Meanings and Uses of Europe in Making Policies against Domestic Violence in Central and Eastern Europe

The major Europeanization exercise that has been unfolding over the past ten years, and has so far brought about the new membership of ten countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), has also been the catalyst of new thinking in the burgeoning field of European integration research and, within that, of new analyses of gender equality policies. Most commonly, these analyses (Sloat, 2004; Falkner, Treib and Holzleithner, 2008; Avdeyeva, 2009; Sedelmeier, 2009) have focussed on those gender equality fields that formed part of the core conditionality criteria for accession, mostly related to inequalities in employment and other areas of the economy. In this literature, Europeanization is largely construed as a unidirectional, top-down process of the adoption of norms that are defined at the European Union (EU) level and then transposed to candidate and accession countries under the threat of consequences for non-compliance (Roth, 2008).