European Integration and Disintegration

Feminist Perspectives on Inequalities and Social Justice

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6282401
AutoresEnzo Lombardo (0000-0001-7644-6891, autor de correspondencia), Emanuela Lombardo (Departamento de Ciencia Política y Administración; Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas Universidad Complutense de Madrid Madrid), Johanna Kantola (0000-0001-6214-1640, Tampere University Tampere)
Año2019
Volumen57
NúmeroS1
Páginas62-76
Fecha de publicación2019-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJCMS Journal of Common Market Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-9886 • E-ISSN: 1468-5965
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/jcms.12949
OpenAlexW2982458416
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas44

European integration and disintegration: Feminist perspectives on inequalities and social justiceThe year 2018 marked the tenth anniversary of unprecedented challenges to the European integration processes.Beginning in 2008 the global financial crisis, which later turned into a Eurocrisis, started a chain of events that shook the process of European integration.From Brexit to the rise of European populist parties, and attacks to democracy in member states such as Hungary and Poland, each ensuing development suggests a move towards European disintegration.At the same time, the EU sought to reply to these challenges by strengthening integration is some areas.The EU established new mechanisms of economic governance, moving decision-making power away from member states and the European Parliament, to new undemocratic actors.A stronger social dimension was debated too as evidenced by the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR).In many ways, 2018 is the year when the European disintegration as a process enters mainstream discourse and thinking.The juxtaposition of deeper integration in some areas, coupled with less democratic forms of governance, can be understood also as part of this balancing between integration and disintegration that is at the very core of the year under examination here.Scholarly debates about the European crisis are marked by contestation about whether we can speak of disintegration, and how to identify the phenomenon (see Rittberger and Blauberger, 2018).In this article, we ask what insights feminist political analysis can bring to these contradictory processes of integration and disintegration and how we theorise these competing processes.We argue that feminist political analysis shows that mainstreaming gender as a core analytical category of European integration theory becomes a litmus test for the whole integration process.It is an indicator of the democratic health of the Union.Scrutinizing real-world challenges to European integration from an intersectional gender perspective reveals that when gender equality is dismantled, attacked or marginalised in the EU, it is not just one tiny slice of social and political reality that is affected, but the democratic character of whole integration process is at stake.We apply a five-fold analytical framework of gender (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017a; 2017b) to selected key challenges to European integration to illuminate these questions and the significance of different gender perspectives for understanding European integration (EI).We suggest that of our five feminist approaches, which we have termed (i) women, (ii) gender, (iii) deconstruction, (iv

Art · Genealogy · Humanities · Gender Politics and Representation · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Social Policy and Reform Studies