EU’s child-welfare rules and Europe’s ‘soft empire’ games
The child-care and family welfare policies endorsed by the European Union highlight the imperial nature of every EU enterprise, which invariably advances on an international ‘standards-setting’ tactic.
The European Union (EU) presents itself as an empire with a difference, whose authority is based not on force or realpolitik, but on the desire of member-states to belong to the EU, as if the EU were an attractive and exclusive “club”. But it has been argued that the structure and institutional framework of the EU is more akin to an imperial polity resembling that of a neo-medieval European empire ( Jan Zielonka, 2006, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union).
The most striking manifestation of this imperial diktat style was the insistence of large EU member states like Germany to approve budgets of the smaller “errant” states like Greece and imposition of austerity programs.
During an interactive parliamentary session, the then President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barosso, let the cat out of the bag when he spoke of the EU for the “ordinary people” as “the organisation of empires” and “the first non-imperial empire” functioning without any centralised force or sovereign authority.
How does the EU exercise authority? One of its powerful weapons is “Regulations” or “StandardsSetting”, which it uses not just to wield power over member states, but to extend its tentacles much beyond its geographical borders. Child welfare and family practices assume top priority, along with environmental norms, in these “soft empire” games of the EU.
This is evident from Article 3(3) of the Lisbon Treaty which introduced as an objective for the EU a model for child rights that was directly adopted from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Under the Lisbon Treaty, the EU appointed a Child Rights Coordinator as part of the Directorate-General of Justice and set up specific EU funding programs for promotion of best practices and methods. An elaborate institutional network has been established with NGOs, activists and child-care practitioners whose job is to actively convince and propagate in EU member states and the wider world the EU’s vision of what the best and optimal childcare model should be.
Nordic states play an important role in this imperial game. The Nor- dic welfare state model is touted as the perfect model both within and outside the EU. It is widely considered to be the ideal towards which the EU aspires. EU thinkers such as Professor Karl Ove Moene describe the “Nordic experience”as “a society model” (2011 CASE Policy Research Seminar lecture on “Nordic Experience”).
Hence, it should not be any surprise for us that the EU in concert with the Nordic states and UN agencies would attempt to actively promote these child welfare practices and measures in countries like India. We already have an example of this in the disproportionate influence exercised by the UNICEF on Indian child welfare policies. Regarding child rights under the Lisbon Treaty, the EU has declared that “The Commission is guided by the principles set out in the UN Convention on the rights of the child.” In this way UN agencies often act in tandem with the EU in using standards-setting as a means of exercising international influence.
The concept of EU as a “Regulatory Empire” was developed by Raffaella Sarto in 2006 in his analysis of “EU empire-ness” in the context of whale bans proposed by Nordic countries. In a later work, Normative Empire Europe: The European Union, its Borderlands, and the Arab Spring (2015), Sarto explored the theoretical concept of a “Normative Power Europe”, where the EU is actively engaged in the export of universal norms and regulations as part of its exercise of international relations.
The EU as a Regulatory Empire involves the export of rules and practices, and stressing of their universal validity, and “civilizing” aspect. This is accompanied with propaganda of being a sort of “holier-than-thou” society, with the highest ideals of humanity and progressive thinking in the world.
During my Brussels days as a student while attending seminars or interacting socially with EU Commission functionaries, European Parliamentarians, NGOs or anyone connected with the labyrinth of the EU, they made clear their belief that the EU was the most comfortable and congenial zone compared with the rest of the world.
The ugly side that immigrants in welfarestates such as Norway, whose child protection measures are held up as an ideal by the EU, are disproportionately targeted by their child welfare services.
In their book Immigration Policy and the Scandinavian Welfare State, AnnikenHagelund and Grete Bochmann have described the relationship between immigrants and the welfare state as being one of tension and discomfiture. Katrin Kriz and Marit Skivenes, in their research paper funded by the Norwegian Research Council, titled “Challenges for Marginalized Minority Parents in Different Welfare Systems: Child welfare workers’ perspectives”, published in the International Social Work Journal (2012), conducted a cross-country empirical study of the challenges faced by marginalised racial and ethnic minority families from different welfare agencies in England, Norway and the United States . The study clearly indicated a certain oblivion towards the possible challenges faced by mi-