Looking East. What can historical studies of Eastern countries contribute to current debates on commonalities and divergences in family, kinship and welfare provision in Europe?

Both Hajnal’s hypothesis about the existence of an imaginary line historically bisecting European marriage patterns and Laslett’s subsequent quadripartite typology of European forms of domestic organisation were widely criticized in the late 1980s and then in the 1990s. Over the past ten years, macro-regional hypotheses either reminiscent of or directly indebted to Hajnal’s and Laslett’s arguments have been rather surprisingly revived by the realization that in Europe both family forms and reproductive patterns are currently failing to converge as predicted by modernization theorists. However, most recent work has emphasized the divide between the northern and southern countries of western Europe, whereas eastern Europe has been mostly left out of the picture or assumed to have been in the past basically similar to south-western Europe. The aim of this article is briefly to examine some results of recent investigations in history, sociology, anthropology and demography touching on issues of continuity, change and divergence, and suggest that more thorough and accurate studies of family history (broadly understood) in Eastern Europe are of critical importance to assess these issues, both theoretically and practically.