Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Read Online Free PDF Page A

single more ‘radical’ article on, for example, women’s rights at work or abortion is usually far outnumbered by articles on cosmetics and a good portion of “life wisdom” from psychologists. Its predominant middle classness goes without saying.
    Within post-communist Europe, Poland is in the so called Visehrad group, the ‘Central European’ core of the New Europe, along with the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.
    Until today, progressive magazines of that region, like
Visehrad Focus
, discuss the recent events, crisis, strikes and protests rather in the fashion of “what are the chances of the middle classes” rather than “how can we change the class system”. Basically, it turned out that the best thing was to consume, read
Wyborcza
and shut up. Today, anyone trying to discuss any solutions to the current crisisother than accepting austerity measures is dismissed.
    Similarly, the rights to welfare, sexual equality and reproductive rights in most post-communist countries have circled the square. As the 90s were to reject everything belonging to the communist past, together with the erasure of the ideology, we had in Poland a total rejection of liberal social rights, such as mass availability of contraception and abortion. Now, those countries that once enjoyed some social liberalism, have the strongest anti-abortion law in Europe, together with recurring rejection of civil partnerships and intolerance towards LGBT people (with a ban on adoption/reproductive rights for gays) and a serious anti-feminist backlash. It is curious, that in Romania, which had a draconian anti-abortion law under Ceauşescu, this led of course to the liberalisation of the law after 1989.
    One of the most ground-breaking films from the post-communist East of the last few years,
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
, dealt with the outcomes of the anti-abortion laws in Romania for the lives of ordinary people, presenting in all its harshness the conditions in which women underwent illegal terminations. In Poland it provoked a discussion rejecting abortion as ‘horrible’, rather than rethinking the ways women could obtain legal help so that they wouldn’t have to go through the same as the girls on the screen.
    It is this optic/epistemic schizophrenia that pervades post-communist Europe. With the negative memories still remaining, the later governments almost universally used the communist red rag to force through reactionary laws. What a weird combination: a low-tax free market laissez-faire economy, with religious obscurantism, anti-feminist and homophobic laws, and a massively conservative society. This is precisely what makes us so attractive for the foreign investors, for whom at the same time our country seems so obviously secondary, lesser, that it begged to be exploited, with little regards to its economy or citizens. Yet the reasons for the profound role of the church within the contemporary, and officiallysecular countries of the ex-Bloc differ enormously. In Russia, the church is an element of the pro-Putin lobby – as the recent case of anarcho-punk group Pussy Riot makes clear. In Poland, it takes advantage of the previous anti-communism to influence restrictive civil and reproductive rights.

A Tale of Two Cities, or On The Real Meaning of Borders
    How does the West react to this? Let’s focus on the UK. In the European Parliament, the Conservative Party is in the same camp as the nationalists and exotic right from the former East, forming the so called European Conservatives and Reformists, because the previous center-right coalition of Christian Democrats had turned out too liberal for them. So interestingly, when on the international arena, this right-wing nationalism very rarely meets any real opposition. This was felt greatly in Hungary, which met with criticism from the EU not when its human rights were abused, not when Fidesz gained power two years ago and basically abolished opposition. It happened when Victor