Europe <3 Gays? LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-Yugoslav Space

In March 2013, the Gay Lesbian Info Centre, a Belgrade-based LGBT activist organisation, issued a statement urging the European Union to stop using the Serbian LGBT population as a bargaining chip in the European integration process. This was an immediate reaction to the words of Jelko Kacin, the European Parliament Rapporteur for Serbia, that the Belgrade Pride Parade was one of the key tests, if not conditions, for the country’s membership of the European Union. Our paper outlines the major trends of post-Yugoslav LGBT activism showing how it developed at the intersection of war, ethnic nationalism, devastating neoliberal privatisation, strong reclericalisation, authoritarian populism, pronounced urban-rural tensions, contested sovereignties and European integration processes. We discuss the cultural implications of pairing Europeanisation with “gay struggle” and argue that this coupling destabilises the grassroots ownership of activist initiatives, detaches the increasingly NGOised and professionalised activist community from its “constituency”, and creates a new “intermestic public sphere” of privileged voices. By examining the challenges that identitarian activist politics based on “non-normative” sexualities encounter in the current social circumstances, we problematise the trope of “Europeanisation” as linear and approach it as a complex, dynamic and troubled “translation” process that reproduces asymmetrical power relations, equating Europeanisation with progress and civilization and, hence, intolerance to gays as a form of non-European primitivist Other. Binaries between modernity and retraditionalisation become inscribed not only between the European Union and the post-Yugoslav space, but also within the post-Yugoslav space itself.