When the Berlin Wall fell, CEE societies had unprecedented exposure to norms concerning LGBT people, which were developing more rapidly in other parts of the continent. Pathways for the exchange of ideas opened tremendously as the continent again re-examined its understanding of “Europe,” and as increased transnational channels supplemented the internal dynamics that led to such striking changes in CEE. While political scientists generally analyze the diffusion of policies across states, the abruptness and rapidity of European integration in the 1990s also exhibits value internalization among and across societies. Indeed, international norm diffusion theory suggests that accepted ideas spread from areas of high concentration (usually powerful states) to areas of low concentration; at its essence, this theory describes how social entities change their behavior (Florini 1996). Change in attitudes toward sexual minorities is thus a measure of norm internalization that goes beyond state compliance.

Surely, for most LGBT movements, legal recognition is deeply intertwined with the objective of sociocultural recognition. A “revolution in thought,” as the Italian transnational activist Angelo Pezzana called it, is about fundamental shifts in behaviors, practices, and understandings that change lived experiences for sexual minorities. Activists like Pezzana understood that for minorities – who are so often deemed radical in their own domestic contexts – such changes have both domestic and transnational sources.

In this chapter, I focus on international norm diffusion pertaining to changing attitudes and perceptions of sexual minorities in an integrating Europe. Attitudes toward homosexuality are still largely negative in most countries around the world, including much of Europe, and only recently has there been a more rapid shift toward internalizing the norm of accepting homosexuality. In their “return to Europe,” newly admitted member states were exposed to similar EU norms and regulation, yet their societies display stark variations in value shifts (see Figure 5.1). For example, between the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 and accession to the EU in 2004, nearly 60 percent of Slovaks positively shifted their opinion on homosexuality, while Hungarians saw no positive change at all.

This chapter returns to several core questions: why have societal attitudes toward lesbian and gay people been different across states?

In the 1980s, activists of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in New York coined the slogan “Silence = Death,” an expression that came to define much of the LGBT movement in that decade. In the spirit of Harvey Milk, who rejected what he called a “conspiracy of silence,” the activists were responding to the Reagan administration's silence on the HIV/AIDS epidemic that had brought the gay community to its knees. ACT UP adopted a logo that featured, above the words “Silence = Death,” a pink triangle symbolizing the patch that gay concentration camp prisoners were forced to wear during the Second World War (WWII). That historical context also evoked the theme of silence and death: in the 1940s, the silence of a nation and the silence of a social group resulted in death in the camps of Dachau, just as it did in the hospital beds of Chelsea in the 1980s. Equating silence with death is therefore neither new nor unique to a particular context. Indeed, nearly a century earlier in 1896, a German gay advocate (using the pseudonym Ludwig Frey) wrote that “Stillschweigen ist der Tod” (staying silent is death) (Beachy 2014, 107). At various points during the twentieth century, members of a marginalized group who sometimes had the ability to disguise their sexual orientation and gender identity were compelled to come out, to act up, and to make themselves visible.

Extending the logic of the “Silence = Death” campaign, I argue that visibility explains the transnational diffusion of LGBT rights in Europe. The premise that visibility leads to change is not new among European rights activists, many of whom share Harvey Milk's theory that gay and lesbian people should publicly declare their orientation if they wish to see society accept them (Herek 2004, 14). That said, they also caution that coming out – especially on an individual basis – is a privilege that can be more or less difficult depending on context (a point I return to at the end of this chapter).

On the gray late spring day of June 19, 2010, Judith Butler, the renowned philosopher and public intellectual, took to the stage at the Brandenburg Gate to address Berlin's Christopher Street Day parade. The annual event celebrates the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) identities, and that year it had again attracted almost a million guests from across the continent. A bird's-eye view of the colorful throng of people on the tree-lined street that connects the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column – the Prussian military monument that Berlin's gay community symbolically claimed as their own – clearly suggested that the organizers had achieved their goal of generating visibility. While some participants simply came to celebrate (though by making their identities visible, their presence was still political [V. Taylor, Rupp, and Gamson 2004]), others purposefully enhanced the colorful nature of the event by carrying signs and banners that articulated political grievances. Many of these statements championed or targeted the governments of foreign states, reflecting political action that reached far beyond the city and the state. Butler stood before a crowd peppered with diverse national symbols – in recent years they have included a Swedish flag, a banner with the words Solidarność Gejów (“gay solidarity” in Polish), an image of Russian President Vladimir Putin's face painted in drag, and floats foreign embassies and expatriate communities had commissioned.

The scene illustrates the transnational dynamics of a movement that has spilled over the borders of nation states, a dimension of visibility that is central to this book. Visibility for LGBT people often has its roots in transnational sources. Indeed, the Berlin parade's name, Christopher Street Day, refers to the street in New York City where police raided the Stonewall Bar in 1969, subsequently spawning the gay liberation movement that moved LGBT people out of the closet and into the streets. With the parade's audience spread across both halves of a once-divided city where the Berlin Wall stood, the location itself represented both persistence and change in the role transnational movements play in an integrating Europe. Berlin was the avant-garde city that housed the world's first research center on homosexuality in 1897 but then stood aside in fearful silence as the capital of a state that brutally persecuted gay identity during the Third Reich.

In 1948, Axel and Eigil Axgil and their colleagues founded Denmark's first gay rights organization, Kredsen af 1948 (The Circle of 1948). Inspired by the UN Declaration of Human Rights of that year, homophile organizations like Kredsen af 1948 began to lobby states for gay rights. For affluent democracies, the birth of the gay liberation movement and the dawn of the 1970s heralded a marked, albeit gradual, expansion in the legal protections that states provided gay and lesbian minorities. By October 1, 1989, the first same-sex couples – including the Axgils, who celebrated four decades as a couple and as human rights activists – had entered into registered partnerships in Denmark. Although progress has been slow and has often provoked countermovements intended to block progressive legislation and to promote anti-LGBT policies, the proliferation of LGBT-friendly legislation has amplified the voice of a once politically invisible group and has become a recurrent theme in modern European politics.

Legal recognition of LGBT minorities varies greatly across European states, however. In this chapter, I explore LGBT norm diffusion by examining legislative changes across states. Europe is distinctive in that it houses states at both ends of the global spectrum of LGBT egalitarianism, with wide discrepancies both in legislation, which this chapter examines, and in the social acceptance of LBGT minorities (Chapter 5). While some states (e.g. Denmark) quickly became the world's leading advocates for LGBT rights and provided the most extensive legal measures to their citizenry, others have only recently decriminalized homosexuality (e.g. Romania in 2001). Furthermore, some states in the region have introduced or proposed legislation that retrenches the rights of LGBT minorities, such as bans on same-sex unions or bills banning gay propaganda. Figure 4.1 shows how EU member states have varied in adopting LGBT legislation over three decades. The 12-point LGBT legislation score counts various pieces of pro-LGBT legislation, described in detail in Table A.1 in the Appendix.

Transnational activists have long publicized this imbalance in legal recognition of LGBT minority rights as a central concern for those working to achieve social equality across Europe.

Research methods and data collection

Research methods

In my research design, I employed an eclectic multimethod (quantitative and qualitative) approach. I used a nested analysis technique, which began with the large-n statistical test of correlation between variables and then, depending on the results, proceeded to either “model-testing” or “model-building” small-n analysis (Lieberman 2005, 436). The project included large-n analyses that used statistical methods to test correlations between predictors in all EU member states, and small-n analyses that used qualitative methods to trace channels of diffusion between carefully selected case studies. I thus used a triangular design in which the preliminary large-n analyses identified a set of ideal cases (on the regression line) for the small-n analysis, which I used to test the theory and to understand the mechanisms by which ideas diffuse.

I first constructed the data sets for preliminary quantitative analyses (final versions appear in Table A.1 and Table A.3). Next, I turned to qualitative methods in order to confirm or question the validity of the correlations I observed in the large-n analysis. This allowed me to answer open questions of causal order, measurement, and the heterogeneity of cases. I followed the principle that in triangulation “the best use of [small-n analysis] is to leverage its distinct complementarities with [large-n analysis], not to try to implement it with the exact same procedures as one would carry out regression analysis” (Lieberman 2005, 440). In this sense, the small-n analyses also allowed me to observe the mechanisms that connected the independent and dependent variables, aiding my understanding of historical sequence and causal process (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001).

In a paired comparison, I chose Poland and Slovenia because my initial analysis revealed that, among new EU member states, these historically Catholic states were on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of legal standing and societal attitudes toward LGBT people. Both cases had variation on the explanatory and dependent variables. I also studied Germany and the EU as “norm entrepreneur” cases, because I identified them as sources of horizontal and vertical diffusion, respectively. These cases served as mobilizing structures for activism in CEE. They illustrated how ideas diffused, with activists using resources available to them in one context to mobilize in another.

Braving sweltering summer temperatures, 15,000 people gathered in Warsaw to celebrate LGBT visibility on a July weekend in 2010. Everything about that weekend in Warsaw – from the 90-degree temperatures to the parade of rainbow colors – seemed atypical as marchers from Poland and beyond assembled for the annual EuroPride parade. Hosting the regional event was a first for Poland and also for CEE. The European Pride Organizers Association, a group that included Tomasz Bączkowski, wanted the event to come to Warsaw after the 2007 ECtHR decision that had made it illegal to ban public assembly in Poland. This was a moment to reflect on the progress that domestic and transnational activism had made in Poland, and for activists from across Europe to gather and discuss the achievements and obstacles ahead. Yet the parade was met with strong resistance, as an estimated eight counterdemonstrations took place alongside it.

That same month, roughly 300 participants attended the tenth annual Ljubljana Pride, where “there have never been large masses of counterdemonstrations” (interview no. 154). The Ljubljana Pride, whose theme that year was “Enough Waiting on Equal Rights,” proceeded as usual. It received political endorsements from the president of the national assembly, Pavel Ganta, and Ljubljana's mayor, Zoran Jankovič – who has attended in years since. The minister of the interior, Katarina Kresal of the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia party, again marched alongside participants. Novel to the 2010 event was the attendance of several Slovenian celebrities who expressed their support for expanding additional rights to the LGBT community. As had been the case every year since 2001, the Ljubljana Pride looked and felt like a celebration.

The Warsaw and Ljubljana Pride parades employed similar tactics and made related claims. Yet the striking difference between the events lies in the forms and extent of local resistance they provoked. Even the academic panels at the Warsaw “Pride House” in the week leading up to the event drew demonstrators. In Slovenia, political leaders were responsible for the sober public statements in reaction to the parade, but in Poland the stage was left open for religious leaders to respond. Although the EuroPride program included encouraging messages of support from mayors of other cities, such as London and Berlin, Warsaw's mayor, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz of the center-right Civic Platform Party, remained silent.

Introduction

In democratic political systems, elections are the most important institutionalised opportunities to articulate political preferences and opinions, to mobilise citizens and to organise political conflict. Political conflict is expected to be most intensive in the electoral arena, where political parties fight for votes, offices and policies. In Schattschneider's words, this is where the ‘crowd’ comes in because ‘[n]othing attracts a crowd as quickly as a fight’ (Schattschneider 1975 [1960]: 1). In our context, this statement needs to be qualified in two respects. First, it is true that elections have by far the strongest mobilising power compared to national referenda or protest events. However, they have an elitist bias because they are dominated by political parties and marginalise interest groups and organised civil society. Second, while political conflict in integration debates is clearly directed at European issues, elections are open for any political issue. For this reason, conflicts over European integration have to compete with other domestic issues (such as welfare, unemployment, security, etc.) for public attention and for consideration in parties’ electoral strategies. Taken together, elections may provide a favourable political opportunity structure for politicisation, but it is uncertain whether parties actually make use of this opportunity. It is the task of this chapter to examine this empirically.

We concentrate on the national electoral arena, because national elections in the period under consideration were ‘first order elections’. Compared to ‘second order elections’ to the European Parliament (Reif and Schmitt 1980) or to sub-national election contests, they had the highest turnover and parties directed their strongest efforts at them. Moreover, as we argued in the introductory chapter, in the EU's multi-layered polity, national elections are expected to be the most important institutionalised channel to mobilise political conflict beyond the narrow range of the governmental elite. In order to assess the relative importance of conflicts in national election contests, we introduce an empirical benchmark which allows European integration issues to be compared with the most relevant domestic issues. Against this background, the key questions to be answered in this chapter are the following. Has the European integration process become politicised in the last four decades in the electoral arena?

Introduction

The empirical analysis in this book represents the most comprehensive effort so far to understand political conflict over European integration in all its relevant manifestations. Our study covers more than four decades of European integration from the early 1970s to the most critical phases of the euro crisis in six west European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK). We examined public debates on every major step of integration in the past four decades; we have investigated the relevance of European issues in every national election in this period; and we have collected data on protest events on European issues since 1995. If there has been a politicisation of the European integration process in the last four decades, we will have observed it!

In the following, we summarise and discuss the main findings in five steps. First, we give a résumé of the level of politicisation and its development. In this context, we check the validity of our general politicisation hypothesis and of the hypotheses on the individual dimensions of politicisation. In a second step, we provide explanations of the pattern of politicisation which we have observed; third, we analyse the effects of politicisation on the structuring of political conflict in Europe; fourth, we investigate the consequences of politicisation for the European integration process; and, finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for integration theory.

In sum, we argue that the politicisation hypothesis as advanced in the scholarly literature needs substantial revision. There is neither a single uniform process of politicisation nor is there a clear trend over time. Rather, European integration must be interpreted as a strategic opportunity for political actors, political parties in particular, to mobilise citizens. Such opportunities to politicise European issues became increasingly common with the intensification of the integration process after the mid 1980s, but they already existed in the 1970s and they have been exploited not only by radical challengers but also by mainstream parties on several occasions. The result is a punctuated politicisation, characterised by significant variation over time, across countries and political arenas. This pattern may be interpreted as a result of the dynamic interplay of strategies of politicisation and de-politicisation. Although these findings do not fully support postfunctionalist integration theory, they are compatible with most of its assumptions.

Introduction

The previous chapters have traced the politicisation of Europe by looking at contestation both around key integration steps and national elections. Generally speaking, the results support the claim that the European integration process has become politicised since the 1990s. At the same time, they suggest that public conflicts over Europe are still very much an elite affair. While the study of election campaigns focused exclusively on political parties, the integration debates turned out to be dominated by public authority actors. Less powerful actors, such as civil society or social movement organisations (SMOs), were hardly present in these public debates (see also Koopmans 2007, 2010; Helbling et al. 2012: 216–220 and Statham and Trenz 2013a: 85–93). While this finding casts doubt on the idea that social movements and other civil society actors are key to the politicisation of Europe, as suggested by Beck and Grande (2007) and Habermas (2012), we still lack a systematic assessment of this claim.

This chapter provides such an assessment by testing our ‘mass politics hypothesis’ (see Chapter 1). In other words, the chapter answers the question of whether European integration has become part and parcel of mass politics, i.e., whether non-party challengers and ordinary citizens are becoming more involved in conflicts over Europe. To do this, the chapter shifts attention to the protest arena. More specifically, we ask whether and to what extent European integration has become politicised in the protest arenas of the six countries. The protest arena's centre and pivotal point is the direct participation of people in protest events. Mobilising this active participation is a core competence and resource of the collective actors involved in protest politics (Hutter 2014a: 26–29). Taking up Schattschneider's (1975 [1960]: 1) words again, the protest arena is the channel where the ‘crowd’ can enter the fight without institutional, thematic or territorial boundaries. Thus, we change our research strategy and focus on protest events that are thematically related to European integration – either directly in terms of the issues articulated by the protesters or indirectly by means of the justification frames used or the addressee of the event (for the data collection strategy, see Chapter 2).

The focus on protest events reflects our general definition of politicisation as involving three dimensions: salience, polarisation and actor expansion.