Anxieties of Ageing and Demographic Nationalism in Southeastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

There are few places, where demographic developments receive so much public attention like Southeastern Europe. Discourses of “decline”, “catastrophe”, “crisis”, “white plague”, or even outright “disappearance” abound in political and media debates about ageing and declining birth rates in the region. In our panel, we want to explore the framings producing these discourses and their political implications. Policy makers and (pseudo)experts have been looking for ways how to ‘liberate’ their populations from what they perceive as a cruel demographic fate since the 1960s. The resulting policies often had a nationalistic edge, presenting the body of the nation as threatened by those who prevent its growth (women, the unmarried, queer people, immigrants, ethnic minorities). We will be looking into intersecting representations of presumed demographic threats, highlighting especially their gender and ethnic dimensions, and ask in which narrative repertoires these images are rooted. The exploration of demographic anxieties uncovers a potent source of populism; it helps to understand which socio-demographic processes are problematized, and which are marginalized or ignored. Hence, we look also in the question of knowledge production and how knowledge is translated into policy. Why is it the security frames usually dominate about inequality frames?
The panel is interdisciplinary bringing together perspectives from social history, demography and political science. Its comparative coverage of different Southeast European countries aims to showcase the important of historical legacies and of developmental thinking, as well as the role of the perceived peripherality of the region for the spread of demographic anxieties.

Sub Unit

• Sociology, Public Health, Education

Chair

• Paul A. Hanebrink, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

Papers

• Replacing Who?: Current Discourses about Age and Demographic Threats in Southeastern Europe - Florian Bieber, U of Graz (Austria)

• From Statistics to Ethnic Cleansing: Nationalist Mobilization and Demographers in Socialist Yugoslavia - Ulf Brunnbauer, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (Germany)

• Demographic Nationalism and Biopolitical Repression - Attila Melegh, Hungarian Demographic Research Institute

Discussants

• Cynthia J. Buckley, U of Michigan

• Alissa R Klots, U of Pittsburgh