UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Saturday 18 February 2:30 – 4:00: Panel K2: Regime and Government

Anca Gheaus (Central European University): ‘Welfare, feminism and new patterns of exclusion in Romania’

Feminists as different as Martha Nussbaum and Alison Jaggar have, in the past decade, put forward arguments against neo-liberal globalization, which they claim is bad for women. At the same time, other feminist philosophers – such as Joan Tronto, Diemut Bubeck and Eva Kittay – have argued in favor of various mechanisms of redistributing care via public institutions; their arguments are meant to support the welfare state and defend it against libertarian attacks. According to Western scholarship, justice requires a fair redistribution of basic goods (like education or health care) with the aim of including those marginal groups who could not afford quality services on a free market.

By contrast, some of the feminist scholarship recently produced in some countries in Eastern Europe (more specifically, in Romania) argues that the current welfare policies of post-communist states are noxious to women. The argument put forward by Vladimir Pasti (2003) and Mihaela Miroiu (2004) is that post-communist welfare states mostly subsidize well-paid state jobs and social security nets for men, with money collected from taxes that are mainly paid by women. As a result, the redistribution is deeply unjust to women and precludes them from reaching economic autonomy. The upshot of these arguments is that laissez-faire economic policies would advance feminist goals better than the welfare state.

How should we read this dissonance between western feminist scholarship and that coming from Eastern Europe? Are the two sets of arguments really reflecting a different political ethos? Are they resulting from the difference between western and eastern institutional set-ups, or do they reflect different stages of modernization?

This paper engages with the paradox of advocating a laissez-faire economic regime from a feminist perspective. I argue, against Miroiu, that the abandonment of the welfare state would bring more harm than help to women. A major problem with her view is that she entirely eludes the question of what to do about those who inevitably would find themselves with no safety net, at all, under the conditions of a minimal state.