Provincializing Global Feminism: The Polish Case

IS GLOBALIZATION a threat to or an opportunity for local feminism ? In Poland, globalization intersects with three political and cultural processes: the post-1989 systemic transformation; the process of integration into the European Union; and the celebration of certain elements of the past long censored and now retrieved. When one looks at these processes through the lens of gender, one ends up with—if not necessarily an unclear, then at least a perplexing—picture, the dynamics of which are driven by various paradoxes, by contradictions not easily reconcilable, and by the coexistence of different pasts and bizarre figures. The relationship between globalization and feminism in Poland leads me to think of the murals of Marc Chagall: thoroughly modern but idiosyncratic, and, as such, not founded on the premises of modernity. When Economic Transformation Meets Globalization A few years ago sociologists began to question whether the category of transition and transformation was still applicable to the situation in the region. The Roundtable Talks in Poland, in which a new political contract was negotiated between the society and its last unelected regime, were concluded on April 5, 1989, and the Poles have just celebrated the contract’s fourteenth anniversary. Can something that has been going on for 14 years still be called a “transitional period?” asks one Polish sociSOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003) Provincializing Global Feminism: The Polish Case ELZBIETA MATYNIA ologist.1 He proposes taking a longer evolutionary view in which the changes that have taken place in Poland from 1945, with the installation of communism, to 1995, when basic economic reforms, democratic institutions, and a legal infrastructure were finally in place, can be described as a movement “from organized disorder (after 1945) to disorganized order (after 1989)”. I think that the process of accession to the European Union reveals some new aspects of the systemic transformation in Poland, which is by no means completed. One of the main foundations of the new “disorganized order” was an economic reform that led—through the structural privatization of enterprises and entire industries—to a market economy. Thus both the so-called transition to democracy and globalization are processes unfolding here in a context of extensive privatization and the dismantling of centrally planned economies. What has followed in many countries of the region is the mismanaged and famously corrupt privatization of state utilities and enterprises , commonly known as the “privatization, or the ‘propertization ,’ of the Communist nomenklatura” (Transparency International, 2001), as well as the collapse of whole industries, economic dislocations , unemployment, and the rapid impoverishment of entire regions. The jury is still out on whether these are all just the necessary costs of a transformation that will eventually bring economic rewards and a degree of equity to the affected population. At this point it is difficult not to observe that there is a very close connection between the devastation of the national economies and the emergence in the region over the last decade of a certain massive profit-making option: trafficking in women.2 There is also a close link between the illegal trafficking in women and their powerlessness in the face of new and confusing, but still gendered, realignments in the marketplace. The UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODC) warns that the traffic in women is now the fastest-growing element of organized crime, and its rate of growth is highest in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It is estimated that the 500 SOCIAL RESEARCH industry is now worth several billion dollars a year. According to the UNODC, Russian trafficking victims working in the sex industry in Germany reportedly earn on average $7,500 a month, of which the exploiter takes at least $7,000 (UNODC, 2003). This trafficking is obviously a global phenomenon. It moves across borders, continents, and oceans. And Central Europe, at the interface between the wealthiest and the poorest countries of Europe and Asia, is the point of passage. As economic differences between the countries of the former Communist bloc become sharper, the trafficking runs not only from east to west (Ukraine to Germany), but also from east to east (Bulgaria to Poland), because even within “The East” there...