4 - State strategies and kinship

Summary

Strategies over time

Stated simply, my objective in this schematic overview of state strategies will be to write a history of family policy as a future-oriented narrative whose telos is to direct the citizen's lifecourse. This history disaggregates and contextualizes kin codes; it will not reduce the family and the state to simple control instruments or voluntarist arrangements. I will disaggregate law and policy by isolating the shifts in units or objects of state interest between 1945/1949 and 1989 and contextualize by relating kin strategies to the larger state goal of nation-building in the context of the Cold War. This type of analysis does not easily lend itself to praise or chastise the motivations of policymakers or states, who may well be aware of what they want but are rarely able to foresee the rules of the game in its entirety. Hence during the making of policy they are unable to predict fully the effects of their strategic moves, and therefore unable to close the narrative.

I will focus on three characteristics of postwar family policy:

1. 1 On the historically arbitrary yet contextually constrained nature of strategies of kin restoration/construction during the Cold War. Both parts of Berlin and both states began with the same set of demographic circumstances (the same population, the effects of the same wars), yet the solutions proposed were rarely the same, and when they were, they took on different meanings.

2. […]