This article discusses women's political representation in Central and Eastern Europe in the fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the adoption of liberal democratic political systems in the region. It highlights the deep-seated gender stereotypes that define women primarily as wives and mothers, with electoral politics seen as an appropriate activity for men, but less so for women. The article explores the ways in which conservative attitudes on gender roles hinders the supply of, and demand for, women in the politics of Central and Eastern Europe. It also discusses the manner in which the internalisation of traditional gender norms affects women's parliamentary behaviour, as few champion women's rights in the legislatures of the region. The article also finds that links between women MPs and women's organisations are weak and fragmented, making coalition-building around agendas for women's rights problematic.
The present study aims at sketching some aspects of the last phase of existence of one mixed Czech-German community (Karlov-Libinsdorf), on the basis of ethnographic and historical sources. It offers a reflection of a more general process from the point of view of a local microlevel, a process that finally resulted in the ethnic homogneization of the Czech lands. The analysis of the controversy fo r national character of the community is being realized, on the one hand, through the study of the competition for the character of national schools in the locality, and, on the other hand, through the symbolical importance that the contesting parties ascribed to the existence of this mixed enclave. As a result of the general ethnic homogneization, the inhabitants of the naturally double-language community were confronted with the necessity of the unequivical declaration of their ethnicity. The nacionalization of the collective identity of the local inhabitants and the necessity of the „actualization“ of this identity according to the political situation of the moment was being imposed through the general social context and through the movement of „ethnic defense“ that was being incited from the outside, by the representants of the „defense associations“ The possible alternatives, however, were in competition one to another and, at the same time, they were inconsistent with the „traditional“ local (i.e. non-ethnic) identity. This dilemma hadbeen „imported“ from the outside, from the makrosocial level, but had to be solved on the level of local everyday life. In the situation of real existence of two different (ethnic) linguistic groups in the community under study, however, didn't exist the need to express the social reality through explicitly ethnical cathegories. If this expression was realized, it was in the direction to the outside, especially as a reaction to the demands from part of the State administration to define unequivocally the ethnic denomination - for example, for the use of the population censuses at the times of the Austria-Hungary and the Czechoslovak Republic or during the Protectorate when asking for the citizenship of the Protectorate or of the Reich - or in connexion with the regular interventions of the nationally outspoken activists. Similarly, also the institutionalized form of the „national struggle“ that seemingly found its possibility for expression in creating theparallel social structures in the community acquired such imposed character. There are many arguments for the assumption that the rivalry of the nationalist associations didn’t stem from the authentic local conditions. The local inhabitants could not be labeled as the ori and ginators of the conflicts with nationalist bacground, even though they have been sometimes perceived as the actors of such conflicts. We can sum up that the nationalization of the social ties didn’t occur spontaneously and represents rather a product of the interventions to the life of the community and a response to the ethnic enunciation imposed from the outside
The issue of migration among the rural population living on the lands of the Czech Crown in the early modern age continues to attract only marginal attention in Czech historiography. Therefore, those people who lived on the very edge of that society remain outside the scope of research interest. The Romany Gypsies who were bom without homes, lie also outside the traditional focus of attention. In the early modern age, anyone could kill a Romany Gypsy without punishment; people were meant to despise them and were even supposed to persecute them. The Romany Gypsies were therefore forced to develop a specific strategy of action, which was intended to help them survive, and a significant role in this strategy was played by migration. A condition for survival was not only the need to maintain a strong internal structure within the Romany Gypsy group, but also the need to create ties with a settled society. These ties ensured, in the case of a threat, at least some form of a rudimentary protective social network. Such ties were probably passed down from generation to generation and the Romany Gypsies therefore, as much as was possible, restricted their movements to only well-known areas. On their travels through the landscape they tried to obtain food not only through begging and theft, but also by telling fortunes and reading palms, skilfully taking advantage of the fact that in the eyes of the settled population their lives were cloaked in mystery. However, they never forgot to emphasise their ties to the land in which they were bom and the impossibility of leaving it for another land. A question remains for further research as to whether they were persecuted for their ethnic origin or whether it was because of their nomadic lifestyle, which enabled them to evade the mechanisms of social control.