ABSTRACT
On a warm May 1st evening in 2004, I was standing in the doorway of a Berkeley house in the hills overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. I was a junior Fulbright scholar, spending a year at the University of California, Berkeley to work on my thesis. I was waiting impatiently for my guests: two dozen other young researchers and their partners, most of them from Western Europe. We all came from different European countries and between us we spoke about 12 different languages, yet there was something intangible that strongly connected us. My guests were coming to celebrate with me one of the most important days in the history of my home country. I called it the E-Day party; the day Poland joined the European Union (EU). They didn’t think it was funny or strange of me to throw a party on that occasion. On the contrary, they shared that feeling of history-in-the-making. For them, it was the day they would be able to welcome me into their fold as one of their own, a European citizen.
