Why is Eastern Europe so socially conservative?
Why is Eastern Europe so socially conservative?
Whenever I see opinion poll maps on :reddit-logo: from Europe with questions like
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Would you be ok with your son/daughter dating a person of a different race?
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Would you be comfortable with your son/daughter dating a member of the same sex?
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My country has too many immigrants, yes or no?
There is always a very noticeable difference between Western and Eastern Europe, with the West (and Scandanavia) being WAY more progressive, and Eastern European / former Soviet states being exceedingly conservative, particularly countries like Czech.
Why is this?
Maybe I'm just naive but I would think that the legacy of the USSR would cause the exact opposite tendency.
I also have no real context as I have never stepped foot in The Old World.
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what we consider the foundations of modern liberalism (multiculturalism acceptance of gender and sexual minorities), is seen in Eastern Europe (specifically Russia/former USSR) as a controversial "western import". It's like the culture war in America, there are two different general cultural factions: westernizers and slavophiles. The disastrous economic changes the "westernizer" liberals brought to some parts of eastern Europe really soured their reputation. The Soviet Union and nostalgia for it are firmly culturally linked to the slavophiles, which are also consistently socially conservative on other issues (they are strongly tied to the Orthodox Church). In other eastern European countries like Poland the Catholic Church is still very dominant politically.
So I guess the answer to your question is that a lot of eastern Europeans are homophobic and racist because they think these ideas are just more western attempts to destroy their culture. People who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union tend to be anti-western for obvious reasons, and unfortunately cultural conditioning pushes them towards these backwards views.
This is exactly the materialist analysis/explanation I was looking for, thank you comrade :fidel-salute:
FR, everything else is just saying 'well actually western europe is pretty bad though' which is true but they dont have fucking LGBT exclusion zones
In a weird way, pro-Western liberals are often even more racist that anti-Western conservatives, because they think that if PoCs are poorer than whites then it is due to them being inherently stupider.