Sidestepping Lethal Antisemitism – The EU's Response in the Aftermath of Terror

Introduction: In 2014, the European Commissioner's former president (José Manuel Barroso) refuted suggestions that Europe's Jewish communities had no future; he maintained that European values are incompatible with antisemitism and insisted Europe's integration is an antidote against it. His remarks were in tribute to the four people murdered by a French jihadist at the Brussels Jewish Museum, an attack he characterized as “a wound to the heart of the European Union.”1 Since the additional slayings of Jews in 2015, that wound has deepened. Barroso's faith in European values and the EU's ability to condemn antisemitism seems misplaced. For instance, shortly after the slaughters at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, the EU's culture ministers issued a unanimous condemnation of the "intolerance and ignorance" that led to the "senseless barbarity" of the Charlie Hebdo murders and omitted mention of those Jews who were murdered for simply being Jews

The European Union and Violence Against Women: Fundamental Rights and Con Games

Deciphering the European Union’s (EU) commitment to countering violence against women is challenging. To date, much of its response has been rhetorical. This article opens with a brief consideration of the EU’s first few initiatives to counter violence against women before turning to the polity’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Council of Europe’s 2011 Istanbul Convention, which defines such violence as a human rights violation. Not least, it offers a critical analysis of the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency’s 2014 survey on violence against women, the world’s largest international survey of its kind. That inquiry involved 42,000 in-person interviews with a representative sample of approximately 1,500 women (aged 18-74) across all of the EU’s then 28 Member States. After examining the Agency’s survey and its subsequent report in the context of those efforts that preceded it, the article suggests the EU’s rhetoric and related programs for women may conceal the more controversial manifestations of the violence directed at them. For example, the Agency’s survey excluded female genital mutilation from the rubric of violence against women. One finds a similar reluctance on the part of the Agency and other institutional actors across the EU to address the eroticized commodification of violence in prostitution and pornography that pervade the polity’s common market. Despite the EU’s occasional pronouncements to the contrary, it appears violence against women is a human rights violation that the polity deliberately circumscribes and perfunctorily condemns

The European Union, Antisemitism, and the Politics of Denial

Copublished with the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, this study asks if the European Union (EU) has the capacity or the will to counter antisemitism. The desire to counter antisemitism was a significant impetus toward the formation of the EU in the twentieth century and now prejudice against Jews threatens to subvert that goal in the twenty-first. The European Union, Antisemitism, and the Politics of Denial offers an overview of the circumstances that obliged European political institutions to take action against antisemitism and considers the effectiveness of these interventions by considering two seemingly dissimilar EU states, Austria and Sweden. This examination of the European Union’s strategy for countering antisemitism discloses escalating prejudice within the EU in the aftermath of 9/11. R. Amy Elman contends that Europe’s political actors have responded to the challenge and provocation of antisemitism with only sporadic rhetoric and inconsistent commitment; this halfhearted strategy for countering anti-Semitism exacerbates skepticism toward EU institutions and their commitment to equality and justice. This exposition of the insipid character of the EU’s response simultaneously suggests alternatives that might mitigate the subtle and potentially devastating creep of antisemitism in Europe. The author offers a new approach insofar as scholarly considerations of the EU’s attempts to combat racism rarely focus on antisemitism, while scholarship on antisemitism rarely considers the political context of the European Union

Progressive Europe? Gender and Non-discrimination in the EU

[Introduction by series editor]. THE ISSUE OF EQUAL RIGHTS between women and men—at least in the workplace—has long been one of the most prominent examples of "positive integration" in the European Union, and arguably the most far-reaching element of EU social policy. In recent years, the EU’s traditional emphasis on sex equality in the workplace has been supplemented by a commitment to the "mainstreaming" of gender issues, the upgrading of sexual equality as a common objective in the Treaties, and the insertion of a new Treaty provision relating to the principle of nondiscrimination more generally. These and other developments have led some authors to present the EU as a "progressive polity" in its commitment to gender equality and non-discrimination. In this Forum, four authors assess this claim of a "progressive Europe," focusing on the evolution of EU gender policy (Sonia Mazey, Jo Shaw, R. Amy Elman) and the development of a broader policy regarding non-discrimination on the basis of factors such as race, age, and sexual orientation (Mark Bell). Taken together, the essays reveal the impressive legal and constitutional foundations of EU gender and non-discrimination policies, as well as the significant weaknesses of EU policy practice, the problematic relationship between gender and other grounds for discrimination such as race and age, and the difficulty of measuring what constitutes "progress" in the first place

“The Domestication of Equality: Gays, Lesbians and EU ‘Family’ Rights”

While feminism sparked the systematic politicization of personal relations that exposed the family as patriarchy’s chief institution, liberalism afforded comforting illusions of exceptionalism that encouraged us to believe that the egalitarian families, which eluded our foremothers, were ours for the making. This paper focuses on those living on the margins of this institution within the European Union and contends that the politics of integration affirms neither the insights of feminists nor the aspirations of liberals with regard to the family, particularly for lesbians and gays

"Historicizing EU equality policy: Is hindsight 20/20?"

This conference paper offers details that undermine the common assumption that EU policies emanate from enlightened foresight and/or coherent planning. To this end, it explores the relatively recent interest in Eurocrats in violence against women, an issue that few previously expected the EU to address. This paper suggests that while European Commissioners, judges, activists and others are important political actors, they are hardly fundamental architects (or obstructionists) of sexual equality. This distinction, though modest, recommends that we see a more tenuous relationship between the past and present. In short, for all of our efforts to comprehend social change, a brief look at the issue of male violence underscores the way in which policy development is a serendipitous process with unintended and often misunderstood consequences