The European Union, courtesy of Orbán's Fidesz and Kaczyński's Law & Justice, is supposedly experiencing a crisis of values. This article points to two fatal errors in the design of EU values: ambiguity and practical unenforceability. Politicians can exploit these flaws by interpreting ambiguous values in self-serving ways. Based on an analysis of the Hungarian Prime Minister's speeches, it shows that descriptions of Orbán as an unrepentant challenger of EU values miss the mark. Instead, Orbán used the plasticity of EU values to style himself as a pro-European statesman, ready to steer the Union back to its moral roots.
As the number of European countries that recognise same-sex unions increases, so does the number of countries that resists this institution. This trend runs counter to the conventional wisdom, which links anti-LGBTI policies to domestic demands and developments. Instead, this paper argues that political homophobia needs to be situated within an international context. Using the Slovak case as a plausibility probe, the article shows that the bans on same-sex marriage were adopted as a precautionary measure: worried by the growing support for LGBTI rights elsewhere in Europe, conservative lawmakers feared that their traditional family values would come under threat.
This article asks why sexual orientation was included in the anti-discrimination clause of the Treaty of Amsterdam (Article 13) in the absence of active support within the Council of Ministers and even though few Member States had established it as protected ground prior to the intergovernmental conference. A detailed historical analysis reveals how the European Parliament (EP) gradually developed into the hub of a transnational advocacy network that promoted gay rights to the European Commission and the Council. The dynamics of the intergovernmental conference enabled the EP to introduce sexual orientation into the treaty-making process, while the use of naming-and-shaming tactics vis-à-vis the Dutch Presidency secured the ground's final inclusion. This political history has theoretical implications since it presents a challenge to extant liberal intergovernmentalist and institutionalist analyses of the Amsterdam Treaty and suggests that the EP should be afforded more attention by neofunctionalist scholars.
This paper will evaluate the extent to which the European Union (EU) manifests the ability to act as, and possesses the potential to develop into, a norm-setting bureaucracy in its external relations when it comes to the protection and promotion of sexual minority rights. In order to examine this, an overview of the theoretical notion of Normative Power Europe, as developed by Ian Manners, is offered. This is followed by an evaluation of the EU’s international identity regarding LGBT rights. Ultimately it is concluded that the ability of the EU to shape international norms and values concerning this policy issue is severely undercut by a set of internal, institutional and conceptual inconsistencies. Only by overcoming this confliction and inconsonance can the EU develop into a full-fledged, credible and effective normative power in the case of sexual minority rights. It is concluded that the recently launched LGBT toolkit could constitute an important step in this direction.
European Union values such as human dignity and non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation are enshrined in treaties and therefore not subject to discussion. However, because the European Union does not have the tools for defining or enforcing its values, the Religious Right can exploit this ambiguity through strategic framing and norm contestation. I show how this played out for European Citizens’ Initiatives on sexual and reproductive health and rights (‘One of Us’) and marriage and the family (‘Mum, Dad & Kids’). The petitioners pursued traditionally conservative goals, yet relied on technical, rather than moral or religious, arguments.
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