Ever Closer (Discursive) Union or Separate Lifeworlds? International Language Games and the Meaning of Gender Equality in the European Union

In 2020, Poland and Hungary (occasionally joined by Bulgaria and Slovakia started a sudden opposition to the use of the term “gender equality” in Council of the EU documents. After a period of contestation the dispute has been solved by Polish and Hungarian standing interpretative declaration stating that the term means "equality between men and women" for these two countries. By studying this dispute, including through interviews with member states' negotiators, I show that they do not have a shared understanding of what "gender" means and what the term should/should not be used by the EU. As a case of international terminological dispute, it reveals that the literature on the Council of the EU lacks theoretical tools. The negotiation of terms cannot be accurately described with the concepts such as 'interest', 'cost', 'benefit', 'bargaining' or 'problem-solving'. At the same time the standard concepts of discourse analysis, e.g., 'empty signifier', also does not adequately represent the object of study as it presupposes uniformity of the studied discourse. I therefore propose to study the negotiation as a case of international language games (Wigen 2018), where the supranational discourse needs to be negotiated between separated national discourses, usually conducted in different languages, with its unique clusters of connotations and referents. The research shows that the fact that 'gender' functions differently in national discourses (e.g., closeness of the term with adjacent terms like 'sex' and 'gender identity') has a bearing on what 'gender' becomes at the EU level. The paper opens the way into the study of interlingual discursiveness at the EU level, discussing the often forgotten separateness of lifeworlds in Europe.