Ellina, Chrystalla A. Promoting Women's Rights: The Politics of Gender in the European Union.

• Author: Northcutt, Susan Stoudinger
• Position: Book Review

Ellina, Chrystalla A. Promoting Women's Rights: The Politics of Gender in the European Union. New York: Routledge, 2003. 174 pp. Cloth, $69.95.

Presented initially as a dissertation, Promoting Women "s Rights: The Politics of Gender in the European Union is an insightful and readable book. It provides insight into the workings of the European Union (EU), arguably one of the most complex and complicated institutions on the face of the earth. It also offers insight into current theoretical debates within the field of international relations, using gender policy in the EU as a case study.

The book begins with a brief introduction containing an overview of EU institutions and a discussion of the book's organization and research methodology. The first chapter launches the formal analysis. Here the author outlines pertinent theoretical perspectives: realism, globalism, neofunctionalism, intergovernmentalism, historical institutionalism, and rational choice institutionalism. In order to study supranational gender policy, the author, in a cogent analysis, embraces neofunctionalism and historical institutionalism. The study's principal propositions are "... that states are no longer the primary actors in EU policymaking, that institutions are not merely instruments of states, and that policies are not the direct outcome of member-state preferences" (p. 18).

The second chapter examines the long-term development of gender policy in the EU, employing historical institutionalist analysis. Beginning with Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome (1958) which enshrines the principle of equal pay for equal work regardless of sex, gender policy expands by the mid-1990s to include other gender-related issues as parental leave, sexual harassment, and gender mainstreaming. Based on the decision-making models developed by John Kingdon, a political scientist interested in political change, the author deploys the concept of "streams"--problem stream, policy stream, politics stream--to organize this thoughtful developmental analysis.

Chapter 3 extends the argument in favor of historical institutional analysis and points out the weaknesses of intergovernmentalism as a theoretical approach. Two cases provide evidence for historical institutionalism as...