Giving up Europe as a reference point? A feminist and decolonial approach to the EU Influence Mechanisms

This paper offers a feminist and decolonial reading of the EU’s influence mechanisms of conditionality and social learning, conceptualised as “Europeanisation”, as applied to gender equality policies. We challenge the epistemic positioning on which these mechanisms are built on and the fact that gender equality is attributed to the to the ownership of “the EU” as a black box without considering informed consent and representation of the communities that has contributed to the creation of the norm of gender equality. Our paper engages with two questions. First is related to the issues of legitimacy and consent and we ask how gender equality policies legislated through the EU’s influence mechanisms include voices of different epistemic subjects. Secondly, we question depoliticising and dehistoricising the colonial history and structures of Europe and highlight that failing to recognise these have had lingering effects on subaltern voices. The paper locates epistemic power in the centre of these discussions to show how the EU’s influence mechanisms remain oblivious to the colonial, parochial and exclusionary discourses, and structures, as well as the identity-based epistemic judgements (such as seeing the women in third countries as entities to be saved and liberated). The first question engages with the EU’s influence mechanisms and the ways in which “the EU”s values are constructed whereas the second question engages with the rationale on which these values and mechanism are exported, negotiated and practiced. Drawing on our feminist critique of the Europeanisation process (Cin and Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm -Chapter 4), we also bring the debates of decoloniality into this feminist critique to challenge canonised knowledge. The feminist politics of decolonial conversation we embark in this paper in envisioning an epistemically more inclusive process with a focus on three principles: opening epistemic spaces for the less trained and heard voices and praxis of living; epistemic reconstitution of knowledge claim and authority; and forming epistemic institutions and communities. We place colonial relations and matrix of power at the centre of the processes stemming from patriarchal and racial privilege as we argue how feminist decoloniality can be embedded to challenge the ways in which the so-called “Europeanisation” process silences and objectified and colonised epistemic agents.