Politics, policy and identity: EU eastern enlargement and East-West differences

Abstract

This article considers the implications of generalizing existing EU equal opportunities legislation to countries that are in a transition from state socialism. The transposition of Western policy assumes that gender identities and interests in the East and the West are the same. The East-West tensions that persist over the ideas of gender and feminism suggest that such an assumption may be out of place. I discuss explicit sexual equality policies under communism, showing how, despite the limits to their success, sexual difference was nevertheless not experienced as the source of political inequality during the communist regime. Sexual equalization was rather the unintended consequence of state socialism, where political exclusion was defined in terms of society vis-À-vis the state. While existing EU policy has been oriented towards the exclusionary meaning that the public-private distinction has had in the West, in the communist countries political inequality was not defined in these terms. For eastern European countries, convergence with the West means not only the rise of masculinism, it means - among other things - the rise of unemployment for both women and men, and the rise of class. One reason why sexual discrimination in the labour market may not have priority among eastern European women's concerns is that a starker comparison is between the unemployment of both sexes now, as compared with the full employment of both sexes in the past.

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