WWU’s Laurie Trautman visits Poland on border study exchange
WWU’s Border Policy Research Institute Director Laurie Trautman recently returned from a week-long exchange in Poland to explore how nations recover from border strife and repair their relationships after conflict – particularly as U.S.-Canada relations become increasingly fraught.
The visit was through Erasmus+, a program funded by the European Commission in support of education, youth and sports. Trautman is the first WWU faculty member selected for an Erasmus+ exchange.
In Poland, Trautman was paired with Polish scholar Joanna Kurowska-Pysz to visit several towns along the border with the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany. She also spoke at Kurowska-Pysz’s institution, WSB, a private university in Poland known for business and international studies.
Kurowska-Pysz is scheduled to visit Western for a week early in spring quarter to study issues surrounding the U.S.-Canada border.
In her work at BPRI, Trautman has been watching the U.S.-Canadian border relationship become increasingly fraught. The most recent symbol of this break is B.C.’s recent adoption of permanent daylight savings time, which will put the province in a different time zone from the bordering state of Washington for part of the year.
“It’s just an example of how relations have broken down. We’re going to have to figure out how to repair those cross-border connections, and Europe’s been at that for over a century,” Trautman said. “Is there a way to learn from the European experience so that here in B.C. and Washington, when we’re ready to start repairing our relationship, we have some lessons to learn from? How do border communities find new ways to connect? What worked and what didn’t?”
These latest border tensions are unusual for the U.S. and Canada. What’s known as the world’s longest undefended border has remained the same since it was drawn along the 49th parallel in 1846, and there are many cultural and linguistic similarities on either side. By contrast, the rich and complex history of borders in Europe sheds light on how relatively young, stable, and peaceful the border between the US and Canada actually is.
In Poland, Trautman visited a town near the Czech Republic named Cieszyn, where the border runs through the middle of the city. The area became a disputed territory following the first World War and the border itself moved several times over the course of 50 years. “So you had people who never moved, but their citizenship changed,” she said.
When borders change, people suddenly become citizens of a new country they never chose to migrate to, and must navigate differences in culture, language and identity, Trautman said. And while the bordering nations today collaborate politically, economically and in other ways, people remain understandably sensitive about maintaining their cultural identities.
The U.S. bombing of Iran also sparked many conversations about a different military conflict right over the Polish border. Ukraine, along Poland’s southeastern border, has been fighting off a Russian invasion for more than three years.
As a result, security issues are at the top of mind in Poland, Trautman said.
“Every new infrastructure project has to also have a security element,” she said. “So all the new hospitals have to have a bunker underneath, and the new roadways have to be able to land military planes.”
Trautman spoke to business students at WSB.
“They asked really good questions,” she said. “A lot of them were going back to school – they have micro-credentialling programs over there so they could get a certificate in security studies or international relations.”
Students and other scholars also asked Trautman questions about current U.S. politics, but she didn’t sense the concern or even anger that she often hears from other Europeans.
“There was a lot of sympathy, I think, from the Polish perspective, that ‘we understand what it’s like to elect a leader that turns out to be an authoritarian figure or party that doesn’t reflect the views of the American people.’ I think that’s really unique within Europe,” Trautman said. “The Polish perspective is a little different, because they recently voted out the (populist, conservative) Law and Justice party, which was taking away a lot of rights and freedoms for a number of years.”
Next, Trautman will host Kurowska-Pysz during the first week of spring quarter at WWU. They’ll visit the U.S.-Canada border and Seattle, and Trautman hopes to offer a time for Kurowska-Pysz to meet WWU faculty and students.