| Why do some ideas and discourses diffuse easily while others do not? The literature on diffusion is extensive, especially regarding European Union integration. However, these accounts do not typically address, much less explain, diffusion's limits. My dissertation seeks to fill this gap by accounting for a critical case: Poland's problematic implementation of the European Union's gender equality directives, particularly in contrast to other parts of the accession mandate. Relying on triangulated empirical research, and employing media archives, parliamentary transcripts, qualitative interviews, and public opinion research, I argue that resistance to that implementation is grounded in conceptions of Polish national identity that became crucial issues during the accession process. Poland is a case of successful resistance to ideational diffusion in this area, because domestic implementation of the gender acquis differed in significant ways from other parts of the accession mandate in terms of domestic cooperation and compliance. In the Polish case, the most active resistance to EU requirements coalesced around social issues such as gender equality, and was effective as a political strategy to channel public frustration and inter-party competition into symbolic confrontations. I argue that, rather than successfully diffusing its own vision of gender equality, the EU's policy agenda instead created conditions that allowed Polish policy-makers to re-traditionalize gender policy. This leads to the conclusion that diffusion does not always "work," not even in the pre-accession period when the EU has the coercive power of conditionality to call upon. I demonstrate that some of the ideas germane to the gender equality agenda are embedded within privileged national discourses that occupy a central position in the construction of identity, and are therefore resistant to displacement by competing discourses, I propose a method for determining actors' receptivity (or lack thereof) to competing normative discourses in a specific context by evaluating both the epistemic strength of that discourse and its resonance with local cultural schemas. This highlights the need for additional analysis of the cultural dimensions of European integration, towards identifying not only the mechanisms, but also the criteria for new discourses to be taken up and integrated into local knowledge. |
