Lisbon and Beyond: A Policy in Crisis

Abstract

Litotes, understatement used for deliberate effect as in the quote above, is perhaps the rhetorical tool best suited to describing the most recent transformations in European public action on gender equality, marked as they are by the impact of the economic and political crises that have hit the EU since the end of the 2000s. Beyond the accuracy of rhetorical figures, this policy has indeed found itself confronted with the effects of this period of austerity and with what Peter Gourevitch (1986) called ‘politics in hard times’. In these ‘hard times’, the canons of European gender equality policy, such as they were conceived and established in the 1980s, have tended to be progressively eroded over the years. Gender equality policy has taken a subsidiary form, concentrating on specific legal instruments and on more sporadic and more targeted activities. Undergoing a process of dismantling, the question that remains is whether this policy will be reborn in another form, or whether it will disappear entirely in the years to come.