National and International Discourses on Ageing

The subject of the presentations are discourses about (active) ageing policies in UE and Poland. Namely the connections, intersections and contradictions between national and supranational definitions of ageing policies’ problems and their solutions.  Researchers points two important for this subject issues. One is the assimilation of West European and World trends such as transformations in welfare states or of particular social policy paradigms like active social policy. (Grewiński 2006, Rymsza 2007) Another issue when one considers the mixture of national (Polish) and international (EU) policies is a “problem of two speeds social policies” (Rymsza 2007). The notion refers to incompatibility and lack of communication between policy departments working with national and EU founds and programs, what results in contradictory policies'  aims and dispersion of EU projects activities.  For both claims can be found proofs, however  it seemed to be more useful to  look at the state as an aggregate or assemblage of diverse institutions, actors and capabilities which function differently in various moments in history and in different places. (Sassen 2006) That is as organization that do not have fix borders or teleological aims. The way of thinking about nation-state as open and complex institution proposed by Sassen is highly useful for analysis of a mixture of Polish and EU policies that can be found in documents about ageing and allows to omit a trap of onesided thinking about the contemporary political field: as divide into separate nation states or absolutely globalized, whatever means this notion. The proposed paper is an attempt to such “open” interpretation of discourses about ageing produced by actors on inter-, intra-, and national level.