In the late summer of 2014, two Montenegrin friends of mine, Čarna and Danijel, who are also among the authors of this volume, invited me to join them for the second Montenegro Pride march which was taking place in Podgorica in November of that year. An activist (Danijel) and an anthropologist (Čarna), curious about what they could learn from each other in their common struggle for a non-heterosexual emancipation, the two of them embody both the potential and the challenges of a kind of cooperation, a form of professional-emotional symbiosis, that has inspired my interest in the politics of activism in the post-Yugoslav space. In spite of the affinity and the respect that I feel for their engagement and regardless of an urge for support that almost instinctively arises from our communication, the invitation which I received from them provoked in me probably more dilemmas than they could have imagined.
As a citizen of Serbia, a country which has been, over the last three decades, exposed to what seems to be an endless series of social and state transformations, I have had an opportunity to be enveloped in that mesmerising spirit of change that guides activist undertakings. I have learned and felt how politically and emotionally significant it can be to come together in a public space in an effort to resist resignation and generate hope which is by far the most precious activist resource. As a sociologist of social movements, I am all too well acquainted with tensions, contradictions, and conflicts which inevitably weave the tissue of any collective enterprise that is based on and aspires to freedom (Bilić, 2012). I have witnessed how intransigent and intolerant some activists can be and how more often than not even those who declaratively (and sometimes loudly) struggle for a progressive cause may perpetuate the mechanisms of exclusion which they are supposed to destabilise. As a gay man, I am painfully aware of how suffocated one can feel within the constraints of the patriarchal regime and how dangerous it can be—but also how necessary—to try to interrupt the symbolic order that has been constructed to sustain it.1
In this regard, I have closely followed the turbulent, and at certain points, overtly violent attempts to organise pride marches in the post-Yugoslav region. While despising and being shocked by the ignorance, hatred, and malice that in certain instances accompanied them, I have repeatedly found myself admiring the activists’ courage, but also disagreeing with some of their strategies and motivations. My political doubts and maybe also my fears, those stemming from the deepest layers of patriarchal socialisation, at times reached the extent that made me question the very purpose of insisting on such an event as a Pride march at all. However, after receiving Čarna and Danijel’s invitation, I realised that my experience with these events in the post-Yugoslav space was rather vicarious and although I was far from being devoid of apprehension, I thought that, as a friend, sociologist, and gay, I should go.
Thus, in early November 2014 I landed in Montenegro for the first time after the former Yugoslav republic announced independence in 2006. As I was approaching Podgorica in a taxi and talking to the driver who eventually, not without a slight bewilderment and discomfort which I thought also had a tinge of disappointment, realised that I was there to take part in the march, I learned how frustrated he was by the decision of the Montenegrin government to demonstrate its commitment to (its aspiring membership of) the European Union (EU) by imposing sanctions on Russia. In the breaks of our talk, full of quick political judgments that were neatly positioned within a binary reference system which I was not sure how to handle, I was looking through the window and feeling that uncanny familiarity with the stereotypical “greyness” (Harboe Knudsen & Frederiksen, 2015) of a post-socialist concrete-dominated landscape that has been left on its own to decay through decades of neglect, corruption, impoverishment, and a general social involution witnessed by the region as a whole.
On the evening before the Pride march I was walking around the streets of Podgorica and crossing the bridges on the beautiful Morača River thinking about how hard it must be and how much audacity and determination it must require to start inscribing elements of non-heteronormativity in that patriarchal topography that teems with heroes and saints and celebrates masculinity and warfare. I was wondering about the most adequate—the least intrusive—strategy that would make my taxi driver, that man exhausted by years of insecurity, pause for a moment to acknowledge the incredible richness of sexual urges, intimacies, pains, and pleasures without feeling disgusted or threatened by them. I was asking myself how is one to broaden the rigid frontiers of patriarchal sexuality, make them more porous, and allow the exuberance of rainbow colours to, at least for a moment, disrupt—without negating—that grey “aesthetic regime” (Fehérváry, 2013, p. 8) of poverty, precarity, and disillusionment. How is one to supply discursive instruments for articulating the ambiguities of desire that are rooted in local practices and experiences without having to wait for all of the “more important issues” to be successfully resolved first? What is the most effective way to convince that taxi driver that the march happening on the following day might also have to do with him and the future of his children and that it is not—or not only—yet another requirement that his country needs to fulfil before it is formally allowed to join the EU? How can it be explained that gays, lesbians, and other non-heterosexuals are not merely European “imports”, harbingers of the “decadent West,” or symbols of infertile luxury, but that they are also his co-nationals, colleagues, relatives, and friends? What are the most persuasive means for unmasking the hypocritical face of tolerance and closing the gap that has opened up between legal measures resulting from EU conditionality, on the one hand, and the everyday instances of humiliation, rejection, and exclusion, on the other? How are we as activists, researchers, and activist-researchers (Bevington & Dixon, 2005; Chouldry, 2009) to harness the affective force of anxiety, perplexity, and uneasiness that is released into the fissures of public life as the notion of citizenship (Bell & Binnie, 2002; Plummer, 2001; Richardson, 2000) dilates to include a variety of sexual preferences that are also at the heart of who we are?
“Europeanising” Post-Yugoslav Space Through LGBT Activisms
The authors of this volume interrogate the multiple forms and implications of the increasingly potent symbolic nexus that has developed between non-heterosexual sexualities, LGBT activism(s), and Europeanisation(s) in all of the post-Yugoslav states (Bilić, 2014). The gradual but variegated and uneven efforts to include certain members of “sexual minorities”2 into the national polities of the EU hail from a variety of 1960s Western liberation movements. These initiatives, combined with capitalist consumerism, (neo)liberal policies and the ever stronger conceptualisations of democracy through a liberal human rights paradigm (Stychin, 2004), started to gain global impact, in large part sustained by advances in information and communications technology (Kahlina, 2014). Although emancipatory ideas regarding non-heteronormative sexual identifications were present in public space as the European Community/Union consolidated its legal structure, sexual orientation was not explicitly mentioned in the 1993 Copenhagen criteria for membership. It appeared almost a decade later in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union as well as in the Employment Equality Framework Directive 2000/78/EC. While legal arrangements that pertain to family, civil partnership, and marriage remained at the discretion of individual nation-states, eradicating discrimination—at least formally or formalistically—on the basis of sexual orientation started figuring quite highly within the EU accession process.
Given that EU membership is actively pursued as the “first foreign policy priority” (Grabbe, 2006, p. 96) in all Central and Eastern European states, the Union has been for long enveloped in a Denkverbot which, in its poorer regions, practically leaves it without any historically valid alternative (Maljković, 2014). As “LGBT rights have become a powerful symbol of Europe, featuring centrally in debates ranging from foreign relations to economic trade” (Ayoub & Paternotte, 2014, p. 3), “gay tolerance” appears as an ever more prominent condition on a long list of those that need to be fulfilled by (prospective) candidate countries and is regularly included in European Commission Progress Reports, key documents based on wider consultations, which explicitly calibrate progress made.
Our book problematises the widespread trope of “Europeanisation” as a linear process through which the EU policy procedures are smoothly incorporated into the logic of domestic political structures (Radaelli, 2003). Héritier (2005) claims that Europeanisation can be defined
Rather than see it as a “one-way street”, we approach Europeanisation in the post-Yugoslav space as a complex, dynamic and troubled “translation” process (Clarke, Bainton, Lendvai, & Stubbs, 2015) whereby “ways of governing and being governed through language, practices and techniques” are constantly contested and renegotiated (Lendvai, 2007, p. 26). We examine the challenges that identitarian activist politics based on “non-normative” sexualities and often articulated by supranational political and professional activist bodies encounter in the current social circumstances characterised by the legacy of armed conflicts that has, along with the ensuing neoliberal transformation, impoverished and deindustrialised the region. By zooming in on LGBT activist initiatives in the context of EU accession, this volume underscores the relevance of the post-Yugoslav space, in its current configuration, for furthering the field of European studies. In this regard, Gilbert et al. (2008, p. 11) claim thatin terms of the influence of EU policies and values on “the rest of the world”, i.e. non-member states. It encompasses a broad variety of processes featuring direct and indirect influence of EU policies and economic, social and cultural activities on political, economic, social and cultural processes well beyond Western Europe (p. 200). (…) A further difference between Europeanisation West and Europeanisation East is that Europeanisation West is a two-way street when it comes to shaping EU policy measures, whereas Europeanisation East, at this state, seems to be more of a one-way street (p. 207).3
The post-Yugoslav states, which share a long period of common institution and state-building embedded in a profoundly authoritarian political culture, find themselves at this moment in different positions regarding their integration into the EU: there are member states (Slovenia joined in 2004 and Croatia in...post-Yugoslav societies are an excellent place to interrogate the concepts of European and Western modernity. [I]t [is] an important strategy to resist studying or analysing the Balkans against a set of supposed “European” norms. […] the gap between such “norms” and what is happening on the ground [is] a fruitful place to begin to theorise socially productive forms of practice that are otherwise glossed as failure, apathy, anti-politics and corruption. If we understand that the contradictions and tensions embedded within contemporary European imaginaries are being worked out at Europe’s Balkan margins, the study of post-Yugoslav societies may have something to teach us about democratic, capitalist and nationalist forms as such, and not just about their “Balkan” versions.