Dr. Fiammetta Balestracci

Citizenship and Democracy in Europe: The Seventies and Beyond
The Contribution of the European Community and the EU

The Seventies represented a radical turning point in the history of European society. After the demographic consequences of the two World Wars, the economic boom of the Sixties and the struggle for civil rights in the Seventies European society underwent a profound structural transformation. Diversification of family models and behaviours became part of a generalized trend, while new social groups linked their identity to their gender and sexual orientations. Single-parent families, informal cohabitation, couples with or without children and couple between individuals of the same sex started to shape the social panorama, acknowledged first in sociological analyses, and then in legislation reforms such as new family laws and new welfare and fiscal policies. This reform process extended through the Eighties, undergoing a second surge in the decades following the end of the Cold War.
The profound changes that came about in European society from the Seventies onwards triggered a revision of institutional cultures in each state that indirectly affected the statutes of citizenship, in other words the nature of civil and political rights of citizens and their relationships with the state, and also the level of democracy in each state, i.e. the representative capacity of the institutions. Resolutions and declarations issued by the European Community and other European institutions regarding family rights, women, young people, and sexual minorities all helped to orient the policies of the nation states, and these rulings became increasingly binding after the Treaty of Maastricht came into force in 1993.
The present Simone Veil fellowship is intended to spend a period of in-depth study on the policies expressed by the European Community and other European institutions from the Seventies up to the early 2000s on the themes of gender, family, civil rights, and rights of sexual minorities.