East European Politics and Societies

This article explores how the changes in commemorative culture in postcommunist Poland, namely, the loss of status of the traditional self-sacrificial martyr/hero at the expense of the passive victim, have produced new models for individual and collective identification based on vulnerability and suffering. Through the analysis of Pilgrim/Majewski’s surrealist plays The Peregrinations of the Black Iza of Wałbrzych (2009) and The Testimonies of the Ups Downs Ups Ups Ups Downs and so on of Antek Kochanek (2012), I examine the artistic transformations of two nearly forgotten city legends into victims of communist gender oppression and cultural icons of tolerance and inclusiveness for the purposes of reinventing the Lower Silesian Town of Wałbrzych’s postcollapse identity. I argue that Pilgrim/Majewski’s plays challenge the centering of Wałbrzych’s post-1989 identity discourse on the traumatic loss of the coal-mining industry by undermining hegemonic male heterosexuality’s exclusive claim on collective trauma and inscribing female and queer trauma into collective suffering. By heroizing two marginal characters with “socially inappropriate” sexual behavior, the playwright brings to the fore alternative subjectivities predicated on gender, sexuality, and the body, thus advocating for a more inclusive, polyvalent citizenship. More broadly, the author questions essentialist understandings of the self as a set of immutable core attributes (hinting at Wałbrzych’s clinging to its traditional identity as a coal-mining center) and promotes the social constructivist approach to identity as a fluid entity, a product of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts.

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Family, Gender and (dis)Abled Bodies after 1953”, guest-edited by Maike Lehmann and Alexandra Oberländer.

While the ideal of the New Socialist Wo/Man was never fully realized and seems to have been abandoned across the Eastern Bloc after 1953, the question still arises what role individuals were to play within the socialist system. As dichotomous conceptualizations of state and society have been repeatedly criticized in recent years, we propose to look at how the role of the individual was imagined by different actors in Eastern European countries and how the ideals inherent in these imaginations were (to be) embodied. One possible avenue would be to explore the role of official language for subjectivization processes as they have been discussed during the last twenty years in Soviet studies. We, however, want to turn the attention towards the body and its role in shaping the individual in a cluster dealing with the impact family, gender, and dis/ability (were meant to) have on the formation of an individual body and its place within broader society. This is to explore some of the ways in which anybody could become somebody in socialist Eastern Europe and might help to shift the attention from dichotomous conceptualizations of political dogma and social practice towards an exploration of socialism as a diverse, yet specific cultural system.

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Family, Gender and (dis)Abled Bodies after 1953”, guest-edited by Maike Lehmann and Alexandra Oberländer.

Research on the history of masculinities and fatherhood during state socialism in East Central Europe is still rare. Therefore, scholars in the field of women’s and gender studies sometimes reproduce the idea of men in that region as stable characters across the period of socialist rule. In particular, they insist that “official,” that is, state-sanctioned, representations of masculinity did not change. Yet, as I show, there is evidence that socialist authors, journalists, and even the politburos of the regions’ communist parties did reflect on what they perceived as the need to change the conceptions of men and fathers. They advocated men’s greater participation in housework and child care. In this article, I examine this “struggle for a socialist fatherhood” in the GDR, focusing mainly on the discussions and suggestions of sociologists, educationalists, psychologists, and sexologists active in the study of childhood and adolescence, sex education, or marriage and family. From the 1960s on, experts from these fields as well as communist politicians targeted increasingly men to implement equality in marriage and parenting. In the 1970s and 1980s, their suggestions became more and more concrete. These suggestions as well as the theoretical discussions demonstrate the enduring belief in the socialist society’s ability to overcome traditional gender stereotypes. Even in the late 1980s, they were future directed and contained a utopian element.

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Family, Gender and (dis)Abled Bodies after 1953”, guest-edited by Maike Lehmann and Alexandra Oberländer.

In this article, I examine the academic discourses and socio-educational practices in post-war socialist Czechoslovakia concerning children who were considered “behaviorally difficult,” and I analyze those discourses and practices as elements of biopolitics and governmentality. I concentrate on the diagnostic conceptualizations introduced into the psycho-medical discourse of the 1950s and 1960s by what was called “defectology.” Czechoslovak defectologists, who composed their approaches from Soviet, Czech, and other academic sources, explained children’s difficult behavior in terms of “defectivity,” that is, a disturbed relationship between the individual and his or her social environment. The educational aims of defectology and the communist regime converged in the ideal of the “embodiment of socialism,” according to which the difficult child should be taught to be a conforming, able-minded, and productive citizen. The preferred treatment for reaching this goal was reeducation in the expanding network of residential institutions. However, defectology had no solution to the increasing number of children diagnosed as difficult or deviant. Moreover, other disciplines, like psychology, pediatrics, and pedagogy, criticized its conceptual inadequacy, which reoriented the discourse and governmentality toward prevention. I also show how gender and ethnicity abetted the diagnosis and affected the treatment of behavioral difficulties, for defectologists and other practitioners considered “sexually depraved” girls and “Gypsy children” as the “embodiment of deviance.”

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Family, Gender and (dis)Abled Bodies after 1953”, guest-edited by Maike Lehmann and Alexandra Oberländer.

My article “Violent Inclusion: Disability and the Nation in Polish 1950s and 1960s Young Adult Literature” analyzes representations of physical and sensory disability in some of the most popular young adult novels published in 1950s and 1960s Poland written by Krystyna Siesicka, Jadwiga Korczakowska, Irena Krzywicka, Jadwiga Ruth-Charlewska, and Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa. It argues that the recurring trope that connects the novels—the overcoming of disability—serves as a synecdoche for the Polish nation overcoming the catastrophe of World War II. Moreover, it shows that compulsory rehabilitation functions as a way of including disabled subjects into a Polish post-war society. At the same time, participation in the “rehabilitative regime” constitutes a patriotic duty for a disabled Polish child or teenager and paves a way to a socialist citizenship. Rehabilitation is always successful and culminates with a child or teenager transforming into an able-bodied socialist citizen reminding of a successful, yet sacrificial, reconstruction process of Poland. My article focuses on the sites of the overcoming of disability showing that Polish nature, whether it is a sea or woods, is crucial to the healing of a disabled subject. This way, the writers accentuate the connection between Polish nature and land and a “healthy” body, thus reconsolidating their fantasy of “Polishness.” What the novels ultimately testify to is the emergence of an embodied socialist subjectivity constructed through the corporeal rehabilitative practices and internalization of socialist values.

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Politics and Current Demographic Challenges in Central and Eastern Europe,” guest-edited by Tsveta Petrova and Tomasz Inglot.

In this article, we introduce a multidisciplinary and multimethod, special section on the intersection of politics, policy, and the current challenges of demography in Hungary and Poland. We argue that aging, declining fertility, and migration as well as their politicization all deserve urgent attention as some of the most pressing concerns for most of Central and Eastern Europe today. Accordingly, we first use European Commission data to paint a comparative picture of the demographic challenges that the region faces. We then introduce the article contributions in the special section that examine aging, declining fertility, and migration. Next we turn to the question of the politicization of these demographic challenges. We discuss how the proposed special section speaks to two important but previously rarely linked debates taking place within the social sciences today: (1) the voluminous literature on the demographic changes and policies in Central and Eastern Europe, including their ethnic and cultural dimensions, and (2) the expanding scholarship on the rise of nationalist populism and decline in the quality of liberal democracy in the region. Lastly, we summarize the arguments of the contributing authors, who pay closer attention to policy responses to and the politicization of the demographic challenges faced by Central and Eastern Europe.

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Politics and Current Demographic Challenges in Central and Eastern Europe,” guest-edited by Tsveta Petrova and Tomasz Inglot.

Like other countries in Europe, Poland’s population is growing older, because of a combination of increasing life expectancies and decreasing birth rates. Such demographic change poses challenges for policy makers, who often understand population aging to put strain on social-service, health care, and pension systems. In response, governments and civil society often emphasize “active aging,” a rubric encompassing a wide range of policies and programs meant to promote health, workforce participation, lifelong learning, and social engagement. Although active aging is often part of neoliberal policies that focus on individual responsibility, recent anthropological theory shows that neoliberal ideals of self-care cannot fully explain contemporary forms of responsibility and social relations. Anthropological theory and ethnographic data can thus help to analyze the effects of demographic change as evident in social policy and programs. In this article, I integrate an analysis of Polish governmental documents meant to promote active aging with an analysis of ethnographic data of older Poles’ experiences of active aging. This article provides an ethnographically grounded perspective on the concept of active aging that focuses on how people actually experience such policies by exploring the meanings such programs and activities take on in the lives of individual and groups. Ethnographic data reveal that the past has multiple emotional valences that shape people’s experiences of these programs, stemming from histories of violence and rupture in the region. This suggests that making explicit the multiple, complex meanings of the past could shape active aging policy and thus civil society to be more inclusive.

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Politics and Current Demographic Challenges in Central and Eastern Europe,” guest-edited by Tsveta Petrova and Tomasz Inglot.

Even if Poland has been commonly presented as a typical emigration country, the post–EU accession migration still presents an extremely interesting case in terms of its (very high) scale, structural characteristics, and consequences. With about 2.5 million of its citizens staying temporarily abroad, Poland belongs to the most mobile European nations, and the post-accession migration to the EU is presented as a “natural experiment.” The article aims to discuss the main economic outcomes of the post-2004 migration from Poland and to address the question to what extent the Polish experience is transferable and can be used as a policy lesson for other developing countries. Based on the Polish case, the authors argue that labor migration from a country with large workforce surpluses (as present in most of the less developed countries) can help avoid hysteresis and support the structural transformation of the economy. Fulfillment of these positive expectations is however dependent on several factors including structure of migration (and return migration), structural conditions at origin and public policies imposed. Authors argue that migration policies have only limited impact on the scale and structure of international migration but public policies are critically important in harnessing the developmental potential of migration.

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Politics and Current Demographic Challenges in Central and Eastern Europe,” guest-edited by Tsveta Petrova and Tomasz Inglot.

We explore housing finance and policy in East Central Europe to understand the connection between housing, in particular independent household formation, and the demographic crisis. The combination of high debt-free homeownership rates with illiquid housing finance and limited rental markets produces conditions where housing restricts independent household formation and likely has a restrictive effect on fertility. We first assess the housing regime type in East Central Europe and demonstrate that it closely corresponds to the “difficult housing regime” in Southern Europe, which has well-established negative effects on independent household formation and fertility. Then we present a detailed case study of Hungary, which is a country with very low fertility rates and substantial changes in housing finance and policy over time. In particular, the issue was recently politicized through housing policies centered on household formation to counter the demographic crisis. We present a detailed analysis of policies related to access to housing for young adults through increased access to markets or state housing support schemes. These policies attempted to reduce dependence on families, but after the crisis, we find that these policies reinforce, rather than challenge, dependence on families for housing solutions, thereby limiting independent household formation. While these policies may serve a rhetorical role demonstrating a state response to the demographic crisis, we claim that their impact on fertility can be at most minimal because of stringent restrictions in access that concentrates on upper-middle-income households and limited financial commitment.

This article uses the case of post-2010 Hungary to investigate the ways in which the concomitant trends of mobility, migration, and demographic decline may intersect to both challenge and bolster the discourses and policies of nationalist, populist governments in Central and Eastern Europe today. Using an expanded conception of “divided nationhood,” it explores the tensions and continuities in the Hungarian government’s populist discourse of protecting the nation as it is projected onto different national populations: Hungarians within Hungary, Hungarian emigrants, and Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries. While fears of migration and population decline provide useful fuel for the particular brand of populist nationalism we see in places like Hungary, the ability of leaders to offer a coherent and effective narrative of protection for the nation becomes significantly more complex when there are multiple internal and external populations to protect. The article highlights the strategies that the FIDESZ government has employed in order to (1) mobilize antimigrant rhetoric while marginalizing Hungarian emigrants; (2) respond to demographic deficiencies while supporting a conservative, populist narrative; and (3) maintain its access to symbolic, political, and demographic resources within the Hungarian minority communities. These strategies include a discursive reconceptualization of migration as something that comes only from outside Europe, the use of social and economic policies to selectively privilege key segments of the nation and exclude others, and the creation of a regional Hungarian nation with Budapest at the center.

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Politics and Current Demographic Challenges in Central and Eastern Europe,” guest-edited by Tsveta Petrova and Tomasz Inglot.

During the past two decades, many European countries, including Germany, Italy, and Spain in the west, and Poland and Hungary in the east, encountered prolonged demographic crises. These challenges first became evident in the late 1990s as fertility rates declined rapidly, much below the level necessary to ensure a simple replacement of generations. Moreover, since the EU accession, mass labor migration from the new Member States to the more developed western European countries added yet another dimension to the growing population problems. This article attempts to explain variation in governmental policy responses to these developments between two countries, Poland and Hungary. Hungary, owing to its long-term tradition of relatively generous and extensive social programs directed to families, youth, and children, should be expected to handle its population emergency much better than Poland. Yet, the opposite has happened. In the last few years, Poland has proposed and implemented several innovative measures to address fertility and migration pressures while Hungary has remained committed to its traditional social policies in this domain. I will analyze and compare the two cases by examining a combination of historical factors related to the legacies of demographic emergencies defined in terms of national strength and survival, and by examining the politics of family policy, with a special focus on the creation of coalitions of governmental and/or nongovernmental actors that either facilitate or obstruct effective policy innovation.