Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

During the 1992 presidential election, James Carville, a democratic campaign strategist for soon-to-be President Clinton, coined a phrase that would epitomize the election: "It's the economy, stupid!"' At the time incumbent President George H. W. Bush was coming off a string of successful foreign policy efforts, most notably the immensely triumphant first Gulf War, and at one time garnered an approval rating in the eighty percent range.' Nonetheless, Carville and the Clinton campaign used the phrase to refocus the election on the underlying recession gripping the country and the general dissatisfaction Americans had with the domestic performance of President Bush.

In the 1990s in the United States and the 2000s in Europe, there was much self-congratulation over the successful passage of seemingly progressive disability rights legislation, specifically the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") in the United States4 and the Directive Establishing a Framework for Equal Treatment in Employment and Occupation ("Framework Directive" or the "Directive") in the European Union ("EU").5 As discussed in Section II, academics and disability rights advocates had for years urged that an ADA-style legislative program on disability discrimination could and should be exported worldwide, with particular emphasis on Europe. Their wishes were apparently granted when, after years of activist lobbying, academic writing, and a general proselytizing of the ADA's curative powers, the EU Council finally adopted the Framework Directive, discussed in Section IV, which provided clear prohibitions for discrimination on the basis of disability.

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