The potential of EU legislation to address gender inequalities is considerable. In recent years, several EU Directives have been adopted to prevent and combat violence against women, promote a more equitable distribution of caregiving responsibilities between parents, encourage gender-balanced decision-making in companies, and strengthen the enforcement of equal pay for equal work. However, strong disagreements within the Council have limited the extent of policy change. This paper investigates the relative influence of member states and EU institutions on gender equality legislation, and examines the factors accounting for variation in preference attainment. The analysis draws on a new dataset capturing member states’ preferences across 18 contested issues within four recent gender equality dossiers. The findings reveal an uneven distribution of bargaining success that cannot be explained by countries’ power resources. Across the cases examined, the Council generally favored maintaining the status quo, while the European Parliament played a crucial role in steering outcomes toward policy change. These insights enhance our understanding of the EU’s capacity to address socio-economic inequalities and the prospects for further European integration in related policy domains.

For many years, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU, the Court) has been portrayed as a motor of European integration. However, the scholarship on the Court’s impact on integration in the area of social policy is rather divided. Many have highlighted the detrimental effects of “negative integration” on national social systems, whereas others have praised the Court’s progressive stance in anti-discrimination matters. These accounts focus on the CJEU’s application of EU social legislation. However, the EU also deploys coordination processes and soft law-based governance to shape employment and social policy in the EU. This makes the CJEU’s influence on EU social policy even more complex.

This paper explores the Court’s engagement with the European Semester and its predecessors, the open method of coordination (OMC) and the Luxembourg process.^[1] This will be done by analysing case law and Advocate General (AG) opinions. The selection of cases is based on a keyword search in the Court’s official databases (InfoCuria and EUR-lex). In this keyword search, I included the titles of guiding documents and of soft law documents that are produced through these policy coordination processes.

In chapter I, I will give an overview of the literature that inspired this endeavour, notably discussing the EU’s “social deficit” and how its critique applies to policy coordination processes. The second chapter gives an overview of how the Court’s impact on social policy has been discussed in the literature so far. In chapter III, I will present four Court cases and elaborate on the impact of policy coordination mechanisms and the objectives set out therein, on the legal reasoning of the Court. From this analysis, I derive the need to explore further the Court’s policy-making role in relation to policy coordination processes.

Union citizenship has, without doubt, taken a battering in recent years. The departure of an EU Member State following a popular referendum suggested, at best, a lack of understanding of its benefits and, at worst, an outright rejection of the very notion of a supranational identity. Meanwhile, populism remains on the rise within many remaining Member States. In related political rhetoric, the Court of Justice is the Union institution most frequently on the receiving end of Eurosceptic attack. In response, the Court has rowed back on many of its progressive judgments, exposing itself to strong academic criticism that it has ‘sacrificed EU citizenship’ and exacerbated inequalities faced by Union citizens resident in host Member States. This paper accepts those critiques whilst also asking whether Union citizenship was ever that progressive to begin with. Indeed, for the Court at least, citizenship’s resilience, despite recent turmoil, seems reliant on its capacity to retreat to its market origins and the restrictions on equal treatment that they continue to offer. The paper advances, nonetheless, that the apparent flexibility of a market-based citizenship is the cause rather than the cure of Union citizenship’s current woes. Grand judicial claims about the ‘fundamental status of Union citizenship’ simultaneously provide useful soundbites for Eurosceptics and mask the social inequalities that a market-based citizenship poses to EU citizens in practice. Both are exacerbated by fragmented and piecemeal judicial retreat, which necessarily impedes any sort of meaningful transformation. Only through political bravery and clarity of case-law can true progress be made.

My paper explores how Member States have invoked the principle of Member State equality in order to contest socio-economic inequalities in the context of European integration (substantive equality). I contrast this with the Court’s approach, where Member State equality primarily functions to buttress the legal authority of EU law (formal equality).