Queering Brexit: what’s in Brexit for sexual and gender minorities?

On 24 June 2016, many people had the feeling that they had gone to bed the night before in the United Kingdom and had woken up in Little Britain – a country prone to isolationism and protectionism, risking hurting its economic and social development for the sake of imperial nostalgia and moral panic about ‘loss of sovereignty’ and ‘mass migration’. That feeling inevitably affected many individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, queer and other (LGBTIQ+). Although the possible impact of Brexit seems to have been scrutinised from most angles, there has been limited analysis of how it may affect LGBTIQ+ individuals. This contribution assesses Brexit in relation to the situation of LGBTIQ+ individuals. This is particularly timely in the light of the recent UK Supreme Court decision in Walker v Innospec Limited, where the Court relied on European Union (EU) law to hold a provision of the Equality Act 2010 unlawful for violating pension rights of same-sex couples

"The EU as an international negotiator"

In this paper we want to problematize this conventional view of the EU as a reactive, conservative international negotiator. We argue that the EU's structural features need not always result in a disadvantage for the Union in international negotiations. We also content that EU negotiation behavior to a large extent depends on contextual factors. Are negotiations symmetrical or asymmetrical? Are the intentions of the EU shams quo-oriented or change¬-oriented? All these negotiation-specific factors determine what bargaining pattern we expect to find. In addition to the EU's structural features (actor level characteristics) and the negotiation situation (interaction level characteristics), we also ask if the changing nature and character of international negotiations in general (at the systems level) may also begin to impact on the conventional view of EU as a passive and inflexible negotiator