The “White Paper on the Future of Europe” published in March 2017 by the European Commission provides five scenarios for the EU by 2025 and Commission president Juncker recently added his personal sixth scenario. When designing the future of European integration over the last decades, promoting equal opportunities between women and men, gender equality and anti-discrimination seldom played a core role for revising the treaties. There seems to occur a pattern of negligent neglect when it comes to putting substance to one of the – according to all European institutions – "founding values of the EU" – gender+ equality. Todays various crisis of the EU such as Brexit, financial and debt crisis, and the so called refugee crisis illustrate the massive legitimacy crisis the EU is facing. The perceived lack of attention to the needs of European citizens has fuelled the rise of populist eurosceptic parties. One would expect that the EU tackles this situation by addressing head on core values and putting them first in their visions on “the Future of Europe” as laid out in the White Paper. We claim that the six scenarios imply different outcomes and prospects for gender equality policies that are not addressed at all – neither in the White Paper nor in Juncker’s statement.
We take the White Paper as the serious basis for future discussions of the direction of EU integration. As the scenarios even imply changes to EU primary law, assessing the possible impact of changes on gender equality is not simply a mental game. Legal studies and studies on new governance in general found that formal texts are required to ensure any kind of implementation; in other words – what is not legally fixed will most likely not happen.
Indeed, silencing the topic does not mean that there will be no impact. Not only the social dimension, which is the one with probably the most implications for gender equality, is included in the White Paper, but in addition all scenarios will also shape the way in which gender equality policy can be promoted, designed and implemented – with huge impact on our future European society. In this paper, we ask 1) what role gender equality and gender mainstreaming plays in the six scenarios and 2) what – given the history of EU gender equality policy - the likely impact of the six scenarios for gender equality policy would be. The paper carries out a (hypothetical) Gender Impact Assessment (GIA) of the "White Paper on the Future of Europe" – as obviously the European Commission missed to carry out one. With the analysis, the paper contributes to evaluating the status of gender mainstreaming and gender equality more generally in EU macro-politics and EU integration as a political project.
