‘God,patria and home’: ‘Reproductive politics’ and nationalist (Re)definitions of women in East/Central Europe

Abstract

I argue that through complex processes of social construction of gender, women in East/Central European societies are seen primarily as reproducers of the nation. One effect of such definitions is the enforcement of reproductive policies which amount to the nationalization of female bodies.

After a brief assessment of reproductive policies during the state‐socialist period, an overview of the contemporary debate within the post‐communist universe of discourse, and of the policies enacted by the new East/Central European regimes, I argue that within the framework of the emerging masculinist cultures in East/Central Europe, masculinity becomes increasingly identified with the public domain; in contrast, women are progressively confined within the ‘private’ sphere, identified with holding the primary responsibility for the family. Definitions of femininity along these lines have been influenced by the emergence of a particular form of ‘reproductive politics’ supported by post‐state‐socialist movements stressing the right of the nation to mobilize all of its resources, and thus, to subjugate women for the ‘national good’.     

Authenticity or skill-oriented individualism,neutrality or managerialism: diversity officers as modern public officials

ABSTRACT

Diversity has become a new buzzword in European cities. Newly introduced diversity policies have replaced previous multicultural policies with an approach that acknowledges difference in a more general sense. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork in diversity departments in Amsterdam, Antwerp and Leeds, this article investigates how the introduction of diversity policy impacted on the recruitment and the self-representations of public officials in newly created diversity departments. Despite a proclaimed move away from recognising minority-group specificities, many officials conceive their immigrant origin as a central element of their profiles. This continuation of a multicultural logic is interpreted as misunderstanding or resistance on the part of those meant to implement these policies, indicating agency of contemporary bureaucrats as well as creative space within bureaucracies. In order to place the shift from multicultural to diversity policy in the context of welfare state transformation and neoliberalism, I assess whether diversity officers endorse diversity policies in conjunction with New Public Management policies. However, I do not find an unequivocal promotion of both policies and my study thus does not confirm the common association of diversity policies with neoliberalism.     

Still left out: healthcare stratification under the Affordable Care Act

ABSTRACT

The 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) increased healthcare access for many Americans. But, its exclusion of most noncitizens and imperfect state-level implementation stratified coverage by documentation status, place, income level, race, and ethnicity across the U.S.A. Drawing from the sociological literature on boundaries, this paper argues that these demographic boundaries facilitate de jure and de facto stratification for immigrants and low-income Americans of various ethnoracial backgrounds. Using existing survey research regarding national ACA implementation and a qualitative study of ACA implementation in Boston, MA, this paper shows how such stratification may worsen existing disparities in healthcare coverage and access among the U.S. population. Implications regarding President Donald Trump and conservative lawmakers’ plans to repeal the ACA are also discussed. The paper contributes to researchers’ understanding of how public policies produce boundaries by place, documentation status, race, ethnicity, and income that facilitate inequality.     

Multilevelling EU external governance: the role of international organizations in the diffusion of EU migration policies

ABSTRACT

The thematic and geographical expansion of EU migration policies has gone along with an increasing mobilisation of pertinent international organisations such as the IOM and UNHCR. Combining insights from the external governance approach with IR debates on international institutional complexity, this article examines the dynamics behind this ‘multilevelling’ of EU external policies. Three strategies of institutional interplay are distinguished: counterweight, whereby international organisations act as independent complement or corrector to EU policy; subcontracting, referring to the outsourcing of EU project implementation to international organisations; and rule transmission, a process in which international organisations engage in transferring EU rules to third countries. Whereas greater organisational authority and autonomy have allowed the UNHCR to keep an independent voice as counterweight to EU action, both the UNHCR and IOM have become increasingly involved in the implementation of the EU's ‘global approach’ to migration via subcontracting and rule transmission. In sum, these processes shed a new light on the role of the EU within the international migration regime complex.     

Recycling the idea of race: socio-political agenda,transnational business culture,and diversity management in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article intends to contribute to the line of studies that critically addresses diversity management, bringing the Brazilian experience into the discussion. It aims to demonstrate how large Brazilian companies and transnational corporations operating in the country have been recycling the idea of race in order to cope with the greatest politicisation of debates on the racial issue within the Brazilian public sphere since the late twentieth century. This phenomenon is related to changes in the political actions of the black movement in Brazil, which since the same period has been absorbing the new socio-political agenda existing within the global network of anti-racism advocacy. This is an agenda in which two purposes have a central importance: the battle against racial inequality and the demand for affirmative action policies. The data presented in this paper are part of broader research in which, by means of the biographical method and the ethnographic fieldwork, the social trajectories and career paths of two generations of Brazilian black executives were analysed.     

Diversity discourses and the articulation of discrimination: the case of public organisations

ABSTRACT

Public organisations are contexts that particularly further a contested diversity discourse. They have a long tradition of various equal opportunity policies and are characterised by an internally differentiated structure. Based on interviews in a university and two city administrations in Austria and Germany, this study shows that the ubiquitous ‘diversity turn’ is not intrinsically opposed to the articulation of discriminations and social inequalities. Rather, diversity discourses in public organisations are characterised by a ‘heterogeneous space’, which enables the recourse to discriminations of groups of people marked as diversity-relevant as well as to instrumental benefits of diversity-related activities. As a consequence, the organisational diversity discourses and their related practices are far less driven by one-dimensional motives of marketability than commonly assumed.     

The National Identity of the 'Natives' of Poland's 'Recovered Lands'

Among the inhabitants of the formerly German territory that came under Polish administration following the Second World War, the Polish authorities and public expected to find both Poles and Germans: the former would be allowed to remain and the latter would be expelled. But the question of the national identity of the inhabitants of this territory proved more complicated than expected. Polish attitudes and policies toward those inhabitants initially considered Polish often had effects opposite of those intended. As a result, a substantial portion, perhaps even a majority, of those who had originally been seen as Polish either were expelled along with the Germans or claimed to be German and on that basis sought to emigrate to Germany.     

Making good citizens: local authorities’ integration measures navigate national policies and local realities

ABSTRACT

Using the case of Odense (Denmark), this article explores how, in the process of devising and implementing integration measures, local authorities mitigate between the demands of national-level integration policies and the local realities. It shows that Odense's local authorities combined local resources into a variety of horizontal governance structures geared towards supporting refugees’ integration, and engaged in vertical interactions responding to local priorities. The study finds that new governance structures emerging at sub-national create opportunities for refugees and help their integration. However, inequalities between national and sub-national levels may have negative consequences for refugees’ integration outcomes.     

Too hot to handle: African Caribbean pupils and students as toxic consumers and commodities in the educational market

Secondary sources are used in this paper to highlight how African Caribbean pupils and students – the Black British-born descendants of post-war Caribbean migrants – are victims of symbolic violence, because they are denied the educational capital needed to improve their social status. Since African Caribbean children entered the 1960s British educational sector, their learning has been perceived as problematic by the State. Although assimilation, integration and multicultural education policies were implemented to supposedly address the ‘problem’ of educating Black children, subsequent government reports identified racism as a significant barrier in their education. I argue here that the contemporary marketisation of education makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between racism and competition, as causal factors of ethnic differences in educational attainment. Moreover, due to increasing private sector intervention and decreasing mediation by the State, racism is now hidden within the vicissitudes of the educational market. School exclusions and discriminatory practices in universities are viewed in this paper as major barriers to the economic success and future social mobility of Black Caribbean pupils and students. I conclude by suggesting that marketisation policies can be appropriated to ameliorate racism in education, but only if the political will to do so exists.     

Contested control at the margins of the state

ABSTRACT

While the fact that the implementation of migration policies fails to perfectly manage migration is well known, the actual dynamics of policy implementation have received little attention to date. A serious engagement with this phenomenon requires a move beyond policy texts and political intentions, and towards a ‘migration regime’ perspective that pays attention to the inherent contradictions, conflicts of interest and competing logics within migration control practices. This collection posits a multi-actor perspective that includes state agents, migrants and non-state actors alike and proposes three key factors that require a closer examination: competing institutional logics, discretionary practices and migrants’ agency. Based on original empirical research, the contributions of this collection ‘zoom in’ on specific asymmetrical negotiations over the right to enter or remain in Europe, and focus on the institutional logics and interplay between the different actors involved.     

Different narratives,one area without internal frontiers: why EU institutions cannot agree on the refugee crisis

ABSTRACT

This article contextualizes contemporary institutional responses of the European Union (EU) to the refugee crisis within the historical setting in which EU migration and asylum policies emerged – namely during the implementation of the border-free Schengen Area (1984–1995). Using the analytical framework of ‘policy narratives’, it argues that EU institutions have used the creation of the ‘area without internal frontiers’ to build coherent narratives about the nature and scope of EU action and of their own role in it. Such narratives became locked into the institutional discourse and influenced the subsequent evolution of EU politics on the topic.     

The (surprising?) nonchalance of migration control agents

ABSTRACT

This paper sheds light onto the processes of controlling irregular migration in Germany, based on ethnographic fieldwork with immigration officials, police forces, home office bureaucrats and non-state actors. Several studies have examined the policies and tools of migration control available to state officials and contracted third parties and generally found a trend towards greater restrictiveness and securitisation with regard to irregular migration. However, relatively few analyse their actual implementation. This paper seeks to fill this gap, and to act as slight corrective by highlighting the relatively limited nature by which migration control was exercised. In fact, the practice of detecting, identifying, detaining and deporting irregular immigrants was far removed from the politicised discourse that surrounds it in the public sphere and academia, and instead influenced by pragmatism and nonchalance. However, in contrast to explanations that see lenience towards irregular migrants as motivated by economic factors, here the limits of migration control were directly related to officials’ sense of duty, as well as working conditions and a lack of institutional oversight. In this sense, the enhanced possibilities of control through new means of surveillance and data collection are in fact restricted because officials might just not be bothered to use them.     

The politics of evidence-based policy in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’

ABSTRACT

Increased migration across the Mediterranean to Europe during 2015 was associated with growing interest in generating new research evidence to assist policymakers in understanding the complexities of migration and improve policy responses. In the UK, this was reflected in funding by the Economic and Social Research Council for a Mediterranean Migration Research Programme. Drawing on evidence from the programme, this volume explores the nature of Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ and the extent to which the development of new migration management policies was grounded in evidence about the causes, drivers and consequences of migration to Europe. The authors conclude that there is a substantial ‘gap’ between the now significant body of evidence examining migration processes and European Union policy responses. This gap is attributed to three main factors: the long-standing ‘paradigm war’ in social research between positivist, interpretivist and critical approaches which means that what counts as ‘evidence’ is contested; competing knowledge claims associated with research and other forms of evidence used to construct and/or support policy narratives; and, perhaps most importantly, the politics of policymaking, which has resulted in policies based on underlying assumptions and vested interests rather than research evidence, even where this evidence is funded directly by European governments.     

Mining,social contestation and the reclaiming of voice in Australia’s democracy

ABSTRACT

This article examines social mobilisation against coal seam gas and coal mining in country New South Wales. While environmental concerns are one of the motivations behind recent mobilisations, the alliances that are emerging bring together groups with a diversity of interests and ideological orientation. Disappointment with political elites and concerns with lack of transparency and public accountability, are setting the foundations for new forms of grassroots collaboration. Against the widespread notion of depoliticisation in Western liberal democracies, I argue that the growth in community mobilisation in country Australia reveals a more dynamic relationship with politics, one that requires differentiating the more rigid spaces within political institutions, from the political field more broadly.     

Trans-regional institutional cooperation as multilevel governance: ECOWAS migration policy and the EU*

ABSTRACT

Regional economic integration in West Africa establishes the framework for the movement of persons within the highly mobile region. Eighty-four per cent of the migratory movements is directed towards another country within the region. This article analyses the role of trans-regional institutional cooperation on intra-regional migration policymaking, exploring the role of the European Union (EU) in the formulation of regional migration policies in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) specifically in labour migration, refugee protection, and return/readmission. It examines the normative role of the EU in influencing policies of third countries and argues that in the case of ECOWAS, networks are increasingly important in enabling formal and informal diffusion. The article uses multilevel governance as the lens to examine migration governance between the EU and ECOWAS, concluding that power relations equally play a key role in trans-regional institutional cooperation. Included in this mix are bilateral agreements which stand between trans-regional and intra-regional institutional cooperation, exerting a strong influence on inter-institutional EU- ECOWAS relations.     

“一主二辅”：民族地区公共服务多元化供给的基本模式

本文首先归纳了公共服务供给中市场失灵、政府失灵和第三部门失灵的表现形式,指出公共服务供给应实现主体多元化。在分析了民族地区公共服务供给的现实状况后,提出民族地区公共服务多元化供给的基本模式：以政府部门为主导,私营部门和第三部门为辅助,最后对民族地区各级政府实施这一模式提出政策建议。     

民族地区基本公共服务均等化研究述评:基于公共政策的视角

随着基本公共服务均等化的提出,研究者们展开了对民族地区基本公共服务均等化问题的研究。从本质上说,基本公共服务均等化是一项公共政策,所以文章试图从公共政策的视角出发,以政策价值取向、政策系统、政策过程为分析维度,对研究者们的成果进行归纳和述评,以期对民族地区基本公共服务均等化问题的研究现状有更加全面的认识和把握。     

Rhetorics of the State: The Public Negotiation of Political Character in Germany,Russia, and Quebec

National identity construction is a fundamentally rhetorical phenomenon maintained and transformed through public discourse. Through the analysis of dramatically rejected state speeches related to national identity and public responses to them, critics can compare competing articulations of national identity against the chronological historical record to identify various instances of strategic memory. By isolating dominant strategies of remembrance, the political character of emergent national identities can be outlined. In this essay, I explicate a critical rhetorical approach to controversial speech called limit work, providing examples of the public negotiation of national identity in 1988 West Germany, 1993 Russia, and 1995 Quebec that illustrate its utility.     

Navigating health care: brokerage and access for undocumented Latino immigrants under the 2010 Affordable Care Act

ABSTRACT

Brokerage is a prominent mechanism that explains access for Latino immigrants to many American institutions. However, few studies examine the dual nature of brokerage in answering questions on access to health care for undocumented Latino immigrants. The growing importance of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and ethnic navigators connecting immigrants to health care under the 2010 Affordable Care Act calls attention to the duality of brokers and its role in access. The study draws from 44 in-depth interviews with providers, clinic directors, navigators, and immigrant patients and two years of fieldwork in FQHCs in California’s San Francisco Bay Area (2011–2013). Results show that brokers enable access through coaching and myth-busting but they also hinder it through scrutiny and bureaucratic filtering. The widespread dependence on brokerage, I argue, leads to ersatz brokerage, such as when providers navigate the health-care system for the undocumented without the appropriate linguistic resources or coordination. Furthermore, the study shows that the duality in brokerage generates misinformation, churning, and alienation. Understanding the relational processes that both include and exclude vulnerable populations from needed services enhances theories of immigrant integration and can help design more efficient policies and address inequalities related to documentation status.