Frames among Serbian Women’s Activists and EU Enlargement Policy: Resonance and Discursive Opportunities?

Abstract

This paper examines the framing of claims in the Serbian women’s movement and compares these frames with the EU enlargement discourse to see if the discourse offers constraints or opportunities for movement actors. By distinguishing the framing of diagnosis and prognosis in EU enlargement policy, as well as by describing the framing of gender equality in EU policy documents, the EU is identified as a potential discursive opportunity structure that can help gain leverage to the claims put forth by Serbian women’s organizations. Theoretically, the contribution here is an attempt to apply the social movement framing perspective comparatively in studying both movement- and policy frames as well as to combine the concept of discursive opportunity structures with frame analysis and thus highlight the discursive context of EU accession negotiations for movement claims-making. Empirically, the contributions of this paper shed some much-needed light on Serbian women’s organizations describing their radical feminist frames and their view of the state as the “common enemy”. The analysis indicates several points of resonance between movement and policy frames, especially regarding the weak implementation of gender equality legislation and the overall lacking political will for change.