Institutionalizing Intersectionality in Central and Eastern Europe: Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia

Abstract

Countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC) emerged in the early 1990s from a half-century-long state socialist emancipation project (Fodor 2004, Gal and Kligman 2000) to join global processes of human rights and gender equality norms diffusion. This brought about a shift from the total absence of formal equality policies towards an increasing recognition, formalization, and institutionalization of equality concerns within a relatively short period of time. Although most comparative research has conspicuously failed to document them in the region, gender equality institutions started to emerge from the mid-1990s. The EU accession process presented a new and strong incentive structure for countries in this region from the early 2000s onwards, pushing them towards amending their existent, often embryonic, or weak equality institutional structures. The accession negotiations of CEECs coincided with the emergence of new priorities in the EU equality agenda: namely a steady move away from policy approaches that deal with gender inequality separately towards approaches to address multiple inequalities in integrated ways (EC 2007, Lombardo and Verloo 2009, Squires 2008). This European shift has been especially manifest in institutional terms, where equality bodies dealing with multiple inequalities came to replace or to complement previous inequality-specific institutions. Changes were accompanied by expectations that an integrated equality policy and institutional approach would be more favourable to deal with multiple, intersecting inequalities, and thus would better capture the complexity of inequalities and disadvantages (EC 2007, Fredman 2005, Squires 2008).