The Unbearable Dialogicality of Being: Polish and Baltic Post-Cold War Politics of Becoming European.

Whilst there is an emerging theoretical consensus in critical security studies on the Bakhtinian understanding of the 'other' as an epistemological and ontological necessity for the comprehension and completion of the 'self', the response of the 'other' to the construction of its identity has generally escaped scholarly attention, not the least in the context of Central and East European states' responses to the long-time Western designation 'Europe but not Europe'. Yet, this paper argues, the experience of being framed as simultaneously in Europe and not quite European has left a constitutive imprint on Poland's and the Baltic states' current self-understandings and security imaginaries. This paper applies William Connolly's notion of the politics of becoming in order to analyse the Polish and Baltic versions of becoming a subject in the field of post-Cold War European foreign and security policy. Setting out from a Sartrean dictum 'we are what we make of what others have made of us', this paper presents a critical discourse analysis on what the representation of Central and East European countries in Western post-Cold War security debates has made of them, with a particular reference to the bifurcations of New/Old and modern/postmodern Europe. The paper thus aims to advance Bakhtin's ideal-typical model's applicability to the study of international relations by pinpointing the inevitable infusion of collective identity formation with power relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]