Understanding the European Union as a Global Gender Actor: The Holistic Intersectional and Inclusive Study of Gender+ in External Actions

899345PSW0010.1177/1478929919899345Political Studies ReviewDebusscher and Manners
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Special Issue Article
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(3) 542 –557
Understanding the European
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Union as a Global Gender
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919899345
DOI: 10.1177/1478929919899345
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Actor: The Holistic
Intersectional and Inclusive
Study of Gender+ in
External Actions
Petra Debusscher1 and Ian Manners2
Abstract
This article assesses the study of gender equality policies in European Union external actions with
a focus on the theoretical and empirical routes to understanding the field in times of crises. It
argues that the emerging body of literature on gender in European Union external relations makes
it possible to explain, understand, and judge the European Union in global politics by rethinking
the nature of power from a gender perspective. The article then argues that to develop gender
and European Union external relations in its next decade, it is necessary to rethink the study of
the European Union as a global gender actor. This encompasses a reassessment of the ‘European
Union’, ‘gender’, and the ‘global’, as well as the development of a holistic macro-, meso-, and
micro-analysis. The article concludes by proposing a distinctive theoretical and methodological
approach which involves a holistic intersectional and inclusive study of gender+ in European
Union external actions.
Keywords
European Union, gender, external actions, intersectional, inclusive
Accepted: 11 December 2019
Introduction: Gender in the European Union’s External
Actions
The European Union (EU) stands out among regional organisations in its early support,
and treaty-based mainstreaming, of the goal of gender equality (Chaban et al, 2017).
Gender equality is at the core of European values and is enshrined within the EU’s legal
and political framework. The EU aims to be at ‘the forefront of the protection, fulfilment
1University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
2University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Corresponding author:
Ian Manners, University of Copenhagen, DK-1017 Copenhagen, Denmark.
Email: ima@ifs.ku.dk

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and the enjoyment of human rights by women and girls and strongly promotes them in all
external relations’, in ‘developing, enlargement and neighbourhood countries, including
in fragile, conflict and emergency situations’ (Council of the EU, 2015: 2 and 8). Despite
the fact that external policy is one of the oldest policy areas where the EU has advanced
gender mainstreaming, scholars have not yet systematically attempted to analyse gender
equality across the whole of the EU’s external actions. External relations scholarship
studying gender equality generally focusses on only one area such as development policy,
trade policy, or neighbourhood policy. The Gender Action Plan (GAP II) for Gender
Equality and Women’s Empowerment: Transforming the Lives of Girls and Women
through EU External Relations (2016–2020) announced by the Commission and the
European External Action Service (EEAS) in September 2015 suggests that a more holis-
tic approach to studying gender equality in EU external actions is appropriate.
As Muehlenhoff et al. (submitted) have set out, the promotion of gender equality in EU
external relations in times of crisis provides the current context for understanding the EU
as a global gender actor. These crises have escalated since the end of the Cold War and the
triumphalism of neoliberal ideology, but in the twenty-first century there are a series of
intertwined crises for the EU linking economic, social, conflictual, environmental and
political spheres (Lynggaard et al., 2015: 15; Manners and Rosamond, 2018: 28; Manners
and Whitman, 2016: 3, 10).
The crises of neoliberalism, transnational capital, global financial crises and Eurozone
sovereign debt drive the other crises and increasingly sideline the goals of (gender) equal-
ity inside and outside the EU (Rubery, 2015; Walby, 2015). These crises have simultane-
ously heightened social inequalities driven by ideological austerity in Euro and non-Euro
countries such as Greece and the UK, making effective policies for addressing the roots,
branches and fallout of the ongoing refugee crisis almost impossible to achieve (Kennet,
2017). At the same time, the resurgence of nineteenth-century imperialisms, multipolarity
and the rise of nationalist populism currently manifested in Putin’s Russia, Erdoğan’s
Turkey, Xi’s China, Modi’s India, Trump’s USA, and Bolsonaro’s Brazil, together with
the return of the far-right to European politics, have created an extremely hostile environ-
ment for gender equality advocates. The combination of Eurozone economic and social
problems such as austerity in Greece and high levels of unemployment during the 2010s,
together with the 2015 refugee crisis, feeds support for far-right movements, parties and
governments across the EU. As Sylvia Walby (2018a, 2018b) has argued, these crises
have significant consequences for gender equality within the EU, including the question
of the ‘gender regime’ and the potential relationship between the far-right and gender
violence. The ecological crisis is the long-term result of the failure to address environ-
mental crises of unsustainable consumption, life-threatening pollution, the sixth mass
extinction of biodiversity, and the climate crisis consequences for life on earth. It is
already clear that environmental crises have significant gendered consequences, while at
the same time EU responses to climate change tend to displace gender equality policies
(Buckingham and Le Masson, 2017).
While it is clear that all of these crises are linked together, what is less clear is what they
do to EU gender equality promotion. In the introduction, Muehlenhoff et al. (submitted)
suggest that crises may provide windows of opportunity for putting gender equality on the
agenda, as several key planning documents such as the EU GAP and the Global Strategy
have done (see also Abels and MacRae, 2020). However, it is also clear that crises are also
a key feature of ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein, 2007) where the economic shock doctrine and
ideological austerity are used to subvert democracy and suppress progressive political

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agenda. As the contributions by Allwood (2019) and Hoijtink and Muehlenhoff (2019)
make clear, EU crises have tended to promote the securitisation of the migration–security–
climate change nexus and masculated Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), at
the expense of gender equality. Hence, our discussion of EU crises must take account of
the holistic nature of the crises, must interrogate how crises affect different intersectionali-
ties differently, and must advocate more inclusive approaches to addressing the effects of
EU crises on gender equality (see also Slootmaeckers, 2019).
In what follows, we analyse the scholarship on gender in EU external relations and
argue it is necessary to rethink the study of the EU as a global gender actor. The aim of
this article is to critically assess the literature’s strengths, difficulties, and contradictions
and set out three ways of further developing this scholarship in its second decade, involv-
ing a reassessment of the ‘EU’, ‘gender’, and the ‘global’. The article proceeds in three
parts. In the first section, we review the literature on EU gender and external policy and
outline three methodological limitations. In the second theoretical section, we explore
the main theoretical dilemmas that underlie these methodological limitations and the
study of gender equality in EU external relations in general. In the third section, we build
on these findings to propose a reassessment of the ‘EU’, ‘gender’, and the ‘global’ and
set out a distinctive theoretical and methodological approach to study gender equality in
EU external actions.
The article engages with Muehlenhoff et al.’s (submitted) research questions by utilis-
ing the tripartite analytical framework of the normative power approach (NPA) based on
the principles of EU external actions, how these principles shape external actions, and
what impact these principles and actions have on gender equality (Manners, 2008: 47,
2018: 330). The construction and identification of the previously discussed crises on the
principle of gender equality in EU external actions are addressed in the macro-approach
of section ‘Reassessing the global’. The responses and proposed actions to these crises
are considered in the meso-characterisation of the EU in section ‘Reassessing the EU’.
Finally, the impact of the crises on principles and actions of gender equality are analysed
in the micro-level analysis in section ‘Reassessing gender’.
State of the Art: Somewhere, Not Everywhere
Scholarship on gender equality in EU external actions has become a vibrant field that
produces timely research on policies of development, enlargement, trade, peace, security
and defence, conflict, and climate crisis. While feminist work on internal EU policies has
a long history, feminist scholarship on EU external relations as a distinct and established
field of study is a somewhat newer field (see Šimáková, 2018). Scholarship on gender
equality policies in EU external relations is located at the crossroads of feminist politics
and policy studies, international...