CLASH OF NORMS: THE LIMITS OF EU’S NORMATIVE POWER IN GENDER EQUALITY

Abstract

The European Union’s (EU) gender equality norms are an important part of the EU’s identity, as enshrined in many formal documents. The scope of the EU’s gender equality approach has been broadened by agents, including feminists, transnational advocacy groups, national women NGOs, feminists in the European Parliament, and the European women’s lobby. Despite these European-based feminist agents’ ideational contributions that challenge socially constructed gender inequalities, EU policies and acquis privilege women’s empowerment in the labor market, instead of combatting gender-based discrimination in every sphere of life. This market-based equality paradigm can also be seen in the enlargement documents of Turkey-EU relations, in which both the progress reports and the financial assistance programmes-such as IPA- prioritize women’s economic independence as a solution for altering socially-constructed gender roles in Turkey. Even though-in feminist understanding-women’s empowerment within the context of labor market approachlacks a conceptualization of gender equality as ahuman right, this paper aims to analyze the degree of EU’s norm promoter role through transference diffusion in the female labor market participation. It is argued that due to the public institutions’ entrenched resistance and the lack of consent at the local level for ideational change; the EU-driven norm clashes with the local realities of Turkey and this challenges the EU’s potential normative power in terms of human rights norm promotion