• Sara Hejgaard Elsborg
4. term, European Studies, Master (Master Programme)
The EU is founded on the ground of common legislation, and in article 45 TFEU it is stated that every human being has the right to move freely between the EU member states, and that the people who exercises that right should never be discriminated based on nationality or ethnicity. The rise of the right-wing parties in the EU and the discourse that they preset suggest that the EU has not successfully diffused the legislation the norms to the members in practice. The aim of the project is to explore the diffusion process of the EU norms to the hospitals in Jylland. Here are namely, due to lack of specialized ethnical Danish doctors, many foreign doctors working. The frame work of the project is poststructuralism, which implies that ontological standpoint of the project is that the reality is created through negations amongst people whose main way of communicating is the language. The epistemological approach consequently becomes discourses, which means that the data collected will be analyzed through a critical discourse analysis. The starting point of the analysis is the policy document Directive 2014/54EU, this will be used as the point of reference for the data that is conducted through interviews. There are in total 9 respondents. three HR-people, three patients, and three foreign doctors. The purpose of this is to include different levels of actors at the hospitals in Jylland in order to investigate how they translate the norms that EU is trying to diffuse regarding free movement and anti-discrimination. The theoretical fundament relies on Susanne Zwingel, Finnemore & Sikkink, and Kimberle Crenshaw. They are all studying the life of norms, and Zwingel and Crenshaw are especially focusing in norms related to gender and oppression of women. Their theoretical work opens for discussion about power, power struggle, intersectionality and inequality. All useful concepts, when investigating discrimination based in nationality and ethnicity. The data in combination with the theory suggest that the norm diffusion process of the EU is not at homogenized and linear process, on the contrary. The respondents seem to translate the norms differently, which ascribe Zwingel’s concept of transnationalization values when analyzing the life of norms. The data does consequently not point in an ambiguous direction when it comes to power relations, power struggle, intersectionality, and inequality amongst the respondents. There are signs of discrimination based on nationality, but there are also cases that can be explained through the theoretical concept of intersectionality. Gender and immanent power structures between doctors and patient do also have explanatory value when analyzing the data. The conclusion of the project must be handled guardedly.
LanguageEnglish
Publication date30 May 2019
Number of pages104
ID: 304752455