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This paper will examine the self-reported division of housework and childcare in Germany and Poland considering the job-related spatial mobility within dual-earner couples who are living in a household together with a partner, using 2007 data from the Job Mobility and Family Lives in Europe Project. We find that men who are spatially mobile for work often report shifting housework to their partners. Polish couples show a stronger tendency toward an egalitarian division of labor than German couples do, especially in terms of childcare. But the central finding of this research is, gender trumps national differences and spatial mobility constraints. Polish and German women, whether mobile for their work or not, report doing the majority of housework and childcare compared to their partners.
This is the 26. article in our series Trouble on the Far-Right.
In Poland, the long lasting culture war1 over gender roles and religion has been easily framed by the far right into Samuel Huntington’s concept of the “clash of civilizations”. A well-known juxtaposition used in right-wing propaganda: ‘civilization of life’ vs. ‘civilization of death’ in reference to anti-abortion and pro-choice movements respectively is now used to refer to Christians and Muslims. The role of Polish women and the right to abortion remain in the center of the conflict of modernity.
In Europe, the far right heats up the moral panic caused by fear of terrorism, pointing to Muslims as a threat to ‘European’ liberties, especially women’s and LGBT rights. The assaults on women celebrating New Year’s Eve on the streets of Cologne, serve Pegida and many nationalist organizations in Europe as a proof of Arab’s attitude to ‘Western’ expressions of femininity. This argument in the anti-immigration discourse of the far right is well-grounded in nationalists’ ideal of a strong man defending ‘his’ woman. Although, the task might be understood literally, in the context of the assaults in Cologne, protecting wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of the nation has a broader symbolic meaning. Scholars interested in relationship between gender and nation, state that in nationalists discourse women symbolize the nation and are bearers of values.2 In islamophobic discourse female citizens of Europe signify Europeans’ equality and freedom...
Scholars are coming to terms with the fact that something is rotten in the new democracies of Central Europe. The corrosion has multiple symptoms: declining trust in democratic institutions, emboldened uncivil society, the rise of oligarchs and populists as political leaders, assaults on an independent judiciary, the colonization of public administration by political proxies, increased political control over media, civic apathy, nationalistic contestation and Russian meddling. These processes signal that the liberal-democratic project in the so-called Visegrad Four (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) has been either stalled, diverted or reversed. This article investigates the “illiberal turn” in the Visegrad Four (V4) countries. It develops an analytical distinction between illiberal “turns” and “swerves”, with the former representing more permanent political changes, and offers evidence that Hungary is the only country in the V4 at the brink of a decisive illiberal turn.