Stumbling into Experimentalism: The EU Anti-Discrimination Regime

Stumbling into Experimentalism: The EU Anti-Discrimination Regime

Description

EU anti-discrimination law originated in a single provision on equal pay between men and women, which was included in the 1957 EEC Treaty largely to allay French fears of wage competition from states without equal pay laws (Barnard 1996). Since then EU anti-discrimination law has broadened and grown considerably, to include a whole range of grounds other than sex, and contexts other than pay and employment. This chapter focuses on the transformation of EU anti-discrimination law over time, but its emphasis is not so much on its transformation in terms of the expansion beyond sex and gender equality, or beyond the employment context. Instead it is on the way in which EU anti-discrimination law has evolved as a distinctive governance regime, which I describe as stumbling into experimentalism. I use the metaphor of stumbling because, as will be explained in more detail later, there was in the shaping of the regime no apparent political commitment to create any form of experimentalist or reflexive governance in this field, nor any apparent awareness then or now on the part of participants in the system of the merits of such a regime. Indeed, it appears from interviews carried out for this chapter 1 that many of the actors who participate in the EU anti-discrimination regime maintain a fairly conventional understanding of their role as the provision and promotion of information about uniform norms to be defined by central authoritative institutions, even as they are beginning to develop and to share problem-solving practices amongst themselves and across some of the newly established networks.

Source Publication

Experimentalist Governance in the European Union: Towards a New Architecture

Source Editors/Authors

Charles F. Sabel, Jonathan Zeitlin

Publication Date

2010

Stumbling into Experimentalism: The EU Anti-Discrimination Regime

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