A Central and Eastern European roadmap

A Central and Eastern European roadmap: from Communist welfare state to ´social society´

Sonja Lokar, Stability Pact Gender Task Force, Slovenia

Sonja welcomed the rare chance to talk to women from ´three worlds´, East, West and South, and thanked WIDE and KARAT Coalition for the opportunity. She stated that her task was a difficult one: to try to explain what has happened to states and markets in transition economies, and how this has affected women. One of the reasons it is hard is because they were all different before transition, and they have experienced different intensities of change.

In 1989, the Soviet bloc, including Yugoslavia, imploded. The causes included the exhausting cold war arms race, the falling economic effectiveness of national economies managed by one-party states, debt crises dating from the 1970s, and the dreams of millions of women and men about national, political, personal freedoms and a better life. This part of the world started to be sucked into a so-called globalised free market economy. Social and gender equalities are a result not only of economic, historical, cultural and mentality factors, but also a political choice based on power struggles, and the ability of different social, national, gender, age groups to stand up for their interests and rights. So let us look at how the situation in the countries of Central and Eastern European (CEE) changed during transition.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in CEE countries has always been much lower than in the EU´s developed countries, but the distribution policies of the Communist welfare state made social and gender inequalities significantly lower than in most EU countries. In all Communist countries, gender equality, based on the concept of class emancipation, was a part of the mainstream political canon. In the context of no political freedoms, and strictly limited rights to private property and economic initiative, the Communist welfare state (light on benefits, heavy on state subsidised services) was the backbone of egalitarianism, based on full-time employment understood as a right and a duty of all adult citizens. In this economic and political environment, women below 45 years of age on average achieved better levels of education than men, a very high and nearly equal share in full time employment, mostly generous maternal and parental leave for working parents (with the exception of Poland), and affordable child care in industrial areas. There was special protection for working single mothers and modest but accessible health care. Abortion was free and safe, with the exception of Romania. Modest social security in old age was based on women´s own pensions. Pension systems even tacitly admitted women´s additional burdens of unpaid household chores and care for children and other dependants. Women could earn the full pension with a working period five years shorter than men´s. In the 1980s, women´s formal representation in the Communist parliaments throughout CEE was at the same level as the most democratic Nordic countries.

On the other hand, the average standard of living was very modest. Women mostly worked in low-paid sectors, unemployment was hidden, social services were poor and more and more dependent on bribes, there was a glass ceiling preventing women from reaching high levels of economic and political power, men were, in effect, excused from active fatherhood and housework, and domestic violence was not seen as a public issue.

Gender equality was not a substantive issue during democratisation processes before CEE´s first free elections. The exceptions were Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, where modern independent women´s movements had already started to develop, although shyly, by the end of the 1970s. But even in these three countries, the big themes of a new nation-state, parliamentary democracy and a free market economy pushed the issue of gender equality aside. In the shaping of the new political mainstream, instead of the heroic figure of the Communist ´superwoman´ uniting comrade worker, devoted wife, mother, housewife and party activist, there was an offer of a different female role model, ´mother of the nation and queen of the home´.

Women and men were equally involved as activists and participants of Solidarnosc, and the ´singing´, ´velvet´ and ´spring´ revolutions, but women did not lead them. Nor did they ensure their half of political power in any of the newly established political parties. With the first free elections, before the real start of transition, women were completely marginalised within political parties, as well as within crucial elected political bodies. Their presence in freely elected parliaments and governments dropped to symbolic representation only. In every country in South-East Europe (SEE) where the proportion of women members of parliament (MPs) dropped below 5%, this was linked to internal armed conflicts, for instance in Romania in 1989, Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro between 1991-2000, Albania in 1997 and Macedonia in 2001. Politically marginalised, women in the CEE had to deal with the cruel realities of the neo-liberal pattern of transition, or even with transition in the form of armed conflicts.

 Between the ´big bang´ and EU accession: ten years of neo-liberal transition

Transition was never intended to make us poorer, but that was the effect. There were different types of transition; gradual reforms, shock therapies, stop-go or even transitions brought about by war. In all of them, women became the biggest losers, although the intensity of trends differed from country to country. They became the majority of unemployed people, those working in the so-called informal economy, the new category of ´working poor´, and poor pensioners. During transition, new forms of gender based discrimination and violence were added to the old ones: beauty qualifications, age discrimination, sexual harassment at work, massive prostitution and trafficking. The glass ceiling came down lower. The Communist welfare state, which had been the main guarantor of women´s social, economic and political equality, was abandoned without any public discussion and gradually replaced by a badly designed safety net, a patchwork of contradictory social policies, the residual welfare state.

After the shock of transition, it took years for the CEE countries to regain their 1990 GDP levels. Moreover, gender equality, workers´ rights, social security, social justice, solidarity, even social cohesion, all became easy prey to a host of changes. The changes involved deregulation of the labour market, weakening of the rule of law, corrupted privatisation, the rapid opening-up of national markets to foreign competition, the balancing of state budgets and currency stabilisation through reducing minimum and public sector wages, and the replacement of universal social rights with low benefits for the most needy only. Massive unemployment, and the poverty of the working poor, began to have a predominantly female face. With the weak state, led by neo-liberals, overwhelmed by the conservative and religious ideological backlash, women were transformed into a second-class, badly protected or unprotected work force. Open attacks on freedom of abortion and secular childcare and education became the most visible signs of this ideological reorientation. But all attempts to keep women at home with long, badly paid maternity leave (as in Hungary before 1992), or the offer of ´professional motherhood´ (as in Croatia after 1994), failed because of budget constraints. Women lost much more than men regarding their former activity rates. They constituted a much higher proportion of the unemployed, but they kept their share in the formal labour force and filled the ranks of unprotected labour in the grey and black labour market.

The reforms of the Communist welfare state were not made with a view to future membership of the EU and so did not conform to its social standards. Instead, they were done under the auspices of the IMF and the WB. It was a neo-liberal ideological approach to transition, in a context of weak and disoriented social democratic parties and trade unions, without any social dialogue and real social partnership, apart from in Slovenia. Workers, women´s and citizens´ mostly universal economic and social rights from Communist times were replaced by two track public-private systems in childcare, education, healthcare and social security/pensions.

EU standards regarding citizens´ and workers´ rights and gender equality started to guide government policies only when real accession negotiations had been started. At this moment, many of the EU´s binding legal requirements as well as recommendations from its ´soft laws´, even some of the goals of today´s joint strategies, such as the Lisbon Strategy, which had already been achieved in Communist countries before transition, were lost. For instance, there had been near-parity between women´s and men´s employment rates, but this was transformed into very low activity rates for both women and men, with bigger unemployment of women than men, especially in the categories of young, educated women and women over 45. The ageing of the population was dramatically accelerated by terrible drops in fertility rates, due to high levels of youth unemployment and huge emigration; for the first time, women in the best fertility age started to represent more than 40% of all emigrants. Affordable public child-care facilities for very young children (1-3 years), already quite developed in the cities of former CEE countries, were closed, and private ones became too expensive even for lower and middle class families.

In the first ten years of transition, women underwent a great transformation, from thevictims and losers to the survivors of transition. They became well organised within civilsociety, and well connected in the global women´s movement. The Beijing Conference of 1995 was a major turning point in this process. Support from women in EU sister parties and trade unions enabled them to get organised in their own political parties and trade unions. They also developed very important regional networks, such as the KARAT Coalition, the CEE Network for Gender Issues and the CEE Women´s Network of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. Women´s NGOs started to campaign, advocate and lobby against trafficking, domestic violence and sexual harassment at work. First, cross-cutting national issue coalitions were formed, and they proved to be the only efficient tool for women´s efforts to preserve the last positive remains of the socialist past. Two examples are the Slovenian coalition to preserve subsidised, non-faith based public child care institutions and to establish universal child allowances in 1994/6, and the Estonian women´s Round Table to get more women into parliament, in 2000.

The gains of the EU accession period

In the process of EU accession, women in the CEE have succeeded in getting closer to EU standards of gender equality. Only from 2000, partly in connection with the EU enlargement process, did women in the CEE discover the importance of nation-wide, organised strategic action, focusing on the most important issues, national, regional and global partnership in issue coalitions, and building gender equality institutions and mechanisms at all levels.

At the beginning of transition, women human rights activists, ´femocrats´ from the EU15, and newly formed women activists from the CEE did not know much about each other. The EU was focused on the tragic situation of South-East Europe, and had no concept whatsoever about its potential role in shaping the pattern of transition in the CEE. Even less did the European Commission (EC) or the European Parliament (EP) know how to deal with gender equality issue in transition countries. Women NGOs from the EU were the first to open the channels of direct communication, solidarity and support. But because they were the first, their focus was very narrow, concentrating mostly on the victims of violence. Only when CEE countries became full EU member states did the women´s movement in Western Europe start to cooperate with women NGOs in the region.

The Party of European Socialists was the first big family of political parties in the European Parliament to start working actively on women´s political empowerment with their sister parties in CEE. In 1994, it formed its international Women´s Group, and in 1998 the CEE Network for Gender Issues. Due to this support, negative perceptions of women´s parliamentary quotas were slowly overcome and rejected, parties started to develop gender equality policies, to organise women´s organisations within parties, and to open up to civil society feminist initiatives. Trade unions followed suit with the Trade Unions´ Women Activists network, established in 1999.

The last to take part in this process, mostly after 2000, were those crucial EU institutions, the EC and the EP. This was done in a very selective, limited way, based on bilateral accession procedures. The EC always gave preference to Maastricht criteria rather than the EU Social Charter. They followed the letter of binding EU legislation and consigned implementation of the EU´s ´soft´ gender equality policies and recommendations to the changing winds of national governments and the weaknesses of the national women human rights networks in CEE countries. These developments have led to gradual, and still very fragile, positive changes in the legal status of women in the CEE countries.

Even after 15 years of continuous efforts to get their half of political power, women in the CEE countries are still far below their representation in the Communist parliaments, and 10 percentage points behind the average share of female MPs in the old EU member states. What is even sadder is that legislative improvements stayed mostly on paper. In general, they were made without real involvement from grassroots women´s movements, and they have very little impact on the quality of women´s everyday life or women´s ability to realise their human rights in practice. Moreover, all these improvements have a nasty tendency to slip back. In Slovenia for example, the new right wing government is trying to introduce a flat tax rate, further privatise health care, and invest public money in private, Church-controlled childcare and education.

What do we do now?

The EU never had a joint social equality and gender equality model. There is a strong conservative tendency to reshape EU social models into the USA ultra-liberal model, and kill off the welfare state, leaving equality to free market competition. Even left wing governments have been forced to start reforming their welfare state models, which now share common features, including a stress on investing in human capital, lifelong learning during longer working periods, balancing work and family obligations, greater personal responsibility for one´s prosperity and well-being (for instance through education), and the use of dialogue with social partners in the design of reforms. These reforms aim not to kill off the welfare state, but transform it into something that could be called ´social society´.

The changes are inevitable, because the new challenges are too big to be ignored. Women in the CEE share the same challenges as women in the old EU member states: devastating competition in the globalised labour market, the need to take an equal part in building a knowledge-based EU society, ageing populations, falling birth rates and massive migration. They are also in the middle of the two worlds, the most developed and the developing. They dream about the well-being of the first, but understand the needs and the pains of the second, and how it feels to be underdeveloped.

The way the transition process and EU accession were implemented has created an EU25 that is poorer, more socially unequal, more gender unequal, and more fragile regarding the rule of law, respect for human rights and basic standards of democracy, than was the EU of 15. These two processes, which have diminished women´s economic power and marginalised women in decision-making, have also made most of the new EU member states strong allies of neo-liberal ideas of how to reform their own national social models and the EU´s social model in general.

Women in the EU25 need to develop a much more strategic and integrated approach to social equality and gender equality issues, and become much more focused. There is an urgent need to strengthen EU gender equality legislation and policies, and to raise binding EU standards of social and gender equality much higher, not only in the field of labour market relations. What are our entry points? Sonja suggested strict respect for binding EU directives and the inclusion of a gender perspective in the annual progress report on the Lisbon strategy, national programmes for growth and jobs, and dialogue between social partners at national and EU level.

What is the link that can pull the whole chain: women´s power within political parties, the ability of women of different parties to work across party lines and to really open up to women in trade unions and feminist initiatives in civil society. The top priority must be women´s equal representation in all decision-making bodies. The most urgent item on our agenda is the need for gender parity (50/50) in all political decision-making bodies at all levels in the EU. This means not only parity in the EC, EP, and all EU institutions, but also developing joint women´s action in the EU and its neighbouring countries to get parity on all levels and use strong positive legal measures to hasten this process.