Gender (In)equality and Gender Politics in Southeastern Europe

A Question of Justice

C. Hassentab, S. Ramet, C. Hassentab, S. Ramet, Kenneth A. Loparo, C. Hassentab, S. Ramet, Christine Hassenstab

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137449924
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The collapse of socialist regimes across Southeastern Europe changed the rules of the political game and led to the transformation of these societies. The status of women was immediately affected. The contributors to this volume contrast the status of women in the post-socialist societies of the region with their status under socialism.

Part I

Introduction

1

Introduction: Never the “Right” Time

Christine M. Hassenstab¹

In 1995, Rada Iveković wrote a chapter for Beyond Yugoslavia titled “The New Democracy – With Women or Without Them?”² At that time, this was a prescient question and is, 20 years later, still the subject of much debate and analysis. Iveković did not mince words and began by noting that, while the situation was perhaps best in Scandinavia, the basic concept one should keep in mind was that “the non-participation or minimal participation of women is the staunchest common trait of all political systems.”³ While some might disagree with this generalization, Iveković was no stranger to the male-dominated party system of socialist Yugoslavia and its repercussions should one dare to use the “P-word” – patriarchy – in the face of heightened and spreading nationalism.

At the time that chapter was written, Iveković acknowledged that the market economy and economic competition had “not really come into their own, except in Slovenia.”⁴ But, while she acknowledged the rather uncertain future of women in a new and untested market economy, she ended by noting that

somehow, [it is] never the “right moment” for women’s claims. In our patriarchal traditions, other problems are always more “urgent.” But, from our socialist and post-socialist experiences, we know that “priorities” are not established by us, but by those who govern us, and they manage to find endless excuses not to take women’s issues into account. Women of ex-Yugoslavia would repeat their earlier mistake should they allow their dignity and equality to be, once again, pushed aside as “non-priority.”⁵

This book addresses the implicit challenge by Iveković from a viewpoint that encompasses the experience of the intervening 20 years of economic and political history. Have those who govern made women’s everyday lives and living conditions a priority and, if so, when and where? If not, what “excuses” – political, religious, social and/or economic – have been used to justify this lack of prioritization? Who are the actors involved in this process? Which political leaders prioritized women’s needs and conditions? Who sought to prioritize other issues, thus displacing or even marginalizing – again – women’s concerns? Did the influx of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) after 1989, with their foreign resources, contribute to or hinder women’s equality? How did various Church actors respond to this prioritization? Has the legislative and juridical democratic process of instituting new laws only obscured facts for women “on the ground” with de jure legalisms? Has accession to the European Union (EU) by some of these countries really made any difference for women? Do international instruments make a difference for women in their daily lives?

The authors here explore how this prioritization was framed or, alternatively, how the “endless excuses” were framed. This demands looking at the framing of political issues, which have continued from pre-socialist times to the present, and thus asking how the past was woven into or alongside new cultural realties. What interstitial networks, historical continuities, or ruptures have worked for or against the interests of women since 1989? Did a segment of the female population agree with this lack of prioritization and why? Have quotas, where they exist, helped to assure equality or given the illusion of more equality? Is equality of the sexes really the question that should be asked? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this book, attentively written and researched by its authors, in an effort to see if the “right moment” has been reached in Southeastern Europe since 1989 and its aftermath in Eastern Europe.

Six years after the Berlin Wall was breached, Marilyn Rueschemeyer brought out the book Women in the Politics of Postcommunist Eastern Europe.⁶ The contributors examined Poland, East and West Germany, Bulgaria, Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, and Hungary, and in her conclusion Rueschemeyer noted the double-edged sword that women often faced in these countries. On the one hand, feminism was “equated with the imposition of communist rule” and on the other hand it was associated with “the fanatical man-haters of the West.”⁷

“Gender equality” is a term that most politicians, male and female alike, hesitate to use. Quotas for women in political representation are shunned because they are associated with the politics of the past ... . To many ... the fact that the representation of women in politics is far lower than it was during the communist period is no cause for concern – women can now retreat, and the elected politicians do not have to work with tokens who cannot make the same contributions to political activity.⁸

With this, Rueschemeyer reminds us that communist theory and rhetoric assumed the equality of women as it swept them into the workforce. Providing social supports, such as day care for children, to the female worker was a taken-for-granted part of life. While educational opportunities for women increased, work at the managerial or professional level came at a price – party membership. After 1989, women could always be labeled “communists,” or unproductive “tokens,” if they demanded child care, rather than “feminists.” In hindsight, it is clear that, while marching into the new market economy, women already carried this “lose–lose” situation with them. But some researchers could already see this happening in 1993, as we see in Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller’s book Gender Politics and Post-Communism⁹ as well as in the title of a chapter in Barbara Einhorn’s book Cinderella Goes to Market where she asked, “Where have all the women gone?”¹⁰

Feminist theory has not remained static since 1989 and scholars today have an ever increasing range of material to use with regard to the question of gender (in)equality. One area in which this can be readily seen is in the politics of reproduction and in how societies define “public” and “private.” The politics of reproduction can no longer be reduced to childbirth and child rearing and the domesticity of the private sphere as exemplified in the family; the entire discourse reaches well beyond into “how the political process itself is shaped through the discussion and control of reproduction.”¹¹ Reproductive issues are often a way to discuss other issues. As Susan Gal and Gail Kligman point out, in Poland discourses about women as reproducers are often used by the politicians who are redefining “the politics of work.”¹²

Communism had a different dynamic associated with the “public–private” spheres. As a matter of course, this public–private distinction is associated with ideology – of whatever stripe. The public and the private are used to define each other and along with the shift from “woman as worker” – and therefore implicitly equal with men – the public and private spheres shifted after 1989. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman liken this shift to a “fractal distinction.”¹³

This means it is recursively applicable – like self-similar fractal patterns in geometry – and therefore can be nested. That is, whatever the local, historically specific content of the dichotomy, the distinction between public and private can be reproduced repeatedly by projecting it onto a narrower context or a broader one. Activities, identities, and interaction can be split into private and public parts, and each of these parts can be split again, by the same public/private distinction. The result is that within any public one can always create a private; within any private one can create a public.¹⁴

The fractal patterns of each country can also be different. So, for example, under communism, the home which one might normally consider “private” could include a “public” sphere, as a “site of resistance” to communism, where people would speak freely and take refuge from the party line, corruption, and the disparities between the real and the theater of ideology.¹⁵

As all who study Eastern Europe are aware, the politics of reproduction and the issue of gender can create – and have created – painful intersections with nationalism and hyper-masculinity. Discourses about reproduction, and gender, provide a “fulcrum for constructing the relationship between a state and its subjects.”¹⁶ Women as mothers can become a romanticized locus of a nationalist identity and those who do not reproduce are traitors. However, this applies only to the appropriate type of woman who is an identifiable citizen. These children become the lifeblood of the nation, while children of the marginalized or immigrants become threats to the nation.

Communism has sometimes been described in the literature as a type of a paternalized state feminism, in which “new and subtle configurations of public/private emerged in the course of four decades.” This, when combined with the individual history of a particular nation, created different models of public/private spheres. These models are analyzed here by the authors.¹⁷ Previously, Shana Penn and Jill Massino have given a detailed description of the everyday life of women during the era of state socialism in their evocative study Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe.¹⁸ However, all too often, “state feminism” created a dependency and “women’s subjectivities necessary for political action” fail to develop.¹⁹ Conversion to a free-market system without quotas or party membership as a vehicle for including women in politics resulted in the numbers of women in all areas of public life decreasing.

This book is divided into five sections. After the introductory section, Part II deals with the Yugoslav successor states and Part III with Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. Part IV addresses religion and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues and Part V ends with two chapters which analyze quantitative data.

In the next chapter, Katalin Fábián carefully elaborates the evolution of standards by which “equality” and “inequality” have been measured. She analyzes, among others, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) indices as to why they show an improvement in gender-sensitive development and gender equality in the post-communist region. She sets out, in detail, how various indices are constructed, what they propose to measure – and what they do not measure. As she notes, even “analyses of nearly identical databases with similar quantitative methodologies can lead to contradictory conclusions.” And, while life expectancy and education in the post-communist world are, on the whole, increasing, what does it mean when political empowerment is lagging in the same area? Are newer, more complex indices the answer?

With Part I as a background, Part II then examines gender (in)equality in the Yugoslav successor states of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, and Kosovo. In Chapter 3, Ana Kralj and Tanja Rener look at Slovenia and how a type of “state feminism” developed within socialist governments, without feminism and with a pre-socialist “private” and the “public” divide. Thus, for example legal documents portrayed a feminist paradise, while domestic violence went unpunished.

While socialism was an obviously flawed system, Kralj and Rener show that the change to a free-market system and democracy brought its own challenges. They write that in Slovenia, there was a “limited” understanding of democracy which can be seen in the state’s attitude to women, especially in the areas of labor and reproductive rights. The authors also show that with Slovenia’s adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1992, the situation for women has become “problematic” during the last 30 years and the principles and rights elaborated in that treaty have been “both applied and ignored.” The year 2000 was the high point for women’s activism in Slovenia, and Kralj and Rener note that collective action is needed to roll back a CEDAW in abeyance.

In Chapter 4, Jill Irvine and Leda Sutlović discuss elements of the same “compliance gap” problem in Croatia. After socialism, they argue that gender equality progressed in three “waves” in Croatia, which joined the EU in 2013, nine years after Sloven...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Introduction
• Part II  Yugoslav Successor States
• Part III  Romania, Bulgaria, Albania
• Part IV  Religion and Gay/Lesbian Rights
• Part V  Comparative Analysis and Conclusion
• Further Reading
• Index