Gender (In)equality and Gender Politics in Southeastern Europe. A Question of Justice

In the years since the end of state socialism in Europe, an ambivalent picture of democratisation has emerged in the new or renewed nation-states that resulted from the break-up of Yugoslavia, having separated from Russia’s influence or, in the Albanian case, having opened its borders. While main- and malestream social scientists and historians mostly ignored the gendered character of this transformation process, from the very beginning feminist and gender theorists pointed at the backlash experienced by women some forty-five (in Russia seventy) years after the arrival of socialism’s emancipatory politics. Two decades of controversial debates about the impact of the postsocialist condition on women and gender relations left neither the victimisation of women nor Western valuations of women’s situation under socialism (emancipated but state-dependent) unquestioned. What now remains evident is that the elites of the postsocialist states were mostly male and that gender issues weren’t part of the political agenda, which focused on privatising state property and building up a (liberal) democratic political system and a market-based economy.

Christine Hassenstab, one of the editors of the book under review, therefore aptly titles her introduction ‘Never the “Right” Time’ (3-16), alluding to the notorious male argument that political questions other than those relating to women have to be solved first. The anthology therefore seeks answers to questions such as whether there was a prioritisation of women’s concerns—and if not, why not (4). Hassenstab stresses the relevance of discourses on reproduction and on definitions of public and private spheres as crucial concepts that affect women’s lives directly, as they establish an intimate relationship between ‘the state and its subjects’ (6). Following studies by Susan Gal, Gail Kligman, Shanna Penn, and Jill Massino, she argues that ‘communism’ could be described as ‘paternalised state feminism’, where ‘women’s subjectivities necessary for political action fail to develop’ (6). Although Hassenstab ties her arguments to feminist theories, a call for theoretical debates about gender as an analytical concept and for gender-critical approaches in relation to the postsocialist condition is missing here. For this reason, gender seems to be equated with women and communism with the socialist state, here and in some of the succeeding chapters on specific Southeastern European nations.

Katalin Fábián tries to fill this gap, writing on the scientific and political usefulness of equality indices (17-38) applied in international polls and rankings of global gender equality. While discussing the method and validity of quantitative measurement instruments, which often generate contradictory interpretations, she argues for a more complex theoretical approach based on Sylvia Walby’s concept of ‘gender regimes’ (22-23). Her conclusions support findings about the decline of women’s access to means of economic independence and welfare security and its ambivalence, as she stresses the positive effects of socialist legacies and the recent ‘increase in gender-sensitive human development and women’s empowerment’ (34). Her criticism underlines an epistemological Western-centric bias, which becomes evident in the selection of equality indices, e.g., as income-based and thus focused on marketisation. She points out the paradox that these common measurements of equality, based on employment rates and political representation, were also used by Communist parties, a fact that was harshly attacked by feminist critics.

However, the question remains: How valid are quantitative research and interpretations based on statistics in explaining gender relations in societies? It seems that this anthology should offer an answer, given its mix of several methodological and disciplinary approaches and its array of quantitative, qualitative, discursive, and historical analyses. Although the last chapters on comparative political culture surveys (Kirsten Ringdal, 321-337 and Albert Simkus, 338-353) attempt to underline the significance of quantitative research in this field and raise interesting questions about differences among countries and ethnicities, their explanatory power remains limited. As Fábián showed, on the one hand many epistemological traps can be generated by statistics, surveys, and quantitative comparisons, due to issues of definition and the interpretation of relevant indices. On the other hand, political agency and theoretical work needs empirical research, quantitative as well as qualitative, as the book suggests.

Hence, the chapters in the second and third parts offer an overview of the situation of gender equality as well as related political measures in the countries spanning nearly the whole of Southeastern Europe (except Montenegro). The fourth part accentuates the topics of religion and LGBT rights, either in combination or as a single issue; and the concluding part again takes a comparative view of the main issue of the book, as mentioned above. The book’s second part focuses on the successor states to Yugoslavia, assuming common historical and societal legacies—but, as the articles show, the authors’ points of view differ substantially in this regard. In her chapter on present-day Macedonia, Mileva Gjurovska, for example, mentions that state socialism was crucial for social change and for feminist struggles in the 1980s (133), but she makes reference to neither the Yugoslavian state nor the earlier Ottoman empire in her ethnological and historical explanations of Macedonian gender relations. Political circumstances and statehood seem to be present only as a framework to account for economic change and its influence on a gender-based division of labour. Consequently, the author posits that the implementation of EU regulations has met with limited success because of traditional legacies rooted in the male-dominated culture of a rural and mountainous society, an argument that was also central for socialist women’s organisations.

In contrast to Gjurovska, Ana Kralj and Tanja Rener discuss recent struggles about gender equality as a deliberation process between Slovenian national law and inter- and supranational regulations (41-61). The authors show the importance of UN conventions (CEDAW) and EU laws (Gender Mainstreaming) as central tools for feminist activists and women’s groups, but they also criticise the implementations of such conventions when shifting the focus to equal opportunities and anti-discrimination law and to the public sphere. While the Slovenian Equal Opportunity Act (2002) stresses the concept of the ‘duty of the “entire society”’, in practice the government reduces political agency to the efforts of state institutions, as they argue (54). Because of cuts in financial support for civil society organisations and initiatives, the authors criticise this practice as a monopolisation of political and financial means by the state. They perceive this development to be symptomatic of a new ‘state feminism’ (44), a term not meant positively, as when it is used in the Western context to describe Scandinavian gender policies, but rather as an accusation for top-down policies that intend to dry out bottom-up initiatives (54). From their point of view, human rights should be preferred as a tool for fighting inequality, as they offer a universal basis for the deliberation of national standards, e.g., those fixed in a given country’s constitution. The author’s conclusion stresses the importance of legal arrangements, but also the influence of civil society on implementation. Their criticism, embedded in a description of Slovenian feminist practices as part of a history of social movements rooted in the democratisation process of the 1980s, can also be read as pointing to the danger of a backlash, a movement back to socialist authoritarianism. A fact that the authors did not mention or seem even to realise is that the use of legal instruments wasn’t a part of Western feminist legacies, but represents a relatively new strategy in fighting for gender equality and is deeply connected to the postsocialist condition, as Gesine Fuchs argues.^[1] Another critical remark: the term ‘state feminism’ to characterise socialist women’s politics has to be questioned, because of communism’s strict rejection of feminist concepts as a bourgeois legacy.

Comparison of the Macedonian and the Slovenian cases shows the huge gap between former Yugoslavian republics but also the similar barriers they face in broadening democratic values and citizenship. While in Macedonia (male) homosexuality was decriminalised only in 1996 because of international pressure (Slavcho Dimitrov, 231-254), in Slovenia the first attempt to legally make same-sex partnerships equal to heterosexual marriage was made in 2004 (Roman Kuhar, 255-273). But in both countries, obstacles for further democratisations of gender relations since Yugoslavia’s break-up have been generated not only by conservative political but also by religious forces, primarily by representatives of the Orthodox and Catholic churches. Similar findings and arguments about forms of progress and obstructions to gender equality, described by the authors mentioned above, occur in the articles on Croatia (Jill Irvine, Leda Sutlović, 62-86), Serbia (Rada Drezgić, 297-317), Bosnia-Herzegovina (Olivera Simić, 87-107), Romania (Jill Massino, Raluca Maria Popova, 171-191), and Bulgaria (Mariya Stoilova, 192-212), though these essays also broaden the scope by discussing new aspects depending on the national situation discussed. What becomes evident several times is that EU law is a double-edged sword for these countries: it pushes the development of national policies to create laws and instruments to foster gender equality, but at the same time governments claim they must invest in further support for the policies’ implementation and simply keep the money for state institutions.

Nationalism and its persistence is another leitmotif for several authors in this anthology, and after twenty-five years it still seems a useful explanatory concept. In particular Rada Drezgić convincingly shows in her chapter on ‘religious nationalism’ in Serbia how the Orthodox Church established itself as a hegemonic political player during the last two decades. While the voice of civil society could prevent serious changes being made to women’s reproductive rights during the 1990s, the Church’s recent, now more institutionalised position in state structures gives it a greater influence on public opinion. She exemplifies this change in her analysis of the Church’s anti-abortion and homophobic discourses, which influenced the adoption of the anti-discrimination act (2009) that now protects priests from being sanctioned through charges of discrimination (307). As well, Daša Duhaček in her contribution on Serbia stresses nationalism as the crucial cause for obstacles in the way of gender-equality efforts, particularly regarding LGBT rights and gender-sensitive education curricula (108-125). In correlation with the significance of nationalist politics not only Drezgić but also Kuhar and others deliver interesting insights into similar changes to conservative discourses and practices throughout the region. A transformation from biblical to scientific discourse not only informs the Catholic Church’s arguments on homosexuality; the Orthodox Church now argues against abortion using medical, not moral, reasoning. Besides the indisputable presence of nationalist politics in the region, new explanatory concepts should also be discussed to gain more complex understandings of the connectivity of ethnonationalist rhetoric, gender relations, state-building, and economic transformation.

While the term ‘gender’ in the book remains mostly focused on women’s issues, it has to be positively underlined that several authors point to the importance of masculinities for the construction of gender relations and its embedding in national imaginations and institutions. Duhaček, on the one hand, highlights the necessity of looking at the coercive effects of masculinities for men and at their restricted identity repertoires in Serbia; on the other hand, Hilde Katrine Haug (147-168) closes her depiction of the Kosovar situation, where women are left trapped in the traditional role of a nurturing mother and the moral preserver of the nation, with the juxtaposition of two competing concepts of masculinity, legacies of the non-violent masculinity of Ibrahim Rugova’s supporters and the hegemonic masculinity of the Kosovo Liberation Army (Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës, UÇK).

A significant number of the book’s articles provide good and thorough overviews of historical development as well as the current social and political current situations in the region, while some articles attract attention with their in-depth analyses, e.g., Marsela Duti’s and Eglantina Gjermeni’s chapter on women’s representation in local councils in Albania (213-228) or Alenka Bartulović’s commendable chapter on Islam and gender in Bosnia-Herzegovina (274-296). Although every article is very much worth reading, I would again pass along my criticism about the infrequent use of theoretical approaches from masculinity studies or feminist theory to frame the author’s relevant insights via a broader critical and analytical lens. At this point, there is a general underestimation of theory and theoretical debates in the gender analysis regarding Southeastern Europe. In contrast, Kuhar’s article demonstrates the productivity of feminist concepts, when, for example, he points to the instrumentalisation of the public-private divide by the Catholic archbishop Franc Rode or to the importance of an ‘ethics of care’ as an inclusive concept for family relationships (265).

The collection delivers a convincing overview of gender issues in Southeastern Europe, offering historical, sociological, and political knowledge and analysis directed towards the situation of gender equality in the region. The book’s strength is its representativeness, evident in its methodological diversity, its broad scope of topics, and its survey of the current state of research. At the same time, a critical approach to statehood, democratic institutions, and the term ‘justice’, which isn’t discussed at all, would have contributed to a better-grounded analysis of gender relations and how they are embedded in power relations. In sum, through its (without exception) well-researched articles, the book occupies a fruitful ground and opens up the chance for further research and discussion: e.g., on theoretical questions, the dominance of human rights as the political grounds for progressive policies in postsocialist countries, or the role of supranational institutions and international forces in postconflict societies.