Queer Visibility in Post-Socialist Cultures

Nárcisz Fejes, Andrea P. Balogh, Nárcisz Fejes, Andrea P Balogh

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783201297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Queer Visibility in Post-socialist Cultures explores the public constructions of gay, lesbian and queer identities, as well as ways of thinking about sexuality and gender, in post-socialist cultures across the European region formerly known as the Eastern bloc. Featuring eleven essays by scholars and activist researchers focusing on Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Belarus and Russia, the collection encompasses a wide range of fields, including gender and sexuality studies, Eastern European studies, media and film studies, sociology and cultural anthropology. Together, the essays reveal a paradigm of visibility politics centred on the vexed interaction between the post-socialist notions of queerness in activist strategies and the nationalist, mainstream representations of non-normative sexualities.

PART I

Queer Negotiations of Post-socialist Identities

Chapter 1

Sexual Rights as a Tool for Mapping Europe: Discourses of Human Rights and European Identity in Activists’ Struggles in Croatia

Nicole Butterfield

For “rights” to be locally meaningful, we must interrupt the ways national and supranational bodies demand the use of rights rhetoric as a means of displaying a tie to the Euro-American-dominated “community of nations.”

(Patton 2002: 200)

Introduction

At the 2008 Zagreb Pride March in Croatia, one organizer of the march highlighted the sometimes violent reaction of its opponents in a speech to a small crowd of supporters in Cvijetni Trg (Flower Square) by stating that “[E]very attack on a LGBTIQ person is an attack on a civilized and European, democratic and free Croatian society” (Zagreb Pride 2008). Since its commencement in 2002, this march is one of the largest, most highly visible events organized by Croatian LGBT activists and their supporters.¹ Just a month after the 2008 march in July, the Croatian Parliament passed an anti-discrimination law in order to fulfill a requirement of the EU acquis communitaire for EU accession. Article 1 of this law contains a comprehensive and finite list of characteristics that identify social groups who are vulnerable to discrimination, including groups identified through the categories of “gender identity, [gender] expression and sexual orientation”.² According to the activists Sanja Juras and Kristijan Grđan of the LGBT organization The Legal Team of Iskorak and Kontra (from this point referred to as The Legal Team), the inclusion of these last few categories was the result of their lobbying efforts combined with political pressure from European Union institutions (Juras and Grđan 2008). I highlight these two Croatian activists’ strategies for the ways in which Europe and the European Union become markers of progress and the impetus for change.

For Croatia, the annual Pride events and legislative developments such as the passing of the anti-discrimination law are monitored, evaluated, and eventually used by international institutions as a basis for praise and/or criticism and for measuring its progress as a “developing” nation-state and EU candidate country. International organizations such as the International Lesbian and Gay Association of Europe (ILGA-Europe) or the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) and European institutions, which these LGBT organizations have spent many years lobbying, respond to the success or failure of such events through declarations, letters and other public statements. For example, in the Croatia Progress Report of 2008, the European Commission stated that the new anti-discrimination law, which “is aimed at full alignment with EU acquis,” “signif[ies] important progress” (European Commission 2008). On the other hand, in the following 2009 report, the Commission criticized the government, suggesting that “[M]ore needs to be done to tackle discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are subjected to threats and attacks. Many cases are not followed-up adequately by the police and prosecutors, or remain unreported” (European Commission 2009). Reports and statements such as these, as The Legal Team claims, have become valuable tools in local activists’ lobbying efforts to pressure their government to adopt legislative measures to protect LGBT individuals from discrimination.

The discourses that have emerged in the struggles for sexual human rights in Croatia often evoke European identity, European values and human rights as powerful instruments for lobbying. Through the use of these concepts, these struggles take part in (re)defining the border of Europe and what it means to be European. These discourses not only ignore a very long history of homophobia throughout Europe but also interpolate the geopolitical hierarchies that have continuously been cited comparing Europe and the so-called less developed regions of Europe, such as Eastern Europe and the Balkans (Wolff 1994; Todorova 1997). Indeed, as I will argue, advocacy for the adoption of a predetermined set of legislative changes (recently the adoption of employment anti-discrimination laws) that are set as a condition for accession and justified by the “values” of the European Union might become signified as another mechanism in a “cultural narrative of development” in which “proper” European culture, modernity and development originate in Western Europe (Tomlinson 2002) or, more recently, the European Union.

As an alternative, transnational struggles for sexual rights could foster debate on the types of sexual rights that local communities might need, which tend to be marginalized in transnational collaborations. Debates might emerge, for example, around the merits of focusing more on positive rights that would require governments to be proactive instead of reactive and address systematic forms of injustice rather than individual cases. A more open debate on sexual rights would avoid the tendency to predetermine the value of local activists’ work and strategies and create a space for other approaches to emerge, which could lead to other fruitful mechanisms for combating inequalities faced by individuals within diverse sexual communities in Croatia and Europe.

Here, I would like to address the criticism of many conservative, right-wing or nationalist groups that condemn any outside intervention by the European Union and international organizations. It is not uncommon to also hear the political right or more extreme nationalists in Croatia criticize the European Union or Western Europe-based transnational organizations for undermining the sovereignty of their nation-state and the integrity of their national culture and local values. For example, a debate on the necessity of amending the constitution of the Republic of Croatia to include the prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity was aired on Croatian national television (Otvoreno/Open 2010). During this discussion, one participant alluded to the existence of a transnational conspiracy to promote homosexuality, an attempt supposedly orchestrated by organizations such as the International Gay and Lesbian Association and endorsed by the European Union (Otvoreno/Open 2010). This mainstream argument, presented by a Catholic theologian and columnist, is based on the flawed assumption that Croatian culture, society and values are homogeneous and that political, cultural or social movements demanding the recognition and sexual rights do not exist in Croatia. These statements do, however, indicate concerns about sexual rights that are being advocated for through discourses which (re)inscribe the cultural superiority of “Europe.”

What I aim to examine throughout this chapter is the possibility of advocating for sexual human rights without perpetuating these Eurocentric, homogenizing discourses which (re)produce Europe’s “Others” – internal and external. These strategies essentially become tools for combating sexual discrimination while perpetuating other forms of discrimination, e.g. national belonging, race and/or class. I analyse examples of the types of discourses and strategies that invoke European identity as a hierarchical differentiation, prioritize the adoption of pre-determined liberal legislative tools such as the employment anti-discrimination law and contribute to a narrative of progress by using the adoption of these laws as a measure of modernity, development and Europeanness. I examine European identity in the process of European Union expansion and outline the development of sexual rights within the European Union legal order. Then, in my analysis of strategic letters and declarations directed toward the Croatian and regional governments, I show in what ways these particular sexual rights become tools in the construction of European identity when used as instruments by EU institutions and LGBT activists in their lobbying efforts. Based on my analysis of these discourses and the strategies that focus on anti-discrimination laws, I develop a critical discussion on liberal conceptions of sexual human rights and argue that the right of protection from discrimination by itself is inadequate. First, these discursive strategies run the risk of homogenizing cultures, societies and nations and reinscribing the border between these so-called modern, developed “European” societies and backwards, primitive “non-European” cultures. Second, these limited legal strategies may not address the economic and social inequalities that exist within and among different LGBT communities.

Sexual rights as measures of Europeanness

The importance of human rights for the construction of European identity, particularly how they have been articulated within the most recent EU accession processes, has been critically analysed by many scholars (De Burca 1995; Alston and Weiler 1999; Bojkov 2004; Williams 2004; Behr 2007; Lampe 2007). Since the Single European Act of 1987 and in all subsequent treaties such as the Treaty of Maastricht 1992 and the Treaty of Amsterdam 1997, the European Union has increasingly underscored human rights as one of its core principles and as the basis for “promoting democracy” (Bojkov 2004: 337). The timing of this growing importance of human rights for the European Union is significant as it coincided with the collapse of the social, political and economic systems in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and the processes of transition which they have undergone since, including EU accession. Justifying the expansion of the European Union, many representatives of the European Community (now known as the European Union) argued that Western Europe had a moral “responsibility” to help facilitate the transition of these countries to democracy (Sedelmeier 2005: 24-8). These representatives claimed that through the integration of these non-member countries into the European Community, Europe could overcome the East/West divide and ensure that security, peace and human rights would be guiding principles of the newly established governments throughout Eastern Europe (Sedelmeier 2005: 24–8).

Through the EU accession processes, often referred to as processes of “conditionality” (Grabbe 2002; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2004; Trauner 2009), the European Union has been able to exercise great power and influence over the countries that have applied to become members. The basic criteria for this integration process were set by the European Union in the Copenhagen Criteria of 1993 just after the widespread fall of communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. Part of these criteria states that “Membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of national minorities” (Copenhagen European Council 1993). By placing human rights as a central condition and key aspect of the EU accession processes, in which EU member states determine whether the criteria are met, the European Union has positioned itself as the gatekeeper of human rights and empowered itself to define what these rights are and what countries meet these standards. The inclusion of sexual rights as human rights, however, was not a concern of the European Union at the time of the creation of the Copenhagen Criteria in 1993. In fact, the European Union’s commitment to combating discrimination based on sexual orientation emerged precisely at the time when Croatia’s application for EU membership was being taken more seriously.

For Croatia, which has been a candidate for EU membership since 2004, the accession process has been longer and arguably much more arduous than for the countries that entered the EU in the fifth enlargement in 2004. The armed conflict in the 1990s that led to the break-up of former Yugoslavia, Croatia’s failure to turn in war criminals to The Hague Tribunal and Europe’s disdain for the authoritarian and isolationist politics of President Franjo Tuđman and the Croatian Democratic Party (HDZ)-led coalition (1990–1999) have all been described as factors that have delayed Croatia’s accession process (Jović 2006). In the last decade, after overcoming these larger obstacles, the European Union, which has undergone many changes as well, began to focus more on Croatia’s economic reforms, commitment to fighting corruption, the adoption of legal measures of the EU acquis and other judicial reforms defined in accession Chapter 23 on judiciary and fundamental rights. Other countries in Southeastern Europe which are still not part of the European Union such as Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey are facing similar demands.

Commenting on the European Union’s process of conditionality for these candidate countries, current director of the Open Society Institute-Brussels Heather Grabbe describes this phenomenon as the “moving target problem” in which the European Union “is a referee as well as a player” (2002: 251). In other words, the “negotiating” processes for EU accession are often less about negotiating and more about fulfilling requirements that may be changed at any point according to the rules laid out by the European Union. The long pre-accession period for Croatia has allowed the European Union more time to refine, consolidate and develop new requirements or mechanisms of “conditionality,” including measures taken to combat discrimination based on sexual orientation. These requirements for Croatia and the larger region and the unidirectional EU accession processes (re)produce a scale of development that is a declining scale of Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The introduction of the employment anti-discrimination directive, which protects individuals from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation only in their workplace, has become yet another moving target and significant as a defining measure of Croatia’s “developed” status.

The European Union’s new commitment to combat discrimination based on sexual orientation through legislation did not emerge, however, without a struggle. The inclusion of the anti-discrimination law in the European Union’s acquis came after LGBT organizations such as ILGA-Europe had spent many years lobbying EU institutions. Yet, after these enduring lobbying efforts, ILGA-Europe has now allied itself with the European Union in their efforts to apply pressure on national governments. In their report on the European Commission’s progress reports on potential EU member states, including Croatia, ILGA-Europe writes:

The gradually wider and self-evident inclusion of LGBT human rights in the [European] Commission’s monitoring system and in the progress reports means that LGBT rights are recognized within the European Union and that it is expected and demanded of the future members that they comply with the European values.

(ILGA-Europe 2008, emphasis mine)

The emergence of terms like “European values” in the documents used by some transnational LGBT organizations and EU institutions, which are then used to lobby for the rights of sexual minorities in countries outside of the European Union, (re)construct these rights as new markers of European “civilization” and “progress”. The European Union becomes a signifier of European culture as a whole. Commenting specifically on the role of ILGA-Europe’s lobbying work in the processes of EU accession, former member of ILGA-Europe’s executive board and scholar Nico Beger writes that:

[t]his practically does more than participate in the possibilities of gaining rights from a transnational institution: it creates specific meanings of Europeanness and potentially inadvertently substitutes Europe with the European Union. In this respect Europe as ideological concept and concrete institution could become more an addiction than a model for critical activism.

(2004: 158)

This new “addiction” to European values and identity are quite contrary to activist and scholarly literature which has criticized European and international institutions for their failure to recognize sexual rights. Echoing others’ claims about the transnational development of sexual rights as human rights (Fellmeth 2008; Marks 2006; Tahmindjis 2005; Wilson 2002), Austrian LGBT legal activist and scholar Helmut Graupner succinctly states in his work on human rights in Europe that “[W]ritten human rights law is scanty...