Gender, Globalization, and Postsocialism

The Czech Republic After Communism

Jacqui True

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780231501774
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How are changing gender relations shaping and being shaped by post-socialist marketization and liberalization? Do new forms of economic and cultural globalization open spaces for women's empowerment and feminist politics? The rapid social transformations experienced by the people of the Czech Republic in the wake of the collapse of communism in 1989 afford political scientist Jacqui True with an opportunity to answer these questions by examining political and gendered identities in flux. She argues that the privatization of a formerly state economy and the adoption of consumer-oriented market practices were shaped by ideas and attitudes about gender roles.

Though finely tuned to the particular, local traditions that have defined the boundaries of globalization for Czech men and women, Gender, Globalization, and Postsocialism also offers a provocative general thesis about the inextricable linkages between political and economic changes and gender identities.

1 Gender, Globalization, and Postsocialism

In 1989 and 1990, all over Central and Eastern Europe communist regimes fell. The revolutions against communism raised the “Iron Curtain” and rolled out the carpet of liberty for the citizens of the former Soviet Bloc. From now on, it seemed, all roads would lead to the West rather than to Moscow. This story is a favorite with the western media and foreign policy establishment. It suggests the triumph of democracy and capitalism over a failed experiment. But how did people in the region influence and interpret these events? How far and in what ways have women and men’s lives been shaped by processes of liberalization and globalization since 1989? Have they been agents or victims of these processes? Against the relief of their former socialist regimes, postsocialist countries present a telescoped view of the transformation of social relations in a period of rapid and unprecedented change.

For all their merits, the dominant scholarly approaches to postsocialist transformation do not shed much light on how people have lived the transitions from communism. Rather than changes in identities and everyday life, the focus has been on changes in institutions and political-economic settings. In particular, the macro-orientation of these approaches and their emphasis on economic and social aggregates lead them to ignore local complexity. Thus, we know little about how much things have changed and how much they have stayed the same for most people after communism.

Here, I develop a synthetic, gendered approach to understanding postsocialist transitions. The approach highlights how local people and organizations negotiate the global spread of capitalist markets and political democracy. It shows that people can be simultaneously empowered and exploited by the impact of global forces, and that what distinguishes one from the other can be fully understood and theorized only by scholars who are prepared to engage in the close study of local practices. In my view, the transitions in Central and Eastern Europe have involved transformations in masculine and feminine gender identities that have been accelerated by globalization and mediated by local norms. (Those local norms are themselves the result of past social and political practices.) Consequently, gender relations between men and women shape the way that global forces impact former socialist societies. But these global forces in turn, reshape gender relations.

To explore these matters, this book focuses on the case of the postsocialist Czech Republic. The study is motivated by two questions: First, how are changing gender relations shaping and being shaped by marketization and liberalization? And second, do these new forms of economic and cultural globalization open spaces for women’s empowerment and feminist politics? The transition in the Czech Republic offers rich opportunities for exploring these questions. In the Czech case, the interplay between postsocialist transformations and global processes is not straightforward. Nor from a perspective attentive to gender are these processes wholly negative. Indeed, the transition from socialism to capitalism has provided spaces for the expression of new identities, including feminist identities. In their desire to “return to Europe” in 1989 and 1990, Czech citizens did not identify with an undifferentiated “West.” Rather, they identified specifically with a set of western masculinities and femininities. Their selective adoption of these gendered identities has brought both new opportunities and forms of empowerment as well as widespread new inequalities and insecurities.

Mainstreaming Gender in International Relations

Beyond providing a deeper understanding of the gendered processes of postsocialist transformations, this book does two other things. First, it demonstrates the inextricability of gender and global transformations. Second, by analyzing gendered social relations in a specific historical, cultural, and global context it seeks both to advance a second-generation feminist perspective on international relations, and to contribute to the broader task of understanding globalization and its constitution.

Over the past decade or so feminist scholars have sought to challenge the conventional study of international relations. Initial efforts of this kind were undertaken so as to critique realist conceptions of international relations. But because this critique was developed primarily at the meta-theoretical level, the question remained open as to just what a feminist perspective on world politics would look like substantively, and how distinctive it would be from the perspectives that feminist scholars were opposing. Undoubtedly, previous efforts to establish a feminist approach to international relations have cleared space for new thinking. But too often that thinking has gone on at the margins of the discipline and, has not engaged the mainstream. Consequently, this important and path-breaking work has tended to be misunderstood or ignored by many who could benefit from its insights.¹

Recently, a second generation of feminist international relations scholarship has emerged that seeks to build on earlier feminist theoretical contributions by studying aspects of global politics as if gender mattered. Scholars such as Sandra Whitworth (1994), Katherine Moon (1997) and Christine Chin (1999) have developed empirical cases where gender dynamics can be seen to be working simultaneously at local, national, and global levels and with important political consequences.² Clearly a need continues to exist for more of these studies of international relations and global political economy that empirically and theoretically integrate gender. This book is designed to make such a contribution. Here I address a central issue in contemporary international relations and international political economy—that is, the nature of the global integration process in Eastern Europe—doing so in a manner that pays close attention to gender dynamics. As such, I see this study as a contribution to a new wave of feminist international relations. One of the distinguishing features of this and other recent studies is a contextualized and empirically grounded exploration of gender relations and their interactions with processes of globalization.³

Czechoslovakia: The Path From Communism

In 1989 a nonviolent, “velvet” revolution removed the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The estimated one million people who crowded Prague’s Wenceslas Square in November of that year wanted to get rid of state socialism and everything associated with it. They called for “free elections” and proclaimed, “We are Europeans.” Eager to quell their memories of the Soviet past, Czechs looked West. Yet twenty years earlier Czechs had believed in the prospect of their own unique version of socialism “with a human face” just as earlier still, at the end of the 1940s, they had thought liberation from poverty and fascism would come through a national socialist revolution. Before that, Czechs had struggled for independence from the shackles of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They had high hopes for the Czechoslovak multinational democratic state established after World War I. These successive experiments in the Czech lands each came tantalizingly close to implementing ideals of freedom and equality for all citizens. But in each case they were violently crushed by foreign powers. Time and again, Czechs have made history but not on their own terms nor in conditions of their own choosing. In 1989, however, they thought things would be different. This was their chance for a truly emancipatory revolution.

Here, I provide a sketch of the various experiences Czechs have had of communism and democratization from the origin of Czechoslovakia in the interwar period to the federal state’s breakup and the transition from communism in the 1990s. In a following section, I review the major scholarly approaches to postsocialist transformation and their interpretations of this history. That theoretical discussion serves to highlight the uniqueness of the gendered approach I take in the subsequent chapters of this book.

Fragile Democracy

The First Czechoslovak Democratic Republic was formed after World War One out of the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At that time, Czechoslovakia was the tenth most industrialized country in the world. From its birth in 1918 through the interwar period it was unique in Central and Eastern Europe for retaining a democratic system. However, in 1938 Czechoslovakia’s democracy and independence were sacrificed by the European powers in a peace treaty made with Hitler at Munich. In 1939 the Third Reich occupied Czechoslovakia. Bohemia and Moravia became a German Protectorate, Slovakia an independent state, and the Sudety region was incorporated into the Reich. Six years later, in 1945, the Soviet Red Army liberated most of Czechoslovakia. Following World War II, free elections were once again held in Czechoslovakia. After the experience of fascism, the reform program proffered by the Communist Party was widely popular and the party took close to 40 percent of the votes in elections held in 1946. In the democratic government, the communists gradually strengthened their hold on power. Pressured by the Soviets and the opposition parties, the Communist Party legally took power in February 1948, in what was effectively a “bloodless revolution” that ended the western-style system of multiparty democracy.

Socialist Revolution

Between 1948 and 1953 Czechoslovakia was transformed into a Stalinist-type totalitarian society. During the first five-year plan (pětiletka), private property was nationalized and national industry was reconstructed. This instituted a major social transformation in the class structure. Gender relations were also altered in the nationalization process as Czechoslovak women were integrated into the paid industrial labor force en masse. A new type of worker and a new type of man and woman were being molded. While communism adapted some of Henry Ford’s approaches to mass industrialization and social engineering, the emphasis on bourgeois gender respectability and consumerism in the West ran contrary to developments in the postwar Soviet sphere. The socialist Eastern bloc, including Czechoslovakia, broke with the capitalist system and the past by radically nationalizing property and attempting to equalize the roles of men and woman in the labor force.

In the early 1950s a bloody purge of communist enemies, resembling that in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, was conducted both outside the Party and within its own ranks. Dr. Mílada Horáková, one of the most prominent Czech feminists in the interwar period⁴ and chairperson of the Czechoslovak Women’s Union after 1945, was among the first to be executed for treason in 1950 (Igger 1996; Shore 1998). The Women’s Union that had become the women’s section of the Communist Party after 1948 was abolished in 1952. Between 1952 and 1966, there was no Czechoslovak organization that directly represented the interests of women. With the nationalization of property, the regime assumed that the so-called “woman question” had been resolved, and a separate women’s organization was considered to be bourgeois. Trade unions were thought to represent female as well as male workers, while “economically inactive” women (e.g. housewives, retirees) could participate in the local subcommittees of the Communist Party’s national committee (Heitlinger 1978: 65–68).⁵

Czechoslovakia was one of the last of the communist “people’s democracies” in Eastern Europe to react to Khrushchev’s 1956 speech at the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalinism. Although this speech, which marked the end of the “personality cult” and a gradual lessening of the Party’s dictatorship role, sent shockwaves through Eastern Europe, the regime in Czechoslovakia remained relatively intransigent through the early 1960s.⁶ De-Stalinization under the leadership of Antonín Novotný was largely internal to the Party and symbolic, consisting mainly of name changes. In the intellectual and cultural wings of the Party however, criticism of this rigid rule began to emerge. Moreover, the near collapse of the Czechoslovak economy in the third pětiletka (1961–65) prompted calls for policy changes. After an internal power struggle with conservatives at the Communist Party Congress in late 1967, Alexander Dubček, a reformer, became First Secretary in January 1968. The election of Dubček ushered in the beginning of a period of unprecedented democratization and liberalization that would become known as “the Prague Spring.”

Socialism With a Human Face

The “Prague Spring” era saw the thawing of the Czechoslovak communist regime and the breakthrough of attempts at reforming the socialist system. The official program of reform during the Prague Spring, laid out in the action program passed by the Central Committee in April 1968,⁷ drew on critical Marxist concepts and humanist reasoning first explored in the philosophical and cultural realms.⁸ It incorporated reforms across political, economic, and cultural systems.

Beginning in January 1968, democratic procedures were introduced into the Communist Party, and new independent interest organizations were allowed to form. A proposal for a new mass women’s organization that would increase women’s participation in socialist political, economic, and cultural life had already been approved at the Thirteenth Party Congress in July 1967. But the political reforms in 1968 revived the independent Czechoslovak women’s movement, which now began to challenge the gap between official declarations of women’s emancipation and the reality of women’s oppression by state policies. Autonomous of the Party structure, the Czechoslovak Women’s Union became a member of the National Front, to which all non-Party groups were affiliated.⁹ At its inception, the new political system was intended to facilitate the expression of public opinion and to draw upon the input of different societal groups and interests for the collective resolution of social and economic problems. However, the required unity of socialist society and the state prevented the formation of political parties and thus of multiparty democracy.

In the new economy, market coordination was introduced to inject more flexibility and consumer choice into the centralized system of planning. Designed by economist Ota Šik, the reform program mixed plan and market, seeking to rehabilitate only those positive features of the market for the benefit of society. For example, the price mechanism was used to shift the economy away from a model of extensive growth through heavy industry and ravenous use of resources toward one of intensive growth, generated by consumer-oriented light industries (Williams 1999: 22). In the cultural sphere, the censorship of the press was halted and an end was brought to all party interference in civic and cultural life. As a consequence, there was a spontaneous explosion of information and creativity unknown in any existing socialist regime. People used the independent media to criticize the glaring faults of the social system, to raise a whole range of new issues, and to express themselves artistically (see Šimečka 1984). Women’s complaints about the unfulfilled promises of socialist emancipation were integral to this social ferment, and the Women’s Union magazine Vlasta, which had wide circulation in the country at the time, doubled its length to accommodate reader’s letters and concerns.

During the Prague Spring, Czechoslovak reformers and citizens self-consciously saw their country as a model for a “third way” marrying socialism and democracy (Skilling 1976: 849–50). Documents from that era reveal an outpouring of support for genuine pluralism and democratic evolution within the frame of socialism. Moscow saw these developments in Czechoslovakia as lurching inexorably toward the western sphere of liberal democracy. In contrast, American intelligence construed the developments as a series of power struggles inside the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Both assessments were wrong. To conclude otherwise would be to deny the experience of many men and women who believed they were building a system uniquely Czech (see Hruby 1980). But however we interpret the efforts by reform communists to give socialism “a human face,” they were brutally ended in August 1968 by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Warsaw Pact Invasion

In the early hours of the 21st of August 1968, to the amazement and horror of Czechoslovak citizens, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Soviet Secretary Leonard Brezhnev ordered the Soviet move. There was no mass or armed resistance to the invasion, although there were many casualties. Ordinary people sought peacefully to convince the young Warsaw Pact soldiers of their misguidedness and to subvert the invasion effort by changing and removing signs (all roads do not lead to Prague). But their efforts did not succeed in expelling the foreign powers. First Secretary Dubček and his fellow reformers in the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party were arrested and taken to the Ukraine. They eventually returned at the bequest of the President, General Ludvík Svoboda but were forced to gradually reverse the liberal reforms and agree to a Moscow-written accord. Among other things, the accord provided for the “temporary” stationing of Soviet troops on Czechoslovak soil.¹⁰ Believing that he could make a compromise with the Soviets, Dubček sought to salvage some of the reforms by extracting voluntary concession...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• 1. Gender, Globalization, and Postsocialism
• 2. Gendering State Socialism
• 3. Refashioning the Family
• 4. Establishing Labor Markets
• 5. Expanding Consumer Markets
• 6. Importing Civil Society
• 7. Engendering Global Political Economy
• Notes
• References
• Index