5


From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe

Katherina Verdery


Eastern Europe has been for the past half-century a major proving ground for experiments in both
the social organization of gender and the attempted redefinition of national identity. Early
pronouncements by socialist regimes in favor of gender equality, together with policies to increase
women’s participation in the work force, led optimists to expect important gains for women; the
internationalist bias of Soviet socialism promised to resolve the “national question,” making
national conflicts obsolete; and the Party’s broadly homogenizing goals bade fair to erase
difference of almost every kind from the social landscape. Had these promises borne fruit,
socialism would have given “gender" and “nationalism” a wholly novel articulation.

Although socialism clearly did not liberate women or put an end to national sentiment, it did
reshape them and (thus) their interconnections. My objective in this chapter is to offer some
thoughts on how these two aspects of “difference” intersected under socialism and on what changes
we might look for in the postsocialist period. I aim to raise issues for discussion rather than
present a finished argument. I begin by defining what I mean by the terms “gender” and “nation,”
then sketch the gender regime of socialism, give some examples of gendered national discourse in
socialist Romania, and look briefly at what has been happening with nationalism and gender since
1989 in certain Eastern European countries.


Gender had not been a subject of my work until I was asked to contribute a paper for a conference
on gender and nationalism, organized by Catherine Hall and Judith Walkowitz and held in Bellagio in
July 1992. I am grateful to the organizers and participants, as well as to members of the Johns
Hopkins Women’s Studies Seminar, for stimulating comment that assisted my revision. I could not
have written the paper without the assistance of Gail Kligman, who provided much of the material on
which it is based. Mary Poovey, Emily Martin. Kirstie McClure, and Lauren Sobel also offered
helpful advice.

The data used in the analysis come exclusively from primary and secondary written texts, not from
ethnographic research. This chapter first appeared in East European Politics and Societies 8 (1994)
and is reprinted with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.


Concepts

I take “nation” and “gender” to be cultural constructs used both in academic writing and in
everyday life (even, occasionally, with some overlap in those two registers). As constructs, they
are made up – arbitrary – but through their utilization in social life they become socially real
and seemingly natural. Both constructs are basic means of social classification. Each names a
particular way of organizing social difference, a dimension along which categories indicating
difference (male, female; Catalan, French, Polish) are arrayed. Each also implies both homogeneity
and difference simultaneously, creating putative internal homogeneities that can be contrasted with
one another as differences. Thus a given “nation” has no meaning except in a world of other,
different nations, but a great deal of social effort has historically been expended on defining any
given nation as distinctive by virtue of qualities all its members are presumed to share. The same
can be said of gender or gender roles. Gender and nation exist in part as an aspect of subjective
experience (national or gender “identities,” for instance) – as a subjectivity that orients persons
in specific, distinctive ways according to the nationness and gender attributed to or adopted by
them. This subjectivity is, in turn, the joint product of prevailing cultural understandings and
people’s social situations. To examine the intersection of nation and gender is to ask how either
of them implicates the other, in the way they are socially elaborated or lived.

Gender, as a construct, mediates the relation between bodies, as anatomical or biological givens,
and social meanings about them. It is a symbol system by which bodies enter into sociality. In this
sense, gender can be seen as a fundamental organizer of the connection between nature and culture.
Most gender systems construct a very small number of categories – usually two, “feminine” and
“masculine” (with alternative forms generally seen as acceptable or deviant permutations of these).
In making bodies social, gender enters into organizations of power and inequality to produce what
R. W Connell calls gender regimes, which consist of a gender division of labor, a gendered
structure of power, and a structure of cathexis. The term “patriarchy” refers to gender regimes
whose inbuilt inequalities favor the occupants of masculine gender roles.

Nation, as a construct, mediates the relation between subjects and states (which are themselves
social constructs too). It is a cultural relation intended to link a state with its subjects and to
distinguish them from the subjects of other states. I use the term “nationalism” to refer to
activity (including discourse) or sentiment that posits such a relation as important, whether it be
oriented toward an existing state and its regime or toward some other state/ regime, envisioned as
more suited to the nations interests. The subjectivities integral to “nation” are fundamental
elements of the basic political form of modern times, the nation-state. To the extent that the
modern nation-state is defined in relation to a geographical territory, “nation” parallels “gender”
in linking the physical “body” of the state to a set of meanings and affects, thus rendering
physical space sociopolitical. And because such events as war and military service involve the
state directly in the bodies of its (male) subjects, the standard rhetoric of nation-states
effectively ties together control over subject bodies and that over territory.

Actual nations are potentially infinite in number; the grounds for defining them, however, are more
limited. Eric Hobsbawm mentions several of the meanings nation has had since ancient times, but for
the modern world he identifies two main senses of it. These are 1) a relation known as citizenship,
in which the nation comprises all those whose common political participation ostensibly undergirds
collective sovereignty, and 2) a relation known as ethnicity, in which the nation comprises all
those of supposedly common language, history, or broader “cultural” identity. The latter is the
meaning most often invoked with the term “nationalism” (which I sometimes sharpen by calling it
“ethnonationalism,” to signal the ethnic meaning). I would add to these a third form of cultural
relation between state and subject, the form attempted under socialism – in Romania, frequently
using the expression “socialist nation.” It emphasized a quasi-familial dependency I will call
“socialist paternalism.” Instead of political rights or ethnocultural similarity, it posited a
moral tie linking subjects with the state through their rights to a share in the redistributed
social product. Subjects were presumed to be neither politically active, as with citizenship, nor
ethnically similar to each other: they were presumed to be grateful recipients – like small
children in a family – of benefits their rulers decided upon for them. The subject disposition this
produced was dependency, rather than the agency cultivated by citizenship or the solidarity of
ethnonationalism. Sharing a kinship-familial metaphor, socialist paternalism and ethnonationalism
as state-subject relations have a certain affinity. Indeed, in official discourses of Ceauşescu’s
Romania in the 1970s and 1980s, the two meanings are virtually impossible to disentangle.

Nation in these three (or other) senses can implicate gender in a variety of ways. Citizenship and
political rights, for example, can be understood as applying differentially to women and men – or,
to phrase it the other way around, notions of “male” and “female” can be elaborated in such a way
that they intersect unequally with citizenship. In many societies, women are citizens only by
virtue of their ties to husbands and fathers; a man marrying a foreign woman makes her his nation’s
citizen, but a woman marrying a foreign man loses her rights; the offspring of men, but not of
women, automatically become citizens; and so on. Similarly, ethnonational symbols may be thought of
in gendered terms. Other (weaker) nations may be “feminized” (and raped), and a national identity
may be defined and protected by sequestering or defending “our” women from the allegedly insatiable
sexuality of other nations’ men. Finally, socialist paternalism implicated gender by seeking to
eradicate male/female differences to an unprecedented degree, casting onto the state certain tasks
associated with household gender roles. From these examples, it is clear that both gender and
nation are essential to the hegemonic projects of modern state-building, and that a prime vehicle
for symbolizing and organizing their interface is the family.


The Gender Regime of Socialism

Although the socialist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union differed from one another in
important ways, I treat them as forming a broad class of societies more similar to one another, in
certain organizational respects, than to other societies. I have presented in chapter I my analysis
of the “workings” of socialism as a system – without, however, considering the place of gender in
this. 0 In the following brief summary, I draw upon scholarship by Joanna Goven, Gail Kligman,
Maxine Molyneux, and others, whose work helps to clarify the gender regime peculiar to socialism.

Socialist systems legitimated themselves with the claim that they redistributed the social product
in the interests of the general welfare. Using this premise, socialist paternalism constructed its
“nation” on an implicit view of society as a family, headed by a “wise” Party that, in a paternal
guise, made all the family’s allocative decisions as to who should produce what and who should
receive what reward – thus a “parent-state.” As Preobrazhensky put it, “The family must be replaced
by the Communist Party.” While socialism resembled many other political systems in emphasizing the
family as a basic element in the polity, I believe that it went further than most in seeing society
not simply as like a family but as itself a family, with the Party as parent. Socialist society
thus resembled the classic zadruga: as an extended family, it was composed of individual nuclear
families, but these were bound into a larger familial organization of patriarchal authority with
the “father” Party at its head. We might call the result a “zadruga-state.”

Peculiar to the zadruga-state, as Goven and Dolling show, was a substantial reorganization of
gender roles within its nuclear families, increasing the degree of gender equality in them. The
reason was that socialist regimes pushed an industrialization program that was (perforce)
labor-intensive and capital-poor, necessarily requiring the labor power of everyone regardless of
sex. More than any ideological commitment, this fact produced socialism’s emphasis on gender
equality and the policies that facilitated it. These included generous maternal leaves, child-care,
and (except in Romania after 1966) liberal access to abortion, which enabled women to exercise
greater control than before over this aspect of their lives. Among the consequences of women’s
participation in the labor force was increased relative authority within family units, even as
various state policies and the state’s usurpation of allocative decisions undercut the familial
authority of men.

While many commentators have remarked upon the ensuing” double” or even “triple burden” of
housework, mothering, and wage work borne by women – that is, husbands assumed no more of the first
two of these than before – it is nonetheless true that socialism also reorganized household tasks
to some extent. First, relatively youthful retirement served to make unpaid household labor
increasingly the responsibility of pensioners (as opposed to housewives), who stood in food lines,
cared for grandchildren, cooked for their working offspring, and so on. That is, social
reproduction was to a degree “geriatrized.” It nonetheless remained heavily feminized, partly
because the tasks were considered women’s work but also because pensioners were disproportionately
female, owing to the sex imbalance in the elder age groups. (Hence the feminization of food lines.)
Second, the zadruga-state’s interest in their labor power led it to take upon itself some of
women’s “traditional” nurturing and care-giving roles. Policy statements underscored this: for
example, the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party would periodically emit decrees that
ordered local Party organizations to help protect and consolidate the family by ensuring good
working conditions for women, providing more public eating facilities, and increasing industrial
production of semiprepared foods and labor-saving devices for housework. These policies plus the
health system show how socialist regimes moved to assume aspects of the child care, housework,
medical care-giving, and care of the elderly that in other societies were chiefly the job of women.

The zadruga-state could go further still, however: it might seek to “etatize” even the labor of
birth itself. The most extreme forms of this appeared in pro-natalist Romanian policies of the
1970s and 1980s, discussed in detail by Kligman, which treated women’s bodies as no more than
instruments of the state’s reproductive requirements. Obligatory gynecological exams were to ensure
that pregnancies had not been terminated, and doctors were held responsible for natality rates in
their districts, their salaries docked if birth rates were lower than expected. Thus not just women
but also male doctors became agents of biological reproduction in socialist Romania. Childless
persons, both women and men, paid a “celibacy tax” – further evidence that birth was not solely
women’s affair. As Ceauşescu put it, “The fetus is the socialist property of the whole society.” In
support of this premise, his and others’ speeches repeatedly pointed to increases in the numbers of
kindergartens, day-care centers, and maternity facilities and in the size of family subsidies.

In sum, socialism visibly reconfigured male and female household roles. One might say that it broke
open the nuclear family, socialized significant elements of reproduction even while leaving women
responsible for the rest, and usurped certain patriarchal functions and responsibilities, thereby
altering the relation between gendered “domestic” and “public” spheres familiar from
nineteenth-century capitalism. Biological reproduction now permeated the public sphere rather than
being confined to the domestic one. At the same time, the space in which both men and women
realized pride and self-respect increasingly came to be the domestic rather than the public sphere,
as they expressed their resistance to socialism through family-based income-generating activities
(the so-called “second economy”). In a word, families within the zadruga-state differed in
fundamental respects from the organization of domestic and family life common over the past century
in Western countries.

Not only were gender roles reconfigured; in many socialist policies, one sees a long-term goal of
gradually homogenizing the entire “zadruga family” under its Party’s wise patriarchalleadership.
The members of society were to form a homogeneous fraternity, tied to the “father” Party above
them; differences such as those between male and female were to be effaced within a new set of
discriminations – between good and bad Party members, or Party members and others – while women
were expected, like men, to “militate” for the building of a socialist society and to be “heroines”
of socialist labor. Even when describing motherhood as women’s supreme mission, for example,
speeches by Ceauşescu and others simultaneously presented it as a “profession” (meserie) requiring
a “qualification” (calificare); this use of terms drawn from industry helped to equalize “male” and
“female” forms of work.

In addition, women, like everyone in the society, had become dependents, wards of a paternalist
regime that made the most important decisions in “the whole family’s” interests. The dependent
attitude the Party expected of this homogenized populace appears vividly in the Romanian media
during the 1980s, which frequently invoked the “boundless gratitude” and “profound appreciation” of
Romanians for the “parental care” and “exceptionally valuable guidance” of the Party and its
leaders. Horváth and Szakolezai’s fascinating work on Hungarian Party activists gives further
evidence of how cadres perceived the population they served as helpless, infantilized, and
dependent – and worked to make it more SO.

Despite reorganizations of family roles and these tendencies toward homogenization, the structure
of power and the larger division of labor in the socialist family remained decidedly gendered. As
we might guess from imagery of the socialist family’s wise Party “father,” the state apparatus was
heavily masculine. The core sectors of socialism – the bureaucracy itself, heavy industry, the
army, and the apparatus of repression – were almost wholly male, especially at the apex, and were
represented as such. In the state bureaucracy, women overwhelmingly held clerical and secretarial
functions (as is true virtually everywhere). Women were indeed brought into political office, but
generally at lower levels and in areas deemed appropriately female: education, health care, and
culture. Thus although these “female” roles had been to some degree taken out of the hands of
mothers in nuclear families, they remained feminized in the broader division of labor of the
zadruga-state.

Comparable gendering can be seen in the composition of the labor force. For example, in Romanian
industry in 1985, 42 percent of the labor force was female, but women formed 80 percent of textile
workers, 50 percent of those in electronics, and 30 percent of workers in machine construction;
among white-collar occupations, women formed 43 percent of persons employed in science but 65
percent of employees in the more “feminine” jobs in culture, education, and the arts, and 75
percent of health care workers. Like all socialist regimes, the Romanian one fostered a cult of
heavy industrial production whose hero-workers were overwhelmingly represented as male, while
agricultural production and activities related to consumption, including employment in the service
sector, tended to be carried out by women and to be symbolized as such (to the extent that these
production-oriented regimes gave any space to representing those activities).

In addition to this persistent gendering of the power structure and the societal division of labor,
a gradual refeminization of nurturance seems to have been underway during the 1980s (if not
before). The reasons differed from one Eastern European country to another. In Hungary, for
example, Gal reports that Party policy had begun pushing women out of the labor force and back into
housework, so as to reduce the enormous cost of child care and care of the elderly. Expansion of
the “second economy” further reinforced “traditional” gender norms, associating men with the
primary wage and women with supplementary work. In Romania the impetus came partly from these cost
concerns but more directly from the state’s pro-natalist policy, which communicated a very mixed
message concerning women’s roles. On the one hand, Party literature presented women as doing
everything that men did: fulfilling the plan, solving problems, providing political leadership, and
being a dynamic element of Romanian socialism. On the other, despite claims about the “fetus as
social property,” the press emphasized that mothering was the special task and privilege of women.
Countless articles extolled women’s noble mission as rearers of children and guardians of the
nation’s future. Some derived the strength of the mother-child bond from the fact that mothers stay
at home to take care of the house and raise children, while fathers leave for work and for military
service (with women constituting about 40 percent of the labor force, this description applied to
exceedingly few families).

Predictably, the implications of such emphases spilled over into the wider division of labor. For
example, in 1973, the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party commanded enterprises to
create good working conditions for women, so they could give more time to rearing children, and
suggested the following provisions: extending work into the home, developing four-hour shifts and
regular half-time positions for women employees, and providing early retirement for women with
several children. The decree further observed that because women are best suited to certain kinds
of work – those requiring low physical effort, such as electronics, optics, chemistry, food
processing, commerce, and so on – the Party would establish a “nomenclatura” (special list) of jobs
for which women would have first priority. Thus the feminization of certain kinds of work was
further institutionalized, in the name of mothering.

The message about women and childbearing became ever more insistent in Romania throughout the
1980s, as the birth rate continued to stagnate despite the unavailability of contraception and
stringent penalties for abortion. Party literature now spoke of the Party’s support of the “most
beautiful traditions of the Romanian people: motherhood, and the bearing and raising of many
children.”  To document this new “Romanian tradition” of large families, there were articles such
as the lengthy interview with two well-known historians, published in the Party daily under the
headline “The Home with Many Children, Sign of a Good Citizen’s Sense of Responsibility for the
Future of the Nation.” In it, the two scholars discussed historical research proving that since its
very beginning millennia ago, Romanian society had the family unit as its basic cell, preserver of
its traditions and element of its progress. One asserted, in a blatant justification of patriarchy,
that “only with the founding of a family does a man acquire his true social identity.” As these
historians saw it, what had enabled Romanians not to be obliterated through centuries of war and
invasion was their large families, producing a dense population that supported the rise of
defensive medieval Romanian states. In a word, the family with many children was a fundamental
aspect of Romanians’ historical continuity since the time of the Dacians, over two thousand years
ago. We see here how Ceauşescu’s socialist nation intersected with the ethnonation precisely on the
issue of women’s “nurturant nature.”

Although Romania’s pro-natalism was extreme, the tendencies it revealed were nonetheless evident
elsewhere in Eastern Europe: a socialization of reproduction, in tension with various factors
reinforcing patriarchal family norms, and a persistent gendering of power and of the work force.
These features of socialism have several consequences for gender and nation in the postsocialist
era. The most important of them is that the zadruga-state’s incursions into women’s nurturant roles
opened both socialism and women to accusations of having jointly destroyed the ethnonation, the
national character, and “traditional” national values. Nationalist politics in the post-socialist
period thus focuses on driving women back into their “proper’ nurturant roles, recaptured from the
deficiently mothering state, so as to reverse the damage to the nation. Work on the abortion
controversy in Poland, Hungary, and Croatia (to be discussed in the final section of this chapter)
shows precisely this line of assault on the positions women acquired under socialism.


The Gendering of Nationalism in Socialism: Examples from Romania

Regime emphasis on building a “socialist nation” did not mean total erasure of nation in the ethnic
sense. This was particularly true of Romania, where to a degree unparalleled elsewhere, Party
leaders themselves embraced the (ethno) national idea. From the forms this embrace took, we see
even more clearly how thoroughgoing was the patriarchy of the zadruga-state, even as it emasculated
its nuclear-household heads and empowered women.


Nation as Tradition

The national idea has lain at the center of Romanian politics for two centuries or more. It shares
with other ethnonationalisms in Eastern Europe (as well as elsewhere) an obsession with Romania’s
territorial borders: with where “the nation” ends, territorially speaking. There has been trouble
on nearly all borders but particularly on the western one with Hungary, for many Hungarians contest
Romanian sovereignty over multiethnic Transylvania, to which each side has an arsenal of “proofs”
of rightful ownership. For Romanians, these center on arguments from ethnography and folklore
–showing an unbroken Romanian peasant tradition – and from history and archeology – showing
unbroken Romanian continuity of settlement from time immemorial. Both arguments are served by the
existence of regions where “tradition” still “lives” – where peasants still walk around in the same
garb as can be seen on Trajan’s column, for example, or sing Christmas carols mentioning events
registered in antiquity. The region par excellence of this “living tradition” is Maramureş, in
northern Transylvania. Its “tradition”, and national rhetoric more broadly, are interwoven with
gender.

From the official point of view – in the Ceauşescu regime’s discourse about tradition and in how
its invented traditions were organized – tradition was not gendered; it was equally male and
female. But as Kligman’s research in Maramureş shows, tradition was effectively feminized. This is
partly because regime investment policies drew Maramureş men out of the rural labor force into
industry or into seasonal labor migration, thus leaving peasant agriculture overwhelmingly female.
Therefore women were perforce the bearers of a “traditional” livelihood, since they were the ones
who stayed at home in conditions from which state policies had excluded economic “modernity.”
Moreover, the regime’s very marginalization of Maramureş made it a locus of resistance to the
political center. The tenacity of local custom became a sign of its resistance and produced an
identity distinct from the regime’s image of Romania as a “multilaterally developed”
industrializing society. In women’s centrality to life-cycle rituals and in their consumption
styles (“traditional” clothing, food preparation, house decor, etc.) women reproduced this
resistant localism more than did men. As Kligman puts it, “Women are now the practical tenders of
tradition – for their families, their villages, and the state.” Her data show that in Ceauşescu’s
Romania, “modernity” in the form of industrial wage work was produced and figured by men,
“tradition” by women. This feminized tradition is, of course, crucial to Romanian claims to that
territory.


Nation as Patrilineage

Nationalist texts from the Ceauşescu years also show a gendering of the “nation” and of
“tradition,” but in rather different ways from those just discussed. The Maramureş peasantry
stabilized only a part of Romanian national identity (a very important part, of course, since it
made Transylvania “Romanian” by the putative longevity of the regions folk customs); other parts of
this identity rest on national history. Not only Ceauşescu’s speeches but all manner of newspaper
articles, for example, included lengthy references to Romanian history. These nearly always
presented that history as an endless sequence of male heroes, strung out one after another, almost
like a series of “begats,” and producing the impression of the nation as a temporally deep
patrilineage. Here are parts of such a text, published in English under the title “Great Figures in
the History of Romanian Genius”:


A Romanian, and especially a foreigner who would make a study of the great figures in the history
of the Romanian spirit, according to Carlyle’s vision of the “hero,” of “geniuses,” of the great
“makers of history,” may not understand the precise way in which the history of the Romanian spirit
took shape. . . . More than in the West, such figures acquire general collective features and, one
after the other, enter “history,” “tradition” and “folklore.” Hence the response they arouse in the
people, the assimilation of their message by ever broader sections of the Romanian people. The
Romanians lack the egocentric vision of the great personalities. The [se] become “great” first by
redeemed, recuperated collectivity. . . .

One of the earliest figures of South-Eastern European dimensions, the Ruling Prince Neagoe Basarab,
represents a synthesis between the Byzantine and Romanian spirit, owing to the twofold cultural and
architectural work he helped advance: The Teachings of Ruling Prince Neagoe Basarab to His Son
Teodosie, and the church built at Curtea de Arges, a superb 16th century architectural monument.
The Teachings, more especially, those contemporary with the work of Machiavelli, are a handbook of
political and practical wisdom, dealing with ethic thinking, military art and pedagogy. The
Romanian political spirit had reached the stage of theoretical, crystallized and codified
presentation. It was a decisive step forward in the art of governing, in the relationships between
the ruling prince and his subjects, in moral principles, at the opposite pole of “Machiavellism.”
Influenced by the Christian lore. . . the Romanian spirit constantly rejected cynicism and
political amorality.

Two great, pre-eminently political figures, who lived in the 15th and 16th centuries respectively,
embodied and gave memorable expression – traditional now – to the spirit of independence and
resistance to foreign aggression, against invaders. One must never forget that this highly
patriotic feature has left a deep imprint upon the entire history of the Romanian national spirit,
where it can be traced as an uninterrupted presence.

Through the battles he won and the military defeats he suffered, through the foundation of citadels
and churches, through his feudal yet uninterrupted cultural activity, Stephen the Great, the Ruling
Prince of Moldavia, is the symbol of a great personality always present in legends, in folklore, in
the great tradition of the Romanian people. The end of his rule marked the end of the independent
political life of Moldavia. . . . His activity also belongs to the European resistance against the
Turkish invasion. There is much truth in the thesis holding that the West was defended against the
many waves of invasion by the fight waged by the peoples living in the East and South-East of
Europe. The Romanian spirit, viewed in a historical light, possesses some of the legitimate pride
stemming from a vocation and a feeling for the necessity of courage and sacrifice, in an area of
expansion and passage to Central Europe or to Constantinople.

Michael the Brave is an epic figure. . . possessing a vision that exceeded by far the historical
conditions of the epoch. His opposition to the Turks marked by a memorable date, the battle of
Calugareni (1595), which he won under epic conditions, is a daring attempt at unifying the three
Romanian lands (Walachia, Moldavia and Transylvania) under one single rule. The unification was
achieved – though ephemerally – through a rapid campaign and his political acumen, and, though
short-lived, it has lasted ever since in the national history of the Romanians. Thus, the awareness
of the unity of the Romanian people, of its common origin and language . . . became a reality for
the first time. A spiritual tradition became an historical fact. . . . Treacherously murdered by
his chance allies, Michael the Brave illustrates and consolidates through his death one more
historical constant of the Romanian spirit: the value and significance of sacrifice, of the supreme
sacrifice for the triumph of a lofty or common cause. One should not overlook the fact that
masterpieces of Romanian folk poetry . . . belong to the same ethos of accepted, creative death,
through the natural agreement between individual destiny and hostile forces.

All through the history of the Romanian people, the social and national awareness has brought about
actions of equal symbolic value. When conditions of social and national oppression in Transylvania,
at the end of the eighteenth century, led in 1784 to the outbreak of the great peasant uprising
headed by Horea, Closca and Crisan, the execution of the three national heroes added one more
foundation stone that helped build the edifice of the Romanian spirit. It was the contribution of
spontaneous, “anonymous” heroes, genuine representatives of the oppressed masses of people. By
means of such popular, anti-feudal explosions, the Romanian spirit, under highly unfavorable social
conditions, asserted periodically its dignity, the dream of a juster and better life, of a more
prosperous life. Due to its national and social fights against serfdom, the people acquired the
awareness of its liberty, of its national and human rights, and demanded the abolishment of
oppression and social discrimination. . . .

The 1821 revolt led by Tudor Vladimirescu, openly national [and] antifeudal . . ., gave a
regenerating impulse to the social and national claims, an ethic consciousness once again marked by
the supreme sacrifice of the leader of the revolt. Tudor Vladimirescu too was to die, murdered like
his forerunners and fellow-sufferers in their collective sacrifice.

The 1848 Revolution in all the Romanian Principalities is the first expression of the bourgeois
democratic spirit, accompanied by a great national and social elan. It was dominated by the pure
image of Nicolae Bǎlcescu, who stands out most clearly as an ideologist, historian and politician
possessing a vast European vision. . . . Nicolae Bǎlcescu contributed his fervour, an ardent
revolutionary spirit, a radical democratic consciousness, complete devotion to the cause. The
modern democratic Romanian political spirit won in him its first ideal exemplary figure. . . .

The figure of the national poet Mihai Eminescu possesses the same shaping quality and spiritual
significance as any promoter, social or political, of the Romanian historical awareness. Eminescu
gave powerful expression to the national consciousness of the Romanians, he also gave Romanian
poetry its true dimensions, he transformed the Romanian language into an exceptional means of
expression and fixed in the hearts and minds of millions of Romanian people the effigy of the
“poet” and of the “genius,” thus the encounter with great Art, with Poetry. Through such a
representative, the Romanian spirit was not only enriched, but it also became universal, more
subtle and purified. . . .

The prominent representatives of the Romanian culture and spirit mentioned so far constitute a
brief selection from a large number of personalities whose names echo solemnly in the remoter or
more recent history of the Romanian people.

In line with the great humanistic traditions of the Romanian people, in the vast context of
historical revolutionary transformations in Romania, the out-standing personality of Nicolae
Ceausescu expresses, in a striking militant hypostasis of a modern, independent, fully sovereign
socialist country, the loftiest aspirations of the Romanian spirit.


This text, as suggested earlier, presents Romania as an extended patrilineage of “heroes” living
“exemplary” biographies. Their biographies all emphasize heroism and triumph, along with
victimization and sacrifice – things they share as individuals with the nation that unites them,
“Romania.” The passage constructs a national self that is collective and has collective rather than
individual interests – that is, it constructs the nation as a “collective individual.” This
collective individual acts as an entity: it does things, fights for its freedom, asserts its
dignity, participates in world culture, possesses legitimate pride, rejects cynicism, and so forth.
Such a collective individual generally also possesses: it “has” a culture and a bounded territory
and a character or spirit. The one presented here seems to consist largely of “sons” (sometimes
with their fathers), culminating in Ceauşescu, who was usually referred to as the “most beloved son
of the nation.” The excerpt’s complete silence on female “geniuses” eloquently renders men the
dynamic, active, heroic principle. (In school manuals during the socialist period, some effort went
into finding the occasional exemplary female, but they rarely appear in Ceauşescu’s speeches or
articles in the popular press, except in women’s publications.)

There is nothing especially unusual in this. As George Mosse has shown, much nationalism rests on
homosocial masculine bonding. It suggests a peculiar kind of lineage, however, one that reproduces
itself without re-course to females or even to sex. In this excerpt, emphasis falls primarily on
the national spirit and its reproduction through culture (created by men) or through men’s creative
death – that is, women may create life in this world, but more fundamental to the nation’s
continuity is its life eternal, ensured through culture, heroic deeds, and qualities of the spirit:
the realm of men. The theme of sacrifice and creative death in this excerpt permeates both Romanian
historiography and important Romanian folk tales (not to mention other nationalisms).

There are interesting parallels between this image of a collective Romanian nation reproduced
without women’s intervention and the biblical creation story Carole Pateman sees as the originary
myth for models of patriarchal civil society (the myth that stands at the root of the citizenship
meaning of “nation”). Adam – like the zadruga-state and like the eponymous ancestors of Romanians –
is both mother and father, representing the pro-creative power of a male complete in himself; Eve
springs from him, after all. Thus woman’s procreative capacity is “denied and appropriated by men
as the ability to give political birth, to be the originators of a new form of political order.”
These parallels show a patriarchal imagery underlying both ethnonational and citizen nation,
collective entities nurtured and midwifed by the heroic deeds and sacrifices of men.


Nation as Lover/Beloved

The patrilineages of this kind of history writing do more than simply pro-create the nation. They
also provide the source of sentiments necessary to procreating it, and here they join with other
elements of national culture such as poetry and art. In exploring this issue, I follow Connell’s
suggestion that an essential component of any gender regime is its structure of cathexis, or gender
patterning of emotional attachments. I see this as providing a clue to a problem I do not find
persuasively treated in literature on nationalism: how national sentiment becomes cathected – how
subjects come to feel themselves national.

Let me illustrate by means of a second excerpt (henceforth referred to as “excerpt 2,” the one
above being “excerpt 1”). It comes from a long essay by Romanian poet and writer Ion Lăncrănjan, in
his book A Word about Transylvania. Unlike the previous one, this text was produced not for an
international audience but for a local one. It offers a self-definition of Romania and Romanians
implicitly against Hungary and Hungarians. Its context was increasing friction between Romania and
Hungary, evident in writing by historians throughout the 1980s and probably related to the
increasingly divergent strategies of the Ceauşescu and Kádár regimes – ever-greater coercion vs.
ever-greater market forces. Accompanying this friction was evidence of heightened attachment (on
the Romanian side) to the idea of “Romania” and to the contested soil of Transylvania. These two
themes are apparent in excerpt 2:


Patriotism – A Vital Necessity

Only One Love

As a child, you think the world begins and ends with the threshold of the house where you were
born, with the edge of the village or town in which you first saw the light of day, with the light
that first set the boundaries of your sight. As an adolescent, you think that your first love is
your only true and great love, in comparison with which the stars in the sky grow pale and the
lilies fade, along with everything that is alive and mortal, for, or so you then think, only this
love of yours, around which everything else turns, even the land and the waters, is undying. Things
change after that, you realize the world is bigger and more comprehensive, and loves succeed one
another endlessly, yet over them all there arises out of nothing, when you aren’t even aware of it,
a single and inextinguishable love – love of your country [patria], love of your native land and of
the places of your birth and of the nation [neam] you come from, that unstinting love that
overpowers, time and again, that grows and opens itself to the light as you yourself grow and are
clarified in and toward the world, a love that intersects with and fraternizes with your first love
and with all your other loves, for only those who are capable of love are able to love their
country and their people, only those who are good and generous, only those who know the weightiness
of speech and the earthquake of self-abandon can raise themselves up to the height of this profound
and powerful sentiment.

We will see, if we look back, that the most notable sons of the Romanian people, the most
enlightened and gifted, the best and most just, the most honest and sincere, the most daring,
passed through the fire of this sentiment, gave themselves to it without restraint, gave themselves
in fact to the country and the people they were descended from. The life and work of Eminescu, for
instance, are inconceivable without this self-giving, without this sacred love, which his genius
purified for all time, raising it up into the undying light of eternity, and in its light he
himself was pulverized, without stopping to waver, without awaiting sustenance or payment from
somewhere, carrying everything through as if preordained to happen thus so that our country,
Romania, and our ancestral language, our culture, in its entirety, might acquire a new and deeper
self-awareness. The pathos of the life of this great poet, whose feet trod all the regions
inhabited by Romanians so as to hear their speech and know their aspirations and legends, his
tremendous labor, of inestimable value, everything that this superb man wrote and did, stood under
the sign of his great and earth-shaking love, for in his unique and exemplary case, things took a
dramatic if not indeed tragic turn, so deep was his ardor, so pure, so unhesitating, so total, that
it was transformed at last into an undying flame.

The same things can be said also about Bǎlcescu, about Iorga, and about Sadoveanu. Bǎlcescu,
especially, can be compared only with Eminescu, for the same fire consumed him, too; he too put
above everything, above satisfactions and glory, his love for his people and his country, where he
would have wanted to die but where he did not manage to return, dying instead in the loneliness of
strangers and entering thus into eternity. The other two men, Iorga and Sadoveanu, seem less
legendary, being closer to us in time. But the pathos of their lives also stood under the sign of
love of their country and people, which both of them served in their own ways, with
self-abnegation.

Nor should we forget, besides the example of these notable men and of so many others – the
always-fresh and ever-unsullied example of the man of the people, the example of the people itself,
for it was the parent and the teacher of all, it ascended the “Golgothas” of the centuries,
bleeding and gnashing its teeth, believing so much in its own star, having such strength in its
manner of being – its beauty, and sensibility, and intelligence, and vivacity, and love, and
longing – that it overcame everything in the end: centuries of hostility, subjugation, and
dependency, being itself that which its most important men were: the people of an earth-shaking,
profound, and pure love. . . .

Love, any love, raises up and purifies, and love of country, love of your places of birth, of your
people, gives another meaning to everything, raising everything up onto the high platform of all
accomplishments, making of yesterday’s child a daring and clear-headed man, transforming the
adolescent into a hero, as has so often happened, as will happen again, and as ought to happen.


Romania – Eye of the World

Romania is my natal land, the land of my dreams, the land of my longing. . . . Romania is my land
of origin, it is the old song of the flute and the quiet whisper of the plowed field that is almost
ripe; . . . it is the far-away and almost forgotten tinkling of the shepherd’s pipe that brightens
the mountainsides of an evening – it is the land with the name of a girl and the fiery soul of a
fiery man! . . . Romania is the land that paid with sweat and tears – and often, much too often,
with blood – for whole days and years of its tumultuous history, it is the land across which came
massive waves of fire and smoke, it is the land that always refound its being in its own soil, in
its mountain springs, in the quiet of its glades, in the fascinating journey through its
fascinating landscapes, in its just and honest judgment, owing to which no one can push you aside
or destroy you if you rely on what is yours, if by your work and your struggle you have become one
with the soil on which you tread!. . .

Romania is the land whose boundaries give it the shape of the sun, “plump,” as our unforgettable
poet Blaga would have said; it is a land with so much beauty, so rich and so good, so generous and
credulous and endowed so bountifully – that you can’t capture it in words, you can’t paint it on
paper in all its true and radiant splendor, you keep missing something: a leaf that is dying, a
flower opening its corolla toward the sky, the rumbling of a mountain storm or the endless calm of
the sea, the deep breathing, barely perceptible and barely felt, of the plain at sunset, the
peaceful song of the regions between the Carpathians and the East, the silver trill of the swallow!

Romania is the land of some unforgettable men, the land of Bǎlcescu, the land of Horea and Iancu,
of Michael the Brave and Stephen the Great, the land of the Basarabs, of Gelu and the Muşatins, the
land that never let itself be conquered, that met difficulty with quiet and patience – and how
often that was! . . .

Romania is a hardworking and capable land, exceedingly capable, with the most diverse and
unexpected inclinations, and even if it was also often sad, in a distant and not-so-distant past,
the reason is that the fruits of this industriousness were often taken from it, outright or
indirectly through the usual base perfidy, and it was left more often than not only with tears and
weeping. . .

Romania is the land of the truest independence, a land now geared into a profound process of
renewal, it is a land penetrated from one end to the other by the manly, powerful, and rising hum
of machines; it is a land that adds to its old jewels other, more valuable ones, a land that makes
the strong waters into current and electric light, a land in which fires burn constantly – at the
[steel mills in] Hunedoara, Galaţi, Reşiţa and other places! . . .

Romania is the land of friendship, a hospitable land full of understanding and of respect for
everyone, eager to assimilate all that is good and beautiful, wanting only to be respected,
understood, and appreciated justly for its hard work! . . .

Romania is the eye of the world, an eye that is clear and watchful, sensitive to the finest nuances
of the light, deep and vibrant, with rustling eyelashes of rustling grain stalks, with melancholy
eyelids and with rough hiding places of a rough audacity, with the clearness of great and calm
waters, with undreamt-of openings toward the future! . . .

Romania is my natal land, the land of my origin, with which I am so much and so fervently in love
that if I should happen to die who knows where, in a distant and foreign place, I would rise up
again on my feet and I would walk back here, to my country, to these loved and known places! But
let us not speak of death, now when it is more appropriate than ever to speak of life, of that
which was and will remain imperishable in the soul of this land with the name of a girl and the
rough steadfastness of a rough man!


These two essays, like the one preceding them, construct a collective individual made up of sons
and unforgettable men, and they emphasize heroism and self-sacrifice, triumph and victimization.
But they also do something more: they explicitly work on sentiment. The excerpts show clearly how
central gender is to eroticizing the nation: male heroes burn with ardor for a feminized “Romania”
who has eyelids and eyelashes, is “plump,” has the “name of a girl,” and is overtly linked with a
man’s first adolescent amour. Whereas the unstated emotional underpinnings of national solidarity
in excerpt 1 are a simple admiration of heroes or, at best, loyalty to a kinship line, the love
appropriate between a son and his father, in excerpt 2 this becomes an (almost incestuous) erotic
attachment between “Romania” and her “sons.”

To create the basis for this erotic attachment requires identifying two separate elements that can
be joined. In this text, “Romania” becomes divided into two components: a container or receptacle
(a kind of house) and the thing contained, the residents. Each has gender connotations and is
linked with additional oppositions. The container is feminine and the residents masculine, the
space of “Romania” is feminine and the temporally deep lineage of its inhabitants (those
“unforgettable men”) masculine, the body is feminine and the soul masculine. That is, space is
feminized and time masculinized, and “Romania” is given a female body and a male soul (the “fiery
soul of a fiery man”). The homeland becomes the inactive female object of sentiment, while the male
subject is a historically acting subject, themes very common in modern conceptions of identity.
Thus we cannot say that this collective individual “the Romanian nation” is strictly masculine, as
appeared to be so in excerpt 1: here it is an active (masculine) principle intimately tied to a
(passive) feminine space – territory – which the masculine principle will defend.

The feminization of space deserves further comment. In Romanian historiography, where national
victimization is a central theme, this victimization often has a spatial dimension: the barbarian
violates Romania’s borders, rapes her, mutilates her. The Soviet annexation of Bessarabia is widely
referred to as the rape of Bessarabia, and the temporary annexation of Transylvania by Hungary in
1940 – 44 is seen as a bodily mutilation. (Similarly, when Hungary lost Transylvania after 1918,
images of this showed the beloved motherland’s “white and virginal but mutilated and bleeding
body,” and politicians spoke of a “revered body. . . torn asunder and ravaged by barbarians.”) The
most obvious basis for seeing this violated space as feminine is the (Western) association of the
female with body and nature, as in landscape. One thinks of all those metaphors of men plowing the
fields, as well as the images – ubiquitous in so much celebrated art – of prostrate female nudes,
like material nature the passive object of the active gaze and actions of men.

This association, one not confined to the case at hand, achieves two things. First, it
naturalizes/genders the question of territorial boundaries, so vexed in the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century history of Eastern Europe. It makes these boundaries like the skin of the female
body, fixed yet violable, in need of armed defense by inevitably masculine militaries (“sons”
defending their “motherland,” their “mothers,” and their “beloveds”  – conveniently conflated).
Second, it establishes a gendered structure of cathexis, a set of sentiments, to support this armed
defense.

We therefore see in excerpt 2 the outlines of a set of antinomies familiar in Western thought and
especially in Romanticism:


woman     beloved      body       nature      land         space             birth

man           lover          soul       culture     people      time       (creative) death


That is, we see something paralleling the values of a “traditional bourgeois” gender regime, and
this organization sustains a cathexis of the national sentiment as like, but better than, one’s
first love. Does the excerpt reveal a form of resistance (perhaps unacknowledged) to socialism’s
reconfiguration of household gender roles by usurping male authority and empowering women, in
relative terms, as allies of the state? Or does it reveal, rather, the “deep structure” of a
higher-order patriarchy, essential to the zadruga-state? That a text permeated with the preceding
antinomies can exist at the heart of this zadruga-state, written by one of Ceauşescu’s favorite
poets, indicates that however radical socialism may have been in reorganizing family structures and
roles at one level, at another its paternalism dovetailed perfectly with patriarchal forms central
to national ideas elsewhere in the West. What happens to these two levels of gender organization
with the fall of socialism, and how does the national idea figure in the outcome?


Postsocialist Nationalism and Antifeminism: Examples from Hungary, Poland, and Croatia

With the end of socialism, the prior differences among the countries of Eastern Europe have been
accentuated, yet one unsettling commonality is evident in nearly all: increasingly visible
ethnonationalism, coupled with anti-feminist and pro-natalist politicking. Much of it centers on
the issue of abortion. Only in Romania is there (so far) no active antiabortion movement, because
the earlier ban on abortion there has made people all too aware of the costs; but even in Romania,
Kligman detects the same “retraditionalization” – a return to “traditional values,” family life,
and religion, with women’s place once again to be in the home. Elsewhere, abortion was more or less
readily available, and as is clear from recent work, nationalism and opposition to abortion are
working hand in hand, together with assaults on the position of women in the labor force and in
public life. As a male Hungarian worker told anthropologist Eva Huseby-Darvas, “The ideal situation
would be if from now on all women could stay home as Hungarian mothers should, and if men could,
once again, earn enough to support their family.”

 The connection is strikingly visible in slogans such as “The Unborn Are Also Croats” and “Abortion
Is Genocide.” It appears also in political arguments about the “seventeen million murdered fetal
Polish citizens” or the “five million Hungarians” dead in “our Hungarian Holocaust,” killed by the
thirty-five years of the Communists’ liberal abortion policies and the selfish women who took
advantage of them – and still want to. In Croatia, conservative groups, funded by private sources,
the Catholic Church, and international pro-life organizations, are taking the liberal abortion law
to court with arguments about the family as the fundamental unit of a nation; their feminist
opponents are treated as subversives. Nationalists in Hungary have gone so far as to compare the
aborted Hungarians with the (many fewer) dead from Hungary’s worst historical military disasters
(the Turkish defeat in 1526, the battle of Stalingrad in World War II) and to erect, in the town of
Abasár, an “Embryo Memorial” to those sacrificed Hungarians. They refer to pro-abortion feminists
as “murderers of mothers” and hold women responsible for the “death of the nation.”

The most extended analysis of these trends is Joanna Goven’s, based on data from Hungary. Her
argument, more complex than I can summarize here, roots this reaction in the way the pre-1989
opposition to socialism reinforced “traditional” family roles, and this is now exaggerated as the
opposition takes over the running of society. New political movements are reversing women’s gains
under socialism and their increased control (except in Romania) over reproductive decisions. In
other words, the zadruga-state’s usurpation of familial-patriarchal authority is now giving way to
policies and attitudes aimed at recovering that lost authority for men in nuclear families. The
politics of this involves “othering” women as allies of the Communists. Because Communism proved
itself the enemy both of nature, by trying to make humans be what was “contrary” to their
acquisitive and deeply gendered “nature,” and of the nation, which it almost killed off by
permitting birth rates to fall, the women who became its allies (or at least careerist, feminist
women) must therefore be enemies of the nation, too. So a nationalist politics now proposes to
reshape the nation against the debilitating “mothering” of socialism. This entails reconfiguring
the family yet again, compelling women back into the nurturing and care-giving roles “natural” to
their sex and restoring to men their “natural” family authority.

Goven offers some stunning material to illustrate this. She cites political texts that speak of the
need for Hungarian men to become real men again instead of the wimps that socialism had made them;
if they do, then women will automatically want to be their subordinates once more. Numerous
writings express concern with or disapproval of the “matriarchy” that had become all too common in
Hungary. They argue that “socialist mothering” made men weak and lacking in authority, and to alter
this requires restoring autonomy to the family and authority to the father: mothers should be
dependent not on society but on their husbands. Essentialism pervades these writings, with their
emphasis on “natural differences” that suit women to homemaking functions. Even more important are
texts decrying the aggressiveness (especially in sexual matters) that socialism encouraged in
women, and above all their destructive aggressiveness within the family; women, such texts
complain, have ceased to be affectionate and understanding. I see this as further confirmation that
what is at issue is precisely women’s nurturing and emotional roles, weakened by socialism’s having
assumed them so women could work.

Thus, Goven’s data suggest, political pluralism and the restoration of capitalism in Hungary are
bound up with the reimposition of certain “bourgeois” family norms. This is the more necessary as
the welfare state of socialism is forced to shuffle off many of its functions: there is no longer
enough money for all those day-care centers and kindergartens, for lengthy maternity leaves and
family allocations – in a word, for socialized reproduction. Nurturance must re-devolve onto women,
then, and politics must assist this by reining in all those aggressive Hungarian wives and mothers
so derelict in their duty to the nation. Here, for example, is Kata Beke, Hungary’s first secretary
of education under the HDF government in 1990: “In the rich store of historical examples... the
European model of marriage has proven to be the most successful and resilient. Because it
corresponds to humanity’s two-sexed nature, to the set of complementary differences hidden in our
genes. Because only here [in Europe] can a new generation grow up in a normal – that is, two-sexed
– world.” Only if gender polarity is restored, argue political groups across the spectrum, will
Hungary again become a healthy society.

There is some evidence that although many women wish to continue working, others are eager for this
restoration and do not resent the loss of their place in the labor force and political life. For
them, work was a necessity, not something they sought; Party activism was a torment that a certain
number had to bear because the Party insisted on proving its egalitarianism with “quotas.” For
many, the home was always a haven from an oppressive state; they are content to return there now,
if only their husbands can earn the proverbial family wage. Many women indeed saw socialism as
contrary to nature, because it treated as equal two sexes that they believe are “by nature” wholly
different. Many see the end of socialism as necessarily a restoration of the natural order of
things, in which gender essentialism and the natural role of mothering have a crucial place. It is
chiefly the abortion question that has mobilized a few of them to defend what they had come to see
as a right.

If Hungary is any indication, postsocialist Eastern Europe reveals how tightly interwoven are
“socialism” and “capitalism” with specific – and variant – organizations of gender; and these in
turn are bound up with the national idea. The end of socialism means the end of a state that
assumes significant costs of biological and social reproduction, instead of assigning most of these
costs to individual households, as capitalist systems have done. If, as some scholars argue, the
gender organization of the capitalist household cheapens the costs of labor for capital by defining
certain necessary tasks – “housework” – as nonwork (and therefore not remunerating them), then the
economies of postsocialist Eastern Europe will be viable only with a comparable cheapening. Thus
the end of socialism necessarily means making once again invisible, by feminizing them and
reinserting them into households, those tasks that became too costly when rendered visible and
assumed by the state. The chief alternative Eastern Europe’s women might anticipate is what has
happened in more advanced economies: the commodification of household tasks into services (day
care, cleaning, meal provision, etc.) for which a working couple pays something closer to their
real cost than is paid when these are “housework.” Until the commodity economy becomes as pervasive
in Eastern Europe as it is now in the developed world, however, postsocialist Eastern Europe will
be returning to the housewife-based domestic economy that was superseded at least in part by both
socialism and advanced capitalism.

A crucial means for this return will be the new democratic politics, which is proving to be – for
quite different reasons from one place to another – “misogynist.” And central to this, as Goven’s
Hungarian data show, is ethnonationalism. It is not difficult to see why. Post-1989 political forms
are still being legitimated through “anti-Communism”: through being the opposite of what the
Communists did. Because Communist Parties all across Eastern Europe mostly toed the Soviet
internationalist line in public, national sentiment became a form of anti-Communism. This resistant
aura to nationalism makes it an obvious means of reversing the damage Communists did to the nation
they suppressed. To the extent that women are seen as having benefited from socialism or as having
had the socialist state as their ally, feminism becomes socialist and can be attacked as
antinational. The separate threads come together, as has been shown, in the issue of abortion. It
owes its force partly to a vital symbol of socialism’s demise: the idea of the nation’s rebirth.
The nation cannot be reborn if fetuses – and the nation with them – are condemned to death. The
nation cannot return to health if its women refuse to bear and nurture its “fetal citizens.” The
nation’s recovery from socialism requires, then, a new patriarchy, instituted through a new
democratic politics that serves the national idea.

One of several ironies here is that Western policy-makers accustomed to thinking of nationalism,
with its irrational “tribal” passions, as not in keeping with a modern Western political economy
are suddenly finding that the best promoters of the Westernizing, anti-Communist values they hope
to foster are local nationalists. Western liberalism has always found ethnonationalism suspect, for
it restricts the “demos” of democratic participation to the members of a chosen people, excluding
the ethnic “others” from full citizenship. This challenge to the notion of universal citizenship,
which liberal political theory would place at the heart of democratic politics, is now lodging
itself at the center of Eastern European “democracy.” As the transition from socialism proceeds,
scholars should be especially attentive to how nationalist politics integrates gender, what
alternative forms of national imagery will be offered and by whom, and how the politics around
issues like abortion will produce distinctive forms of democracy and capitalism in which nation and
gender are intertwined in novel ways.


In: Verdery, Katherina. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996. 61-82