal institutions, cooperation of civil society-embedded groups and initiatives, and more or less spontaneous networking between local milieux. With regard to the first level, the authors stress the intense symbolic politics that were referred to above. At the second level, that of civil society, they detect a feeble and sporadic engagement with cross border issues, for example with respect to environmental problems. In terms of the third level, however, the interaction of everyday life milieux, Matthiesen's (2001) assessment is quite devastating. Here he refers to "sometimes disastrous tendencies of closure procedures, of fundamentalist ethnic codification processes, of aggressive acts against foreigners... implicitly supported by the 'normal' everyday life cultures."

Governance Paradoxes in Guben/Gubin

The conflicting processes sketched out above raise the following question: What is the relationship between the astonishing amount of formal cross-border oriented networks on the one hand, and on the other the segregating tendencies on the level of informally structured border milieux, especially on the German side? These conflicting tendencies result in what we have termed 'governance paradoxes' (cf. Matthiesen 2002): 'good' institution-building processes tend to produce 'bad' closure effects. As a result, the danger of structural contradictions between individual expectations and the results of collective trans-border processes is growing fast. Not surprisingly, these interaction asymmetries and governance paradoxes tend to reinforce peripheralization processes in the 'in-between' border zone as a whole. In this way, a vicious circle is impending over the borderland, combining economic, political, social and cultural processes in a downward spiral.

It has to be noticed that so far the twin city's feeble civil society has not been able or willing to bridge the conflicting strategies of everyday culture and politics, and thereby to mobilize resources for proactive forms of local capacity building. If anything, civil society, at least as far as the German part of town is concerned, has been reactive and in parts even non-constructive. The following story may further illustrate this point. In 1999, intermediary groups started a petition against the Mayor of Guben in an effort to kick him out of office. In the county of Brandenburg, this procedure is called 'Burgermeister-Kegeln' ['Mayor-Bowling'], that is, throwing the mayor out of his job, like a pin in a bowling game. This populist attempt was initiated because of the mayor's clear support for Europe-oriented, cross-border activities and the amount of vested 'symbolic' interests in the eastwards enlargement of the EU. The mayor was labelled 'Polenfreund' ('Friend of Poles'), with the implicit assumption t hat he did not care enough about the interests of his fellow German Gubeners. Up until now, the mayor and his local power networks have tried to stick to their approach of strengthening discursive strategies, playing the European card and not giving in to hostile zero sum games that set 'them' against 'us.' Nevertheless, the option to choose communicative strategies and the respective governance styles within the border situation becomes increasingly precarious. (4)

That this paralysing tendency in local policies has already had a huge impact on the urban culture and local identity of Guben/Gubin, the German-Polish 'Euro-Town,' can be illustrated by one final observation. One important objective in connection with Guben/Gubin applying for 'Euro-Town' status has been the development of a joint spatial structural concept for the twin city. A coordinated plan was agreed upon, focussing on the development of the still-missing town centre of Guben/Gubin. This plan develops a project that explicitly crosses the border space. The main axis of this project tries to link the two most important downtown areas in function and design. It is hoped that a new commanding landmark on the German side will correspond with the dramatic ruin of the huge old city church in Gubin on the Polish side of the axis (Stadt Guben 1998; Internationale Bau-Ausstellung 1999). However, to date no concrete investor is in sight. Despite concentrated ad hoc attempts by the local councils, a practicable joi ned strategy for a joined city centre redevelopment has not yet emerged. The 'empty' town centre has become a symbolic marker for the rather bleak situation of the locality, a symbol of an as yet unsuccessful struggle for a shared local identity. The symbolic significance of this (non)development for the Gubeners and Gubiners cannot be overestimated.

Conclusion

Three patterns catch the eye when looking back at the two case studies investigated in this paper. There is, first of all, the pragmatic and ongoing character of attachment to place that both case studies reveal in the context of a twin city at the periphery of Europe. What can be observed is a de-linking of place identity in the narrower sense from urban culture and local identity in the wider sense. The discursive framing of local anchorage is in both cases de-linked from the larger discursive frame of a 'Model Euro-Town' but also, at least to a certain extent, attempts to pragmatically ignore the socio-economic realities of a 'dying city.' Thus, place in the narrower sense becomes the last anchorage in the tidal waves of intense socio-economic and spatial restructuring. Secondly, we can observe a tendency to overlook the 'neighbour' as the 'nearest other' when it comes to generating attachment to place and urban culture. Despite selective engagement with the other side of town, the cultural and innovative potential of a twin city is not vitalized in terms of generating a trans-border urban culture. This, finally, amounts to a huge tension between the local elite's focus on EU integration and its failure to take hold at the grassroots, thereby widening the gap between the socio-cultural and the political embeddedness of place identity.

From these observations some rather analytical issues need to be drawn out. First, despite the epochal changes in the post-socialist period, the 'soft' elements of local milieux have proved to be astonishingly persistent. Any policy attempt trying to steer against processes of further peripheralization and urban decline at the Eastern margins of 'Europe' has to take into account these embedding structures of post-socialist everyday life. Secondly, and following on from the previous point, our research shows that the respective pathways of transformation are of crucial analytical significance. Both case studies reveal the conflicting logics of action behind these respective patterns of post-socialist development, which not only determine people's milieux, but also characterize the general urban culture of a twin city such as Guben/Gubin. This, finally, has crucial implications when widening the analytical focus of our investigation into urban culture and local embeddedness to larger processes of globalization. The mainstream literature in the Anglo-American discourse on locality, place and attachment has grown used to operating with multiple mixtures of the global-local, or glocalization (cf. e.g. Cvetkovich and Kellner 1997). And, no doubt, processes of globalization have caught on in the Guben/Gubin locality. Processes of dis-embedding at the level of action strategies as well as discursive framing can clearly be detected in both our case studies. However, informed by our research in the German-Polish borderlands we would articulate unease about the dominance of the globalocal formula for two reasons. On the one hand, the formula is rather blase about the importance of meso-structures within the process of current social transformation (cf. Smelser 1997; Matthiesen 1998). Accordingly, we feel, the regular categories of the glocalization discourse are too generalized. Regional pathways of transformation need to be taken into account as a crucial mediating element between the local and the global. And, this being our second hesitation, the current glocalization discourse is carried by the implicit assumption that what we see now in terms of urban developments in central and eastern Europe is merely a belated catching up with western developments, a 'catching-up modernization' so to speak. It is in this sense that our 'view from the margins' hopes to make a contribution to a deeper understanding of the regional specificities of contemporary urban developments.

Acknowledgements

The article is based on a DFG (German Research Fund)-sponsored (MA 2195/2) project at the Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS.) in Erkner (n. Berlin). The two authors and their Polish colleague Anna Zinserling are currently conducting research into 'Milieux and World Views in Transformation' in the German-Polish twin-city Guben-Gubin. We would like to acknowledge the very helpful and constructive comments of the anonymous reviewers. Thanks to Kieran Bonner for his patient and yet firm guidance throughout this project.

Notes

(1.) Names have been changed to protect anonymity.

(2.) "Wessis" is the going Eastern German colloquialism for Western Germans.

(3.) The EU's legal corpus that must be adopted by the accession countries.

(4.) In fact, while editing the article, incoming results from the local elections of November 11, 2001 in Guben suggest that the mayor has been thrown out of office and been replaced by a Liberal candidate who plays the 'local business' card as opposed to the 'European neighbours' card.

References

Anderson, J. and L. O'Dowd. 1999. "Borders, Border Regions and Territoriality: Contradictory Meanings, Changing Significance" Regional Studies 33(7): 593-604.

Appadurai, A. 1992. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy." In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, edited by M. Featherstone. London: Sage.

Bauman, Z. 1998. "On Glocalization: or Globalization for Some, Localization for Some Others" Thesis Eleven 54: 37-49.

Burkner, H.-J. and U. Matthiesen. 2002 [forthcoming]. "Antagonistic Structures in Border Areas: Local Milieux and Local Politics in the Polish-German Twin-City Guben/Gubin" GeoJournal special issue on 'Twin Cities.'

Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of Network Society. Oxford. Blackwell.

Cvetkovich, A. and D. Kellner, eds. 1997. Articulating the Global and the Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies. Oxford: Westview Press.

Douglas,M. 1995. Purity and Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.

Eade, J., ed. 1997. Living the Global City: Globalization as Local Process. London: Routledge.

Entrikin, J.N. 1999. "Political Community, Identity and Cosmopolitan Place" International Sociology 14(3):269-282.

Giddens, A. 1993. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity.

_____. 1994. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

Glaser, B. and A. Strauss. 1979. The Discovery of Grounded Theory. New York: Aldine Publishers.

Grathoff, R. 1989. Milieu und Lebenswelt: Einfuhrung in die phanomenologische Soziologie und die sozialphanomenologische Forschung. Frankfur/M.: Suhrkamp.

Gruchman, B. and F. Walk. 1997. "Transboundary Cooperation in the Polish-German Border Region." In Borders and Border Regions in Europe and North America, edited by P. Ganster, A. Sweedler, J. Scott, W.-D. Eberwein. San Diego: San Diego University Press.

Guben.de. 2001. http://www.guben.de/wirtschaft/infrastruktur.htm.

Guben-online.de. 2001. http://www.guben-online.de/fact.htm.

Hall, S. 1996. "The Question of Cultural Identity." In Modernity and its Futures, edited by S. Hall, D. Held and A. McGrew. Cambridge/Oxford: Polity/Open University Press.

Harvey, D. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hau[beta]ermann, H. and W. Siebel. 1993. "Die Politik der Festivalisierung und die Festivalisierung der Politik. Grosse Ereignisse in der Stadtpolitik." In Festivalisierung der Stadtpolitik: Stadtentwicklung durch grosse Projekte, edited by H. Hau[beta]ermann and W. Siebel. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

Held, D. 2000. "Regulating Globalization? The Reinvention of Politics" International Sociology 15(2):269-282.

Internationale Bau-Ausstellung. 1999. Vorbereitungsgesellschaft mbH: Furst-Puckler Land 2000 bis 2010. Gro[beta]raschen.

Jajesniak-Quast, D. and K. Stokosa. 2000. Geteilte Stadte an Oder und Neisse: Frankfurt (Oder) - Slubice, Guben - Gubin und Gorlitz - Zgorzelec 1945 1995. Berlin: Berlin Verlag Arno Spitz.

Keim, K.-D. 1997. "Milieu und Moderne: zum Gebrauch und Gehalt eines nachtraditionalen und sozial-raumlichen Milieubegriffs" Berliner Journal fur Soziologie 7(3):383-399.

Kratke, S. 1999. "Regional Integration or Fragmentation? The German-Polish Border Region in a New Europe" Regional Studies 33(7):631-641.

_____. 1998. "Problems of Cross-Border Regional Integration: The Case ofthe German-Polish Border Area" European Urban and Regional Studies 5(3):249-262.

_____. 1996. "Where East meets West: the German-Polish Border Region in Transformation" European Planning Studies 4(6): 647-669.

Lash, S. and J. Urry. 1994. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage.

Matthiesen, U. 1998. Die Raume des Milieus: neue Tendenzen in der sozial- und raumwissenschaftlichen Milieuforschung sowie in der Stadt- und Raumplanung. Berlin: edition sigma.

-----. 2001. "Transformational Pathways and Institutional Capacity Building: the Case of the German-Polish Twin-City Guben/Gubin." In Urban Governance, Institutional Capacity Building and Social Milieux, edited by G. Cars, P. Healey, A. Madanipour and C. de Magalhaes. Avebury: Ashgate.Matthiesen, U., ed. 2002. An den Randern der deutschen Hauptstadt. Opladen: Leske + Budrich.

Miller, G. 1998. "Building Bridges: the Possibility of Analytic Dialogue Between Ethnography, Conversation Analysis and Foucault." In Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice, edited by D. Silverman. London: Sage.

"Modellprojekt Expo 2000." 1999. Brochure, Guben/Gubin.

Nissen, S. 1992. "Die sozialistische Arbeitsgesellschaft in der okologischen Transformation: Arbeit und Umwelt in der ehemaligen DDR." In Modernisierung nach dem Sozialismus: okologische und okonomische Probleme der Transformation, edited by S. Nissen. Marburg: Metropolis.

Scott, J., A. Sweedler, P. Ganster, and W.-D. Eberwein. 1997. "Dynamics of Transboundary Interaction in Comparative Perpsective." In Borders and Border Regions in Europe and North America, edited by J. Scott et al. San Diego: San Diego University Press.

Sennett, R.1999. "Growth and Failure: The New Political Economy and its Culture." In Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, edited by M. Featherstone and S. Lash. London: Sage.

Silverman, D. 1999. Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analyzing Talk, Text and Interaction. London: Sage.

Simmel, G. 1994/1908. "Bridge and Door." Transl. by M.Ritter. Theory, Culture and Society 11:5-10.

Smelser, N.J. 1997. Problematics of Sociology: the Georg Simmel Lectures 1995. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stadt Guben 1998. Raumliches Strukturkonzept Guben-Gubin. Guben

Staniszkis, J. 1998. "Postkommunismus: Versuch einer soziologischen Analyse" Prokla Nr.l1228(3):375-394.

Stark, D. and L. Bruszt. 1998. Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Strauss, A. 1987. Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Strauss, A. and J. Corbin. 1998. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures of Developing Grounded Theory. (2nd ed.) London: Sage.

Suddeutsche Zeitung. 2000. "Amusement statt Abschreckung: der Prozess um die todliche Hetzjagd von Guben wurde zur Farce" (November 14): 1.

Sztompka, P. 1993. "Civilizational Incomptetence: the Trap of Post-Communist Societies" Zeitschrift fur Soziologie 22(3): 85-95.

Waldenfels, B. 1985. In den Netzen der Lebenswelt. Frankfurt/M.: Sunhrkamp.

Wendl, T. and M. Rosler. 1999. "Introduction: Frontiers and Borderlands. The Rise and Relevance of an Anthropological Research Genre." In Frontiers and Borderlands: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by T. Wendl and M. Rosler. Frankfurt/New York: Peter Lang.

Wernet, A. 2000. Einfuhrung in die Interpretationstechnik der Objektiven Hermeneutik. Opladen: Leske und Budrich.