East/West Exclusions and discourses on population in the 20th century

The 20th century can rightly be thought of as the century of institutionalized population policy and a more and more institutionalized intervention into human reproduction. The institutionalization and intervention could not have proceeded without powerful discourses on population development appearing around the Enlightenment period and completed during the 19th century. By linking different spheres of social and intellectual life (politics, medicine, natural and social sciences) these discourses created the basis for “biopolitics” (Foucault 1990, 1992). Through this they determined concrete population policy measures besides getting into a web of other discourses dominating the mental mapping of the world. They were more than just ideas on population development. They were general interpretative frameworks, structures and webs of statements, which guided the thoughts of politicians, demographers and activists. In the light of the tragic events of the past century and the rapidly advancing genetic revolution nowadays, it is not surprising than that since the end of the 1980s, there have been serious multidisciplinary endeavours to study the political, social and intellectual background of population policy. Demographers, sociologists and anthropologists have analysed the “ethnography of the state” (Kligman 1998), “population politics” (Quine 1996), the “national forms” population debate (Teitelbaum–Winter 1998) or the sociogenetics of vision (Muel–Dreyfus 2001) In other words they all moved beyond the analysis of direct population policy measures and concentrated on changes and special twists of debates via revealing underlying “structures”. This ‘post-structuralist’ move is important not only from a heuristic point of view, but it also reformulates our views on the responsibility of social scientists in the unfortunate development of the 20th century. This paper contributes to the comparative studies of population policies and discourses with the intention of finding such teleologically not biased interpretative frameworks in which both “Western” and “Eastern” histories can be linked to each other without setting up Eurocentric or West centric comparative structures. In other words we look for such nterpretative grounds, which do not fix “Western” arrangements as norms to be followed by other regions of the world or as ones having superior characteristics. The first part of the paper builds on the concept of ‘biopolitics’ and involved “disciplining” discourses of the 18th and 19th centuries. The term and the related ideas have been introduced by Foucault, whose analysis establishes a natural connection between racism and modern political systems (Foucault 1990, 1992). Then we focus on the direction and the method of “stigmatising” the demographic behaviour of certain social groups and the role of the powerful East-West dichotomy (the discourse of a descending civilizational achievements from West to the East) in these mechanisms. In our interpretation the idea of a civilizational or East-West slope provides one of the main cognitive mechanism of discourses on population development. According to such geopolitical and geocultural maps actors identify themselves on a descending scale from “civilization to barbarism”, from “developed to non developed” status (Böröcz 2000; Melegh 1999a; Todorova 1997; Wolff 1994; Wallerstein 1997). This “sliding scale of merit” (Glenny 1992, 236) can also be interpreted as a form of “liberal humanitarian utopia” as introduced by Karl Mannheim (Mannheim 1991). Combining the idea of biopolitics and the East/West slope and using new archival material we will demonstrate that the pre-second world war Malthusian stigmatisation of the lower classes in America is later projected upon the Third World in the framework of global family planning programs by the help of the East-West dichotomy and the related discourses on demographic transition. Within these cognitive structures the creation of “Eastern” and “East European” otherness is also analysed with a special attention to historical demography and the idea of the second demographic. In the second part East European and mainly Hungarian discourses – guiding the writings of ‘populist’ writers and the creation of “socialist” population policy documents after the second world war – are reflected upon the ‘Western’ discourses and the involved ordering of societies according to an East/West civilizational slope. The Hungarian discourses, which represent another method of stigmatising the demographic behaviour of certain groups, are not independent of the Anglo-Saxon Western discourses and especially not from the East-West dichotomy, or East/West slope. The paper will end up by showing how these different Western and East European discourses come together in Hungary from the 1970s and what implications they might have on our understanding of future developments especially with regard to the Roma groups. But before we start our analysis it is important to clarify the term biopolitics and the links to the texts of Malthus.