Language-bargaining in the Council of the European Union: meaning negotiations and the concept of gender equality

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ABSTRACT How do states negotiate meaning? Building on the empirical case of the contestation of the term ‘gender equality’ in the Council of the European Union, I show that the scholarship has so far lacked precise tools for analysing negotiation over meaning. This gap is surprising given how ubiquitous and politically consequential are negotiations over definitions in the European Union and other international loci. Because of assumed contradiction between constructivism and bargaining in the EU literature, bargaining over language has not received enough scholarly attention. In this article, I propose an analytical framework for studying intentional meaning-making through negotiations and I introduce concepts of language-solving and language-bargaining. I show how the meaning ascribed to the term ‘gender equality’ in the EU is a result of language-bargaining between nationally-located understandings represented by EU member states. The negotiations led first to the open meaning of the term between 1990s and 2010s and then, following ‘gender crisis’, an explicit agreement by member states to attribute diverging meanings to the term ‘gender equality’ since 2021. The analysis shows the importance of partial separation of national processes of meaning-making for international negotiations.