As Global North countries make significant progress in the social and legal situation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex people (LGBTQI) (Velasco 2018, Roberts 2019), these governments are increasingly under scrutiny for instrumentalizing the human rights of sexual and gender minorities for racist, xenophobic and imperialist political agendas. Queer of color critique (Puar 2007, Reddy 2011, Ritchie 2015) argues that rather than being motivated by the genuine concern for LGBTQI people around the world, Western governments and global institutions such as the United Nations use LGBTQI equality as a tool to demonstrate the civilizational superiority of ‘Western culture’ in opposition to both countries in the Global South and internal ethnic minorities. LGBTQI equality has been a concern for the European Union at least since the adoption of the Amsterdam Treaty, which explicitly mandated the Union to fight discrimination on grounds of - among others - sexual orientation. This resulted not only in adopting a set of legal measures explicitly referring to sexual orientation and gender identity, but also paying specific attention to such issues in the accession process (Kristoffersson, 2013; Slootmaeckers, 2020), as well as the foreign and neighborhood policy of the Union (Ayoub & Paternotte, 2014). The EU’s commitment to LGBTQI human rights was further strengthened by the adoption of the Commission’s list of actions to advance LGBTI equality (2015-2019) and most recently the first ever LGBTIQ Equality Strategy 2020-2025, both of which mention mainstreaming LGBTQI concerns in the Union’s external action as well. How should we evaluate these developments? Does the charge of homonationalism hold in the case of the European Union? Following the methodology of discursive policy analysis, in particular critical frame analysis (Verloo & Lombardo, 2007; Dombos et al., 2012) the paper will analyze a number of policy documents including the above mentioned strategies, accession reports, Commission guidelines, European Parliament reports and resolutions, as well as public speeches by EU leaders to assess whether the framing of LGBTQI issues at the EU level constitute a consistent homonationalist discourse. The paper is interested in identifying alternative framings of the issue that allow for raising concerns about the rights of LGBTQI people around the world without using the issues to strengthen social, cultural and physical borders.

The European public spere is conceptualized by EU studies scholars as a space for democratic deliberation and collective will-formation (Risse, 2010; Statham & Trenz, 2013). Contestation over Europe results in the construction of European identities that are nevertheless shaped by existing national discourses on Europe. Widely cited accounts of British EU debates tell a story of an ‘island nation’ defending its national sovereignty and ‘pragmatic’ economic interests in relation to its European ‘Other’ (see e.g. George, 1994; Gamble, 2003; Diez Medrano, 2003; Anderson & Weymouth, 1999). In this paper, I draw on feminist public sphere theory and queer-feminist theories of nationalism to argue that the epistemological and methodological underpinnings of European public sphere research tends to position white, cis and heterosexual, and majority male, politicians and journalists as the agents who define what it means to be European - or not. By exclusively analysing elite discourse, parliamentary debates, or mainstream newspapers, or asking gender- and sexuality-blind questions about national belonging, diverse women and queer people are rendered largely invisible, irrelevant to national stories about Europe. What does it mean to be British or English in Europe if women or queer people are positioned as agents, or if we assume gender and sexuality to be critical to understanding the state and European politics? Using the case of LGBTQ+ rights, and applying feminist curiosity as method, I reveal very different stories about national identity and Europe from the UK’s EEC accession through to Brexit. In mainstream news narratives, ‘Europe’ is constructed as a threat not just to the political but also the moral integrity of the nation following major ECJ and ECHR rulings granting equal rights to LGBTQ+ people. In LGBTQ+ counter-publics, ‘Europe’ is constructed as a progressive space in contrast to a ‘backwards’ Britain, with the EU and ECHR offering important albeit limited protections and arenas for political efficacy denied at the national level. Such findings have implications not just for our understanding of the UK and Brexit, but for academic knowledge production in European Studies more broadly.

This is a paper in normative political theory of European integration. The paper draws on an agonistic conception of EUropean (sexual) citizenship, which sees conflict and disagreement over the EU’s identity and values as characteristic and constructive of democratic life, rather than merely a stumbling block on the road to reconciliation or redemption. That is, democratic forms of conflict on the proper interpretation of the EU values and identity are seen as a sign of ‘pluralism at work’. As a case in point, the paper focus on disagreement concerning the EU’s ‘LGBT-friendly’ identity and values. On this background, the paper argues that existing normative theories of European integration have serious shortcomings in terms of their ability to account for and engage with high levels of disagreement. In order to make its case, the paper analyses, by way of deconstruction, three exemplary texts belonging to the cosmopolitan, statist and demoicratic schools of normative theory of European integration: Jürgen Habermas’ cosmopolitanism, Richard Bellamy’s neo-republican statism and Kalypso Nicolaïdis’ demoicracy. The results of the analysis show how the theories are unable to think through disagreements over the EU's identity and values as something which is not to be either circumvented, overruled or overcome. These theories are thus not sufficiently able to think legitimacy in agonistic terms. As a consequence the diagnosis and prescriptions put forward by the normative theories risk producing the very dissent they seek to master, because they end up designating alternative interpretations of the EUropean project as objects of either conquest, conversion or expulsion.

This paper examine the role gender norms in framing the role and leadership High Representatives (HR) for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Focusing specifically the appointments of Catherine Ashton and Federica Mogherini, we set out to understand the positionality of elite women in highly masculinised institutions and operating in areas traditionally seen as ‘gender free’. Of particular importance to our analysis is the role of symbolic representation in defining Normative Power Europe (NPE) and the gendered symbols of NPE regarding the EU as a gender equality actor. Therefore, the fact that the first HRs were women, underpins the principle of the EU’s normative vision as a gender actor and thus the HR is seen as an agent standing for this principle. Hence the research question is: ‘how have gender norms been discursively constructed in the work of the HR/VP?’. We focus on Ashton and Mogherini’s speeches, as these help to construct narratives around values and norms, articulated and verbalised by the symbols in legitimising the role of the EU as a gender champion. In this respect the paper provides insights into the EU’s identity as a gender actor, articulated through the role of the HR, which is given added significance as the position of HR is filled by female bodies which provides legitimacy for the gender norms and symbols being articulated.