Constructing Supranational Political Spaces: The European Union, Eastern Enlargement and Women's Agency

Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Brunswick NJ

Investigators

Abstract

This research project will contribute to the understanding of the ways in which political spaces are constructed and of the role that participation of groups traditionally marginalized plays in this process. It argues that the recognition of the existence of a new world order and of new political spaces, located beyond the nation-state, requires us to see political actions as involving a multi-layered web of interactions, originating and being articulated simultaneously from different sites across a variety of scales. The research will question the notion of politics as spatially bounded and political space fixed and it will show that a more adequate notion of scale requires the recognition of new forms of political action and an expansion of the meaning of "political subject." The European Union (EU), as an institution operating at the supranational scale, and the process of the EU's eastern enlargement will be used to explore the ways in which women in two accession countries, the Czech Republic and Poland, have engaged as political actors in the construction of supranational political space. Particular attention will be given both to the restrictions on what women can do (through an analysis of constraints such as the lack of political culture, legacies of socialist uneven development, the limitations of the EU's primarily economic focus, and institutional rhetorical restrictions), and to what women do succeed in doing, as a result of the new opportunities that have been created by globalizing tendencies and by the post-1989 transformations. Through an empirical and institutional analysis of processes, actions, and responses by women in the matter of the EU and of two different states, this research will provide an account of the ways in which women's political participation is mobilized and competing interests are negotiated in the process of constructing political space. This cross-national study will apply a multi-method approach and will be divided into four stages, (to be carried out simultaneously in the two countries: 1) textual analysis of documents reflecting preparation for the EU accession, with special attention to a gender analysis of the EU discourses of eastern enlargement; 2) data collection, through approximately 150 individual and 12 focus group interviews with women's NGOs, national politicians and policy-makers in each of the study countries, EU representatives and EU related women's NGOs in Brussels; 3) textual analysis of empirical data using ATLAS ti, a computer program for the qualitative analysis of non-numerical and unstructured data, and 4) final comparative analysis and theory construction, based upon the findings of the first three stages. Through an empirical and institutional analysis of processes, actions, and responses by women in the matter of the EU and of two different states, this research will provide an account of the ways in which women's political participation is mobilized and competing interests are negotiated in the process of constructing political space. In particular this project will: 1) produce the first extensive examination of discourses on eastern enlargement and gender and will provide an understanding of the ways in which women activists, state politicians, and EU representatives use and rework EU and gender discourse as a means of advancing their goals and formulating political agendas across various scales (supranational, national, local, individual); 2) develop an understanding of the ways in which women understand politics and their political activities; of how they mobilize, voice their interests, and construct their identities beyond the nation-state, and of how these identities translate into the mobilizing practices across various scales, and 3) have broader implications insofar as it reveals the intricacies of EU negotiations. The results of the research will be publicly available, and this research will in that way increase public awareness and stimulate gender debates regarding the benefits and costs of the EU eastern enlargement for groups socially and politically marginalized.