The Ghosts of the Past

Peggy Watson

Peggy Watson is a sociologist at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge. She  has carried out research in Eastern Europe both before and after the end of communism.

She has been an invited fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA, and has received a series of awards from the Economic and Science Research Council, The MacArthur Foundation, the British Academy, the Nuffield Foundation,  and the Wellcome Trust.

She has been editor of The Ontology of Socialism (Clarendon Press  1992) and co-editor of Crisis and Transition: Polish Society in the 1980s (Berg 1987). Key papers include:  The Rise of Masculinism in Eastern Europe, New Left Review,  1993; Explaining Rising Mortality Among Men in Eastern Europe, Social Science and Medicine 1995; Rethinking  Transition: Globalism, Gender and Class, in JW Scott and D. Keates (eds) Going Public: Feminism and the Boundaries of the Private Sphere (University of Illinois Press 2004); Unequalising Citizenship: the Politics of Poland’s Health Care Change, Sociology, 2006.

Further details can be found at:    www.nowahutastudy.info  

Presentation:

Ghosts of the Past or Fighting for Life?: Capitalism, Democracy, and Gender in Postcommunist Health Care

Of all the momentous changes that have taken place in postsocialist Europe over the last twenty years, perhaps the most contentious have been in the field of health care.  Nowhere has this been more obvious than in Poland. In Poland, the struggle over the privatization of health services, particularly hospitals,  has lasted around ten years ,  ever since the introduction in 1999 of major health care reform. Opposition to the reforms has been reflected in industrial and court action, in parliamentary debates, in social survey responses, in extensive press reporting and in daily discourse. The reforms have proved to be the stumbling block of successive governments, with health care a burning issue in Poland’s election campaigns. Surprisingly, it has been nurses and midwives, who took part in high profile protests in 1999-2000 and 2007, who have emerged as key protagonists in this process.

 In postsocialism health care change is not simply a technical issue, but represents an integral aspect of a broader and historically unprecedented process of transformation in the shift to new forms of power and citizenship founded on capitalism.  Firstly,  the paper  will discuss the broader social and political processes health care transformation has involved in practice, and the way in which past and present have been mutually implicated in experiences of change.  Rather than erasing the frictions which have become an integral feature of health care change within Poland, the paper examines what lies behind them and why they remain relatively invisible to transnational health policy discourse. Secondly, the paper will offer an interpretation of the nurses’ protests. In a context where Western feminists have explained the absence of feminist activism in post-communist Europe in terms of state-socialist induced ‘passivity’, to what extent should the nurses actions be now be seen as a gendered - or even feminist - protest? To what extent and how has the past served as a resource for resistance, and how does the struggle over health care relate to a global (health and gender) discourse which emphasises empowerment, the preservation of equity and the importance of trust?  What are the implications for understanding feminism – and democracy - in post-communist contexts? In addressing these questions the paper will draw on interviews, protest bulletins, and official and media reports collected before, during and after health care reform.

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