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5 Gay Rights and Political Homophobia in Postcommunist Europe Is there an “EU Effect”? conor o’dwyer If the recent past has witnessed an international trend toward increasing recognition and contestation of the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, then postcommunist Europe is also, perhaps surprisingly, a part of the trend. Why should its inclusion be surprising? As I will describe below, communism left a profoundly destructive legacy in this sphere, bequeathing a history of state repression of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals,1 broad-based homophobic attitudes in society (at least in comparison to Western Europe), and a more general phenomenon of weak civil society. These legacies made homosexuality a taboo topic after 1989, and the weakness of civil society organizations hampered efforts to demand new rights in the political arena. Though the timing of gay rights’2 new prominence in the postcommunist region suggests the workings of broader global trends, it also suggests, more specifically, the influence of the European Union (EU). On closer inspection, however, the overall effect of the EU remains an open question. It can and has focused pressure on countries to improve their gay-rights records as the price of membership, but it can also be argued that, in the face of deeper homophobic attitudes, such pressure may later provoke a political backlash that undoes rights (Kochenov 2007; O’Dwyer & Schwartz 2010). As countries in the region have struggled through the prolonged process of seeking membership in the EU, the price of accession has included the banning of the most egregious forms of discrimination, including that based on sexual orientation. The EU—and associated European-wide institutions such as the Council of Europe—have promoted antidiscrimination norms in 104 . conor o’dwyer postcommunist states applying for membership. Given a growing literature arguing that the EU has deepened democracy in the postcommunist applicant states, from the rights of ethnic minorities in the Baltics (Kelley 2004) to the reduction of political corruption (Vachudova 2006), it is only natural to look for a similar effect with regard to gay rights. Yet there are important questions about European institutions’ capacity to bring about real policy change, especially given the very real possibility of provoking political backlash and, thereby, rights retrenchment. This chapter attempts to sort out the EU’s impact on gay rights in the region . It asks two central questions. First, has accession fostered gay rights despite the hurdle of still widespread societal homophobia? To put the question slightly differently, can differences in gay rights across the region largely be explained with respect to deeper differences in the level of societal homophobia ? If so, then the EU’s impact is insignificant. To the extent that the EU does have a demonstrable effect in promoting legal rights for gays, the second key question is: Does such rights promotion spark a homophobic backlash in the broader political sphere, particularly that of political-party competition? In answering these questions, I employ two different approaches. For the first, I look broadly at the postcommunist region, especially in comparison to Western Europe; for the second, I take a more intensive approach, focusing on the experience of Poland. Most empirical analyses of the politics of gay rights in postcommunist Europe to date have relied on country case studies. The case study is, in fact, probably the best research strategy at this point, given the still underdeveloped nature of theorizing about even the basic contours of the region’s gay-rights politics and the limitations of the extant comparative research. By and large, individual country studies have offered empirical support for arguments that both the communist legacy and EU conditionality have strongly imprinted themselves on the politics of gay rights. Yet the extant case-study research has also often raised questions about the limits of EU influence, struggling in particular to sort out what the backlash against gay rights—for example in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Poland—reveals about conditionality ’s ultimate effectiveness (O’Dwyer 2010; O’Dwyer and Schwartz 2010; Ohlsen 2009). It has been difficult within the confines of studies of individual countries to separate the effect of the EU from possible confounding factors, such as different levels of societal tolerance and differing political cultural legacies based on the predominant national religion. The first part of this chapter aims to expand beyond the individual country study, making use of a recent index of gay rights constructed by ILGA- [3.12.36.30] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 05:13 GMT...

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