Family-centred world ordering: Polish conservative civil society seeking remedies to the world in crisis

This paper explores actors, visions and practices of family-centred world ordering, which refers to a process in which existing global normative and institutional architectures are questioned and other visions of desirable order are collectively developed and undertaken. The paper takes the case of Polish conservative civil society organisations which questions the liberal world order. Albeit unavoidably overstretching and including a broad spectrum of views, the conservative denominative is attributed to groups which share scepticism towards liberal values which give primacy to individual rights and freedoms, and neoliberal capitalism which implies deregulation of the market and state withdrawal from welfare provision. Members of these organisations came to resent the liberal world order through their own everyday experiences of living through the capitalist transition in Poland after the end of communism in 1989. Consequently, they see the world plunged into overlapping crises of the liberal world order and neoliberal capitalism, and seek alternatives. Visions developed by such conservative organisations from the ground up are centred around a heteronormative family unit with at least two or three children, call for a strong local community, rely on Catholic values (although not necessarily on guidance of the Catholic Church), and demand more state responsibility for welfare provision and wellbeing of families. While it could be argued that normatively such organisations are part of the global right (Graff et al. 2019; Cupać and Ebetürk 2020), they nonetheless lack an ultraconservative religious positioning, and do not advance explicitly nationalist, racist, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT and Islamophobic claims. Arguably, such visions lacking big controversies remain overlooked in recent IR literature on anti-globalisation resistance, which tends to focus either on the radical, anti-gender and anti-LGBT movements, and populist far right. In this case, however, more ‘ordinary’ socio-economic claims the base to advocate for ‘traditional family’. The paper critically investigates where the family-centred visions originate from, how they develop from the ground up, and how they are enacted at community, municipal, national and international levels.