Nations and Nationalism 6 (4), 2000, 523-40.

0 ASEN 2000

Gender, nations and states in a global era

SYLVIA WALBY
Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, Lee& LS2 9JT

ABSTRACT. Nations and national projects are gendered in different ways. Feminist theory has raised important questions about the conceptualisation of difference. This article develops the conceptualisation of the different ways in which nations and national projects are gendered, arguing for a mid-level conceptualisation of gender relations. It argues against, on the one hand, the excessive fragmentation of gender, and on the other, too simple dichotomies of mordless unequal gender relations. This draws on a theorisation of gender relations which connects the different dimensions into specific kinds of gender regimes, either public or domestic gender regimes. This enables us to conceptualise different national projects as having a more or less public or domestic gender project. The conflicts between different national projects and with other polities, such as states, are then conflicts between differently gendered projects. The usefulness of this mid-level conceptualisation is demonstrated through examples of the competing relations between the UK, Ireland, the EU and the Catholic Church in a global era.

Introduction
Nations and national projects are gendered projects. Whether already stabilised within a nation-state, or energetic political movements aspiring for a state of their own, they hold ideals as to the proper place of women and men in society which will often be in conflict with those of other nations and nationalisms. There is a need for coherent conceptualisation of the different forms of gender relations at an analytic level similar to that of nations in order to understand these conflicts. Gender is not a simple concept, nor is it sufficient to add it in as a separate dimension. There are significant differences between women, such as those based on nation, ethnicity and race, which means that it is inappropriate to generalise from one group alone. We need a robust conceptualisation which enables us to address the different forms of gender relations at this macro level. In an era of globalisation, the political communities within which people can claim effective citizenship are changing. Since political communities articulate the interests of component social groups in different ways, so these changes impact on changing social divisions.

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Several of the dilemmas in theorising the relationship between gender and nation and other forms of difference rest on the extent to which it is possible to generalise, to be able to go beyond the empiricism of describing the details of a specific gendered national project, while yet not succumbing to over-generalised and essentialised conceptions of womanhood and nationhood. On the one hand, much recent gender analysis has been concerned to avoid the dangers of essentialism and instead to show a sensitivity and appreciation of difference. While on the other, there are problems in too great a concentration on descriptive detail which can result merely in empiricism. I shall address this dilemma by utilising a vocabulary of midrange concepts, which facilitate both sensitivity to context and ability to compare across a range of cases. This is a development of earlier work on theorising gender regimes (Walby 1997), on the transformation of the forms of patriarchy (Walby, 1990) and on the operationalisation of these theories in comparative analysis (Walby 1994) to issues of competing national projects. The concept of gender regime captures the notion of gender relations at a macro level, while distinguishing between domestic and public forms separately from the degree of gender inequality enables us to conceptualise differences in gender regime without succumbing to unwarranted ethnocentric assumptions. This article is an argument for a new way of addressing key theoretical debates about difference which are now central to social theory and feminist theory (Calhoun 1995; Felski 1997). But the renewed focus on the politics of recognition, which emerged as a response to problems of overgeneralisation from the experiences of the dominant group (Taylor et al. 1994; Young 1990), is contested by both those who consider that identity politics can be merely another form of essentialism, reifying cultural groups (Squires 1999), and those who argue that this move to recognition politics is at the neglect of processes of transformation (Fraser 1995). Further, there has been a tendency in the feminist analysis of difference to examine ever finer distinctions, ever smaller units of analysis, in order to include an ever wider variety of forms of difference, and in order to avoid the perceived problem of essentialism (Spellman 1988; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989), and in order to capture the standpoint (Smith 1988; Harding 1986, 1991) of ever more finely differentiated groups of women. In contrast, more traditional work which has recently introduced gender has a tendency to treat gender inequality too simply as if it were simply a matter of greater or lesser inequality between women and men (Castells 1997; Mann 1986). Here, by means of an analysis of difference at the level of nations and states I am attempting to ground an analysis of difference on a new analytic plane, which adequately captures the social, collective, contested nature and scale of the processes involved. Though traditionally national projects have not been seen as gendered (see Gellner 1983; Kedourie 1966; Smith 1971, 1986), today such analyses are so generally seen as lacking in important components that this point

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does not need rehearsing here. The contemporary question is rather how, in which way, and to what effect are national projects gendered. While there is an extensive body of literature on the relationship of gender and ethnic difference (Felski 1997; hooks 1982; Mirza 1997), the literature on national issues has been less well developed. Recently, however, there has been a developing concern with the gender dimension of nations and related polities. This has addressed the gender dimension of: international relations especially in relation to the military (Enloe 1983, 1989); the crossing of lines of conflict in zones of ethnic/nationdl strife by women (Cockburn 2000); the extent to which the gendering of nationalist projects is influenced by the West (Jayawardena 1986); the intersection of religion, the state and national projects (Kandiyoti 1991); and the mutual construction of gender, national and ethnic projects (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989, Yuval-Davis 1997); and variations in the form of patriarchy (Kandiyoti 1988; Moghadam 1993). The focus in this article is on national projects, but in the context of the relationship of these to other polities, such as states. The increasing rate of globalisation creates a context which demands the raising of the level of abstraction of gender relations from the micro to the macro level. The fragmentation of the concept of gender by the postmodernist impulse has gone too far (Benhabib 1999). In order to address contemporary patterns of gendered change in a globalising world we need concepts which do not retreat to ever smaller units, but which are able to make reference to a wider horizon of events. The global frame of reference requires that we look at larger scale phenomena, rather than continuing the ever finer splitting of differences. Specific projects now often refer to a wider global framework (Soysal 1994). Globalisation is a frame within which many contemporary polities act, and indeed reflexively acknowledge this, even though its impact is variable (Roberston 1992; Held 1995), incomplete (Hirst and Thompson 1996), and contested (Castells 1996, 1997, 1998), rather than uniform (Ohmae 1995). Here I am arguing that it is useful to develop a set of mid-range concepts, and thereby to re-focus the analysis of difference. Nations, and other polities, such as states, supra-states and organised religions, are important in the organisation of gendered differences. By examining the way that nations and other polities are gendered, and the gendered conflicts and compromises which occur at this level, we can see how to analyse in new ways the transformation of various specific forms of gendered difference. There are four steps to my argument in this article. First, nations and national projects are gendered projects, as are also other polities. Second, gender needs to be conceptualised at a macro level which is then able to articulate at a similar scale to that of nation. Third, conceptualisations of gender are needed which do not capture merely greater or lesser inequality but also qualitatively different forms of gender regimes. Fourth, to illustrate the power of this reconceptualisation using various instances of gendered forms of overlap and contestation between nations, states, and religious

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communities and their implications for the transformation of gender relations, I shall use as the main examples of this the interaction between different gendered national, state and religious projects around the United Kingdom, Ireland, the European Union and Catholicism.

Fragmenting gender A key theoretical response to overgeneralisations about gender relations was to argue for attention to the detailed forms of difference between women (Mohanty 1991). This response was echoed in texts on nation and gender. Yuval-Davis (1997) has written a number of pioneering texts on the relationship between gender, ethnicity, racialisation and nation, sometimes with Anthias (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992). Yuval-Davis (1997) (following Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989) suggests that there are four major and different ways in which women are involved in ethnic and national processes: as biological reproducers of members of the nation or ethnic collectivities; as participating centrally in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and as signifiers of ethnic/ national differences; as differently positioned from men in relation to the regulation of immigration and citizenship; and through the gendering of the military and war. Yuval-Davis list draws attention to a number of important places where there is an intersection of gender and nation, although it is not complete, omitting among others economic issues. More importantly, Yuval-Davis does not develop from this list a conceptualisation of different kinds of gender relations, or theorise their significance within a wider theory of gender relations. In relation to theories of gender, she sets up a tendentious distinction between essentialised theories and those which build on difference. She explicitly avoids macro theorising of gender relations for fear of falling foul of essentialism. Thus her conceptualisation of the issues understates the significance of macro differences in the forms of gender relations themselves; understates the way that national boundaries can be, though not always, boundaries between different forms of gender regime, of different forms of patriarchy. This reluctance to produce a typology of forms of gender relations is in marked contrast to her willingness to use a typology of forms of national project (ethnic origin, culture, citizenship Volknation, Kulturnation and Staatnation), so she does not have a reluctance to theorise other issues at a mid-level. It is this missing theoretical level, the development of mid-level concepts for the analysis and comparison of patterns of gender relations, which is needed. The effect of this is that gender is so dispersed in her analysis that she is not able to analytically examine the differences between different forms of gender regime at a level of abstraction parallel to that of nation. In her determination to avoid essentialising gender she has a tendency to fragment the category too far.

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Yuval-Davis focuses on what women can do for nations, rather than on what nations can do for women. There is a tendency to reduce women to the level of pawns or political symbols, with a consequent reduction in the economic content of different patterns of gender relations. This is reflected in the low priority accorded by Yuval-Davis to economic issues in the analysis of gender and nation. Women are seen as being used to build nationalist projects in that women are seen as symbols of nation, and are used to reproduce the group. Yuval-Davis makes little reference to the economic costs and benefits of different national projects for women. Her focus on nation, rather than on the reciprocal relations between gender and nation, contributes to the tendency to splinter the category of gender. But the extent to which this occurs is actually problematic, as Kandiyoti (1989) points out. Kandiyoti (1989) draws attention to the way that women are not only symbols and pawns but actors in their own right. As I shall show below, the material content of different national projects has important implications for the form of gender relations and the degree of gender inequality. This has implications for the extent to which women, or certain groups of women, support different, and sometimes competing, national and state projects. In order to understand the gendering of nations and related social entities it is necessary to have concepts which enable us to grasp and compare gender relations at the level of nation, for which we need a typology of forms of gender relations at this macro level. When gender is splintered and fragmented into so many multiple forms of difference it precludes effective analysis of its relationship with national projects.

Patriarchalism
In contrast to the fragmentation of the category of gender, Castells (1997) and Mann (1986) introduce the macro concept of patriarchalism. While their introduction of this macro concept to capture gender inequality is to be' welcomed, their development of this concept does not allow sufficient space for differences in the form of patriarchy. They address gender relations in a simple way, as involving either greater or lesser inequality, in a manner which pays too little attention to the diversity of form of gender relations. Castells (1996, 1997, 1998) presents a wide-ranging account of the information age, globalisation and their intersection with nations, states and social movements. He considers that the processes involved with globalisation are leading to the demise of patriarchalism. He suggests that there is a simultaneous decline in the patriarchal family and increase in women's employment with the development of globalisation. Castells conceptualises gender relations in terms of a system, patriarchalism, which can have a greater or lesser degree of inequality.

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Castells account of the development of information technology and globalisation and its interconnection with processes around the world is impressive. However, his concern to be comprehensive has meant that his analysis is less nuanced in some places than others. In relation to gender his treatment of it as a system is too simple. There are differences between systems of patriarchy which are additional to that of greater or lesser inequality. In particular, Castells (as also did Mann) inappropriately conflates the transformation of the family with the end of patriarchy. This follows from the over simple specification of the system of patriarchy. One of the consequences of this conceptualisation is that there is little analytic space to consider whether the increase of employment may for some women under certain circumstances not lead to a reduction in gender inequality. There is an extensive literature, neglected by both Castells and Mann, especially in gender and development, which debates whether, how and in what way, increases in womens paid employment impacts on other dimensions of gender inequality (Boserup 1970; Leacock and Safa 1986; Elson and Pearson 1981; Standing 1989). The decline of the traditional form of the family and the movement of women into the public sphere should not be analytically conflated with the end of patriarchalism. It may not always be the case that these phenomena are so closely and tightly inter-related. Much work in development studies has long problematised simple assertions about the impact of womens employment (Standing 1989; Boserup 1970; Leacock 1986). Rather we need a more complex specification of the form of gender relations which analytically distinguishes between the form of gender regime and the degree of gender inequality in order to understand macro level changes such as those in the relationship between gender and nation .

Theorising gender

Thus we need to conceptualise gender using a range of mid-level concepts in order to facilitate the analysis of mid-level social phenomena, such as nations, states and other polities such as organised religions, as gendered entities. The concept of gender regime is used to denote a system of interrelated gender relations. A gender regime is composed of six component structures or domains: paid employment, household production, the polity, male violence, sexuality and cultural institutions. These are interconnected in a systematic manner. It is possible to distinguish two main forms of gender regime - a domestic gender regime and a public gender regime (for a fuller account see Walby 1997). (These concepts are the same as those denoted by the terms private and public patriarchy, developed and elaborated in (Walby 1986, 1990, 1994)). These two forms of gender regimes are distinguished by different relations between the six domains listed above. In the domestic or private form women are typically subordinated by exclusion from the public domain and confined to the household; in

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contrast, within the public form women are not excluded from the public arena although they are subordinated there. In the domestic form the main patriarchal strategy is exclusionary; in the public it is to segregate and subordinate. The separation of the form of the gender regime from the issue of the extent of the inequality between women and men is important in the analysis of the diversity of patterns of gender relations (Walby 1994). It avoids the conflation of the degree of gender inequality with the form of gender regime, which is so problematic. It avoids possibly ethnocentric assumptions that the more public form is necessarily the more egalitarian one. This set of concepts enables the conceptualisation of both diversity and change in gender relations at macro and meso levels. They facilitate comparative analysis because of the way that they provide a framework within which to analyse diversity. For instance, the concepts facilitate an understanding of the changes in gender relations in specific countries over the last century. During the last 100 years or so, the UK and much of the Western world has been experiencing a transition from the domestic to a public gender regime. This has been a consequence of the destabilising effects of the increased demand for womens waged labour and the impact of capitalist development on household production together with the role of first wave feminism and the political citizenship which this feminist wave won for women. This process of transformation from a domestic to a public gender regime is uneven, between countries and between regions, over both space and time. This has meant that there are different forms of gender regimes in different countries, although there has been a transition in most of the Western world in the form of gender regime. In some locations some of the domains have been transformed more rapidly than others, creating variations in the forms of gender regime (Walby 1994). Thus there is variation and unevenness in the forms of gender regimes across nations, states and religions and other large-scale social entities. Each polity (e.g. nation, state, organised religion) contains a different form of gender project, a different form of gender regime. The interaction between nation and other entities such as the state is a gendered relationship. It is a relationship between bodies which usually have different forms of gender regimes. The focus of analysis here is then not so much on the inter-relationship between gender and nation. But rather that between differently gendered national (and other) projects. Men and women do not always share the same goals for a national project, nor even share the same boundaries to such a project. There is a struggle to define what constitutes the national project, and women are, typically, heard less than men in this process. Gender relations are important in determining what is constituted as the national project. Concepts of nation and other polities have been used largely to differentiate between groups of men. But the concepts which denote

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difference between men are not necessarily the same as the concepts which usefully denote difference between women. Womens political interests may be represented in different polities differently from those of men. Different issues come into focus as the sites of conflict between polities when gender is foregrounded, while different institutions may provide the focus for different political projects. These themes will be developed in relation to some specific examples, in particular, the gendered relationship between Ireland (both as a nation and as a state), the UK, the EU and Catholicism.
Women, nation and Europe

The shifting relations between these polities - states, the UK and Ireland; nations, the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh and the English; and a supranational body, the European Union (EU) - illustrate the issue of different bounded units having varying gender regimes. Gender, religion, ethnicity and class have different relationships to such polities as the nation, the state, organised religion and to supranational state-like institutions. This is because the determinants of gender, class and ethnicity are different. Hence the nation-state has a different place in their construction. There are two sets of differences which are important in the understanding of the gendered relationship between the EU and EU member states: first, the EU has a different gender project from that of most of its member states; and second, the nature of the powers of the EU are different from those of the member states. The EU has a more public gender regime and a more egalitarian gender regime than that of the UK and most EU member states, though probably less public and egalitarian than that in the Scandinavian countries. The EU is a different kind of state from a conventional nation-state, with different capacities and powers. It is both more and less powerful than conventional nation-states, depending on the field under consideration. Its regulations are supreme in the regulation of the economic market, including the labour market, and are less powerful in the fields of taxation and the military (Walby 1999a; Hoskyns 1996). The gender regime of the EU is public rather than domestic. Further, this has been articulated through policies which have sought the equal treatment of women and men, and thus sought to reduce the extent of gender inequality in so far as this is related to labour market processes. The founding Treaty of the EU laid down in 1957 in Article 119 that women and men should be paid the same. During the 1970s a series of legally binding directives were created which developed this principle of equal treatment between women and men. The 1975 Equal Pay Directive interpreted the meaning of equal pay broadly so that it encompassed not only equal pay for equal work, but equal pay for work of equal value; the 1976 Equal Treatment Directive extended equal treatment of women and men beyond pay into many areas of employment including training and

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working conditions; the 1978 Directive on Equality on Social Security extended the principle of equal treatment into social security measures. The Social Charter (the Community Charter of the Fundamental Rights of Workers, 1989) and Social Chapter of Maastricht were further developments of the core idea of Article 119. With the Treaty of Amsterdam these legal provisions not only have been reinforced, but further developed, deepening the level of commitment and broadening its range beyond employment. Article 2 of this new Treaty makes the promotion of equality between women and men part of the mission of the EU, while Article 3 states that the Community shall aim to eliminate inequalities, and to promote equality, between women and men (Gregory 1987; Hantrais 1995; Hoskyns 1996; Pillinger 1992; Women o f Europe, 1998). These measures on the equal treatment of men and women in the labour market and related areas went much further than the legislation of most of the member states. The only exceptions here are the Nordic countries, of which only Denmark was a member of the EU during this period of development of these Directives, with Sweden and Finland joining only very recently. The EU took the lead on equal treatment and member states were obliged to follow the direction of the European Commission and the European Court of Justice (Pillinger 1992; Hoskyns 1996). The EU does not have the same powers as a conventional nation-state. The EU does not have an independent military force, nor does it have more than marginal powers to raise taxes and hence to dispense benefits, such as income support, to EU citizens. These features have led some commentators to suggest that the EU is not significant in the field of social policy. Indeed, there is considerable controversy as to whether it is appropriate to conceptualise it as a state, or whether it is merely a committee of nationstates. There is debate rather than agreement as to how to conceptualise its degree of fusion and fission (Boye, van Steenbergen and Walby 1999; Kapteyn 1996; Leibfried and Pierson 1995; Moravcsik 1993). Nevertheless, the 1980s saw a revitalisation of the European Union project under the leadership of Delors. This project was that of increased integration of the single market together with the building of a significant social dimension (Bornschier and Ziltener 1999). While the EU has minimal powers to tax and spend to support a social dimension, the EU does have significant powers to legally regulate markets. It is a regulatory state. Within its remit, the EU has supremacy over the legislation of its member states. These legal powers of the EU reside in the European Court of Justice which has the powers not only to make member states revise their domestic legislation to come into line with its rulings, but, the Treaties and Directives of the EU have direct effect on every citizen of the EU. The Treaties are a de fucto constitution of the EU, and thus of its member states to which all European citizens can make direct appeal over the head of their national governments (Curtin 1989; Fitzpatrick 1992; Majone 1993; Pillinger 1992; Walby 1999a; Weiler 1997).

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The significance of the powers of the EU should not be underestimated, even though they do not follow the same form as those of a nation-state. While many nation-states appear to be victims of globalisation, in the sense of the curtailment of their power to effectively act, the powers of the EU have strengthened as it responds positively to the challenges of globalisation. It has taken on the role of a regional hegemon, playing a strategic role intervening and shaping the nature of the globalising process as well as being shaped by it. Because of the perception that the EU is a more effective level of polity to respond to the challenge of globalisation, its member states have ceded important powers to it. These are powers especially to create and regulate a single market within the EU. This responsibility includes the regulation of the labour market, and it is here that the EUs most significant interventions into gender relations have occurred. There has been significant contestation between the UK (and other member states) and the EU over the appropriate policies to be followed in the regulation of markets. While agricultural policy, not least the BSE crisis over British beef, has perhaps the highest profile, there have been significant disputes over a wide range of issues. Gender policy, especially that of equal opportunities policies, has been a significant area of conflict between the EU and the UK. The EU won (Walby 1999a, 1999b). In 1979 infringement proceedings were taken in the European Court of Justice by the Commission against Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK who had refused to implement the 1975 Equal Pay Directive. After the success of the Commission, these member states were obliged to change their domestic legislation to bring it into line with the rulings of the ECJ. In the case of the UK, the Conservative government under Thatcher was obliged to introduce an amendment allowing women to take equal pay cases on the basis of work of equal value, not only when there is a man doing the same work. Here in the contestation between Thatchers project for the political autonomy of the British nation and EU interventionism over labour market conditions for thg whole EU, the nationally specific project lost. It was the determination of the doctrine of direct effect of European law for individuals in the case of Defrenne v Subena (the Belgian airline) heard in the ECJ in 1979, which was perhaps even more important than Commission instigated proceedings in establishing the supremacy of European law above domestic law, providing a faster and more effective route of change, since it meant that complainants could take cases directly utilising European law without waiting for the Commission to force changes in domestic legislation. The importance of the underpinning legal interpretation has been shown by the way important aspects of full-time rights for part-time workers were granted in the UK, by the House of Lords, despite the Conservative governments opt-out of the Maastricht Social Chapter, because it rested on Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome (Curtin 1989; Fitzpatrick 1992; Gregory 1987; Pillinger 1992).

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Thus the contestation between the UK and the EU has been a contest in which gender has been a significant dimension. The EU gender regime, which is both more public and more egalitarian, has emerged supreme in this contest. The EU gender model is one in which women are fully employed, while the UK has only recently moved to such a position in its official policy. The UK, while in transition to a more public form of gender regime, has been resistant to that change taking place in a form which reduced inequalities. The UK state does not resist the increasing entry of women into employment, indeed a flexible labour market is consistent with the growth of a low pay, low skill, non-permanent sector of womens parttime working. However, during the 1980s it did attempt to resist the equal opportunity regulations spreading from the EU. In order to understand the nature of the conflict between the EU and the UK it is necessary to distinguish between the form of gender relations and the degree of gender inequality. However, for those few countries, the Scandinavian and Nordic countries, which already had a public gender regime and one which was less inegalitarian, the impact of the EU is more mixed. Here the tighter fiscal regime and the different prioritisation of employment and inflation policies together with a domestic neoliberal political reaction combined to produce policy initiatives to curtail welfare provision. Welfare provision rather than labour market regulation had been the primary Scandinavian route to a public gender regime, so the impact of the EU on gender relations in the Scandinavian countries is therefore mixed. Nevertheless, the point that the relationship between the member state and EU is a gendered one still holds. Indeed women have been more opposed to joining the EU than men, in Denmark and Sweden, largely as a result of its perceived effects on their welfare regime (Dahlerup 1997; Hoskyns 1996). The relationship between polities is gendered, having different outcomes dependent upon the nature of the prior gender regimes, the nature of the polities, and their relative strength. The nature of the gender regimes which are being contested need to be understood not only in terms of whether they are domestic or public, but also as to the extent of gender inequality.

Ireland and other polities Ireland has been subject to overlapping and competing polities, an understanding of which is essential to the understanding of its history. The main polities here are the Irish nation, Irish state, the British state, the EU and the Catholic Church, though there are further influences including Gaelic and Celtic ethnic identities and the role of the Irish diaspora, especially from the United States. Each of these polities has a different preferred gender regime. It is a further example of the need to engage with the contestation and overlap between different kinds of polities in order to

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understand the development of gender relations. The gender regimes of these various polities are very varied. Relatively speaking, the Catholic Church has the most domestic form of gender regime; the EU the most public form; with both the Irish nation and the UK undergoing a transformation or transition from domestic to public during this period. The EU has had a more egalitarian form of gender regime than Ireland or the UK. The overlap and contestation between these polities has been a gendered struggle. Sometimes the gendered dimension is at the fore, sometimes it is in the background. The nature and significance of the powers of each of these polities is obviously quite different. Religion, nation, state and suprastate engage rather different kinds of power, operating at different social levels with different kinds of governance. In particular, religious and state power are not equivalent. Further, they are uneven in the extent to which some have power over others. Ireland was a colony of the British state at the beginning of the period (Munck 1993) and thus subject to the gender regime of the British state, but both have been subject to the EU since 1973 (Whyte 1988). Catholicism was closely associated with the Irish nation during the struggle for independence from the UK (Larkin 1975), but its governance is centred in the Vatican rather than in Ireland. It is often argued (e.g. Miller 1973) that religion was a badge of nation in the case of the relations between Ireland and Britain in that religion was the primary (though not only) demarcator between Irish and British in the absence of any visual identifier, any racialised markings. The Catholic Church is larger than the Irish nation, a transnational polity based in the Vatican. An additional political element was that of first wave feminism, centred loosely around the North Atlantic area, which introduced a competing anti-patriarchal discourse (Ward 1989, 1991). The implication for gender regimes is that the Irish national project in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew heavily on the domestic gender regime of the Catholic Church. This was not uncontested, not least by those who were involved in first wave feminism and the struggle for womens suffrage. Indeed several of the leading figures of the Irish national movement were women who sought to combine their feminism and their nationalism. However, they lost and were pushed aside in the representative structures formed immediately after independence (Ward 1989, 1991). In the period immediately before and after the independence of the southern Ireland from British rule in the 1920s the Irish national project adopted a primarily domestic gender regime. The Irish constitution written in the 1930s consolidated the domestication of women (Farrell 1988; Scannell 1988). Indeed, in the 1950s the Catholic Church hierarchy in Ireland resisted the development of services by the Irish state, even that of health care for mothers and babies, on the grounds that this was the proper matter for families (Whyte 1971), such was the intensity of the determination to hold on to a domestic version of a gender regime. But the inward looking economy based on the father headed family

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farms did not flourish and by the 1960s Irish political leaders looked outwards towards the international arena to develop their economy (Clancy er al. 1995; Goldthorpe and Whelan 1992). As part of this move, Ireland sought to join the European Union and became a member in 1973. The European Union had a more public gender regime than Ireland. By joining the EU Ireland acceded to the EU regulation of the market, including equal opportunities laws. The superior legal standing of the EU to the Irish state on labour market regulation was a key factor in the dramatic and rapid transformation of the gender regime, starting with the labour market. Irish entry into the EU was conditional on Ireland signing the EU Treaties and Directives. One of the first changes was the removal of the marriage bar which had prevented married women working in certain occupations. The Irish were also obliged to grant women the legal right to equal pay, and the end of discriminatory closure against women on the labour market (Curtin 1989; Pyle 1990; Whyte 1988). The implications of the single market have been profound, and more farreaching than employment relations. In particular, there was a major constitutional crisis over the issue of abortion, which had been banned in Catholic Ireland but which, under normal EU regulations governing markets, was a service which, under the single market, should be available to be sold to Irish women from other member states. Attempts at special exemptions for the Irish under the Maastricht Treaty heightened and extended the nature of the constitutional conflict. Legal cases were profiled in the media, referenda fought, and there was extensive public debate as to the reconstruction of the appropriate proper relationship between church and state. The conflict with the Catholic Church has been cataclysmic, and the constitutional battles over abortion and also over divorce were eventually lost by the church. Further the church lost its special protection by the state, following the willingness of the government to cover up a paedophile priest which led to such a political outcry that the government itself fell. The relationship between church and state is being fundamentally restructured, and the conflict over gender relations is at the heart of this conflict (Reid 1990, 1992; Smyth 1992). In this way the defence by the Catholic Church of one of the most domestic gender regimes in Western Europe was undermined. The gender regime of the Irish nation is in extremely rapid change. This is not simply an endogenous process, although there are some important elements of internal modernisation and reconstruction. Key elements in the change in gender regime result from its changed position in relation to other gendered polities. In particular, the impact of the European Union and the declining influence of the Catholic Church. The focal point of the extraterritorial systems of governance of Ireland, beyond Dublin, have thus shifted from London to the Vatican to Brussels. These are the headquarters of the other polities with which the Irish nation has had to deal. Each of the polities has a different kind of gender project. Each of the

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polities has a complex history of the development of its gender regime which result from a number of different factors. Most importantly, this includes the context and the nature of the other domains of the gender regime, including paid work, housework, male violence, sexuality and culture. However, it also includes the mode of governance of the polity. Each mode of governance itself has a different history of social divisions and gendered contestation. One of the proximate causes of this is the varied gender composition of the key decisional committees and assemblies, not least national parliaments (Gardiner 1993; Inter-Parliamentary Union 1997; Manning 1978; Norris and Lovenduski 1995). This is related to the extent to which each of these polities is democratic. Those modes of governance which are more democratic are more likely to havc a higher proportion of women in their key decisional arenas. For instance, the Catholic Church does not allow women into membership of its key governing bodies, because they are women. Women are not allowed to become priests, or bishops, or cardinals nor pope. This is not to say that women do not have a place in the governance of the Catholic Church. As nuns and women religious, they have a place, and when the church was significantly involved in the running of schools and hospitals this was a significant source of influence (Clear 1987; Luddy 1995). Nevertheless, despite womens devotion in Catholic countries, women are not allowed into membership of the key governing committees, which are confined to men. The extent to which women are allowed into key assemblies and positions is a factor in the gendered nature of the polity. However, it is not the only one, since economic structures, the extent to which women work in the waged or domestic economy, and complex relations with other dimensions of gender relations, especially sexual mores, harassment of women, and culture are also relevant. The nature of the gender regime of these polities is embedded in complex ways in the other domains of gender relations.

Conclusions

Polities are gendered in different ways, and the competition and contestation between polities is simultaneously a competition and contestation between different forms of gender regime. Gender regimes can be usefully conceptualised along two axes of first, a continuum of domestic and public, and second, in the degree of inequality. There have been major changes in the nature of gender regimes in recent years and, in many Western countries there has been a transformation or indeed transition from a domestic to a public gender regime. This has sometimes been accompanied by changes in the degree of gender inequality, though this has varied considerably between different social groups, especially according to age, education and class location Nations exist alongside and in complex connections with other polities, such as states, organised religions and suprastates. Polities exist in time and

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space and thus have different temporal and spatial reaches. Some come and go or are transformed quite rapidly, while others last for centuries. Some have larger spatial reaches than others, for example, the EU encompasses its member states, and some national diaspora live far from their original location. Some polities are more powerful than others. The gendering of nations and national projects is best understood within this context. We need a conceptualisation of gender at a level which enables an analysis at the level of nation. This needs to be neither too specific and local, as has been the case of a lot of recent feminist theorising, nor too simple and undifferentiated, as has been the tendency in the more traditional literature. There are complex articulations between these gendered polities. These are often crucial to the changes in gender regime. That is, changes in gender regime are not always, nor indeed usually, endogenous processes, that is, processes which are contained within a specific unit. Rather, the contestation and changing relations between polities has an important impact on the nature and timing of changes in gender regimes. Nations are one of a series of overlapping intersecting polities, each of which has its own distinctive gender regime. Gender relations in any one location can be subject to more than one polity: a nation, a state, a religion, a suprastate, as well as perceived global pressures. There is not a simple unit of analysis, rather complexity deriving from multiple power sources some of which are in competition with each other. The processes of change are today rarely ones which are primarily endogenous, because of the significance of competition and conflict with partially overlapping polities. Indeed it is hard even to identify a robustly independent unit over a long period within which such change could occur, so frequent are the changes in relevant polities and political boundaries. Women are not simply pawns or symbols of nations, but active participants in the struggles to define and change national projects and to prioritise one polity over another. Gendered interests are differently represented in different polities and gender is a component of the struggles between them. These gendered interests need to be analysed in their own right and not reduced to effects of other phenomena. The development of political projects, of political identities and strategies, takes place within the context of competition between and within polities. It is inappropriate to focus on a detailed level of analysis to the exclusion of these wider and larger processes, especially in the current context of globalisation. It is inappropriate to separate issues of recognition from those of struggle over material goods and for equality, since, at least in the current period and in the topics under analysis here these so often go together, albeit in complex ways. Gender relations are undergoing transformation in most Western countries, rather than oscillating between two alternative gender regimes. The competition and contestation between gendered polities is an important element in these changes.

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