European Morality Politics in the European Union: The Case of Prostitution
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European Morality Politics in the European Union: The Case of Prostitution François Foret1 · Lucrecia Rubio Grundell1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Prostitution is a standard case of morality politics (MP), defined as a particular type of politics that engages issues closely related to religious and/or moral values, giving way to strong and uncompromising value conflicts in both societal and political spheres. This kind of issues have increasingly become a European policy matter due to their transnational nature and the tensions they create between different legal principles. Our hypothesis is that this leads to the emergence of a specific type of European morality politics (EMP) reflecting the particular constraints of the policymaking of the European Union (EU). The purpose of this article is to understand to which extent the rise of prostitution on the EU agenda alters usual patterns of MP to shape a distinctive type of EMP. Our findings suggest that prostitution characterizes EMP albeit with a significant difference, namely the challenge to regulatory inertia through the successful mobilisation of European values by some policy entrepreneurs to promote a neo-abolitionist approach. Keywords European Union · Morality politics · Values · Prostitution
Introduction Prostitution is ubiquitously identified a standard case of morality politics (MP), broadly defined as a particular type of politics that engage issues closely related to religious and/or moral values giving way to strong and uncompromising value conflicts in both societal and political spheres (Euchner and Knill 2016). Indeed, prostitution and its regulation have always been the subject of strong value conflicts. In Europe, a particularly stringent system of regulation was set up in the nineteenth century based on the understanding of prostitution as a necessary evil: a sinful and * Lucrecia Rubio Grundell [email protected] François Foret [email protected] 1
Cevipol‑IEE, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
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immoral activity yet indispensable as an outlet for extramarital sexuality, and on the state-run-brothel as the key mechanism of control (Corbin 1990). By the end of the nineteenth century such system was collapsing internally at the same time as it was being harshly criticised from outside, mainly for its inefficiency and the sexist and illiberal treatment it proffered to prostitutes and by the emerging abolitionist movement: a coalition of religious, feminist and liberal actors advocating for the total repeal of regulation (Walkowitz 1982). Their success across Europe by the 1950s put a definitive end to regulation giving way to a new regional consensus based on deregulation coupled with the criminalisation of third-party involvement (Summers 2008). Prostitution re-emerged in national, regional and international political agendas in the 1980s as a result of sexual liberation, increasing international tourism and migration,
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