European Integration and the Politics of Scale. a Gender Perspective

Democracy, size and scale have a tight but rather unresolved relationship. Space and location are not innocent with respect to structures of power and domination, and hence for gender relations and gender equality politics. We argue that issues of size and scale are important dimensions, which might shed light on gendered dimensions of EU integration, EU politics and policies. Creating size and scale, hence might be an instrument to institutionalize gendered power relations by disempowering women and women’s groups: Jumping scales, re-locating spaces of decision-making, expanding or narrowing down spaces of politics might challenge and dis-encourage people’s participation in politics. On the other hand scaling and size might also create empowering structures for women’s politics – as the feminist literature on federalism has shown. Feminist theory building has emphasized that state and supra-state government is not external to citizens’ lives, but is lived through various political, social and cultural experiences. How citizens experience European integration in their daily lives thus needs to be reflected in any integration theory and refers back to evidence of scaling. Hence, we consider developing a feminist theory of scale and size an important contribution to a critical feminist theory of EU integration. This paper wants to contribute to the studies and theories on EU integration the dimension of size and scale by referring to feminist standpoint theories as well as critical feminist geography.