From appeal to European Action: Polish Women‟s NGOs between Mainstreaming and Contested Agendas», Paper presented at the

Since the 1990s, Polish Women’s NGOs have developed strategic gender interests (cf. Mo-lyneux 1985) and sharpened them during EU accession. National and transnational network-ing, coalition building and strategic framing on a whole range of issues can be seen as col-lective political learning processes. Some important women’s NGOs joined the Polish Women’s Lobby that became member of the European Women’s Lobby, while others did not. This first Polish Women’s Lobby collapsed; the “second try ” will held its first general meeting in September. In the current situation of dwindling institutional grants and political backlash the women’s movement has lost some of its capacity to participate on the EU level and to act strategically. The paper will introduce to the developments of the women’s movement and their adoption of “Europe ” as a master frame. I will then point to some political and systematic difficulties of interest representation on the European level, e.g. the assumed uniformity of group interests, and the representation of mainly uncontested issues and discuss alternatives such as the establishment of different thematic networks. I conclude with some tentative reflections on interest formation and interest representation. Data for this paper comes from my research on women’s NGOs in Poland since 1997, mainly from primary sources and interviews of activists (see Fuchs 2003, Fuchs/Payer forth-coming). I also learned a lot from the discussions with my students Silvia Payer and Heidrun Aigner from the Rosa Mayreder College in Vienna, who collected empirical data for thei