From the point of view of social movement theory, ENAR (European Network against Racism) is a strange creature. Being an outcome of the European Year against Racism celebrated in 1997, ENAR was created in 1998 explicitly as an interlocutor with the European Commission in terms of its consultative functions. Consequently, much like European Women´s Lobby (EWL) or ILGA-Europe, ENAR may be regarded as an EU lobby organisation or – conversely – as an example of a transnational social movement advancing the interests of a wide and geographically dispersed constituency. This means that the organisation has to straddle potentially opposing expectations for its mode of operation: on the one hand, the need for professionalised lobbying and creating policy input; on the other hand, expectations and traditions for broad (sometimes street based) social protests, historically embraced by some of the member organisations which in several cases outdate ENAR itself by decades.
This paper reviews ENAR’s history right from its inception in 1998 and the context in which it was established, and up to its recent organisational changes, which may in some ways be seen as an expression of an ever increasing need for creating a professionalised lobby organisation with the ability to respond quickly to new policy developments. Furthermore, against the backdrop of discussions about intersectionality, the paper further investigates ENAR´s attention to and ability to integrate questions of for example gender, sexuality or age in their policy input, given the potentially rigid compartmentalisation of discrimination strands set up within the Commission´s system of civil society consultations. Overall, the paper aims to assess ENAR´s position as potentially hemmed in between 1) the Commission vs. member organisations’ expectations for its modus operandi and 2) attention to intersectional discrimination vs. potential compartmentalisation within the Commission.
