Prof. Andrea Pető: Reproductive Rights as Battlefield in the New Cold War, a hybrid lecture organised by the Trinity Centre for European Studies

Tuesday, April 4, 2023 - 18:00 pm -19:30 pm (CET)

Attacks on reproductive rights fill the headlines. Allegedly mainstream governments increasingly adopt positions previously espoused only by the far right, creating a dangerous void in the centre of the political spectrum. Meanwhile, white mothers with cute white babies are smiling down from expensive billboards advertising motherhood from Hungary to Poland, from Germany to Denmark, and from Russia to Serbia. Is the ethnocentric pronatalism of today comparable to the pronatalism of the interwar period in its rhetoric and mobilizational potential? Using the method of historical comparisons, what can we learn from the past for the future? In the literature on interwar Europe, there is consensus about the trigger moment for the rise of far-right movements: the financial crisis of 1929. Should the triple crises – financial, security, and ‘refugee’ – of the years following 2008 and/or the COVID-19 pandemic be considered as our era’s trigger moments?