ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes figures on disability, and legislation and regulations regarding the formal and actual rights of disabled people in Eastern Europe, giving some ethnographic descriptions of their everyday life in some communist and post-communist countries. It focuses on disabled welfare recipients' experiences of an intentional and unintentional hierarchy that was predicated upon the cause of disability. The chapter shows the post-socialist period has been characterised by a major shift in numbers and definitions of what constitutes disability and who is a 'disabled person'. It examines legislative frameworks with the actual citizenship rights of people with disabilities to demonstrate that despite legislative changes that occurred after 1991, these did not translate into actualised rights for disabled people. The chapter also shows how old-fashioned cultural images and representations of disability and daily practices act as local gatekeepers of actual equality and that disability as difference results in inequalities and not a valuing of diversity.
