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.
This article discusses the topic of national identification. The author's aim is to define the appropriate conceptual framework for describing nationality, while taking into account the pluralistic character of the nation and the related contextual and multi-levelled nature of national identification. In the author's view, the concept of 'identification' more accurately applies to individual nationality than the category of identity does, owing to the latter's undesirable subjectivism, methodological individualism, and its occasional references to an over-intellectualised concept of the individual. Scientists who use the second of these two terms tend, moreover, to conflate descriptions of individual and collective phenomena. In an effort to substantiate and elaborate his arguments the author draws on the Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek and presents an analysis of the national identification of the novel's multi-national protagonists. He demonstrates that national identification is multi-levelled and variable, depending on particular situations and institutional frameworks. The author's description shows that the best method of analysing individual nationality may be by examining the individual's set of social roles and institutions rather than describing individual identifications.
he paper quantitatively analyses a sample of 300 Czech prayer books and other popular religious handwritten material (not including songbooks) from the 18th and 19th centuries. The author maintains that most of the material consisted of (partial) transcriptions of popular printed books and their widespread popularity was influenced by the growth of literacy and the individualization of piety. Their use was by no means limited to the milieu of the secret non-Catholics which were proscribed until 1781; indeed the majority of Catholic writings were not fully orthodox. The character and decoration of the writings in question were not directly related to the confessional nature of their originators and/or users; in fact the general rules of early modern popular culture played a much more important role and in many cases it is difficult to determine whether the source is catholic, protestant or sectarian. Prayer books fully reflected official forms of religion relatively late i.e. from the tum of the 18th and 19th centuries as a result of church domination over popular piety. However, even at this time the process did not result in absolutes: religious writings substituted the non-existence of baroque literature the printing of which was prohibited by the enlightened censorship prevalent at the time. Only a change in religious forms and new opportunities for the printing of pre-enlightenment books in the mid-19th century led to a decline in handwritten prayer books.
The study is a computer-assisted text analysis of corpora obtained from the web pages of nine volunteer, non-governmental organisations and interest groups. The analysis encompasses three areas of justice claims: trade unions (the relationship between employers and employees), feminism (the relationship between men and women), and human rights (the relationship between citizens, foreign nationals, and the state). The aim of the study, based on Foucaultian concepts, is to determine whether media communications are structured by the formative impact of the discourse of claim-making or justice. The main findings relate both to the content and the structure of textual production. First, the organisations examined do not make frequent use of normatively loaded words in their statements. The matter of justice is implicit in their texts. Second, the structure of the statements, represented by the thirty most frequently used words, exhibits a common pattern in all three areas studied. At the one end of the 'statement spectrum', there are words referring to the social situation of the contesting actors ('background'), while at the opposite end, words used in reference to their 'battlefield' (claim-making, bargaining and decision making) appear. This polar structure supports the hypothesis that the media communications of selected activist groups are influenced by the discourse of claim-making or justice.
In this article, a comparison is made between economic and identity explanations of preferences toward EU membership in the Czech Republic. This research demonstrates that economics rather than identity is a more powerful explanation of public opinion on accession. With regard to economic explanations of public support for integration three models are examined - a winners and losers model, an international trade liberalisation model, and a foreign direct investment model. A comparison of these three models shows that support for accession was primarily based on attitudes toward foreign direct investment. Moreover, contemplating employment opportunities within the EU following accession was also an important factor. Contrary to previous research the empirical evidence presented in this article suggests that being a winner or loser in the post-communist transition process was not the strongest factor explaining popular support for membership. The results presented should not be taken to imply that instrumental rather than ideological or affect-based motivations determine general attitudes toward integration. On the specific question of vote choice in the accession referendum instrumental economic considerations were most important.
A problem in educational attainment research is that measures of association, and not measures of inequality, have been used to observe inequality in the distribution of higher education between classes. While the statistical association between class and education in many countries has been relatively stable, measures of inequality applied to the same data show a marked reduction of inequality in the distribution of higher education over time. This is a result of reduced bias in the allocation mechanisms, most likely facilitated by the increasing provision of higher education. Decreasing inequality means that the conclusion in the literature that egalitarian educational reforms have been ineffective lacks empirical support. One reason why measures of inequality have been overlooked in most educational attainment research may be the firm but unfounded belief in the 'margin insensitivity' of loglinear measures. They are assumed to capture the association net of changes in the marginals of the class-by-education table, thus reflecting the 'true nature' of the allocation mechanism in recruitment to higher education. This notion can be shown to be a logically untenable deduction from the property of loglinear measures of being insensitive in relation to one specific kind of change in the marginals, to the claim that these measures are insensitive to marginal changes in general.
European agriculture has recently undergone important changes connected with the reorientation of EU policy towards regional, recreational, and land-use subsidies, and owing to the internal divergence in agriculture itself, which has led to large 'industrial' farming companies on the one hand and small, ecological farms on the other. During the period of transformation, the Czech agricultural sector has been forced to confront these changes and full stability remains a long way in the future. Transformation has thus brought both advantages and disadvantages to all the players involved. The former include the existence of large-scale farms, relatively highly skilled workers, and a cheap labour force, which make Czech agriculture competitive on a European scale. On the other hand, Czech attitudes towards work and respect for the property of others are inadequate; production efficiency and quality are low, whereas the expectations of farmers are high. Czech entrepreneurs have opted for relatively strict, unsocial, win-win strategies and understand their business simply in terms of material profit. Conversely, Western businessmen active in the Czech Republic more highly value the long-term profit, social ties and the symbolic functions of agriculture, though that does not mean they would not prefer 'industrial' forms of farming. The main problem of Czech agriculture is thus the absence of family-type farms rooted in their local, social environment, and there is only limited potential for this to develop. Unfortunately, this fact creates the threat of a 'two-speed' European agriculture: the Western model, combining both small and 'industrial' farms, and the Eastern model, focusing solely on extensive large-scale farming.
The article deals with the questions of the (in)visibility of women in Slovak political life. The material presents statistical data on women's participation in Slovak national, regional and local politics with the support of qualitative data from interviews with women politicians and activists. The author looks at the reasons for the low political representation of women and the unsuccessful attempts to increase it by introducing positive mechanisms such as quotas. The primary focus is put on the representation of women in municipal politics. The author analyses the main reasons why women are more successful in local politics than in 'high' politics.