Nationalism, Gender, and the Nation

¶ … Nationalism, Gender, And the Nation

The objective of this paper is to answer the question of whether policies of nationalist government modernize gender relations or do they represent a traditionalist aim to preserve or reestablish unequal and pre-modern gender relations, in effect archaizing gender relations? Another important goal is to connect this to a more specific question of "How does the notion of women as biological reproducers of the nation influence reproductive choices of women and nationalist agendas behind reproductive policy in socialist and postsocialist Poland?"

It does not really matter what country or region of the world in which the women lives there are always inherently, biologically, and perhaps even genetically related reasons why the woman does not realize the same autonomy or freedom as does the male. However, Nationalism plays a great role in the determination of the path that will be followed in these areas by those females living within the realm of that Nationalism. Feminism deeply despises the traditionalist aim of preservation of the imbalanced gender relations and is also feared by the same.

Integral to the struggles and incompatibility of Nationalism and Feminist movements is the notion of women as biological reproducers of the nation and the influence that reproductive choice of women and nationalist agendas behind reproductive policy. This is precisely the focus of this work and specifically in terms of socialist and postsocialist Poland.

Statement of Thesis

Immediately upon accession to the European Union all appearances of Poland's focus on gender equality disappeared and faded into the background of the traditionalist and nationalist mindset.

Literature Review

Gender Mainstreaming

The work of Alexandra Gerber (2007) entitled: "Gender mainstreaming and becoming European: At The Intersection Of Polish And EU Gender Discourses" reports a study that examined the accession of Poland to the European Union which "began in 1997" and ended in 2004. This accession is stated to have "imposed both a new institutional context within which the formal/legal aspects of national identity must be constituted, and introduced a new strand into the already complex braid of intersecting elements that constitute national subjects." Becoming European is stated to entail "…a cultural dimension of transformation that is not only undertheorized in the existing literature, but is downplayed in the policy environment itself.

Transfer of Gender Equality Policy from EU to Member States

The transfer of gender equality policy from the EU to member states is a case in point." (Gerber, 2007) Gerber notes that issues relating to gender and the rights of women "have proven contentious not only between Poland and the EU, but have long been a source of intranational conflict -- within the Solidarity Movement and before." (Gerber, 2007) During the process of Poland's accession, gender equality, abortion and other women issues were passionately debate topics in the public forum. Accession is stated to have hurried the confrontation "between EU norms and Policy social space" because the "prospect of membership introduced new rhetorical possibilities for talking about gender in Poland that were either inconceivable or infeasible within the conceptual frames available to Poles prior to 1989." (Gerber, 2007) Gerber states the claim that the gender transition is so difficult for two reasons:

(1) Gender is integral to national sovereignty, and to discourses of Polish national identity -- therefore, certain traditionalist factions in Poland have been able to mobilize support for their efforts to thwart extra-national attempts to redefine the gender status quo; and (2) The E.U. does not have a clear strategy of implementation nor a strong idea of the outcomes it seeks to produce, there is space for resistance and almost no cost to doing so." (Gerber, 2007)

Media's Effects on Gender in Poland

The work of Agnieszka Graff (2007) entitled: "The Land of Real Men and Real Women: Gender" states that during the period of time just prior to and immediately after the accession of Poland into the European Union in January 2004 that the Polish media "were overflowing 'gender talk'." Stated to be a key topic on the radio was "randomly placed banter about 'natural differences between the sexes'…" and a new station was established (FM94) in 2002 with 'real men' as their target audience. (Graff, 2007) Graff states that practically any topic of discussion on the "evening news could spark a comment such as 'this is what women are like' or 'men cannot help but be men'. (Graff, 2007)

Graff focuses her study on attempting to find the link "between the media's obsessive concern with gender and the process of Poland's E.U. accession." (Graff, 2007) Graff states specifically of media reports the following information:

"Polityka, Newsweek, and Wprost represent the mainstream of Polish print media. They are the top three opinion weeklies on the market in terms of distribution, selling between 130 and 165 thousand copies per week. On the spectrum of political views they range from liberal/progressive and pro-E.U. (Polityka) to neo-liberal and neo-conservative (Wprost), with Newsweek somewhat uneasily trying to occupy a neutral space, where various views of social phenomena are examined from a "common sense" point-of-view. Despite the differences between the weeklies, there is one striking similarity: in the period examined here all three presented a consistently pro-E.U. line, supporting Poland's accession and encouraging "yes" in the June 2003 referendum." (Graff, 2007)

It is important to note the following descriptions provided by Graff in her work explaining in detail the depths to which the news media sank during the time approach Poland's accession to the EU. Graff states as follows:

"Each of the articles comes with an image, for they are all cover stories. In each case, the front page features a photograph of (usually anonymous) men and women, ultra-masculine and ultra-feminine respectively. Many of the Wprost covers can, in fact, be described as quasi-pornographic: out of the 16 gender-focused covers that appeared between June 2002 and May 2005, six featured air-brushed nude bodies. The couples are arranged in poses resembling the sexual act, the woman clearly "on top," dominating the man. In the most explicit image, the woman is riding the man like a horse, holding the reins rather tightly (14 July 2002). Such images were more than magazine covers to be enjoyed in private. On the contrary, they received enormous public visibility. Displayed on newsstands the week a given magazine came out, they lingered in various waiting rooms for months afterwards. More importantly perhaps, they occupied public space in the form of large posters advertising the weeklies, especially in urban centers." (Graff, 2007)

The entirety of Poland was inundated with media descriptions, visualizations, imaginations, fantasy, and pondering of the gender issues of the country during the time preceding its accession to the EU. Graff states that this "…intensification of gender talk" during the time of the accession of Poland into the European Union "was especially pronounced in the one magazine Wprost in which were reported to be sixteen publication with gender-focused cover stories. Five of the sixteen cover stories are stated to have appeared "between early April and mid-June 2004, which is fifty percent of the cover stories for the magazine during that period of time representing a "five-fold increase." (Graff, 2007)

Graff states: "Poland's E.U. accession took place on the 1st of May, between Wprost's jeremiad on falling birth rates, and its proud announcement that Poles are desired as wives and husbands." (Graff, 2007) Wprost's optimistic announcement of "The Return of the Real Man" is no more and no less fact-based than its anxiety about the unsatisfactory nature of Internet sex, or the "crisis of masculinity" which troubled Newsweek two years earlier. Rather than search for gender realities behind the gender myths, the stories are symptoms of a process that is not really, or at least not primarily, about gender. In my view, the media's preoccupation with masculinity, femininity, and sexual orientation is tied to Poland's E.U. accession -- a link that becomes apparent once we focus on the structure of the stories rather than try to identify the social realities they claim to describe." (Graff, 2007)

Stated by Graff to be emerging from these articles is the unfolding of a master-story as follows:

(1) Things used to be "normal" and "natural," men and women used to know who they are, but (2) Sex roles in Poland -- indeed, worldwide -- are in crisis today, so that

(3) The future looks bleak. Nonetheless,

(4) The natural order (i.e. male domination) will soon be restored." (Graff, 2007)

Therefore the media in the Country of Poland went about weaving a story and bringing the mass of those in Poland to viewing the same happy ending to what was a huge problem due to accession into the European Union.

This structure is stated to appear in many of the articles and also can be "traced at the intra-textual level: the progression of Wprost articles in April-May 2004 also roughly reproduces the sequence." (Graff, 2007) Graff states that the last issue of Wprost in May 2004 "The Return of the Real Man" is one that takes the reader on "a speedy tour of world history from the Amazons, through feminism, parthenogenesis and cloning, to "newest research" which proves that "…serious problems are caused by ignoring the role of sperm in procreation," and finally the recent realization that women's emancipation constitutes a grave health hazard. But help is on the way. A Belgian theologian is cited as saying: 'It is important and healthy for women, for families, for societies, that we are dealing with the return of the human male, almost from the dead'." (2007) It is interesting to note that there appears to be great fear among the Polish majority mindset that the strong role of men in their society will somehow be diminished by women also entering into a role that is modified from the present role attributed to Polish womanhood and strengthened. The media in Poland has actively and imaginatively played with the Polish nationalist party and served to drive the country back into pre-E.U. accession mindset.

The cover of Wprost in May 2004 is stated to feature a man "placed well above the woman" who is looking "proudly and sternly ahead, into the future; the woman teeth bared in a submissive smile, turns her trusting gaze up towards her mate." (Graff, 2007)

Gerber states that there are varying "terminologies and typologies" which have been used to describe how policy transfer functions. According to Gerber (2007) it has been referred to as "copying, emulation, diffusion, borrowing, learning, persuasion, coordination, and influence. Regardless of the terminology employed, all of these schemas recognize that would-be member states must adopt policy as a condition of accession or of ongoing assistance/support, and that there exists a link between the type of governance involved and the resultant means of policy transfer." (2007)

Polish Government Reluctant to Give Up Power

Gerber relates the work of Bulmer and Padgett and state that they cite the "…sex equality provision under Article 141 TEC on equal pay for equal work and associated work-related rights: "On health and safety, women's employment rights and maternity benefits, national authorities have had to adjust domestic policy in line with supranational provision. All this in a policy area where member governments have been reluctant to give up their powers" (2004: 113)." (2007)

Gerber believes that these are not social policies but instead are "instances unfair labor practices and occupational health standards that have a gendered component. The authors have indicated that this is a policy area in which national actors are loathe to cede power, yet they do not say why nor do they directly address the implicit link between gender and state sovereignty indicated by their own observations." (Gerber, 2007)

Culture and Policy Transfer: Innovation, Contention, and Rebellion

In order to understand the "innovation, contention and rebellion" surrounding the policy transfer process it is necessary to consider culture. According to Gerber "issues of national identity are germane to the transfer process because policy decisions are made in context where such identifications influence how decisions get made. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Poland." (2007)

The work of Hochstetler, Clark and Friedman (2000) hold that sovereignty claim conflict takes place in terms of:

(1) Economics;

(2) National values; and (3) Monitoring mechanisms. (Gerber, 2007)

Hochstetler, Clark and Friedman (2000) are noted as having stated that in the "bargaining process, state elites clung as tightly to social and cultural practices as to economic models or even models of military security…social and cultural values were used in conference rhetoric as masks or vessels of state power in ways that military and economic self sufficiency once were. The prominence of sovereignty rhetoric applied to values suggests that states attribute more to sovereignty than coercive power or economic independence." (2007)

The Meaning and Symbolism in the Polish National Membership & Identity

Polish citizenship according to the belief of Poles is "…an expression of Polish national membership and identity." (Gerber, 2007) This national identity is both "strongly engendered and encoded with normative expectations concerning the proper role and function of women and men in Poland." (Gerber, 2007) Nationalists desire to control such as reproduction and the family structure in order to "naturalize hierarchy both within, and beyond the family. Women become important as metaphors of the nation, hierarchy or their position within it.' (Gerber, 2007)

Of this it is stated by Graff that the narrative, and a "consoling" one is about "an orderly past, a present crisis and an imminent restoration of order in the realm of gender relations" as well Graff states that the narrative is one that is "displaced" and in regards to "collective identity: an effort to dispel, or contain, collective ambivalence and anxiety concerning European integration and globalization, and the resulting diminution of Poland's autonomy as a nation-state a mere decade and a half after this autonomy was restored." (2005)

Gerber states that gender is the one area in which the influence of the European Union is possible to resist and since gender is "so deeply implicated in nationalism, to preserve one is, in effect to preserve the other." (2007) In the transposition of soft policy of the European Union on gender equality and specifically in the national office it is stated by Gerber that the Office of the Plenipotentiary for the Equal States of Women and Men, "designated to pursuing these goals domestically was merely a "…voluntaristic gesture towards joining the EU culturally as well as economically" on the part of Poland. However, just a few months following Poland's formal accession in 2004 "the office was dissolved." (Gerber, 2007)

Gerber writes that in Poland "…development or articulation of these discourses is partially constrained or formed in the context of the EU. External pressure from the EU to transpose social policy has put pressure on national agents to conform. I argue that in fact stripping the office of real power while allowing it to endure as a symbol of compliance would not have been enough, for it was the office's existence as a symbol of Poland's accommodation of European social policy and an abandonment of the sacred terrain of national self-determination, that needed to be addressed -- not its potential for political efficacy." (2007)

Cultural and Normative Dimension

Gerber concludes that the inclusion of a cultural or normative dimension "that recognizes that not all policies are acted upon in the same ways because substance matters, will also greatly enrich our understanding of how and when states engage in sovereignty bargains, and which elements come into play in which circumstances." (2007)

The work of Balakrishnan, Richard, and Anderson (1996) entitled: "Mapping the Nation" states that gender "…cannot be analyzed outside of ethnic, national and 'race' relations; but neither can these latter phenomena be analyzed without gender." Patterns of gender, according to these authors "sometimes take the spatial units as those of class and ethnicity, nation and 'race', but often they do not. It appears from the available evidence, as if women's political activities have tended to be both more global and more local than men's as proportion of their total political activity." (Balakrishnan, Richard, and Anderson, 1996)

Women have engaged at the level of the nation "less often than men" and "commonalities in the nature of gender relations sometimes transcend national frontiers and ethnic and 'radical' specificity." (Balakrishnan, Richard, and Anderson, 1996) However, the 'personal' is stated to be 'as political as ever." (Balakrishnan, Richard, and Anderson, 1996) It is stated that the relationships "between feminism and nationalism is crucially mediated by militarianism, since men and women often, but not always, have a different relationship to war." (Balakrishnan, Richard, and Anderson, 1996)

The work of Robert Kulpa (2006) entitled: "Western Theories, Queer Possibilities, Polish Reality" asks the question of how it is that "after sixteen years of constant democratization processes in the postcommunist Poland, the country is still on the edge of a nervous breakdown?" Kulpa states that the work of Gellner 'recognizes that transitions are times of fundamental conflict, when incompatible practices oppose one another, when people project competing visions of an uncertain future." (Kulpa, 2006)

Kulpa states that the fragment renders the implication that "change, process, happening are not typical, and opposed to the everyday state of things." (2006) This is similar to times of war when the unusual is not questions because the expectation is that following the war that things will return to their norm. Kulpa relates that that which is considered to be the 'norm' is "implied and imposed on us through various ways, but most importantly in a wider social mode of perceiving, analyzing and explaining reality." (2006)

Kulpa states that in Western society that the examination of various subjects, themes and problems that Foucault "was always aiming at understanding the way people think and categorize their environment. Whether it was about sexuality, madness, punishment, or philosophy per se -- he hoped once we understand what we do and how we are in the world, then it will be possible to pursue better, happier life." (Foucault, 1998; as cited in Kulpa, 2006)

In the area of political science which Kulpa identifies as the 'hard science' "with all its well-establish apparatus:

(1) Tradition;

(2) Methodology;

(3) Definitions; and (4) Theories."

These traditions, methodologies, definitions and theories are stated to be of the nature of being both "changing and time sensitive." (Kulpa, 2006) Kulpa states of political science that it "tends to explain the world only in its own terms and classes with no regard to other disciplines. This is where the trick is. The mirage of self-sufficiency: keeping distinct boundaries, lack of openness for novelty from outside of discipline, no wish to communicate over boundaries. We can particularly observe this when descending from more general/philosophical questions of e.g. democracy, into more precise and society grounded problems of citizenship or transformation." (2006)

Resurgence of Anti-Liberal Populism not Uncommon

The work of Dizard, Korte and Zamejc entitled: 'Right-Wing Nationalism in Poland: A Threat to Human Rights?" states that it is not "…uncommon for post-communist transitional democratic states like Poland to experience a resurgence of anti-liberal populism once the widespread euphoria (in celebration of the fall of the ancien regime) begins to wane." (2007)

According to Dizard, Korte and Zamejc the Polish populism "of the current ruling coalition patently falls on the right-hand side of the political spectrum, and "has been a trendsetter for the region since the conservative Kaczy-ski twins assumed power -- one as president, the other as prime minister -- in 2005 and 2006. Their association in government with the League of Polish Families produced a political program based on the assumption that Catholic and national values should prevail over permissive liberalism on issues like abortion and gay rights." (2007)

The political roots of the League of Polish Families is in the historical tradition of right-wing Polish nationalism according to Dizard, Korte and Zamejc and "tends to dominate the discourse on nationalism today." (2007) The League of Polish Families actively campaigns against 'all that threatens the moral fabric of society. This means abortion, divorce, feminism, homosexuality and consumerism, among other things." (Dizard, Korte and Zamejc, 2007)

Those most openly targeted by Polish nationalists are homosexuals, pro-choice advocates and feminists. Dizard, Korte and Zamejc state that the Polish people are "poised to interpret outside influences of many different kinds as threatening to the Polish identity. When the League of Polish Families frames the discussion on homosexuality using language that portrays gay rights as endangering the traditional, Catholic, Polish family model, then said movements easily appear un-Polish, or even anti-Polish. The same goes for pro-choice abortion movements, pro-right-to-divorce movements, and feminist movements generally." (2007)

It is reported that the Never again association was established as a response to racism, chauvinism and neo-Nazism threats in Poland. Dizard, Korte and Zamejc state that contemporary nationalism in Poland "…defended and propagated not just by marginalized extremist groups but by members of today's ruling coalition, visibly lacks any loyalty to liberal democratic traditions. As prominent politicians like Bosak demonstrate, certain "values" take precedence, and some of these values have the capacity to erode the universal rights and liberties…" that many in the European Union are striving to support. There are nationalists who claim that concepts such as "human dignity and freedom are false" as well as claims that "new left movements weaken society and dilute the Polish identity." (2007)

Dizard, Korte and Zamejc state that Poland's politicians are facing some "…critical decisions about whether or not they are willing to expand their conception of a Polish identity in an effort to protect the rights of those who do not fit nicely into the historical model of a heterosexual, Catholic family. If they choose the right-wing nationalism that exists today, the one that appeals to fear and insecurity, that excludes rather than includes, that rigidly promotes religious conservatism, they risk violating a great many human rights of a great many people by allowing discrimination, fostering inequality, and denying that which each and every one of us deserves: human dignity." (2007)

It is reported by Mrozik (2006) in the work entitled: "Polish Women Face a New Reality" that the use of "nationalist discourse which identifies social order with patriarchal structures of social relationships and homophobia, political authorities treat women as natural sources to which men have free and unlimited access. Women and children who stand for an ideological unity are presented as an essence of the nation that has one male subject only." (Mrozik, 2006)

Mrozik relates that it was stated by Professor Malgorzata Fuszara that the "…present situation of women is very difficult but she also said that we should not overestimate the interest in the gender equality issue shown by all Polish governments since 1989. She stressed that all previous governments had an arrogant and ignorant attitude towards the issue of equal status of men and women. But at the same time she agreed that the actions taken by present government are extremely dangerous as they lead to depriving women of the rest of their rights." (Mrozik, 2006)

It was noted by Magdalena Sroda that "…there is a distinct disproportion in the amount of broadcast time devoted to the presentation of male and female opinions. According to ?roda, this lack of women in the media and the politics is symptomatic. Although the social policy, which has become the bargaining card in the political disputes, concerns women mainly, it is shaped by men only." (Mrozik, 2006)

It is related that it was observed by Agnieszka Grzybek when "…comparing the present situation with that of the period 1997-2001, when Poland was ruled by other right-wing parties, we may heave a sigh of relief as now Poland is obliged to abide by the gender equality directives of European Union. In Polish Labor Code there are some anti-discriminatory regulations and the general knowledge of the issue of equal status of men and women has increased considerably." (Mrozik, 2006)

Agnieszka Graff is reported to have stated concerning the "…highly visible phenomenon of trivialization of the women's issue in Polish public discourse. "Using nationalist discourse, which identifies social order with patriarchal structures of social relationships and homophobia, political authorities treat women as natural sources to which men have free and unlimited access. Women and children who stand for an ideological unity are presented as an essence of the nation that has one male subject only." (Mrozik, 2006)