Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper proposes that, during the last thirty years, US-corporate diversity policies exerted a profound impact on diversity norms in Europe. As global US corporations’ operations in Europe expanded during the 1990s, they brought with them diversity norms shaped by the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 anti-discrimination effort, and consequent Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action legislation. In Europe, no consistent, common, European anti-discrimination policy existed until the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty and the consequent respective European Union (EU) directives of 2000, 2002 and 2004, enabled measures to combat discrimination on the grounds of age, disability, gender, ethnicity, race, religion or sexual orientation. This paper focuses on an analysis of the European reaction to the US corporate diversity model in the political and cultural climate of the 1990s and early 2000s, when US skepticism had been fueled by the cascading fall-out from the Reagan era, and social change was viewed in conflict with corporate expansion. Europe’s radical eastern transformation in tandem with civil, political, ethnic and religious strive created a climate that foregrounded deep-seated inter-European prejudice; it required supranational EU diversity legislation that continued to be at odds with the national concerns about multi-culturalism and cultural erosion among European nations and the US. Rapidly increasing migration from non-European countries began to test US diversity norms, especially with regard to race. Race, a contentious topic among European diversity theorists who believed it to polarize global integration in the context of “super-diversity”, was consequently seen as a problematic element of US diversity norms.