| The thesis examines multi-level and transnational political processes, which led, after decades of debates, to the incorporation of a comprehensive anti-discrimination article into the European Union's (EU) Amsterdam Treaty in June 1997. The main goal is to explain how and why anti-race discrimination policy became a significant item on the EU agenda in the mid-nineties, but not before then. The analysis, which draws on agenda setting and policy network literature, concentrates on the structural development and substantive activities (political mobilization, legal strategies, and lobbying tactics) of the transnational policy network which emerged in Europe in the early nineties to promote EU-level measures against racial discrimination. Situating the analysis within larger debates among European integration theorists concerning sources and types of influence on major policy changes and Treaty reforms, I explore the development of anti-discrimination policy by means of two approaches: (1) policy analysis---which focuses on the transnational network's influence over agenda-setting processes leading to the EU's intergovernmental conference (IGC) in 1996; (2) analysis of intergovernmental processes which highlight Member States' self-interested domestic reasons for finally agreeing to launch an EU level anti-racism policy after decades of resistance. The second approach entails the introduction of a hypothesis which posits a (causal) relationship between the degree of individual countries' support for EU-level anti-racism measures and the (perceived) degree of radical right success in those same countries.; An analysis of the relationship between the influence exercised by network actors over agenda-setting process and Member States' influence over decisionmaking at the 1996 IGC shows that by 1994, network actors and Member States were moving in the same policy direction. Although the Member States may have controlled the timing and final destination of the development of an EU antirace discrimination policy, the network actors, by campaigning for the policy for over a decade, and by providing the legal, moral, and political justifications for it, were the pathfinders. |
