Measuring up for Membership. What Can We Learn by Applying a Gender Lens to Relations between the Republic of Moldova and the EU?

Abstract

The Republic of Moldova became an EU accession candidate in December 2023 and is currently busy laying the foundations for future membership negotiations. If the ambitious goal of entering the European Union in 2030 is maintained, much has to be done within a short space of time to ensure that the country meets all the membership criteria and achieves alignment with the EU’s acquis communautaire. The aim of the current article is to deploy a novel ‘gender lens’ through which to consider the Republic of Moldova’s evolving EU perspectives and, in so doing, capture fresh and nuanced findings that traditional, political, economic, security scholarly, and policy approaches to EU enlargement tend to discount. Findings suggest that Moldova performs significantly better on multiple gender-indicators than its country peers in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) region. However, despite palpable improvements and examples of alignment with EU gender norms and international best practice, the article ascertains notable shortcomings and disparities with relevance for Moldova's EU accession. The article adopts a mixed-method qualitative approach, intersecting content analysis of key documents, social and economic data and civil society reporting with stakeholder interviews. The added-value of the research derives from its use of a gender lens aligned with the specificity of the Republic of Moldova, which represents a novel contribution to EU enlargement studies.

Keywords

• eu
• republic of moldova
• gender
• eu enlargement
• europeanisation