Feminist Foreign Policy in the EU: a State by State Analysis

Since 2014, a new approach to foreign policy has been introduced in the international arena: Feminist Foreign Policy. FFP is a model that focuses mainly on adopting a gendered perspective in dealing with a state’s external action and diplomacy. It does so by focusing on three key priorities: protect women’s rights, promote gender equality and increase women’s participation and representation in global politics. Therefore a gendered approach is applied to transnational issues such as climate change and migration. The relevance of women’s perspective is to be found in their central role, especially in second and third world countries, in peacekeeping processes and economic and societal growth. Many arguments have been made that any foreign policy currently implemented by western states is focused on upholding structures of power that have connaurated racism, imperialism and militarism: considering that a comprehensive feminist approach cannot be considered complete if it keeps ignoring foreign policy, FFP could theoretically help in creating a more just and safer world by deconstructing discriminatory power hierarchies and encouraging equal opportunities for all. But is this really the case? Is FFP a unifying approach that changes only slightly from state to state? Or are there significant differences? While it is true that much of FFP literature draws on the corpus of the United Nations Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, as some even argued that the former should be regarded as a continuation of the latter rather than an independent phenomenon, every nation that has adopted FFP has prioritized different areas of development as the amount of legislation adopted and financial funds allocated show. 

The aim of this article is to analyze the FFP framework inside the European continent to check its effective outcomes in external, and in some cases even in internal, action. To do so, the focus will be on three cases of current local implementation of FFP in the EU (France, Spain and Germany) to highlight their strengths and weaknesses, offering a benchmark to proficiently move forward.To be complete, in Europe there are countries like Slovenia and The Netherlands that have recently committed in theory to a feminist foreign policy but in practice the plan of actions is lacking: therefore the effectiveness of the legislative framework is difficult to analyze. Lastly, Sweden was the first country to adopt FFP in 2014 but it was also the first to abandon it in 2022 due to a change in the conception of national interest.

France

Another country whose financial commitment has been growing in the past few years is France: the FSOF, the funding supporting gender equality by assisting, intensifying and co-constructing feminist organizations, has seen its budget increased to 250 million euros over the 2023-2027 period. A precise financial plan has been issued in order to reach and improve the goal of having 75% of the projects funded by France’s official development assistance by 2025. The Support Fund for Feminist Organizations is to this day the most emblematic tool of the country’s FFP, that renders the position of France as a key actor in the promotion of gender equality worldwide as initiative in Africa have the 65% priority on these funds.

The motion against gender based violence in the digital environment put forward by France during the GA meeting of November 14th 2024 furtherly proves  the dedication of the current country’s political stance to this topic. French feminist diplomacy, as this particular form of FFP is institutionally called, was officially announced at the G7 Summit in Biarritz in 2019 and has since then shaped the country’s approach to gender equality and foreign policy.

As Spain, France shows feminist foreign policy implementing a gendered perspective, both internally and externally, in many fields. Nevertheless, the Hexagon has always been prioritizing in a constant and radical way the importance of sexual and reproductive health rights, focusing mainly on fields traditional within feminist theory such as education, violence and representation. This division appears clear looking at the structure of the interministerial plan for equality between women and men 2023-2027 where the three of the four main areas of action are battling violence against women, the access to healthcare, economic and professional equity. An interesting goal is depicted in the fourth section titled “culture de l’égalité” where the focus is put on the importance of eradicating misogyny from the french cultural context, allowing for the building of a just and equal society.

The lack of capillarity in many areas of foreign policy though is why many consider the French FFP to not be sufficiently comprehensive when it comes to intersectionality: sectors such as migration are disarmament are still siloed away from feminist theory, weakening the very same intent of this type of legislative framework. Even though since the beginning the aim was to have an integrated approach creating “a feminist diplomacy that leaves no subject unaddressed”, this type of initiative is to this day still lacking and areas such as migration and military could use more attention. A notable exception, however, are environmental policies: France integrates gender into climate issues at COP negotiations every year, even proposing in the Paris COP 2017 a Gender and Development platform who discussed a document entitled “For climate finance that fully integrates gender”. 

A report made in July 2023 by the High Council for Gender Equality (HCE), recommends more clarity and a better financial and social plan more oriented towards pragmatic results: to reach three main goals (defining, implementing and financing), it proposes interesting ways to develop a gender approach in the country. It’s a matter of time to see whether the HCE will be listened to.

Spain

Spain implemented a feminist foreign policy in March 2021 and since then has come out with regular action plans to detail the strategy and the efforts that are being made. The 2023-2024 action plan has an inherent holistic quality: it covers many different sectors ranging from global digital participation to healthcare to political representation to promote gender equality in all societal fields. This is furtherly reinforced by the centrality of gender equality as a crosscutting priority in many documents such as the Humanitarian Action Strategy 2019-2026 for Spanish humanitarian action and the 2023 Law on Cooperation for Sustainable Development and Global Solidarity that even promotes ecofeminism as tool for the renewable energy sector. 

Furthermore, Spain is significantly making steps toward tackling gender-based violence, stressing the need for a political and social pact to protect the victims as well as being an advocate for feminicide and for children and women’s trafficking.

Surely one of the greatest strengths of the Spanish feminist foreign policy framework lies in it’s complete, clear and multifaceted strategy: a gendered perspective is always incorporated in the policy making process across different areas and different topics, fostering an intersectional approach that allows the plan to promote effective gender equality in all fields. As the IGG 2023 report puts it “The five guiding principles, focusing on structural reform, strong leadership, coordination, participation and intersectionality, provide a coherent roadmap for orienting Spanish diplomatic action towards feminist goals”. Moreover, the dynamical evolution of the approach testifies the commitment made by the country to constantly promote gender equality internationally. The concrete legislative commitments are also supported by a well functioning financial plan enhancing the concreteness of the policy on all levels. Currently, 0.7% of gross national income has been allocated to official development assistance (ODA) by 2030 and the Humanitarian Action Office reserves the 25 percent of the yearly call budget for NGOs to projects with gender interventions.

However, in some areas resources are lacking: the biggest issues that FFP faces in Spain is the lack of coherence between domestic and foreign policy on precise topics such as sexual and reproductive rights. Conscientious objection and the legislative framework protecting access to abortion are topics harshly debated inside the country and this is also due to the impossibility to have full transparency and accessibility on data, as they are difficult to gather and require continuous efforts in doing so. Moreover, despite the effort of the prime minister Pedro Sánchez, the feminist approach is still not widespread across ministries inside the national government: this highlights how the multifaceted approach has yet to reach the administration so that FFP will be implemented to its full potential. It is also important to underline how the intersectionality and diversity promised in the national plan is not fully implemented as certain communities, such the LGBTQI+ community, are not explicitly mentioned in the policy guide.

Germany

Germany adopted Feminist Foreign Policy in March 2023: its particular tilt to the subject is described by being a “collective” and holistic relevance and by wanting to mitigate structural disadvantages worldwide, maintaining the liberal and constructivist approach that gave the country the title of “civilian power”. It is also specified how women are not the exclusive beneficiaries of this framework, but all those that “have been pushed to the margins of society”. The other key component is action: German Feminist Foreign Policy is not an abstract plan, but a combination of pragmatic action and feminist theory, and a “long overdue step” towards equality for all. The main goals are rights, representation and resources.

However, there are some principles upheld in this framework that, in feminist theory, are quite controversial: the first one is the approach to pacifism and war. To protect fragile groups of women around the world, many feminist scholars deem peacekeeping procedures to be necessary in order not to foster a new oppressive system that would furtherly endanger human rights. This, however, clashes with the traditional foreign policy of many countries worldwide. More than once in the Federal Foreign Office Guidelines to Feminist Foreign Policy, it’s underlined how this new framework is not a “magic formula” and that it needs to recognize the realities of foreign policy, considering both the values and the interests of the nation (a compromise that has been considered impossible in Sweden). Because of this, it is clearly stated that “feminist foreign policy is not synonymous with pacifism”, even though Germany is explicitly still committed to the humanitarian tradition peacekeeping is built upon. Furthermore, the Guidelines clearly indicate “Russia’s war against Ukraine shows that (...) human lives must be protected by military means too”. 

This argument has been heavily criticized by feminist organizations all over the country due to the German stance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the Hamas attack on October 7th 2023, Germany has constantly been one of the largest exporters of weapons to Israel, second only to the USA, to the point that the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) has recently taken legal action against the German military supplies in the Middle East (similar cases happened with Syria and Turkey). In this scenario, the country is actively worsening the living conditions of marginalized people, the Palestinians, that are currently facing a conflict that is not mindful of any “humanitarian tradition” and it is not protecting human rights nor human lives. It is also clearly not coherent with the Federal Foreign Office Guidelines, that aim to implement “Gender-sensitive export control” and strengthen “Humanitarian arms control”. Therefore, according to many, by enabling the Israeli military to continue attacking the Palestinian population, Germany is not following their own feminist guidelines, as once again protesters underline how “women rights shouldn’t mean white privilege”. In particular, the founders of CFFP commented about the current action of Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister from the Green Party, of white feminism. Due to this, many have accused the German government of implementing a FFP to  give itself a “progressive veneer”, stemming from the ambiguity of what is a feminist principle and how to translate it into action.

While this is arguably the least feminist point that German foreign policy has touched in the last decades, in the context of German domestic policy making, Baerbock is one of the few politicians currently advocating for sexual reproductive rights and access to abortion inside the country and one of the even fewer political figures that are vocal about being “feminist”. But questions on the effectiveness of the policy on the domestic level have been raised. While women’s participation is highlighted as a key component in foreign policy, similar principles have not been implemented in domestic policy nor widened across all ministries, making the whole FFP framework ineffective. Some important topics, such as migration and colonial legacies, have also been completely omitted. Furthermore, assessment issues are, as for Spain and France, a paramount discrepancy in the current framework: the tools to evaluate what has been done are either lacking or not clearly formalized.