Authors

Discussion

Motherland and Motherhood: Maternity in the Illiberal Discourse in Hungary, Poland and Romania

Although part of global trends, democratic deconsolidation and its important crystallization-  illiberalism -  have a specific configuration in Central and Eastern Europe. These actually coincide in the decade 2010-2020 with the economic and financial crisis and the shaking of the neoliberal capitalist model, both through social contestation in the streets and through electoral and governmental changes. Inspite the economic and financial crisis has questioned the neoliberal order, with the exception of some countries in Southern Europe such as Greece and Spain, the result has not been a strengthening of the anti- or alter-capitalist left, historically and ideologically prepared to contest it. Throughout this decade we see rather a strengthening of authoritarian, nationalist and conservative forces, having as main landmarks the two mandates of Donald Trump as president, the British vote to leave the European Union, the emergence of strong-arm leaders in Turkey, Israel, Hungary or Poland as well as the emergence/strengthening of political parties that were previously non-existent or irrelevant (for example AfD in Germany, VOX in Spain, FN in France). This apparently paradoxical dynamic provides the context of the transformations in the feminist field. Although the economic and financial crisis should have disturbed or perhaps even ended the global hegemony of liberal feminism, leaving the place of a social feminism, more or less anti-capitalist, at the end of the decade they are both on the defensive and in a difficult alliance in the face of  conservative insurgency.

The recent conservative mobilization has also criticized liberal feminism and used popular resentment born of economic decline. However, it has also integrated numerous identity elements that force feminisms of all types to reposition themselves. The conservative recipe is to identify a problem with socio-economic roots and attribute it to elites and liberal ideology, population decline being a good example. This is a central theme of the nationalist-conservative agenda that is based on the following conjecture: liberal feminism has had at stake the fight for reproductive rights, therefore it is to blame for demographic decline. Mutatis mutandis, women, in nationalist-conservative rhetoric, are the main culprits for this dramatic population decline. Simultaneously with this blaming of women for depopulation and the weakening of the nation-state, there was another guilt attached to women - the crisis of masculinity, perceived in Eastern Europe also as a crisis of the nation.