Conclusion

This chapter begins with a review of the book’s argument and principal findings. It then discusses theoretical and applied lessons for the study of sexual citizenship and the practice of LGBT activism in the new EU member-states of postcommunist Europe. The chapter’s remaining sections reflect on the argument’s implications for other social issues and regional contexts. These include the women’s movement in contemporary Poland, Roma activism in Hungary, and LGBT activism outside the sphere of potential EU applicant-states (especially the former Soviet Union and Latin America). Animating this discussion is the question of how to account for instances when social movements fail to thrive, or even wither, in the face of backlash. A second animating question is what counts as social movement “success,” policy gains or organizational development? The chapter concludes with some speculation about LGBT activism in the US and Western Europe in light of the contemporary turn to populist-nationalist politics in both places.

How the Hard Right “Europeanized” Homosexuality

This chapter presents a framework for understanding the consequences of hard-right electoral breakthrough for the framing of homosexuality and LGBT rights. It begins by describing the extant framings of homosexuality under late communism in Poland and the Czech Republic. It then compares how the differing electoral success of hard-right political parties over the course of the EU accession process led to differing degrees of reframing homosexuality in both countries. In Poland, hard-right mobilization transformed the framing of LGBT rights by linking them with EU accession, which it portrayed as a threat to national identity. Because the Czech Republic did not experience hard-right backlash, the predominant framing of LGBT rights did not become as closely identified with the EU. The final part of the chapter moves from framing contests to frame resonance by presenting a quantitative content analysis of LGBT issues in both countries’ press from 1990 through 2012.

Activism after EU Leverage

This chapter completes the close comparison of Poland and the Czech Republic. In 2004, both became EU members, a change that weakened transnational leverage and reshaped the political opportunity structure such that the costs of repressing LGBT-rights movements fell. In Poland, this shift led to an immediate increase in direct and indirect repression under a newly elected hard-right government. Over the longer term, however, this backlash reinforced solidarity, prevented internal framing contests, and helped win movement allies. The chapter focuses in particular on how Polish activism became electorally mobilized through an alliance with the political party Your Movement. The Czech Republic, where the hard right remained irrelevant, saw no such backlash; nor, however, did the Czech movement reap backlash’s benefits. Instead, it continued the demobilizing and deinstitutionalizing trends described in the previous chapter.

The Benefits of Backlash

This chapter presents an overview of the wide variation in the politics of homosexuality and the trajectories of LGBT activism in postcommunist Europe since 1989. Against the conventional wisdom that this region is noteworthy precisely for its lack of progress regarding sexuality, this chapter’s historical-comparative perspective reveals examples of surprisingly well-organized and politically mobilized social movements advocating LGBT rights, often in those countries associated with resurgent traditionalism and backlash against transnational rights norms. This variation is puzzling in terms of the predominant “grand narratives” of post-1989 political development, namely, that of weak civil society and that of transnational diffusion and Europeanization through accession to the European Union. A comparative analytical framework is presented to explain how and under what conditions transnational pressures may boost the organizational development of LGBT-rights activism in postcommunist societies.

Activism before EU Leverage

This is the first of three chapters that process trace the development of LGBT activism in Poland and the Czech Republic through the different stages of exposure to and integration into the EU. It sets a baseline for assessing how hard-right backlash impacted the organization of activism by showing what fledgling activist networks in both countries looked like before the application of EU leverage, a comparison that proves to be a study in contrasts. By 1997, Czech activists had moved from informal organization to the consolidation of a politically oriented social movement organization that aggregated a broad network of local groups into a national-level structure. By contrast, the Polish movement had failed to move from local to national organization; informal affiliations still formed the basis of organization; and, motivated by concerns regarding funding and safety, activists were avowedly apolitical in orientation.

EU Enlargement and LGBT Rights

This chapter describes how the EU came to embrace policies furthering LGBT equality and then promoted them transnationally through the enlargement process. It addresses three main questions. First, what was the EU’s own path to these policies? Second, how have scholars conceptualized EU leverage in diffusing these policies, and what are the findings in extant empirical analyses of this diffusion in Western Europe and first-wave postcommunist EU applicant-states? Third, if the geographic scope is extended to include not just first-wave postcommunist EU applicant-states but all of postcommunist Europe, can EU leverage still be shown to significantly influence states’ adoption of LGBT-friendly policies? The chapter presents statistical analysis to address the latter question. It finds support for the positive effect of EU leverage on legal frameworks regarding sexual orientation in postcommunist Europe broadly considered, but it also finds that the promise of membership has a stronger effect on the quality of rights frameworks than being a member.

Activism under EU Leverage

This chapter shows how the onset of EU leverage began to transform the dynamics of LGBT activism in Poland but not in the Czech Republic. The arcs of activism now began to reverse, with the Polish movement strengthening as the Czech one fragmented and deinstitutionalized. In Poland, EU accession helped reframe homosexuality from a question of morality to one of European law and human rights. Polish activists also exploited the opportunity to broker between the national government and the EU regarding the implementation of EU norms. While EU conditionality helped achieve progress, especially regarding antidiscrimination policy, it also set the stage for hard-right political backlash from 2004 to 2007. In the Czech Republic, by contrast, EU accession hardly touched the politics of homosexuality. It sparked no hard-right backlash and was not taken up by rights activists as a tool of brokerage. Instead, Czech activists devoted most of their energies to a project for which the EU accession process offered no leverage, same-sex partnerships, and largely ignored the area for which it did, antidiscrimination policy.

Exploring Alternative Trajectories

This chapter expands the boundaries of comparison to include three additional postcommunist EU applicant-states over the same time frame as the previous chapters: Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. These case studies offer further support that hard-right backlash against transnational norms builds activism even where extant domestic mobilizing structures are weak. At the same time, they highlight new variations-the possibility of extraparliamentary backlash, the consequences of backlash in the absence of external leverage, and the trade-off between policy gains and grassroots participation. These variations open up vistas for applying the argument beyond Eastern Europe.