Swimming against the Tide: Contested Norms and Antidiscrimination Advocacy in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The EU was a late bloomer where antidiscrimination legislation was con cerned. The development of Community law regarding non-discrimination and equal opportunities came as a side-effect to the expansion of the Common Market and thus as part of an essentially economic agenda to eradicate different discriminatory practices limiting fair competition among the member states. Initially, much of this legislation focussed on gender discrimination. Only in the mid-1990s did a movement take shape in the EU — largely pushed by the European Parliament and NGOs — to expand EU competences into other areas of discrimination. The result was the inclusion of Article 13 in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, providing a legal basis for antidiscrimination legislation in a range of areas, including racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, age, disability, and sexual orientation. Since 2000, equal treatment has been an integral part of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which led to the adoption of two far-reaching antidiscrimination directives: Directive 2000/43/EC prohibits discrimination on the basis of ethnic and racial origin, while Directive 2000/78/EC is a framework directive for equal treatment in employment and occupation (see also Lombardo and Bustelo’s Chapter 6). Both are important steps towards the common space with common rights that was envisioned in the EU’s Lisbon agenda (Bell, 2008).

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Earlier drafts of this chapter were presented at the CONNEX Final Conference in Mannheim (March 2008) and at the National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Philadelphia (November 2008). Helpful comments received from Ron Holzhacker, Umut Korkut, Raphael Koesters, Hans-Jörg Trenz, and especially from the two editors of this volume, Emanuela Lombardo and Maxime Forest, are thankfully acknowledged.