This book is an ambitious, mixed-method examination of LGBT activism in postcommunist East-Central Europe that makes the counterintuitive argument that backlash to international pressures can be constructive to a social movement’s development. Conor O’Dwyer finds that the backlash unintentionally raises the visibility of the group by its targeted attacks: It fosters solidarity as individuals experience having their safety and security threatened, and, when a state is not immune to international pressures, the movement is likely to find new allies.
The argument is grounded in an empirically rich comparison of the dynamics of activism and backlash in Poland and the Czech Republic in the years before, during, and following their accession to the European Union. As detailed in Chapter 2, the EU became an important champion of LGBT rights just as postcommunist countries were seeking accession. Some leverage was direct, as accession required labor code reforms to ensure antidiscrimination protections for LGBT individuals and provided some resource support to local groups. More significant was the indirect impact. In pushing postcommunist countries to adopt laws that circumvented the prevailing social attitudes, this process sparked a backlash in several countries and prompted framing contests between these opponents to gay rights and activists who embraced the EU’s language of human rights. This result is seen most clearly in Poland, where small communities of mostly gay men in the 1990s were transformed into a vibrant and politicized national LGBT movement whose successes included the election of the head of a transgender rights group to parliament in 2011. In contrast, the once-promising movement in the Czech Republic has languished.
Chapters 3–6 trace these processes in detail. As explained in Chapter 4, the Czech gay rights movement had begun early and expanded into a national, politically oriented umbrella social-movement organization that could work “behind the scene” to achieve incremental reforms by the end of the 1990s. This development was facilitated by Czechoslovak sexologists who had gotten homosexuality decriminalized in 1961, by framing it as a problem that could lead to social alienation without therapeutic attention, essentially making it a nonissue for most people. In contrast, homosexuality in Poland was considered a moral failing, and in the context of the Catholic Church’s “outsized role,” activists were not able to consolidate a national coalition before Poland joined the EU. Chapter 3 compares the rise of the “hard-right backlash” in the early 2000s in Poland—in which political parties and their allies politicized the issue of homosexuality with strident homophobia and linked gay rights to Europeanization—to the mostly tepid backlash in the Czech Republic.
Chapters 5 and 6 examine the resulting dynamics in the years leading up to (1998–2004) and then following EU accession (2004–12). In Poland, activists responded to the hard-right’s bans on Pride marches and tacit approval of homophobic violence by embracing the EU’s human rights framing, creating more formal organizations, and becoming explicitly political. By 2010, they were mobilized enough to host EuroPride in Warsaw, the first postcommunist city to host this European-wide event, and had found important allies, including a political party (Twój Ruch). In contrast, the Czech movement fragmented and lost important state funding. The remaining Czech groups focused on the single issue of registered partnerships, which they achieved in quite limited form in 2007, and then disbanded. In the process, they worked through informal, personalized contacts with parliamentarians, missing opportunities to create broader support or to push for other important reforms. Instead of facing backlash as in Poland, the problem was co-optation by a mostly indifferent state.
This in-depth qualitative analysis is reinforced by some quantitative analysis and some minicomparisons. The author uses quantitative data on attitudes toward homosexuality and LGBT rights to substantiate the notable differences between Western and postcommunist Europe, as well as multivariate regression to substantiate the hypothesis about the positive impact of the promise of EU membership on LGBT legal rights. Chapter 7 examines activism in Hungary, whose trajectory was quite similar to that in Poland, though the hard-right has had more electoral success; in Slovakia, whose trajectory is most like that in the Czech Republic, even though it is a more closed society; and in Romania, where backlash came before the EU pressure but together these forces boosted the movement. The book’s argument is strengthened in the conclusion, which adds even more comparisons, showing how the Polish women’s movement’s trajectory is similar to that of LGBT rights, considering why Roma rights movements in postcommunist Europe have not had the same growth, and then comparing the trends in LGBT movements around the world.
Coming Out of Communism is a tour de force in comparative analysis, interrogating civil society—which is notoriously difficult to study—and covering issues often ignored by the field. Most in conversation with Philip Ayoub’s When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility (2016), the book speaks to multiple central literatures in political science. Like Ayoub, O’Dwyer analyzes the impact of transnational influence on norm diffusion by examining the EU’s recent pressure on LGBT rights, pointing to the visibility that such pressure can bring but also to the impact of opponents. However, the author is more concerned with social movement theorizing, making two important assertions that differ from Ayoub: first, that we should think about movement success beyond policy outcomes and, second, that threats to the “immediate protective surround” of individuals—often engendered by backlash—is one powerful way to overcome the collective action problem. While O’Dwyer might not agree—by bringing into focus the mobilization of marginalized “sexual minorities”—I think that his book challenges the common wisdom that postcommunist civil society can be characterized as weak, in the 1990s or today.
The book raises two concerns for me. First, while I agree that social movements are more than their legislative success, I hesitate to use the vibrancy of a movement as the only measure of its success, especially considering the high personal costs paid by LGBT activists and allies in Poland with the return of the hard-right in 2015. Feminist political science has many, and more nuanced, answers to this question of what counts as success for women’s/feminist activism—as well as numerous studies of the EU’s impact on violence against women—that could have been usefully considered here. Second, I think that the book glosses over the strategic political choices made by the hard-right, thereby failing to interrogate their claim that Europe is responsible for their homophobia. For example, the book asserts that “[t]he EU’s promotion of LGBT-rights norms in applicant-states provoked varying degrees of hard-right backlash” (p. 18), even as the EU could do very little really to protect LGBT individuals. As others who have a global lens have asserted, I suspect that the postcommunist hard-right leaders chose to attack LGBT rights because that is what illiberal populists are doing these days; Europe is the scapegoat.
These concerns open up important and timely questions, which, together with the its strengths, make Coming Out of Communism a book that should be considered for use in introductory comparative politics seminars for doctoral students.
