Disability in EU’s institutional discourse

During the last decades, disability policy has undergone considerable changes at European level, evolving from a disregarded branch of social policy to an essential area centered on equal rights and non-discrimination. In this context, terminology and definitions have proved to be of pivotal importance since they can bear and impose more or less appropriate theoretical perspectives, depending on the prevailing ideologies within society in different historical periods (Priestley 2007). Drawing on the assumption that the way disability is linguistically and discursively construed at institutional level has a crucial effect on how it is experienced, the activities of supra-national institutions appear all the more central to how disability is structured in relation to social policy, change, and politics. Within the context of the EU, the European Commission seems particularly relevant since it plays a major role in policy development. In fact, although the Parliament can amend or veto legislative acts, only the Commission can propose new legislation.

This study concentrates on disability-related legislation and strategies – which increasingly shape the lives of about 87 million disabled people estimated to live in Europe – by investigating how disability is framed in the EU’s institutional discourse. Linguistic (qualitative and quantitative) analysis of two of the most recent documents issued by the European Commission (namely the European Disability Strategy 2010–2020 and the European Disability Strategy 2021–2030) is meant to explore the main principles through which disability is theorised and construed in relation to the dominant ideological system of beliefs and values (Drake 1999; Grue 2020). Against the backdrop of previous research (Waldschmidt 2009) which took into account EU disability-related documents over a time-span ranging from 1958 to 2005, this paper seeks to shed light on the way discourses about disability are created and perpetuated, to be then translated into policy outcomes in the last decades and the years to come.