disciplinary neoliberalism in the european union and gender politics

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This article was downloaded by: [Memorial University of Newfoundland] On: 06 October 2014, At: 09:02 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK New Political Economy Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnpe20 Disciplinary Neoliberalism in the European Union and Gender Politics Brigitte Young Published online: 18 Aug 2010. To cite this article: Brigitte Young (2000) Disciplinary Neoliberalism in the European Union and Gender Politics, New Political Economy, 5:1, 77-98, DOI: 10.1080/13563460050001998 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13563460050001998 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form

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Page 1: Disciplinary Neoliberalism in the European Union and Gender Politics

This article was downloaded by: [Memorial University of Newfoundland]On: 06 October 2014, At: 09:02Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T3JH, UK

New Political EconomyPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnpe20

Disciplinary Neoliberalismin the European Union andGender PoliticsBrigitte YoungPublished online: 18 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Brigitte Young (2000) Disciplinary Neoliberalism in theEuropean Union and Gender Politics, New Political Economy, 5:1, 77-98, DOI:10.1080/13563460050001998

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13563460050001998

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor andFrancis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form

Page 2: Disciplinary Neoliberalism in the European Union and Gender Politics

to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use canbe found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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New Political Economy, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2000

Disciplinary Neoliberalism in theEuropean Union and Gender Politics

BRIGITTE YOUNG

This article explores the development of European employment policy and equalopportunity policies and argues that this development � ts quite readily into thepro-market-forming activities of the neoliberal governance structure of theEuropean Union (EU). Both the Amsterdam Treaty of June 1997 and theLuxembourg Jobs Summit of November 1997 showed a much greater concernwith gender issues than had been the case in either the Delors White Paper of1993 or the Essen Council of Ministers meeting in December 1994, so much sothat Jill Rubery has argued that with the start of the Amsterdam Treaty the EUentered a new phase of European employment policy characterised by a growingrecognition of the importance of gender issues.1 Nevertheless, feminist scholarshave reached quite different conclusions about the impact of the EU equalopportunities agenda on women in member states and an important debate hasopened up to which this article seeks to contribute.

Sylvia Walby makes the strongest case for the positive effects equal oppor-tunity policies have on women, in particular in the UK. Walby concludes that‘without the subordination of the UK to the EU on the regulation of the labourmarket, it is most unlikely that the recent round of development of equalopportunities policies would have taken place so effectively in the UK’.2 Sheacknowledges that her positive assessment is not uniformly shared by otherfeminist writers, but argues that scholars have underestimated the power of theEuropean Court of Justice to reach into, and shape, domestic law. Joanne Cookpresents a much less sanguine picture about the impact of EU policy on � exibleworkers in the UK. She credits the EU Equal Opportunities Directives forextending employment rights to part-time, temporary and home-based employ-ment. This positive trend is, however, counteracted by the principle of subsidiar -ity. Since the precise nature of implementation of EU directives is left up to themember states, the formulation and implementation of EU rights are mediatedthrough national social policy regimes. In other words, national objectivesremain an immense barrier to the effective implementation of Equal Opportuni-ties Directives. The UK is thus no exception, as Cook argues, in its attempt tohinder or even obstruct the implementation of the Directives.3 In an even morepessimistic vein, Ilona Ostner and Jane Lewis conclude that ‘the different gender

Brigitte Young, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Otto-Suhr-Institut, Free University ofBerlin, 14195 Berlin, Germany.

ISSN 1356-3467 /00/010077-22 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd 77

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orders in Europe—national structures of labor markets, social policies, andpatterns of unpaid “caring” work—in� uence implementation of gender-equitypolicy at the national level’.4 National interpretations, according to Ostner andLewis, act as gatekeepers favouring policies compatible with a certain set ofculturally embedded assumptions about national gender roles. CatherineHoskyns concludes on a similar note. Studying the implementation of EqualOpportunity Directives in Germany and Ireland, she suggests that the aim in bothcountries ‘seems to have been to make sure that changes induced by the EC didnot move policy too far from what were perceived to be the country’s norms andvalues’.5 Finally, Jill Rubery singles out two limitations to the current integrationof equal opportunities into EU employment policy. The � rst is the macro-economic environment and macroeconomic policy framework that provides thecontext in which the policy programmes are implemented; the second is theabsence of a political will at the member-state level to adopt and implement theequal opportunity dimension. In this context, she cites both the low prioritygiven to monitoring compliance with the guidelines and the continued lack ofawareness in member states of what an equal opportunity employment policymeans. Rubery doubts that the guidelines are suf� ciently strict to ensure thatmember states do comply with the requirements of the guidelines. Moreimportant for the argument I shall pursue in the rest of this article is Rubery’srather pessimistic assessment of the macroeconomic impact on equal opportuni-ties employment policies. The dominance of the Maastricht convergence andstability criteria over issues that deal with employment targets, and the resultingsupply-side oriented measures contained in the employment guidelines, cast, inher view, considerable doubt as to whether these measures can deliver a higherrate of employment. In the absence of a demand-side intervention in the economyto stimulate job creation, and without a ‘recognition of the interrelationshipsbetween macroeconomic policy, public expenditure and employment policy theprospects for the employment guidelines signi� cantly improving the employ-ment position of women must’, according to Rubery, ‘be considered very low’.6

This article is an attempt to interpret European employment and equalopportunity policies within the larger context of economic globalisation with itsfocus on deregulation and political disengagement from the economy. StephenGill has called the process of subordinating governments to the logic of marketdiscipline the ‘new constitutionalism for disciplinary neoliberalism’.7 Whatmay appear as a progressive step in the direction of gender employment andequal opportunity policies in fact � ts quite well, so the argument presented inthe rest of the article goes, with the larger transnational ‘market-making’ effortof the EU.8 To set the stage, the discussion starts with an analysis of theEuropean integration process as a ‘disciplinary neoliberal’ governance system.The next section focuses on gender politics in the context of the macroeconomicenvironment and discusses these developments as a two-stage process: the � rststarting with the Treaty of Rome and running until the 1980s; the secondconcentrating on gender issues as part of Maastricht and post-Maastrichtdevelopments. In the conclusion, European gender politics and its limitationswill be assessed within the wider macroeconomic context of globalisation andregionalisation.

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Neoliberalism in the EU and Gender Politics

European governance and disciplinary neoliberalism

The European Community’s dramatic awakening from years of stagnation to thepoint of creation of a European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) by 1January 1999 was a surprise even to European scholars. Starting with theadoption of the Single European Act (1986) and proceeding to the rati� cation ofthe Maastricht Treaty (1992), the ‘new European order’ had little in commonwith Jean Monnet’s pragmatic vision of a united Europe based on a functionalinterdependence of administrative decisions.9 While the ‘father of Europe’ stillbelieved in creating common institutions and adopting common rules to createa more peaceful and economically prosperous continent the new Europe repre-sents a dramatic shift towards a disciplinary neoliberal discourse of capitalism.Relaunching Europe with the Maastricht Agreements and EMU was a means toinstitutionalis e a new currency regime and a mandate to enforce strict � scaldiscipline, resulting in the recon� guration of the public sphere and rules foreconomic policy. According to Stephen Gill, the ‘central objectives in thisdiscourse are security of property rights and investor freedoms, and marketdiscipline on the state and on labour to secure credibility in the eyes of privateinvestors, e.g. those in both the global currency and capital markets’.10

Creating a European Union is thus more than an economic project. It is astrategic project that is global in nature and not con� ned to � nance capital. AsGill suggests, a variety of social forces cutting across a broad range of socialclasses and nationality are the central actors in support of EMU. These emergingforces combine to form a new transnational historic bloc that operates within andacross national boundaries and seeks to gain global hegemony. At stake is therede� nition of existing power structures into a new international governanceframework. The central objective of this neoliberal framework is to ‘discipline’governments, as well as � rms, through the sheer dominance of the power ofcapital. European integration constitutes accordingly a twofold process: regionalintegration in the context of changing global patterns of power and production.11

As the term globalisation implies, the rules of economic competition—privatisa-tion, deregulation, � exibilisation , de� ationary monetary politics, de-socialisedrisk provisions—apply equally to all countries and regions. But the globaleconomic processes do not occur in an abstract space. As Saskia Sassen hasillustrated, global processes materialise in particular places and create ‘strategicsites of centrality’.12 The EU is part of a global grid of such strategic sites beingradically transformed to produce the conditions for global economic production,the necessary concentration in ownership and control and the appropriation ofpro� ts. A new international governance system has emerged that shifts ‘theEuropean Union towards a neoliberal and � nancial, as opposed to a socialmarket or social democratic, model of capitalism’.13

The contradiction involved in the nation-state remaining the most importantpolitical organisation and focus of collective identity while at the same timelosing the capacity to shape and control its economic boundaries is closely boundup with the new global economic competition. Territorial boundaries are nolonger the main basis for economic management as was the case in the decadesof Keynesian macroeconomic management following the Second World War.

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Through the globalisation of � nancial markets and the transnational integrationof markets for goods and services, states no longer have the capacity to shapethe conditions under which national economies can operate. While memberstates of the EU have remained the pivotal actors vis-a-vis the Europeansupranational organisations, they nevertheless are involved in a ‘regulatorycompetition’ inside the EU.14 In this regulatory economic and social downwardspiral of existing governance structures, states themselves have changed fromsocial welfare states to national ‘competition states’15, or, in the words of BobJessop, from Keynesian welfare states to Schumpeterian workfare states.16

Wayne Sandholtz and John Zysman were among the � rst scholars to point outthat the ‘recasting of the European bargain’ was bound up with the changinginternational economic environment and the disaffection of business with Keyne-sian macroeconomic intervention after the oil shocks of the 1970s.17 The periodof stag� ation in the 1970s, accompanied by high unemployment and highin� ation, gave rise to what they called the era of Europessimism. Nationalneocorporatist strategies for economic coordination lost their attraction in thelight of US high-dollar and high-interest policies, increasing Japanese penetra-tion into the European markets and the realisation that the European marketswere too small to become global players.18 The preparation of the White Paperon Completing the Internal Market (1985) and the adoption of the SingleEuropean Act (1986) can be interpreted in the spirit of Margaret Thatcher’svision of destroying the postwar corporatist consensus between capital, the stateand labour and replacing it with monetarist stabilisation and supply-side� exibility. The weakening of the Left in Europe in the 1970s opened the roadto market-driven cooperation at the European level to overcome the diseasecalled ‘Eurosclerosis’. European integration can thus be traced to an elite bargainamong European governments, transnational industry and the European Com-mission. Unlike its integration into the postwar neocorporatist structures ofinterest intermediation, labour was excluded from the fundamental bargainamong European elites from the start.

Sandholtz and Zysman convincingly suggest that the international structuralshifts and a favourable domestic setting reignited the drive for a market-orienteduni� ed internal market. In this integration process, transnational business playeda key role. The Philips Corporation, for example, proposed in a bookletpublished in the early 1980s:

There is really no choice, and the only option left for theCommunity is to achieve the goals laid down in the Treaty ofRome. Only in this way can industry compete globally, byexploiting economies of scale, for what will then be the biggesthome market in the world today: the European Community homemarket.19

Subsequently some of the largest transnational businesses, organised from 1983onwards in the Roundtable of European Industrialist s chaired by Pehr Gyllen-hammer of Volvo, became important players at the EU level and a powerfullobby vis-a-vis national governments. The Single European Act—completed in1992—with 300 legislative proposals to create a uni� ed market free of the

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baggage of nationally developed corporatist decision-making rules and institu-tions bears the clearest signature of the new orientation toward a market-makingEurope.

Two instruments made market integration both ‘technically possible andpolitically safe’: quali� ed majority voting and mutual recognition.20 The � rst wascritical. Changing the unanimity rule that had governed the European Com-munity since the Luxembourg compromise to quali� ed majority in all caseshaving to do with the creation of the internal market removed the national vetopower of individual states. Indeed, as Streeck points out, quali� ed majorityvoting was acceptable in both European international relations and Europe’sdomestic political economy because it was entirely dedicated to the purpose ofsecuring market autonomy. The second market-making instrument contained inthe Single European Act was that of ‘mutual recognition’. It rejected theCommission’s power to create harmonised ‘Euronorms’ for national products. Inopting for the ‘mutual recognition’ instrument, the Single European Actreaf� rmed the principle in the Cassis de Dijon case ‘that standards (forfoodstuffs, safety, health, and so on) that prevail in one country must berecognized by the others as suf� cient’.21 By recognising national productstandards, the ‘mutual recognition’ device not only reduced the number ofsupranational decisions that had to be made to achieve an internal marketbut more importantly enabled economic integration to be achieved withoutsupranational institution building.

Both regulatory instruments of majority voting and mutual recognition areexamples of what Scharpf has termed ‘negative integration’ in contrast to‘positive integration’. The former increases market integration ‘by eliminatingnational restraints on trade and distortions of competition’, whilst positiveintegration is a market-correcting device ‘to shape the conditions under whichmarkets operate’.22 Essentially, European integration proceeds in harmony withliberalisation and deregulation and separates market-making from state-building.Economic integration is a response to global capital and its power to ‘exit’ ifnational trade barriers and the regulatory framework that had characterised theEuropean welfare state are not removed. Irrespective of whether these capitalistsystems differed according to ‘social democratic’, ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’versions of the welfare state,23 they all curbed the unfettered tendency of thecapitalist market with market-correcting state intervention. The new Europe nolonger pursues the goals of combining the promotion of a vigorous capitalistgrowth with speci� c social, cultural and/or environmental norms. According toStreeck, ‘the act of defending a country’s sovereignty in the councils of Europeand the act of defending the freedom of “market forces” in the integratedEuropean economy thus came to be one and the same, with the objectives ofliberal deregulation, or nonregulation , and of nationalist defense of sovereigntyinextricably intertwined’.24

In other words, the drive towards a ‘free market’ Europe is a processembedded in the transformations of the global economy and the interests ofnational governments combined with transnational business to create an internalEuropean market free from regulation and suf� ciently large to compete with theJapanese and American markets. That transnational actors continued to play an

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important role in the further development of Europe can be seen from theneoliberal focus of the Treaty on European Union, signed at Maastricht inFebruary 1992. As part of the commitment to EMU, a single European currency,the euro, was introduced on 1 January 1999.25 In addition, the Treaty stipulatedthe creation of a single European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, Germany,with a European Central Bank chairperson chosen from among the Europeancountries and a Europe-wide monetary policy to go into effect for all Europeancountries by 1999.26 David Cameron, in his excellent article on the developmentof EMU, concluded that the initiative witnessed a third type of politics groundedin neither the national governments of the member states nor the supranationalinstitutions of the Community. Instead, transnational actors—the Committee ofGovernors of the Central Banks of the Member States of the European EconomicCommunity, the Monetary Committee and certain central bankers actingindependently of national governments—‘were more in� uential than eithergovernmental or supranational actors’.27

This is not the place to render an exact account of the development of theEMU initiative. Cameron’s insights on the enhanced authority of central bankers,particularly the role of the German Bundesbank president, Hans Tietmeyer,28

makes the disciplinary neoliberalism inherent in the de� ationary course of theEMU and the negative implications for a ‘Social Europe’ more understandable .The restrictive Maastricht criteria regarding the joining of EMU29 and the‘Stability and Growth Pact’—signed at the 1996 Dublin Summit30—have givenrise to a ‘competitive corporatism’.31 In order to meet the Maastricht criteria,individual member states have had to reorient their labour market institutionsand constrain wage increases. By connecting the EMU to wage bargaining, payagreements have since had more to do with meeting the Maastricht criteria thanany redistributive goals inherent in the old neocorporatist wage bargaining. It isthus not surprising that, on an EU-wide basis, pay sharply dipped below that ofthe period 1986–90 during the years 1991–95.32 The rigorous stabilisation andausterity measures that are intrinsic to EMU require that countries keep lowin� ation rates, low budget de� cits and low public debt. This ‘negative inte-gration’ has already led to cutbacks in welfare spending and has made thechances for a new European social policy regime possible at best only on thebasis of ‘neo-voluntarism’.33 In the absence of positive integration, as Scharpfpointed out, all member states � nd themselves in a prisoner’s dilemma requiringthem to cut back on social preferences in order to improve the competitiveposition of individual countries.34 Not surprisingly, the Amsterdam summit ofJune 1997 only produced more budget cuts and more austerity measures, despitethe fact that the new French government had come to power on the electoralpromise to deal with the unemployment question.

The implications of all of this for a social and gender-friendly Europe are atbest contradictory. At worst, the equal opportunity employment policies arerender quite unrealistic. The de� ationary macroeconomic environment resultingfrom the Maastricht criteria is counterposed to the social and employmentguidelines enacted by the EU. Adopting the Maastricht guidelines has led toeconomic retrenchment in all member states, which has involved cutting welfareand social expenditures.35 Given the supply-side measures contained in the

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employment policies, it is dif� cult to see how effective the EU will be increating higher rates of employment. Yet the equal opportunity employmentagenda rests on the promotion of women’s employment. The Commission hasforegone, and even implicitly denied, any demand-side intervention in theeconomy. Instead, at the centre of the approach is a focus on the supply side.Improving the skills of the potential workers and facilitating easier access to thejob market by providing childcare facilities is believed to promote the employ-ment of women. But here we confront a catch-22 situation. Women are enteringthe labour market in increasing numbers and the EU, rhetorically at least,encourages such a move. At the same time, the EU creates the conditions for ademand-constrained employment scenario. As Rubery has pointed out, thesedevelopments contribute to the problem of job shortage. To promote theemployment of women in the absence of an active job-creation policy and in thecontext of public-sector cutbacks seems like trying to square a circle. Neither theemployment guidelines nor the Joint Employment Report even mention thepublic sector as a vital promoter of women’s employment and facilitator forlabour-market integration and yet it is dif� cult to see how, in the absence of therevival of the public sector, the private sector can generate the required jobgrowth to absorb the increased labour supply. The strict monetary and � scaltargets circumscribe the policies that are needed to promote the EU’s equalopportunity objectives. In other words, the neoliberal macroeconomic environ-ment shuts the door to a public sector employment strategy that, in fact, was thejob creator for women in the social democratic Scandinavian model.

The defenders of the EU’s equal opportunities policy do not deny its inherentweakness. They argue, however, that in the absence of such EU legislation manymember states lack the necessary push to put gender equity on the nationalagenda. Sylvia Walby makes this kind of argument in respect to the UK. Sheargues that, as a direct result of the EU, the UK was forced to adopt higherstandards for its low-pay employment sector, thereby undermining the UK’s owncheap labour strategy towards its mostly female part-time work force.36 Thepositive impact of the EU-led gender approach can also be found in the southernmember states. In these largely gender-segregated societies, the EU regulationshave undoubtedly helped to introduce the issue of equal employment policiesinto the public discourse. The case is admittedly much more complicated in theScandinavian countries. At issue is whether the EU policies will lead to a general‘levelling’ of gender equity standards across member states. Some countries willbene� t from such a strategy and improve the lives of women. The moreadvanced Scandinavian countries may fare less well with the present equalopportunity policies of the EU. The Scandinavian countries have consistentlyrelied on a high public expenditure strategy to create a more gender-equalsociety. As already indicated, the public sector was the engine that pulledwomen into the labour market and socialised the traditional ‘care work’. Withthe political ascendancy of neoliberalism, the political discourse on socialwelfarism and gender equity is being replaced with a ‘reprivatisation discourse’which seeks to repatriate the social to the former domestic and private en-claves.37 Reprivatisation is being enforced through welfare cuts and � scalausterity measures which try to offload social reproduction to the private sphere.

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Whether EU equal opportunity policies are better or worse than those likely tobe found in member states is surely an important question. However, the moreimportant issue is what type of social welfarism and gender equity is compatiblewith the present European neoliberal governance framework and it is to thatquestion that the next section turns.

Objectives of European gender politics

1. The � rst stage: from the Treaty of Rome until the 1980s

In the 1950s, when the Treaty of Rome was discussed, gender politics was noton the agenda of European leaders. That Article 119 (equal pay for women andmen) was inserted had to do with the insistence of the French government thatit may disadvantage its economy if this policy—a domestic requirement inFrance—was not to be uniform across Europe. Germany, in particular, disagreednot only on the issue of equal pay, but also on harmonising social policy acrossthe Community. Article 119 did—after much controversy—� nd its way into thesocial policy articles in the Treaty of Rome. It stipulated ‘that men and womenshould receive equal pay for equal work’ and went on to specify that equal paywithout discrimination based on sex meant: (a) that pay for the same work atpiece rates shall be calculated on the basis of the same unit of measurement; and(b) that pay for work at time rates shall be the same for the same job.38 In short,the concept of equality inherent in Article 119 meant that working women hadto be treated the same as working men. Until the 1970s, the European Court ofJustice (ECJ) de� ned ‘equal pay for the same work’ very narrowly and only inthe 1970s did it start to deal with the issue of ‘equal pay for equal work’(comparable worth). From the start, Article 119 was tied to labour market andemployment concerns. That women have children and are traditionally tied tofamily care activities that interrupt or even hinder their integration into thelabour market was not addressed in the EU’s nondiscriminator y policy. Asimportant as Article 119 became in the years to come as a spring-board topromote equal opportunity , the social dimension of the Treaty of Rome was thusconstitutionall y limited to labour market creation, with the main purpose ofsocial policy being to remove barriers to cross-border mobility among workers.

The general state of dormancy on gender and social issues started to changewith the rise of feminist movements across Europe in the 1970s. The surge ofnew social movements also corresponded with a change to social-liberal/democratic governments in many European countries and forced the EuropeanCommunity into a more active engagement with women’s policy between 1973and 1986. The Community started to deal with such issues as ‘better employ-ment, gender equality in the workplace, improvement of worker health andsafety conditions, and industrial codetermination’39 and this active period wit-nessed the adoption of � ve equality directives.40 While this was certainly to bewelcomed, the nondiscriminatio n directives were more in line with creating afree market than correcting past discriminatory practices against women. Theequal-pay directive—enacted in 1975—broadened the interpretation of Article119 and introduced the concept of equal value of work. No longer did women

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have to show that they did the ‘same’ work as men in claiming pay discrimi-nation. However, the ECJ put the onus on employers to justify discriminatorypay practices by using an ‘intent’ clause and a ‘balancing standard’ (proportion-ality test) to test ‘legitimate’ reasons for discrimination by employers. Byinserting these two measures, the Court opened a door to ‘justify’ discrimination .The issue of � exibility alone, which is often used by employers to justify payingdifferent pay scales, may have discriminatory effects on women. It is notimplausible to think of situations in which women may ‘justi� ably’ be paid adifferent wage if the employer can show that they are not suf� ciently ‘� exible’as a result of their family responsibilities . In addition, the Court also permittednational legislators to use � scal scarcity and market forces to justify discrimina-tory behaviour. Weighing the importance of � scal scarcity on the one side andsexual equality on the other, the winning side is surely not dif� cult to predict.

As for the other four directives focusing on equal treatment, the � rst, Directive76/207 (1976), dealt with a wide range of forms of sex discrimination relatingto hiring and employment contracts, working conditions and vocational training.Again, a clause for ‘good reason’ was inserted in the directive to permit‘unequal’ treatment among the sexes. The equal-treatment directive was subse-quently used by the ECJ in 1991 to ban night labour for women. This issue iscontroversial even among feminists and many would agree that protectivelegislation has often been used to justify the exclusion of women from certainjobs. In its reasoning, the Court denied women’s added family responsibilitie s asa ‘good reason’ for treating them ‘unequally’ and, as a result, France and sixother countries had to rescind their laws on night labour for women. Neverthe-less, the primary objective of the directive seems to have been to free the marketfrom unwanted regulations.

The effect was no different in the two directives covering equal treatment insocial security. At issue was equal treatment in social protection and the right tobene� ts. National social security systems have traditionally been tied to theemployment status of mostly male workers. They ‘earned’ direct rights toreceive social security bene� ts, whereas women’s access to bene� ts was largelyderived through their husbands. These national patterns made the issue ratherdif� cult to deal with at the European level. However, it is altogether anothermatter to agree with Catherine Hoskyns who has suggested that ‘by entering intothis � eld … the EC was moving into a sensitive area, and one where interventiondisturbed national policies of redistribution and social control, and challengeddeep-seated assumptions and traditions’.41 There is little evidence that the ECJruling on retirement age went against the prevalent interests of the nationalpolitical and economic class. In the Marshall case (1986) the ECJ concluded thatcompulsory early retirement for women was unjusti� ed. It is true that in manycases women had no choice and were forced to retire earlier than men, whichmeans that the decision of the ECJ can be understood as furthering the equalityof women. Yet there is little support for this kind of feminist reading. The equaltreatment directives on social security were subsequently used to justify levellingdown pension rights rather than addressing the issue of gender equality. In evenmore sinister fashion equal treatment directives became convenient legal instru-ments in the hands of national governments to reduce social expenditures. The

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Netherlands and the UK have already shown that the equal treatment reform canbe implemented ‘against a background of severe cost-cutting in the socialsecurity system as a whole’.42 Germany has also been engaged in a heated debateon increasing the retirement age for women. In none of these cases has therebeen any discussion about lowering the retirement age of males.

In sum, the � ve equal-pay and equal-treatment directives remain true to thespirit of the Treaty of Rome’s focus on negative integration. They have not beenused to promote positive integration, i.e. to further equality, unless equality wasdirectly related to the goal of eliminating national regulations. They have servedthe purpose of eliminating national barriers that have ‘protected’ women fromcertain occupations. At no point in the discussions on equal treatment was thesuggestion that protective legislation could be institutionalise d for all workersever taken seriously. In the name of ‘equal treatment’, women were ‘reduced’ tothe male standard. From this discussion, it seems dif� cult to agree with thestatement of Hoskyns quoted earlier that the equal treatment directives on socialsecurity ‘disturbed national policies of redistribution and social control’. Theevidence seems to point in the other direction: the directives � t perfectly wellwith the market-making project of the EU.

Moreover, addressing issues not directly relating to the labour market—suchas those concerned with the private and reproductive spheres—has largely beenrejected by the EU. It is quite instructive to look at the directives that have beenrejected or watered down and that would have involved policies to shape theconditions under which markets operate (positive integration). For example, theCouncil of Ministers has rejected draft directives on part-time work (1983),parental leave (1984), social security (1989), widower’s pensions (1989), addi-tional bene� ts for families (1989), the age of retirement (1989), reversal ofburden of proof (1989), organisation of working time (1991) and atypicalemployment (1991). Watered down from draft directives into weaker recommen-dations or announcements were: women’s unemployment (1984), equal treat-ment in taxation (1991), family policies (1991), child care (1991) and sexualharassment at the workplace (1991).43

2. The second stage: the ‘new’ EU gender politics of the 1990s

Pauline Conroy suggests that in 1988 it was presumed that the ‘internal market’would have no major consequences for women. Yet by 1992 this position hadgiven way to renewed discussions in women’s organisations and committees andto publications on the relationship between the internal market and women’semployment.44 The Commission had euphorically stated in its economic reportin 1988 that the ‘four great freedoms’ (� nance, goods, services, labour) of theinternal market would lead to economic growth, declining prices, up to 5.8million additional jobs and improvements in the states’ budgets.45 Since thecreation of the deregulated internal market, the picture has changed drastically.Gross domestic product in virtually all countries has either shown little growthor even declined, industrial production is stagnating in many sectors, thebuilding industry has been severely weakened, and the number of additional jobscreated has been much below the number that had been anticipated. The of� cial

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unemployment rate is around 18 million (the unof� cial rate is estimated to bearound 25–30 million, since many women are not registered and thus do notshow up in the unemployment � gures); the population living in poverty hasincreased to around 57 million; and there has been a dramatic increase inecological crises.46 These problems were not ‘caused’ by the single market perse. Rather European governance and its political commitment to ‘orthodoxmarket-monetarist � scal and monetary policies’ have turned united Europe intolittle more than a super-regional trading bloc with few legal restrictions on themovement of capital.47

Given this system of disciplinary neoliberalism, is it even possible to identifyfurther developments in gender politics within the Maastricht framework?Hiltrud Breyer, German member of the European Parliament for the Greens, israther pessimistic, judging that the ‘roll-back’ on women’s issues is becomingever more apparent. As the latest example, she cites the refusal of the ECJ todecide whether the low-paying Deutsche Mark 630 jobs can be exempted fromsocial insurance coverage. The Court invoked the subsidiarity principle includedin the Maastricht Treaty and referred it back to the relevant member state,namely Germany.48 Its refusal to decide this issue may have far-reachingconsequences not just for gender politics. By returning this case to a memberstate, the Court has in fact initiated a renationalisation process within socialpolitics. To recall, the Maastricht Treaty did include the ‘Social Policy Agree-ment’, albeit limited to ‘implementation of the 1989 Social Charter on the basisof the acquis communitaires, with an exemption for Britain, which opted out ofthe initial Agreement.49 In Catholic social doctrine, from where the conceptcomes, subsidiarity implies, as Streeck has pointed out, ‘a duty on the part ofhigher levels of governance to enable smaller units at lower levels to conducttheir affairs in responsible “social autonomy” ’.50 Subsidiarity in Catholic prac-tice was not just reduced to the precedence of lower over higher levels ofgovernance. Instead, the concept referred to the organic nature of society wheremuch problem-solving was done through ‘private governance’, involving bothstate and non-state actors. Thus while the Maastricht Treaty speci� cally invokesthe term of subsidiarity , the meaning has changed toward a laissez-faire view ofgovernance. In response to the British and Danish resistance to Maastricht,

Subsidiarity thus de facto changed from a Catholic social into aliberal concept —the difference being that the former requires astrong central state mandating and enabling less encompassingsocial formations to govern themselves in the public interest,whereas the latter implies a weak state acting only at the requestof sovereign constituencies.51

Refusing to hear the case on this particular social policy issue has importantrami� cations not only for German women but for un- and low-skilled womenand men throughout the EU. Women are overwhelmingly the ‘takers’ of thelow-paying DM630 jobs, and whether or not these jobs are to be included in thenational security system is of vital importance, given the increasing� exibilisation and deregulation of global labour markets. The European Courthas accordingly given a clear signal to member states that national practices of

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social policies do not have to fear the intervention of the EU. In the case ofgender this is of particular importance. Despite the rather limited interpretationof Article 119, the directives on gender equality did at least raise the conscious-ness of many member states and encouraged them to confront the issue of genderdiscrimination within their territories. By renationalising social policies, and thusalso gender politics, any advance in this area is left to the political will of themember states.

Nevertheless, Jill Rubery in a rather cautious tone does point out that theAmsterdam Treaty and the subsequent Luxembourg Jobs Summit did includesome important implications for gender equality in the area of employment. Incontrast to the virtual absence of any gender perspective in the Delors WhitePaper on Growth, Competition and Employment of 1993 and the � ve pointsagreed on in the Essen Council of Ministers meeting in December 1994, theinclusion of a gender perspective in the Amsterdam Treaty is a step forward. Inthe Essen conclusion, women appeared only under ‘measures to help groupsparticularly hard hit by unemployment’. In this formulation, women surface onlyas victims of the labour market shifts and not as active political and economicparticipants. A new chapter on employment was included in the AmsterdamTreaty, which speci� ed that ‘employment policy will in future be considered amatter of “common concern”, to be pursued through national action plans whichare not only to be shaped by a common set of guidelines but also theireffectiveness monitored on an annual basis’.52 In contrast to the MaastrichtTreaty which committed member states only to pursue agreed-upon economicguidelines, Amsterdam instructed the member states to act on the issue ofemployment and report on the principal measures they have taken to promoteemployment.

The most novel feature of the Treaty is the insertion of an anti-discriminationclause outlawing all discrimination based on ‘sex, racial or ethnic origin, religionand belief, disability , age or sexual orientation’. Before Amsterdam, equality wasrestricted to the con� nes of equal pay. This new emphasis has broadened theinterpretation of discrimination to minority groups. However, this broad in-terpretation has been criticised on several grounds. Women’s groups rejected thelinkage of sex discrimination to anti-discrimination concerning minority groups.By refusing to accept equality between men and women ‘as a fundamental rightin the strict meaning of the term’, as proposed by the Conference of Parliamen-tary Committees responsible for equal opportunity policy and the EuropeanWomen’s Lobby, the emphasis on achieving substantial equality has beenweakened.53 Subsuming gender equity under the anti-discrimination rubricmeans that any recourse to alleviate gender inequality is tied only to incrementalcorrective measures.

Revisions were also made in the Treaty to the existing provisions thataddressed the issue of equal opportunities . A revised Article 2 now states thatone of the missions of the EU is ‘equality between women and men’, in additionto ‘a high level of employment and social protection, the raising of the standardof living and quality of life, and economic and social cohesion and solidarityamong Member States’. Article 3 asserts that, in all actions and policies, the EUshall now ‘aim to eliminate inequalities, and to promote equality, between men

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and women’. Modi� cations were also introduced to Article 119 of the Treaty ofRome. The revised Amsterdam Treaty establishes the principle of equal paybetween women and men for ‘equal work or work of equal value’. The Councilof Ministers is henceforth authorised to adopt measures ensuring equal opportu-nities and equal treatment of men and women ‘in matters of employment andoccupation’, including pay. The emphasis on ‘positive action’ is not a blanketcheck to offer ‘speci� c advantages’ to women ‘to pursue a vocational activity orto prevent or compensate for disadvantages in professional careers’. It is agrudging admission that positive action can be used in certain restricted andrather limited circumstances to counter the potentially negative impact of theKalanke case (see below). However, as the Newsletter Women of Europe pointsout, positive action is restricted to ‘working life’ and is equally available to menas the ‘under-represented sex’, if they are in occupations in which they are in aminority. A declaration was annexed to this Article emphasising that memberstates ‘should, in the � rst instance, aim at improving the situation of women inworking life’ when adopting such measures.54

The positive action measure of the Treaty held out some hope that Europeanlaw would permit active state intervention to achieve gender equality after thenegative ruling in the Kalanke case of 1995. After the ECJ ruling, The FinancialTimes ran a headline, ‘Positive action proves negative for Bremen’, whichexpressed the fear of many women after the positive discrimination law ofBremen (Germany) had been struck down.55 The case arose in the context of theBremen public sector (parks department) where an equally quali� ed woman waschosen over a Mr Kalanke for the job of section manager. The local Bremen lawon equal treatment stipulated that, in cases of two equally quali� ed persons,priority should be given to women if they are underrepresented. The Germanlocal, regional, and federal labour courts ruled that the Bremen law did notbreach the German Basic Law nor the Civil Code and that the Bremen law didnot set strict quotas for women. Since it was unclear whether the Bremen lawwas compatible with European equal treatment, the case was referred to the ECJ.The Court found, � rstly, that ‘the European equal treatment legislation de� nedthe principle of equal treatment as meaning that there should be no discrimi-nation whatsoever on grounds of sex. Clearly, national rules such as those inBremen involved discrimination’. Secondly, it ruled that ‘the national lawsubstituted the end for the means, by providing for the result of equal oppor-tunity rather than ensuring the existence of the principle of equality of oppor-tunity’.56 This ruling sent shivers through the feminist community and alsocreated uncertainty within the legal community as to whether EU member statescould enact positive action measures to promote equality. It was unclear how theCourt would in future decide positive action cases that involved the activepromotion of equality of opportunity. The ECJ did rule soon after the Kalankecase in another German case (Marschall v. Nordrhein Westfalen) in 1997 and inthis instance upheld the NRW-law. In the Bremen case, the Court objected to a‘special feature’ which ‘gave women an automatic, absolute and unconditiona lright to appointment or promotion over similarly quali� ed men’.57 In contrast,the NRW-law had a ‘hardship clause’ (Hartefallregelung) which made the quota� exible and gave the administration some room to manoeuvre. In other words,

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this latest ruling of the ECJ and the insertion of the positive action measure inthe Amsterdam Treaty seem to suggest that member states can still use positiveaction in certain restricted and limited circumstances to address discrimination ,including � exible quotas.58

Despite the inclusion of some positive measure in the Amsterdam Treaty, thereactions from women members of the European Parliament and women’sgroups/networks involved in the Treaty process were mixed.59 Gertrud Warten-berg, President of the European Women’s Lobby (EWL)), criticised the fact thatthe legal basis for guaranteeing equality was restricted to the workplace and didnot include all areas of life. In addition, inserting the term ‘under-representedsex’ instead of ‘women’ was seen as a ‘dangerous’ development for women. Ina situation where there are 20 women employees and one man who is the boss,it is he who becomes the underrepresented sex. She concluded: ‘all in all, Iwould say the Treaty of Amsterdam is not a women friendly Treaty’. No lesscritical was Claudia Roth, a member of the European Parliament and thePresident of its Green Group. She said: ‘I do not feel anything has substantiallychanged. Let’s look at the amendments to Article 119. There is nothing new inthem. These are lifted from the Social Protocol. Equal rights and equal opportu-nities are reduced to the workplace and that is not enough. The question of therole of women in society remains unresolved’. In reference to the chapter onemployment, she noted that there were only ‘incentive measures’, or ‘exchangesof experience’. For her part, Lydia Zaid, a journalist at EUDIF, a Europeanwomen’s network of documentation and information, although cautiously opti-mistic about the progress that has been made as a result of the revisions ofArticles 2 and 3, nevertheless resented the fact that implementation is left up toindividual member states. She also criticised the inclusion of the phrase ‘under-represented sex’ instead of ‘women’. In fact, Zaid suggested that this might evenjeopardise equality policies in Scandinavian countries, which explicitly targetwomen in promoting equality. If such cases were to come before the ECJ itcould conceivably lead to a repeat of the German case where the Court struckdown a more progressive national law that was market-correcting.

Finally, the � rst-ever European Summit devoted to jobs, convened in Luxem-bourg in November 1997, needs to be considered.60 The Commission’s four mainlines of action, or pillars—increase employability , develop entrepreneurship,encourage adaptability and strengthen equal opportunities—were included in the� nal guidelines for member states in 1998. That equal opportunity wasspeci� cally addressed in the new common European employment framework issurely to be welcomed. The speci� c approaches to strengthen equal opportunityemployment policy, developed by the Equal Opportunities Unit of the Com-mission together with the EU network of experts on women’s employment,highlighted as the main areas of activity improvements to employment opportu-nities for women, along with the reconciliation of work and family life and, inparticular, issues such as parental leave, part-time working for women and menand the reintegration of women into the labour market after a career break. Thedraft guidelines also made reference to ‘mainstreaming’ of gender equality issuesinto the policies enacted under the four pillars. In this context gender main-streaming has been de� ned by the European Commission as:

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The systematic integration of the respective situations, prioritiesand needs of women and men in all policies and with a viewto promoting equality between women and men and mobilisingall general policies and measures speci� cally for the purposeof achieving equality by actively and openly taking intoaccount, at the planning stage, their effects on the respectivesituations of women and men in implementation, monitoring andevaluation.61

Despite the great hopes that have been placed in the concept, its meaning ishighly controversial and subject to varying interpretations. Gender mainstream-ing has been an important issue since the Fourth UN World Conference onWomen, held in Beijing in September 1995, which committed itself to theprinciple of mainstreaming. In fact, the European Commission was a primaryactor in the process of preparing the Beijing conference commitment to main-streaming. The EU adopted the principle of mainstreaming in a Commissioncommunication in March 1996 which de� ned it as ‘incorporating equal opportu-nities for women and men into all Community policies and activities at alllevels’.62 Criticisms of the concept of mainstreaming range from its proximity toa liberal rights tradition to the ef� cacy and the political will needed to implementgender mainstreaming. Issues such as gender-based violence, poverty, abuse andtraf� cking in women are dif� cult to address with mainstreaming. Focusing onequal treatment also omits problems of female oppression and subordination. Atthe same time, a declared commitment to gender mainstreaming tells us little ofthe political will or otherwise to include such a strategy in EU policies.Schunter-Kleemann suggests that the ‘mainstreaming principle’ was disregardedin the Agenda 2000, the Fifth Framework Programme for Research and Technol-ogy, the 1998 budget and the guidelines for future cooperation on developmentbetween EU and Africa, Caribbean and Paci� c (ACP) states. The � nal Luxem-bourg guidelines to the member states also omitted reference to mainstreaming.Despite subsequent corrections to include some gender mainstreaming in thecentral programmes of EU policy, the impression arises that mainstreaming hasbeen more of a promise than a reality.63

The Luxembourg summit included for the � rst time a set of guidelines tomember states on job creation and helping the young and long-term unemployedinto work. These guidelines, however, are only recommendations and eachmember state is free to choose the path of reducing unemployment most inkeeping with the solution of its own distinct national problems. Thus it is inpractice left to each member state to implement these guidelines. The onlycourse of action that can be taken against a recalcitrant state, according to theAmsterdam Treaty, is for member states to reprimand a partner whose effortsto cut unemployment are considered below target. Moreover, while the dis-cussion at the summit focused on the setting of targets to reduce unemploymentfor the young and the older unemployed, no such targets were set for women‘despite a European Parliament call, during its discussion on the 1997 Employ-ment Report, for such targets to improve women’s employment, particularlyemployment rates, training and equal pay’.64

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What is more, feminist economists have criticised the guidelines as fundamen-tally � awed. Rubery et al. argue that differences in female employment patternsare little understood. We � nd ourselves in the paradoxical situation in the EUthat both female employment and unemployment rates have risen simul-taneously. Although two-thirds of the new jobs created in the EU between 1994and 1996 have been taken up by women, this has had little effect on loweringunemployment rates. Women’s unemployment has remained steadily higher thanmen’s (12.5 against 9.2 per cent in September 1997). As Ruberyet al. note, ‘not only have policymakers failed to identify the overalllow employment rate within Europe as related to low female employment ratesin certain countries but also they have regarded the tendency for most newjobs to go to the inactive rather than the unemployed as a puzzle, possiblyrelated to the unemployabilit y of the unemployed, rather than as a consequenceof the gendered segmentation of employment demand or the existence of alarge hidden reserve of female labour outside the conventionally measuredlabour force’.65 This inability to grapple with the problem of female employmentrates is largely the result of the tradition of economics analysing the labourmarket as composed of atomistic individuals outside of the household and familyeconomy.

Mainstream economists and policy analysts see the answer to the problemof unemployment and underemployment for women (and men) in the provisionof � exible and part-time jobs. Part-time work has been promoted for womenas a way to take up paid employment, but part-time work often means low-paid work and the absence of social security provisions. It is true that theLuxembourg Summit moved away from the emphasis on � exibility toemployability . At the centre of the discussion was the need to balance � exibilityfor the employer with security for the employee. In its paper, Partnership fora New Organisation of Work, published in 1997, the Commission hadalready indicated a shift from its previous emphasis on � exibility based onlow skills and low labour costs to upgrading and improving work skills. Theobjective was no longer to get the unemployed back to work, but to providethe means to move up in the labour market. However, the focus on � exibilityand part-time work does not cover all forms of atypical employment in whichwomen are often found. The Social Partners Agreement on part-time work,66

concluded between European trade unions and employers in June 1997, anddiscussed at the Luxembourg Summit, was strongly criticised by Karin Jons(PSE, Germany) in her report to the European Parliament. She objected to theexclusion of both other forms of atypical employment and social securityprovisions and to the fact that there was an ‘opt-out clause which allows MemberStates or the social partners to make “many exceptions” to the principle ofnon-discrimination for “technical” or “objective” reasons’.67 As a result, part-time workers or workers with atypical employment who cannot meet theemployment threshold in terms of length of service, working time and wage orsalary conditions are not covered by the terms of the agreement. Both theLuxembourg Agreement and the Social Partners Agreement on part-time workthus leave much to be desired in terms of European employment policies andgender equity.

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Conclusion: EU gender politics between regionalisation and globalisation

Our review of European gender politics has shown that gender has gainedincreased visibility in the various treaties and agreements on employment policy.Today it is quite unthinkable to discuss a treaty or agreement on labour issueswithout also addressing the issues of equal opportunity and gender equality. Theearly documents did not even recognise the issue of equality as belonging to therealm of politics. It took the rise of the feminist movements in the 1970s toaddress the issues of equal opportunity and gender equity, not just in theworkplace but in all spheres of public and private life. Even so, it was only withthe UN World Conference on Women in Beijing that the EU of� cially recog-nised that gender issues could no longer be treated in isolation, but had to be‘mainstreamed’ throughout the policy process. To recall, at the Essen Summit inDecember 1994, women were still viewed as a victimised group that neededspecial help in the labour market. The change in policy is undoubtedly due to themany women activists and feminist lawyers working within the EU in bodiessuch as the Women’s Rights Committee of the European Parliament and theEqual Opportunities Unit in the Commission, as well as the many transnationalnetworks and lobbying groups that operate at the EU level, which have kept theissue of gender discrimination at the forefront of issues to be considered in allnegotiations. At the same time, the EU organisational apparatus does not quitemeasure up to its own rhetoric. Neither the Council of Ministers nor theEuropean Court of Justice have gender equality of� ces. In fact, the ECJ has theunique distinction of not having a single woman among the eight judges sittingon the bench, despite the fact that so many cases on equality have gone throughthe Courts. Indeed, even if we look at the Commission, which has been at theforefront of promoting gender equality within the EU, the percentage of womenamong the Commissioners is no more than 5.5 per cent.68

The increasing visibility of gender issues at the EU level does not, of course,tell us whether the various directives, treaty provisions and commitmentsactually make a difference in women’s lives. The effectiveness of the equalopportunity commitment depends, above all else, on the political will of nationalleaders to adopt and implement the equality measures. Many feminists havespoken of the weakness in translating EU policies into national policies. JillRubery concludes that ‘the accumulation of evidence at both a national andEuropean level of actual policy-making debates and agendas in fact suggests thatmember states still have little idea what an equal opportunity employment policymeans’.69 Ilona Oster and Jane Lewis suggest that gender-related policies mustpass through the eyes of two separate needles from the time they are discussed,adopted and implemented. Supranationally , the constraints stem from the factthat gender issues are limited to individuals in paid work; nationally, theconstraining features are the preexisting policy and cultural frames that in� uenceimplementation.70 There are few sanctions the EU can apply to force recalcitrantnation-states into compliance outside of monitoring adherence to the guidelines.

As such, the issue of gender politics is an example of what Wolfgang Streeckhas called a two-tier policy process.71 Nation-states have been forced to pay atleast lip service and even provide evidence that they are in compliance with EU

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commitments on gender equality. European integration has thus added a supra-national level of gender policy to the national gender order. At the same time,the member states have tried to maintain their authority and sovereignty vis-a-visBrussels as much as possible. In this dualist game, gender politics has been theloser. No longer are gender relations ‘protected’ by the regulations of theEuropean welfare system. Granted, this system has been male-dominated andmany of the protections have made women into dependents of their husbands.Much has been written in critique of the Keynesian welfare state and itssegregation of women into low-paying jobs that were mostly associated with‘caring’ professions. Far from replicating this system at the European level, theEU has ‘liberalised’ the existing gender orders.

Starting with the Treaty of Rome, the basic rules of the European Communityfocused on eliminating national restraints on trade and distortions of compe-tition. In this process of ‘negative integration’ women have bene� ted insofar asthe ‘protective regulatory mechanisms’ of a patriarchal state have been lifted.But the directives on sexual non-discrimination were foremost a market-makinginstrument and only incidentally ‘feminist’. The same can be said for most of theadditions to the treaties and agreements on equal opportunity and employmentsince the passing of the Single European Act. These gender provisions in no waycontradict the larger project of transforming the EU into a � exible, transnational ,global production site. On the contrary, the regulatory apparatus ‘protecting’women in the Keynesian welfare state became a hindrance to the need for a� exible workforce. European integration, as pointed out in the introductorycomments, is not only an economic project. It involves actively remaking theexisting governance structures and state apparatuses to create the conditions forneoliberal capitalism. It takes both macroeconomic as well as microeconomicchanges to shift Europe from a social democratic to the new neoliberal system.Reconstituting the private and the public spheres is at the centre of this project.It entails changes in existing gender relations from ‘dependency’ to individuali -sation for both sexes. Equal opportunity policies facilitate the development of� exible labour markets by getting rid of unwanted protective female regulations.Although the EU’s equal employment policies may be a ‘cost’ to capital in theshort run, in the long run capital bene� ts by ‘levelling’ the playing � eld for theinformalisation of the labour markets for both sexes. Individualisatio n not onlymeans a trend towards increasing female participation in the labour market; italso involves increasing individual bargaining in employment relations, person-alised contracts and performance-related pay. The ‘new gender contract’ requiresa new working time regime for both men and women enabling them to combine� exibly paid work and unpaid work. To the degree that the male breadwinnerrole is pushed more and more into the background, women are forced to earntheir livings in a combination of the private and the public spheres. They workon call in paid tele- and home-based activities (private sphere), they are foundin sweatshops (neither private nor public), or with their babies on their backs inthe ‘global factories’ (mixture of production/reproduction).

These new forms of ‘work’ are also rede� ning existing gender identities.While the woman was identi� ed with the family and subordinated to the malein the Fordist period, she is ‘reduced’ to an individual in the global economy.

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The informal economy is only interested in ‘her’ labour power. From aneconomic standpoint , reproductive activities are made ‘invisible’. Demands forchild care or other social services are reprivatised. Women are thus in theprocess of � nally reaching the long awaited abstract equality with men—not interms of wages, but in respect of an abstract notion of individualism that is freeat last from reproductive activities. Despite its private seclusion, the reproductivework of the Fordist period was at least socially recognised. Now, with the� exibilisation and informalisation of the labour markets, child rearing has, onceagain, become an economic and social externality.72 The dialectical relationsbetween market and non-market activities have disappeared from the neoliberaldiscourse of the global economy. As is obvious, the increasing individualisatio nof women has bene� ts as well as pitfalls. Women bene� t from labour marketintegration. However, they lose from the neoliberal focus on ‘pure’ individuali -sation. A full-scale switch from the derived rights guaranteed in the Keynesianwelfare state to labour market � exibility without social protection would lead toan ‘Americanisation’ of European social policy. Women would be made moreequal to men in this process, but only at the cost of being equally exploitedwithin the neoliberal system of global capitalism.

Notes

I thank particularly Friederike Maier for generously sharing with me her many resources on the EU andwomen. I also wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers of New Political Economy for their helpfulcomments and suggestions.1. Jill Rubery, ‘Equity and employment : complementary or competitive objectives of European policy?’,

paper presented to the IAFFE Conference, Out of the Margin, University of Amsterdam, 2–5 June 1998.2. Sylvia Walby, ‘Changes in Women’s Employment in the United Kingdom’, New Political Economy, Vol.

4, No. 2 (1999), pp. 195–213; also Walby, Gender Transformations (Routledge, 1997).3. Joanne Cook, ‘Flexible Employment : Implications for Gender and Citizenship in the European Union’,

New Political Economy, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1998), pp. 261–77.4. Ilona Ostner & Jane Lewis, ‘Gender and the evolution of European social policies’, in: Stephan Leibfried

& Paul Pierson (Eds), European Social Policy: Between Fragmentation and Integration (The BrookingsInstitution, 1995), p. 177.

5. Catherine Hoskyns, Integrating Gender: Women, Law and Politics in the European Union (Verso, 1996),p. 123.

6. Rubery, ‘Equity and employment’; also Jill Rubery, Mark Smith, Colette Fagan & Damian Grimshaw,Women and European Employment (Routledge, 1998).

7. Stephen Gill, ‘European Governance and New Constitutionalism: Economic and Monetary Union andAlternatives to Disciplinary Neoliberalism in Europe’, New Political Economy, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1998), pp.5–26.

8. Wolfgang Streeck, ‘From market making to state building? Re� ections on the political economy ofEuropean social policy’, in: Leibfried & Pierson, European Social Policy, pp. 389–431.

9. Jean Monnet, ‘A Ferment of Change’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1962), pp.203–11.

10. Gill, ‘European Governance and New Constitutionalism’, p. 5.11. Elmar Altvater & Birgit Mahnkopf, Grenzen der Globalisierung: Okonomie, Okologie und Politik in der

Weltgesellschaft (Westfalisches Dampfboot , 1996); and Gill, ‘European Governance and New Constitu-tionalism’.

12. Saskia Sassen, ‘The spatial organization of information industries: implications for the role of the state’,in: James H. Mittelman (Ed.), Globalization: Critical Re� ections (Lynne Rienner, 1997), pp. 33–52.

13. Gill, ‘European Governance and New Constitutionalism’, p. 9.

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14. Fritz W. Scharpf, ‘Negative and positive integration in the political economy of European welfare states’,in: G. Marks, F. W. Scharpf, P. C. Schmitter & W. Streeck, Governance in the European Union (Sage,1996), pp. 15–39.

15. Joachim Hirsch, Der nationale Wettbewerbsstaat (Edition Ad-Archiv, 1995).16. Bob Jessop, ‘Towards a Schumpeterian Workfare State’, Studies in Political Economy, Vol 43 (1993), pp.

7–39.17. See, for this argument, Wayne Sandholtz & John Zysman, ‘1992: Recasting the European Bargain’, World

Politics, Vol. 41, No. 1 (1989), pp. 95–128, reprinted in Brent F. Nelsen & Alexander C-G. Stubb (Eds),The European Union (Lynne Rienner, 1994), pp. 189–209.

18. Streeck, ‘From market making to state building?’.19. Cited in Sandholtz & Zysman, ‘1992’, p. 206.20. Streeck, ‘From market making to state building?’, p. 393.21. Sandholtz & Zysman, ‘1992’, p. 205.22. Scharpf, ‘Negative and positive integration in the political economy of European welfare states’, p. 15.23. See Gosta Esping-Andersen , The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Polity Press, 1990) for the division

among different European welfare states. Michel Albert also distinguishes among various kinds ofcapitalism: ‘rheinic’, ‘atlantic’ and ‘asiatic’ in Capitalisme contre Capitalisme (Editions du Seuil, 1991).

24. Streeck, ‘From market making to state building?’, p. 395.25. Although the euro was introduced by 1 January 1999, the mandatory use of notes and coins is set for the

year 2002 replacing all national currencies.26. Wim Duisenberg from Holland was chosen—after great controversy—as the � rst president of the ECB

over the French candidate, Jean-Claude Trichet, in Brussels on 4 May 1998. However, President Chiracwas able to force a compromise in that Duisenberg declared that he would step down after four years andmake room for the French candidate for the remaining four years of the Central Bank presidency. ‘Chiraczwingt Euro-Huter zum freiwilligen Rucktritt’, Die Tageszeitung, 4 May 1998, p. 1.

27. See David R. Cameron, ‘Transnational relations and the development of European economic and monetaryunion’, in: Thomas Risse-Kappen (Ed.), Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors,Domestic Structures and International Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 73–4. Empha-sis in the original.

28. Four years prior to the end of his term, Karl Otto Pohl resigned as president of the Bundesbank in 1991.Pohl disagreed strongly with the Kohl government over German uni� cation and the introduction of theGerman Economic and Monetary Union on 1 June 1990. In fact, he characterised the process as a ‘disaster’and argued that, given the economic divergence among the European countries, the consequences of EMUwould be just as disastrous as had been the case with German uni� cation. See Cameron, ‘Transnationalrelations’, p. 71.

29. The criteria to join the EMU are the following:(a) Price stability: member states need to show an average rate of in� ation that does not exceed the best

three performers by more than 1.5 per cent;(b) Exchange rate stability: countries are required to observe the ‘normal’ � uctuation bands within the

European exchange rate mechanism for at least two years;(c) Sustainability of public � nances: the public de� cit should be no more than 3 per cent of GDP; and(d) Public debt: the ratio of public debt to GDP should not exceed 60 per cent. ‘Countdown to EMU’, The

Financial Times, 25 March 1998, p. 15.30. At the urging of the German Hans Tietmeyer, President of the Bundesbank , and Theo Waigel, Germany’s

former Finance Minister, the Stability Pact was designed to accelerate debt reduction and tighten budgetarydiscipline in a post-EMU era by levying automatic penalties against members running excessive de� cits.See Paul Teague, ‘Monetary Union and Social Europe’, Journal of European Social Policy, Vol. 8, No.2 (1998), pp. 117–37.

31. Ibid., p. 120.32. Figure 1, Percentage change in real compensation and productivity per head in EU (averages for four

periods 1961–95), in: Teague, ‘Monetary Union and Social Europe’, p. 121.33. Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Neo-voluntarism: a new European social policy regime?’ in: G. Marks et al.,

Governance in the European Union, pp. 64–94. Streeck introduces the concept of neo-voluntarism tosignal that, in the absence of supranational capacity for ‘positive integration’ to create market-correctinginstruments, supranationa l social policy ‘is con� ned in its reach by its dependence on the voluntarism ofboth sovereignty-consciou s member states and interest-conscious private market participants’.

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34. Scharpf, ‘Negative and positive integration in the political economy of European welfare states’, p. 22.35. Teague, ‘Monetary Union and Social Europe’, pp. 117–37.36. Walby, ‘Changes in Women’s Employment in the United Kingdom’, p. 206.37. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Univer-

sity of Minnesota Press, 1989).38. Hoskyns, Integrating Gender, pp. 43–57, 212.39. The following relies heavily on the material covered in Ostner & Lewis, ‘Gender and the evolution of

European social policies’, pp. 169–77.40. Directives are regarded as secondary legislation according to European Community law, in contrast to an

article, such as Article 119, which belongs to EC primary legislation. Directives ‘must be justi� ed as‘means to a goal’ by reference to the treaty. Directives bind insofar as the result to be achieved isconcerned , while they leave a choice in the means employed by member states’. See Ostner & Lewis,‘Gender and the evolution of European social policies’, p. 168, footnote 31.

41. Hoskyns, Integrating Gender, p. 107.42. Ostner & Lewis, ‘Gender and the evolution of European social policies’, p. 177.43. Ibid., p. 167, footnote 25; see also Susanne Schunter-Kleemann, ‘Das Demokratiede� zit der EG und die

Verrechtlichung der Frauenfrage’, in: Susanne Schunter-Kleemann (Ed.), Herrenhaus Europa—Gaschlechterverh a ltnisse im Wohlfahrtsstaat (Edition Sigma, 1992), pp. 29–58.

44. Pauline Conroy, ‘Zehn Fragen zur Wirtschafts- und Wahrungsunion ’, paper presented to the ConferenceDer Aufbau der Gleichberechtigungsdimensione n der WWU und die Regierungskonferen z, Lisbon, 17–18February 1997, p. 2.

45. Kommission der Europaischen Gemeinschaften, Europaische Wirtschaft, Vol. 5 (1988).46. Susanne Schunter-Kleeman, ‘Die Freiheiten des Binnenmarktes und die Unfreiheiten der Frauen’,

Weibblick, July/August 1997, pp. 12–17.47. Gill, ‘European Governance and New Constitutionalism’, p. 5; and Teague, ‘Monetary Union and Social

Europe’, p. 128.48. Hiltrud Breyer, ‘Frauenpolitik in Brussel’, Weibblick, July/August 1997, pp. 8–10.49. The UK initially ‘opted out’ of the Social Charter which was adopted as a nonbinding ‘solemn declaration’

of the European Council, but, under the leadership of Tony Blair, the UK has signed on to the socialprotocol of the Maastricht Treaty.

50. Streeck, ‘Neo-voluntarism’, p. 79.51. Ibid., p. 79.52. Rubery, ‘Equity and employment’.53. Teresa Freixes Sanjuan, ‘Women in the New European Society’, Newsletter Women of Europe, No. 79

(May 1998), p. 2.54. All the quotations contained in this paragraph have been taken from ‘Points of View: Mixed Reactions to

the New EU Treaty’, Newsletter Women of Europe, No. 73 (September 1997), pp. 2–3.55. Judy Dempsey, ‘Positive action proves negative for Bremen’, The Financial Times, 18 October 1995, p.

3.56. Kalanke v. Freie Hansestadt Bremen, ECJ FC, 17 October 1995 (C-450/93); ‘Decision on sex

discrimination’, The Financial Times, 7 November 1995, p. 8.57. ‘Kalanke Ruling: Positive Action to Continue’, Newsletter Women of Europe, No. 61 (June 1996), p. 1.58. Ibid., p. 1.59. The citations are taken from the Newsletter Women of Europe, No. 73 (September 1997), pp. 2–3.60. The speci� cs to the Luxembourg Summit are covered in Jill Rubery, ‘Equity and employment ’. See also

THE BULLETIN: Internal Bulletin of the Medium-term Community Action Programme on EqualOpportunities for Women and Men, No. 3 (December 1997); and ‘Employment : New Drive to ReduceJoblessness and Tackle Gender Gaps’, Newsletter Women of Europe, No. 76 (December 1997/January1998).

61. Cited in Newsletter Women of Europe, No. 78 (March/April 1998), p. 2.62. Newsletter Women of Europe, No. 59 (April 1996), p. 3. Padraig Flynn, European Commissioner with

responsibility for Employment and Social Affairs, announced that ‘mainstreaming’ would also be includedin the Structural Funds programmes after 1999. Structural Funds programmes, according to Flynn, will beexpected to spell out how they intend to promote equality between women and men—before they obtainapproval from the European Commission. Newsletter Women of Europe, No. 78 (March/April 1998),p. 1.

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63. Susanne Schunter-Kleemann, ‘Euro-club, globalisation and gender regime’, paper presented to theInternational Conference, Gender and Markets in the Reconstruction of European Welfare States, Bremen,July 1999.

64. Newsletter Women of Europe, No. 76, p. 1.65. Rubery, Smith, Fagan & Grimshaw, Women and European Employment.66. In the EU, over 80 per cent of the estimated 21 million part-time workers are women. Against only 5 per

cent of men, 32 per cent of women now work part-time with great variance among member states(Netherlands with the highest of 69 per cent, UK with 45 per cent and Sweden 42 per cent). See NewsletterWomen of Europe, No. 76, p. 2.

67. Ibid.68. Breyer, ‘Frauenpolitik in Brussel’.69. Rubery, ‘Equity and employment’.70. Ostner & Lewis, ‘Gender and the evolution of European social policies’, p. 161.71. Streeck, ‘From market making to state building?’.72. Brigitte Young, ‘Globalization and gender: a European perspective’, in: R. M. Kelly, J. Bayes, M. E.

Hawkesworth & B.Young, Gender, Globalization and Democratization (Oxford University Press, forth-coming).

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