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“For more than a decade, an increasingly sophisticated literature has
charted the effect that the EU has on LGBTI rights in its own member and
accession states. This book is the biggest step yet toward a new frontier, one
that looks at the EU’s impact on such rights far beyond its borders. Written
by an expert on the inner and outer workings for the EU, and the varied
positions of the member states, Thiel makes sense of the Janus-faced nature
of EU foreign policy on LGBTI rights. He looks critically at the normative
implications of such norm promotion, while not throwing out the simulta-
neous importance of an LGBTI foreign policy that activists could have only
imagined some decades ago. Taking seriously the empirics and the process,
this critical reading shines a light on the potential of softer social mecha-
nisms of change—as opposed to hard conditionality—that should guide IOs
in refining the ways they seek to make a positive impact in the world, as well
as identifying their limits in doing so.”
— Phillip M. Ayoub, Associate Professor at Occidental
College, USA, and author of When States Come Out

“This book is a significant addition to the literature on the EU’s human

rights policy. Thiel critically analyses the EU’s attempts to diffuse norms of
LGBTI rights, in Europe and beyond, and exposes the weaknesses in both
internal and external LGBTI rights promotion. Importantly, he demon-
strates that the EU’s policies can backfire, and generate contestation by ex-
ternal actors, which in turn can damage the rights of LGBTI people on the
ground. He calls for a more reflective and intersectional EU practice, within
a broader foreign policy prioritising support for democracy.”
— Karen E. Smith, Professor and Head of the Depart-
ment of International Relations at LSE, UK
The European Union’s International
Promotion of LGBTI Rights

This book critically analyzes the European Union’s promotion of LGBTI

rights in the international arena. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and
Intersex rights are heavily contested across the globe, with over 70 countries
criminalizing same-sex relations and at least 10 imposing the death penalty.
The book details how the EU, based on different member state positions,
attempts to jointly formulate and implement guidelines for the external pro-
motion of LGBTI rights. It also problematizes the various normative and
policy-based Eurocentric prescriptions to further these rights. Drawing on
an international political sociology framework infused with queer theoreti-
cal thought, the author investigates the apparent normative tensions emerg-
ing from Europe’s promotion of LGBTI rights as liberal human rights and
the ensuing pushback by culturally and politically conservative states. He
examines the compatibility of EU institutional and member states’ concep-
tions of LGBTI rights and the more general question of the EU’s normative
agenda-setting power on the world stage. He then explores the external pol-
icy areas in which LGBTI rights promotion is formulated and diffused –
namely in development and foreign aid, in enlargement and neighbourhood
policies, and in other international organizations. In conclusion, the author
suggests viewing the contention surrounding LGBTI rights within broader
governance contexts, and thus reimagining rights promotion in a more
holistic manner.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of LGBTI and
Human Rights, European Politics, and International Relations.

Markus Thiel is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Inter-

national Relations at the Green School of International and Public Affairs
at Florida International University, Miami. He also directs FIU’s EU-Jean
Monnet Center of Excellence. His research interests are the political sociol-
ogy of the EU and European Politics more generally, Identity Politics and
LGBTI Politics.
Routledge Studies in Gender and Global Politics
Series Editor: Laura J. Shepherd, University of Sydney, Australia

This series aims to publish books that work with, and through, feminist in-
sights on global politics, and illuminate the ways in which gender functions
not just as a marker of identity but also as a constitutive logic in global po-
litical practices. The series welcomes scholarship on any aspect of global po-
litical practices, broadly conceived, that pays attention to the ways in which
gender is central to, (re)produced in, and is productive of, such practices.
There is growing recognition both within the academy and in global polit-
ical institutions that gender matters in and to the practices of global politics.
From the governance of peace and security, to the provision of funds for de-
velopment initiatives, via transnational advocacy networks linked through
strategic engagement with new forms of media, these processes have a gen-
dered dimension that is made visible through empirically grounded and the-
oretically sophisticated feminist work.

International Women’s Rights Law and Gender Equality

Making the Law Work for Women
Edited by Ramona Vijeyarasa

Gender and Political Apology

When the Patriarchal State Says “Sorry”
Emma Dolan

The European Union’s International Promotion of LGBTI Rights

Promises and Pitfalls
Markus Thiel

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/Routledge-Studies-in-Gender-and-Global-Politics/book-series/GGP
The European Union’s
International Promotion of
LGBTI Rights
Promises and Pitfalls

Markus Thiel
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Markus Thiel
The right of Markus Thiel to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thiel, Markus, 1973– author.
Title: The European Union's international promotion of LGBTI
rights : promises and pitfalls / Markus Thiel.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. |
Series: Routledge studies in gender and global politics | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021010134 (print) | LCCN 2021010135 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367514396 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367516185 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003054627 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Gay rights—European Union countries. | Gay
rights—International cooperation. | Sexual minorities—Civil
rights—European Union countries. | Sexual minorities—Civil
rights—International cooperation. | European Union.
Classification: LCC HQ76.8.E85 T45 2022 (print) | LCC HQ76.8.E85
(ebook) | DDC 323.3/264094—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010134
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010135

ISBN: 978-0-367-51439-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-51618-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05462-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003054627

Typeset in Times New Roman

by codeMantra
To my beloved late husband Peter J. Garcia
Contents

List of figures xi
Preface xiii
List of abbreviations xv

1 Introduction: an artificial ‘clash of civilizations’? 1

2 From norm diffusion to norm contestation:

Europe as a normative actor 20

3 LGBTI rights promotion within the EU: crafting

consensual norms where few exist? 44

4 Homophobia and EUrophobia in accession and

neighborhood countries 68

5 Development policy and foreign aid: conditionality

and its discontents 93

6 Global and diffuse? The EU’s multilateral promotion

of LGBTI rights 117

7 Conclusion: rethinking and reimagining international

LGBTI rights promotion 138

Index 161
Figures

3.1 Rainbow Europe Map, ILGA Europe, 2013 52

3.2 Rainbow Europe Map, ILGA Europe, 2020 52
4.1 European Accession and Neighborhood States 71
4.2 Quality of Democracy Index, 2014–2020, Bertelsmann
Foundation 75
4.3 Decline of European Populations According to Sub-region,
Pew Research 79
4.4 Muslim Populations in EU States and Projected Growth
Scenarios, Pew Research 80
Preface

As a ‘critical friend’ of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex

(LGBTI) politics, rather than an outright queer theorist, which also be-
comes evident in my penchant for qualitative empirical research and policy-
relevant critique, I hope that this book serves to raise awareness of the unin-
tended consequences of an important international policy issue. Similarly,
‘feminist critical friends’ (Chapell and Mackay 2020) are generally support-
ive but also use their expertise and distance from politics to be both engaged
and critical analysts of progressive policies. Dedicated to bridging LGBTI
politics and queer theory, this book aims to link the support for human
rights for LGBTI individuals worldwide with a recognition of the manifold
challenges, contingencies, and opportunities that come out of a critical-
reflective position on and analysis of the matter, and use my privilege as a
tenured Caucasian gay academic to advocate for a reimagining of existing
rights policies. This extends to EU politics and policies, which, while often
created with good intentions, may produce ambiguous outcomes, as my pre-
vious critical-constructivist analyses of EU policies highlight. Scholars in
European (Union) Studies have more recently rediscovered and advanced
‘critical studies’ as an essential, corrective focus; however, instead of con-
centrating on mainstream issues such as democracy or capitalism, newer
post-materialist issues such as civil society or sexuality and gender issues are
now analyzed in this groundbreaking manner.
There are many friends and colleagues that helped me along the way with
their insightful comments on this project, and their encouragement through
difficult times. I want to express my heartfelt thanks to David Paternotte
and Phil Ayoub for their unwavering support, Susanne Zwingel for being
a critical friend herself, Johanne Saltnes for the great collaboration on
other outputs, Manuela Picq for her sisterhood and intellect, as well as Elis-
abeth Pruegl, Koen Slootmaeckers, Momin Rahman, Mike Bosia, Emek
Ucarer, Sandy Mc Evoy, Katie Laatikainen, Michael J. Williams, Romain
Pasquier, Anthony Langlois, Yovita Ivanova, Amy Lind, David Rayside,
Sabine Lang, Roberta Guerrina, Hannah Muehlenhoff, Karen Smith, Mat-
thew Waites, and many others for making International Relations a more
humane discipline. A special thanks go to Eloisa Vladescu and Ernesto
xiv Preface
Fiocchetto, as well as my Routledge editors, for their detail-oriented help
in making this manuscript better. And to Laura Shepherd and the anony-
mous reviewers for embracing this project for Routledge’s ‘Gender in Global
Politics’ series. Finally, I would like to thank Florida International Univer-
sity’s Department of Politics and International Relations, where I found an
intellectual and warm home in one of the few remaining free-standing IR
departments in the U.S.
I would also like to acknowledge with gratitude the support of Ben Tonra,
in collaboration with Arena’s GLOBUS Global Justice Project, the German
Development Institute and there especially Christine Hackenesch for the
inclusion in their project on the politicization of EU development aid, the
International Studies Association for awarding Momin Rahman and me
the workshop grant on the politicization of international LGBTI politics,
as well as Christine Caly-Sanchez and our Miami-Florida Jean Monnet
Center of Excellence, supported by the European Commission. May this
book contribute to an already engaging fruitful dialog in the academic
field of sexuality and gender politics and to more inclusive institution- and
policy-building.
Abbreviations

ACP Africa, Caribbean and Pacific

ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations
AU African Union
CARICOM Caribbean Community
CEE Central and Eastern Europe
CSO Civil society organizations
CJEU Court of Justice of the EU
DG Directorate-General (of the EU administration)
EEAS European External Action Service
EP European Parliament
EU European Union
GDP Gross domestic product
HRC Human Rights Council
ILGA International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex
Association
ILO International Labor Organization
IMF International Monetary Fund
LGBTI Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NGO Non-governmental organization
NIEO New International Economic Order
NHRI National Human Rights Institution
NPE Normative power Europe
ODA Official Development Assistance
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
SDG Sustainable Development Goals
SOGI Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
TFEU Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union
TRANS* A variety of transgender expressions
UN United Nations
UNUDHR UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights
UNDP UN Development Program
WB World Bank
WTO World Trade Organization
1 Introduction
An artificial ‘clash of
civilizations’?

The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom,
democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, includ-
ing the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common
to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination,
tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.
Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU)

Despite the successes of global Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and

Intersex (LGBTI) rights promotion over the past few decades, over 65 coun-
tries criminalize homosexuality, 11 countries still have the death penalty on
the books, over 3,000 trans* or gender-diverse people have been killed in
the past decade, and there seems to be a general rights recession occurring
in Europe and beyond (Transrespect 2019; ILGA 2020). These data points
evidence that a global divide about the legitimacy of LGBTI movements
and rights exists. A significant contributing factor in these tensions has been
increasing attempts by governments, transnational Civil Society Organiza-
tions (CSOs), and intergovernmental institutions (IGOs) at global LGBTI
rights diffusion or the prevention thereof. In this complex normative de-
bate, the European Union (EU) stands out as the world’s most visibly active
and progressive rights promoter. The EU is not only a major institutional
actor on the world stage, but has also become somewhat of a ‘normative
power’ (Manners 2002; Whitman 2013) advocating value-based policies
in a number of policy areas internationally. Norms are often notoriously
vague, but can be conceptualized on a basic level as “a standard of appro-
priate behavior for actors with a given identity” (Katzenstein 1996, 5). The
EU’s promoted core norms, according to Manners (2002), include peace,
liberty, democracy, human rights, and rule of law and are often implicitly
or explicitly highlighted in exchanges and agreements with external actors.
Not only are these provisions part of the EU’s normative catalog, but Man-
ners also identifies anti-discrimination, a major LGBTI policy area, as one
of four additional minor norms. Following this normative frame, the EU
broadly emphasizes human rights, and within those, LGBTI rights,1 in its

DOI: 10.4324/9781003054627-1
2 Introduction
internal and external policies. Given the EU’s colonial history and the fact
that the bloc collectively represents the world’s largest development actor, it
then becomes important to critically interrogate how the EU and its mem-
ber states promote LGBTI rights internationally, as a number of disputes
over those policies have emerged in its foreign relations in recent years. An
investigation of the EU’s LGBTI rights policies is also widely significant
as it reflects upon Europe’s global role in rights promotion, development
policy, and foreign relations – not least because in today’s volatile political
environment, LGBTI rights are increasingly contested on national and in-
ternational levels.
From environmental protection to the advancement of LGBTI rights,
the 272 member states prominently support policy standards that they de-
veloped together and deem important for global coordination. These poli-
cies can be imbued with certain normative-ethical reasoning, but they are
also often of geostrategic significance (Beringer et al. 2019). In regard to
internationally promoted LGBTI rights, EU-advocated equality norms –
developed and administered jointly by the executive EU Commission, the
co-legislating Parliament and state-led Council, and the diplomatic Eu-
ropean External Action Service – are accompanied by conditional stip-
ulations. Given these varied policy arenas from which rights promotion
policies emerge, the EU appears to be a rather fragmented normative
power in terms of the way sexual rights norms shape the EU’s internal co-
hesion and subsequently, external actions. Moreover, it is conflicted among
member states about the degree to which LGBTI rights should constitute a
joint policy, and its global LGBTI human rights promotion is increasingly
being questioned as well. Recognizing these issues, several pertinent ques-
tions arise: is the EU’s international LGBTI policy promotion conducive
to an improvement of LGBTI rights globally or is it (counter)productive
of an apparent ‘clash of civilizations’? Are there alternatives to the EU’s
often-conditional advocacy of LGBTI rights norms to avoid the conten-
tious reliance on those policies? Does the universalizing cooperation with
other international organizations such as the United Nations (UN), or the
localizing engagement through enlargement or Neighborhood Policies,
make a substantial difference?
To investigate these questions, this book not only examines but also crit-
ically analyzes the EU’s promotion of LGBTI rights in the international
arena. It describes how the region jointly formulates guidelines and pol-
icies for the external promotion of such human rights based on different
member-state positions. These policies are normatively endowed not only
in order to spread liberal-democratic values when engaging global partners
but are also developed in an attempt to create a more cohesive identity for
the EU. Given the clash over socio-cultural and political values in diplo-
matic exchanges, the question in how far the EU is, can, or should be a ‘nor-
mative power’, one that acts normatively and uses value-based justifications
(Manners 2002), is central. Hence LGBTI rights norms do not only hold a
 Introduction 3
particular meaning for the construction of common policies within the EU;
in their linkage to other policies, they also question the traditional separa-
tion of ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics in international relations (IR). In addition,
in their universalized but simultaneously rather inconsistent application,
they create and maintain (geo)political peripheries and centers. Through
the linking of LGBTI rights to tangible privileges or sanctions, these hu-
man rights issues have increasingly moved to the center of international
diplomacy, signifying a global socio-cultural change. Such a complex and
contentious transformation can best be examined through a combination
of sociological institutionalist and constructivist theories (Tarrow 2001),
enriched by queer theoretical thought. A sociological institutionalist em-
phasis on the socially constituted nature of the emerging human rights re-
gime (Hall and Taylor 1996), combined with the identity- and interest-based
exchanges of actors and institutions as highlighted by constructivist schol-
ars (Wiener 2005), allows for a broader reconceptualization of the politics
of human rights in IR. Queer theory posits that, fundamentally, questions
of sexual and gender expression and identity need to be approached with
nuance and caution, as the performative context and ideological content of
issues surrounding ‘LGBTI’ is often neglected or manipulated (Weber 2016).
More generally, the buildup of false dichotomies – or binaries, as queer the-
orists would call them – such as homophile/-phobe or pre/modern states,
has detrimental impacts on the construction of diplomatic relations, as the
polarized discourse among policy-makers about their countries’ openness
toward specific human rights evidences.
Undoubtedly, the EU, together with its member states, has contributed to
a rights-enabling environment in many countries across the globe, although
this norm diffusion simultaneously evokes norm contestation. This book
then critically examines the apparent normative tensions between the EU’s
Eurocentric conception and promotion of LGBTI rights as human rights
and the ensuing politicization among culturally and politically conserva-
tive governments that contest the EU’s policies. These opponents develop
their own nationalist and/or cultural relativist counter-narrative, arguing
that such provisions are immoral and foreign to their culture and society.
In order to destabilize these binary tropes, this work dissects the apparent
sexual ‘clash of civilizations’ or ‘queer wars’ (Altman and Symons 2016) over
LGBTI rights. It points to the problematic character of an overly particu-
laristic rights promotion strategy, recognizing that recipient countries are
using the promoted arguments to entrench their own contrary positions in
a normative manner. A critical analysis of the emergence, framing and res-
onance of sexual rights claims dismantles simplistic claims and narratives
and helps to uncover alternative perspectives and strategies. To start, the
following sections describe the background of the EU’s human rights pol-
icy, in which LGBTI rights promotion is embedded and highlights some of
the main issues involved in sexual rights advancement. Subsequently, the
following chapters are previewed.
4 Introduction
A primer on EU institutions and their role in LGBTI rights
promotion
In order to understand the EU’s role as global LGBTI rights promoter,
it is necessary to comprehend its complex decision-making and policy-
implementation structure. This is especially true because no uniform LG-
BTI rights policy exists that would be mandated or implemented as such
across the EU institutions and member states. Rather, these rights policies
emerge in a piecemeal fashion, with each institution contributing to this
policy area in a different manner depending on its competence to act and
the degree of agreement on LGBTI rights.
The EU is governed by five main institutions that resemble a national
government to some extent. The European Commission, for instance, is
composed of one commissioner per member state responsible for a specific
EU policy area and, as the Union’s executive body, is in charge of developing
new policy proposals. It also supervises the EU budget and policy implemen-
tation. It concentrates mostly on EU-internal policies and thus has limited
scope in foreign affairs. This means that, in terms of international LGBTI
rights, the Commission is limited to monitoring anti- discrimination in po-
tential member states (such as the Balkan states) and adjoining countries
that want to associate and receive preferential treatment in the so-called
‘Neighborhood Policy’, for example. In an illustration of its increasing em-
phasis on this issue, in 2020, the new Equality Commissioner Helena Dalli
presented an EU LGBTI equality roadmap, the first of its kind (see Chapter
3 for more details).
The European Parliament, made up of 705 members elected by EU citizens
to pass EU legislation drafted by the Commission, is a legislative assembly
that is generally rights-supportive. One needs to keep in mind, however, that
ideological splits among the various parliamentary party groups compli-
cate the issue, as right-wing nationalist parties will take a more critical view
of rights attainment strategies than their leftist counterparts. The LGBTI
group constitutes the largest so-called ‘intergroup’ in the Parliament, made
up of 143 parliamentarians from various parties who are interested in sup-
porting LGBTI rights proposals within and outside the Union. The other
body involved in passing EU legislation is the Council (of Ministers), which
has the qualities of a senate in that it represents the EU governments. It is
made up of the ministers of the member states, who scrutinize EU draft
bills for their compatibility with national interests and laws. Importantly,
in 2013, the foreign ministers assembled in the Foreign Affairs Council es-
tablished guidelines for international LGBTI rights promotion and have re-
peatedly produced declarations supporting it; although their national rights
stances can vary significantly.
Another important institution, the Court of Justice of the EU, adjudicates
in matters of legal competence and has in the past ‘come out’ with a num-
ber of LGBTI-friendly judgements, including the symbolically important
 Introduction 5
first case on LGBTI rights in 1981 (Van der Vleuten 2014). The Court also
transcends EU borders, for instance, when it declared persecution based on
sexual orientation a reason for asylum in 2013. The last main institution,
the European Council, is composed of the chief executives of the respective
member states. Every two to three months, the 27 prime ministers and pres-
idents meet in Brussels to set the general direction of the EU and to provide
impulses for its future development. Human rights matters generally do not
appear prominently on the agenda of these high-level talks. While this in-
tricate system of governance institutions resembles a national government,
the EU lacks concentrated executive leadership, which is dispersed among
the institutions and member states. The Commission President (currently,
Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen) arguably has the most visible leadership
position among the five main institutions, heading the 27 Commissioners
and being responsible for draft legislation and budget, and for the day-
to-day policy planning and implementation. In the end, however, the na-
tional prime ministers and presidents assembled in the EU Council hold the
most power by virtue of their national mandates and the collective power of
their office. Policy analysts suggested that Commission President von der
Leyen “is more willing to speak out on certain human rights abuses when
compared to its predecessor—while simultaneously finding agreement on
gender rights and LGBT rights a much harder affair” (Godfrey 2021).
While not considered one of the main EU institutions, the European Ex-
ternal Action Service (EEAS) – the EU’s diplomatic service in existence
since 2011 – formulates common policy stances together with the 27 for-
eign ministers. Under the leadership of the EU’s quasi-foreign minister, the
High Representative for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy (currently, Josep
Borrel from Spain), the EEAS has developed guidelines to uphold LGBTI
rights in the EU’s foreign policy. Taken together, it becomes evident that the
formulation and execution of rights policies occurs in a diffused manner.
In addition, until 2009, when the EU passed the reform Treaty of Lisbon,
most external policies were intergovernmental affairs decided by unani-
mous agreement of the member states. In sum, the development of LGBTI
rights proposals among EU institutions appears rather fragmented, yet with
a broad normative background supporting human and minority rights (see
Chapter 3).

A short history of the EU’s human and LGBTI rights policies

The EU’s various LGBTI rights promotion strategies have gradually evolved
from its human rights policy, as no uniform LGBTI policy exists to date.
Human rights were an important constitutive marker for Europe when it
emerged from the horrific experiences of the Second World War. Initially,
most states’ postwar constitutions contained human rights provisions so that
a buttressing through the EU’s precursor, the European Community, was not
viewed as necessary. The Union only started to link internal human rights
6 Introduction
policies with external ones in 1993, when it prescribed them as fundamental
criteria for the accession of the newly democratized states of Central- and
Eastern Europe to the bloc. This was reinforced by the EU-wide applica-
tion of the Charter of Fundamental Rights,3 which was devised in 2000 and
became legally binding in 2009. Since EU membership nominally stipulates
that internal human rights are sufficiently respected, there has been a nota-
ble focus on its promotion externally (Thiel 2017). The EU’s commitment
to human rights, therefore, aims to contribute to a cohesive identity for the
region, to establish itself as a role model for other regional blocs, and to ad-
vance a global liberal-democratic order.
Based on the early prerogative of regional economic integration, the
EU’s external human rights policy developed relatively late, with an em-
phasis on development policy in which many of the contentious LGBTI
rights exchanges still occur today. Initially, the latter had a primary inter-
est in helping post-colonial states to stabilize their trade relations with the
region by creating a preferential EU market access scheme. Thus, human
rights considerations became more prominent only after the end of the Cold
War. Over time, the EU collectively has become the world’s largest donor of
roughly 55% of global Official Development assistance (ODA, Keukeleire
and Delreux 2014). Williams (2004) posits that EU development policy has
matured enough to contain a holistic understanding of and prescription for
human rights, but finds that there are inconsistent applications from state
to state (and I would add, in this case, from human rights demographic
to demographic). The insertion of human rights conditionality within the
political dialog in the EU’s agreement with the 79 African, Caribbean, and
Pacific (ACP) partners, for instance, stipulates addressing “discrimination
of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other
opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” (EU Offi-
cial Journal, L287/3 2005). Yet while the quote expresses a general emphasis
on human rights, the document does not mention sexual orientation as deci-
sive criteria for antidiscrimination policies, with gender being related solely
to women’s rights. Sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues,
however, have become a significant point of contention in bi- and multilat-
eral aid and trade negotiations. Moreover, although EU development policy
was a major early vehicle of the EU’s foreign relations, other components
such as enlargement and neighborhood policies and intergovernmental dip-
lomatic relations have, over time, become important arenas for the EU’s
rights promotion effort and will therefore also be examined in this book.
While EU human rights efforts initially targeted Europe’s former colo-
nies, they have now become hallmark principles for all external relations.
In terms of the addressees of the EU’s rights promotion efforts, one ought
to distinguish the regionally contiguous states that are either accession can-
didates or strategically important neighbors as well as the Global South
countries. The focus on the EU’s neighborhoods in North Africa, Eastern
Europe, and Central Asia is often conceptualized as institutionalized rule
 Introduction 7
transfer where power asymmetrically favors the EU (Lavenex, in Falkner
and Mueller 2014). In fact, Mayall (2005) describes a “pyramid of privilege”
that prioritizes relations with third countries depending on the broader
geopolitical context. In the Cold War era, relations with the post-colonial
ACP states were prioritized and, in the post-Cold War period, the Medi-
terranean, Eastern European, and Central Asian neighbors joined them.
Africa has only recently received increased attention based on refugee and
migrant arrivals originating there. The Global South can be understood as
the (mostly) post-colonial countries located in the southern hemisphere,
which, because of their historic links to Europe, face specific political and
socio-economic challenges. A rough characterization would group Latin
America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia together, although country and
regional differences, not least in terms of the reception of LGBTI rights
promotion efforts, exist. For instance, the early (de)colonialization in South
America, coupled with recent democratic transitions that produced vibrant
civil societies, has made these states more open to adopting new rights
norms (Encarnación 2016). While their stance on human rights tends to be
more in line with the EU’s expectations and norms, LGBTI rights are rather
problematically advocated in Africa or the Middle East where cultural and
political differences are more strongly pronounced. This despite the fact
that the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council, where
many of these countries are represented, have adopted declaratory language
protecting LGBTI rights holders in 2016 (see Chapter 6).
Today, the EU as an originator of these policy promotion attempts finds
itself in a crucial period: the various (Euro-, migration-, security-, Brexit,
pandemic) crises, along with their lingering effects, have not only weak-
ened the EU’s standing within Europe. They have also led to an extended
inward-focus on how to adapt policies and institutions, with a coinciding
retreat of the bloc from some international policies. Moreover, the ideal-
ized notion of the EU as successful global model of regional integration to
be emulated is diminished by the strengthening of national interests and
emerging Eurosceptic populist forces across Europe. These factors leave an
imprint on the EU’s promotion attempts beyond its borders. Its credibility is
also challenged when it advocates rather contentious policies, such as in this
case, the promotion of LGBTI rights internationally. This relatively new
area of normative policy promotion through the EU and its member states is
under-researched, and given the increased visibility of LGBTI issues inter-
nationally (Picq and Thiel 2015; Bosia et al. 2020), an examination of these
processes is required.

The Janus-face of EU LGBTI rights policy promotion:

internal constraints…
The EU’s power is fragmented among several main institutions and the
member states that regularly diverge on policy proposals expected to be
8 Introduction
developed in a consensual manner. This is particularly true for strategies
regarding the promotion of LGBTI rights, which is viewed by many, but not
all EU policy-makers as a major civil rights issue and a hitherto underval-
ued activity area; especially so in contrast to comparatively successful wom-
en’s rights and more contested migrant rights. Most of these rights norms
are not uniformly accepted among member governments, with stark dif-
ferences between North and West European countries compared to South
and East European member states. Aside from the EU’s agency, a variety of
contextual factors such as political history and culture, length of exposure
to Europeanization, and the degree of democratic consolidation, contribute
to this sub-regional divergence (see Chapter 3).
Just as the EU’s internal development of a stronger LGBTI equality strat-
egy is hampered by inner EU-ropean divergences, so too is the predomi-
nance of national interests an issue in the consolidation of a developmental
policy that then could address LGBTI rights externally. For instance, na-
tional divisions appeared in 2014 when EU states exhibited differences over
whether aid to the Gambia should be frozen due to concerns over LGBTI
rights there. While the Northern member states, as forceful advocates of
LGBTI rights globally, were strongly in favor of such action, the Southern
states pointed out that a reduction in aid may well lead to more displacement
of Africans moving to the Mediterranean shores in search of a better life.
National interests as well as domestic attitudes toward LGBTI advocacy
internationally contribute to the difficulties in formulating a more cohesive
and effective rights-based development policy (see Chapter 5).
EU-internal coordination issues are not the only reason constraining a
coherent international policy for LGBTI equality. They are also the result of
the way in which the bloc has advocated same-sex rights within its territory
based mainly on two basic premises: on the one hand, the fundamental need
for an EU member state to respect human and minority rights, as spelled out
by the so-called ‘Copenhagen criteria’ for states wishing to accede (which
include an open economy, stable democracy with rule of law and human
rights, and the ability to take on all EU laws). Rights improvements are
strictly monitored in the accession process, in which candidate countries re-
ceive annual progress reports fashioned by the EU’s executive Commission.
Once a state becomes a full member, however, conditional pressure ceases
to exist, and countries sometimes backtrack on certain stipulations, as it
occurred with regressive referenda on banning same-sex unions in Croatia
and Slovakia shortly after EU accession. They may also challenge the EU’s
joint development of new policies, which is particularly relevant for a novel
issue such as LGBTI rights. If a conditional logic exists in the EU candidacy
and accession process, on the contrary, the states addressed by the EU’s
Neighborhood Policy do not have a membership perspective and thus have
little incentive to emulate EU norms (see Chapter 4).
On the other hand, once a country joins the EU as member state, the
Single-Market provisions emphasize non-discrimination in trade and
 Introduction 9
employment through its neoliberal logic. While an anti-discrimination di-
rective on the grounds of religion, gender, age, and sexual orientation exists
since 2000, it can only be invoked in the employment sector as the EU has to
justify its policies based on the Single-Market treaties and needs to respect
national constitutional boundaries. A broader, ‘horizontal’ directive – a di-
rective being the EU’s strongest legal instrument uniformly applied across
member states – covering most areas of public and private life has been lan-
guishing in the EU’s legislative machinery for years now. Another issue with
the current directive is the lack of protection for gender expression, which
would include trans* individuals as well. Hence the volatile standing of LG-
BTI rights in the EU points to further complications when trying to engage
other countries.
To sum up its internal LGBTI ambivalence, while EU institutions can
generally be classified as progressive in LGBTI-affairs, the legal limitations
of the Single-Market and the resistance by certain member states constitute
obstacles to substantive anti-discrimination and equality. Despite these
constraints, the EU and its member states have, for the most part, put in
place more substantial gay-friendly policies than even similar liberal de-
mocracies such as the US (Wilson 2013). At the same time, we have seen
how quickly a single state such as the US can change their LGBTI rights
policies, which, for instance, have varied drastically from the Obama to
the Trump administration. States find it easier to legislate new domestic
policies, as there are fewer veto players than in an international organiza-
tion containing 27 principals. In principle, it is worth developing a com-
mon stance on LGBTI rights as analysts have shown that the EU can, to
some degree, influence the socialization of new EU member states into its
LGBTI-friendly normative framework (Ayoub and Paternotte 2012). Yet,
the internal inconsistency between what could politically and should nor-
matively be done, as opposed to the reality marked by institutional gridlock
and competing interests by member states influence the policies that are
promoted beyond EU borders.

…and external fuzziness: EU-led promotion of international

LGBTI rights norms, conditions, and markets?
While the Union seems to have a more unified approach toward the ex-
ternal promotion of LGBTI rights given the consensus of EU institutions
formulating this policy, a number of contrasting views exist with regards to
how EU-advocated policies should best be diffused abroad. The rationalist–
realist school perceives of the EU’s relations largely as a variable of its po-
litical power and economic might, be it in the way the bloc initiates trade
and developmental agreements, constructs special associative relationships
with individual countries or regions, or posits conditions for accession to
the bloc (Andreatta 2005). From this utilitarian perspective often held by
policy-makers, follows that the EU’s influence will be largely dependent on
10 Introduction
its economic performance and the extent of its negotiating power when en-
gaging third countries (i.e. non-EU states). In a similar vein, Bretherton and
Vogler (2013) highlight three interrelated concepts of EU presence, denoting
EU status and influence, as well opportunity structure, meaning the exter-
nal context of EU action, and capability as the constitution of EU policies,
as determining variables. They contend that EU actorness and internal and
external strategic factors are significant predictors in achieving policy out-
comes. Given the volatility of the EU, it is doubtful that its economic influ-
ence or political presence can lead countries to want to follow. Moreover,
the external context in LGBTI rights promotion is also rather problematic
in that EU counterparts have started to develop their own cultural or polit-
ical counter-narrative to what they perceive as ‘interventionist’ policy pro-
motion, often supported by powerful illiberal states. Hence its capability is
similarly constrained.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are scholars who view the EU
as a significant ‘normative power’ (Manners 2002) committed to advancing
peace, liberty, human rights, and anti-discrimination. The normative power
Europe (NPE) concept is important for this work since the promotion of
LGBTI rights references normative content extensively (see Chapter 2). This
theory holds that the EU’s conviction and good example may have a posi-
tive emulation effect on other states, in addition to material or geostrategic
factors. In its updated neo-normative rendering, this perspective also moves
away from its focus on governmental power and perceives the EU’s norma-
tive strength as the interactive result of its goals, means, and justifications
(Whitman 2013). Despite its ubiquity, the NPE theory has been contested
since its inception because it was viewed as not conforming to reality, overly
generalizing, and appearing Eurocentric (Hansen and Marsh 2015). Inde-
pendent of its conformance with reality, the EU’s over-reliance on norma-
tive reasoning has led to pushback by many countries in the Global South
and created a situation in which contrarian norms of cultural protection,
relativism, and national purity question the EU’s liberal norms, as will be-
come evident throughout this book.
A few scholars have staked out a middle ground between these two oppos-
ing theories: Zielonka (2008) and Ferreira-Pereira (2010) both argue that the
EU needs to be a ‘model power’ with both notions of a convincing ‘model’
and a ‘power’ful international actor being requisites for a successful dif-
fusion of EU-advocated policies. Such reasoning implies “that European
norms can also work for them and provide incentives for adopting these
norms” (Zielonka 2008, 483). They applied the powerful model concept to
EU social and environmental as well as security and democracy promotion
activities, respectively. In its ideal type, “modeling stimuli are intentionally
engendered by the EU to secure and promote European interests, although
they can ultimately contribute to a ‘better world’” (Ferreira-Pereira, 299).
In the same vein, Ferreira-Pereira argues that the EU should distinguish
itself by systematically and positively reinforcing imitative responses by
 Introduction 11
cooperation partners (300) – although it is not exactly specified how such
reinforcement of modeling responses could occur. In this version, norms
would not necessarily be promoted because of their intrinsic value, but be-
cause there is also some (added) value to adopting them. It still, however,
presupposes normative strength and leaves limited room for norm nego-
tiation. The next chapter will delve into a theoretical investigation of the
appropriateness of the EU’s norm promotion policy, given its internal and
external constraints.
A number of additional issues with sexual rights promotion have been
captured by activists presenting a bottom-up perspective on this complex
policy. They decry

the incoherencies between development policies and foreign and trade

policies of donor countries; the power dynamics between North and
South and between former colony and colonizer; the systematic mar-
ginalization of sexual and reproductive rights; the division between civil
and political rights, on the one hand, and economic and social rights,
on the other; a sort of disconnection between North and South based
organizations.
(Anguita 2012)

These agent-based as well as structural factors run like a red thread through-
out this book. Based on these concerns, it not only concentrates on concrete
policy prescriptions that are at the disposal when LGBTI rights are pro-
moted but also probes the rationale of norm promotion by the EU more
generally through a combination of sociological institutionalism and queer
theory; thus, it enables a critical de- and re-construction of problematic bi-
naries emerging between LGBTI rights promoters and opponents.
In its attempt to multilaterally engage other IGOs over human rights, the
EU accesses and strategically uses the UN organizations. In 2013, a group
of about ten progressive UN countries, including three EU members, and
the EU High Representative for Foreign & Security Policy leading the EU’s
diplomatic service, came together to form the UN LGBTI Core Group to
advance SOGI-based rights. Two of the group’s four main activity areas
specifically target countries in the Global South, such as raising LGBTI
issues in dialogs with third countries and promoting LGBTI civil society
in those countries with the financial help of the Union (EU Delegation to
the UN 2014). However, coordination issues such as the fragmentation of
EU legislative, representative, and executive functions as they relate to in-
ternational governance, and the aforementioned variability of interests by
member states limit the EU’s effectiveness in multilateral rights promotion.
Overall, the linkage between both institutions on this issue is strong, and
it appears that this venue is well placed to diffuse LGBTI-friendly policies
more broadly, yet at the same time, less focused given their contested status
at the UN.
12 Introduction
As Karen Smith (2014) succinctly summarizes with regards to the overar-
ching issues in the EU’s external engagement, the EU’s diverging interests
in the formulation of a human rights policy inhibits a forceful engagement
with its development partners. Different priorities prevent the diffusion of
a uniform message and its reinforcement with various incentivizing or pres-
suring means, be they visa liberalization and market access, conditional aid
loans, or even sanctions. On the receiving end, the EU-advocated democ-
racy and human rights priorities are unlikely to find much resonance in the
differently ordered strategic priorities of ASEAN or the African Union, for
example.

Political strategies and their challenges

Given the aforementioned institutional and structural shortcomings, im-
proved political strategies may be more easily achieved as they are more
flexible. In addition, they can be applied in a number of political settings
through tactical ‘venue-shopping’ by various (non)governmental actors
choosing the most receptive political arena. Those listed below are intended
to provide an overview of promising policy strategies, which will be criti-
cally examined in the following chapters in more detail.
One important scheme is the inclusion of the expertise of civil society,
whether EU-based or not, working in tandem with the formal EU insti-
tutional actors. Internally, the creation of the EU Fundamental Rights
Agency in 2008 has provided an arena for the exchange of expertise between
transnational European human rights CSOs, including ILGA-Europe and
other LGBTI rights organizations, and EU policy-makers. Considering the
growing networking abilities of those civil society actors transnationally, a
number of non-EU NGOs are already affiliated with European human and
sexual rights groups. To illustrate that linkage, Friedman (2012) highlights
how “Spanish funding, Spanish strategy and Spanish influence all helped
Argentine activists to achieve equal marriage rights in the face of internal
differences and external opposition” (30). This is not to say that the rela-
tionship is unidirectional, as European CSOs equally rely on the input and
localized knowledge of Global South CSOs to legitimize themselves. Fur-
thermore, Munro and Pérez-Sánchez (2017) remind us that transnational ac-
tivism from the South undermines a strict power-based distinction between
Global North stewardship and Global South adaptation. Yet, there seems
much room for additional engagement in this bottom-up approach, as many
EU-based LGBTI rights organizations remain focused on their European
member-state organizations and extend their reach primarily to civil society
in potential enlargement candidates or Neighborhood countries. The col-
laboration of CSOs with governmental stakeholders also potentially runs
the risk of delegitimizing the organization’s credibility in the eyes of the
ones pursuing a more radical-transgressive queer agenda or want CSOs to
adapt more strongly to local conditions.
 Introduction 13
On a global civil society level, ILGA’s World Conferences consist of
meetings of LGBTI advocates around the globe. Despite providing institu-
tional platforms for groups such as ILGA-Europe, COC Holland, or RFSL
Sweden that channel support into IGOs, these gatherings lack a strong insti-
tutional linkage to the UN or other intergovernmental bodies. For instance,
in the UN’s ECOSOC body composed of thousands of transnational CSOs,
only about a dozen of LGBTI rights groups are accredited. This means that
LGBTI-focused transnational CSOs in and outside the EU need to play
two-level games; they need to be active on both domestic and international
levels in order to exert pressure on non-compliant states and attain the req-
uisite intergovernmental support for policy changes. In this global arena,
the normative disparity between more progressive LGBTI advocacy groups
from EU member states and their counterparts in target countries becomes
evident. A researcher at Human Rights Watch succinctly pointed out this
issue when she declared that

As the US- and Europe-based LGBTI movements accomplish a lot of

what they’ve been working for at home, they’re discovering the rest of
the world and trying to help – and that kind of commitment doesn’t
necessarily mean they’re developing their engagements in the most con-
structive way.
(IRIN 2014)

By antagonistically pushing policy proposals in international fora, Western

(non)state actors run the risk of not only polarizing the intended audience
of governmental decision-makers but also putting an expository spotlight
on domestic LGBTI constituencies that were previously protected by their
invisibility (see Chapter 6).
The linking of LGBTI rights promotion to other policy areas such as
generalized human rights, good governance, and economic development
has its own issues. Connecting one policy objective to another may in the-
ory be a way to set conditions and mainstream LGBTI rights in all policy
areas that are under debate, but blockage in one policy area may spill over
into related ones. The conditional linking of policy issues can be utilized
not only by EU representatives, but this strategy can also be instrumen-
talized by Global South countries strategically, for instance when high-
lighting migrant rights at joint EU–AU summits. For all these reasons,
the outright conditioning of aid disbursement on LGBTI rights implemen-
tation is problematic, particularly when countries are sanctioned for not
adhering to EU standards rather than incentivized to emulate those (for
more, see Chapter 5).
Last, the regular and systematic re-evaluation of existing policy instru-
ments is essential to track successes and failures and improve their ongoing
reformulation. The EU’s development and human rights policies, as most
others, are planned and implemented over a period of several years. This
14 Introduction
provides an opportunity to reflect on those policy strategies in fixed inter-
vals in order to adjust and refine. In fact, the EU Commission’s external
relations directorate general (DG) conducted in 2014 a study about the bi-
lateral human rights policy dialog contained in the EU’s ODA treaty to its
main development partners and spelled out a number of recommendations.
The most important ones are to develop a more strategic and structured
approach to political dialog and thus enhance its legitimacy to ensure a
result-oriented monitoring and to fully exploit the potential of programs
and financial instruments. These prescriptions highlight the need to con-
duct dialogs more systematically and to invest more time and energy in
legitimizing such negotiations in the eyes of both partners. Furthermore,
following up with recipient states and positively incentivizing them by
means of various geographic and programmatic funding mechanisms rep-
resent an additional key component (EU DG External Relations 2014). The
issue of homosexuality appears as a consistent issue in negotiations, but
the country reports evidence that each domestic situation (from Antigua
to Zimbabwe) is different and thus needs to be addressed accordingly. Yet
contrasting priorities within the EU, the polarization over sexual rights, and
limited resources constrain subsequent improvements. This book, then, is
an attempt to reconceptualize existing LGBTI policy strategies, highlight
normative incongruences, and suggest possible avenues for theoretical as
well as policy-relevant interventions.

Conclusion: why analyzing EU LGBTI rights policy is

important for international relations
A mixed picture with certain trade-offs in the international promotion of
EU LGBTI rights emerges. A number of self-inflicted problems with the
EU’s strong normative advancement of particular human rights policies
emerge: if human rights are inherent and provide, among other things, for
freedom from governmental interference, how can a supranational organi-
zation justify becoming the provider of specific human rights? This question
becomes more pressing as these overtures are often made asymmetrically
vis-a-vis Global South countries, potentially clashing with local cultural
rights that may not be as tolerant or liberal. And how can the negative
effects of normative rights advocacy be mitigated when they may lead to
international counter-mobilization and domestic politicization of LGBTI
individuals? Any observer of transnational LGBTI advocacy must have no-
ticed how the recognition of sexual citizenship with the attendant rights has
become the hallmark of ‘Western’ modernity (Rahman 2015). The condi-
tioning of aid, trade, and good relations on the attainment of LGBTI rights
further serves to reinforce a Global South perception that LGBTI sexuali-
ties are a Eurocentric concept and a pretext for neoliberal trade promotion
and neo-colonial intervention. Thus, the EU’s support for LGBTI rights in-
ternationally, while often being considered a peripheral low-politics issue,
 Introduction 15
reflects critically on salient issues in IR such as the (increasingly questioned)
promise of liberal internationalism.
A lack of self-reflective understanding surrounding the issue exists, as
most policy efforts and scholarly research concentrate on the creation of
more powerful advocacy strategies by (non/inter)governmental actors. Thus
far, the forceful promotion of LGBTI rights, often by conditionally linking
aid and sexual rights, has produced ambiguous results. Approaching civil
society more broadly in order to create more generalized supportive hu-
man rights environments in target states may prove more effective. These
CSOs need to be locally embedded and their expertise substantially inte-
grated in EU programming. While civil society is an important amplifier
of EU-promoted policies in the national or local arena, the work with na-
tional human rights institutions or globally with UN offices provides an
added channel of influence that may be perceived of as less interventionist
than supporting LGBTI advocacy groups in foreign countries. No matter
whether EU LGBTI rights are conditional, linked to other policies, or nor-
matively or instrumentally advocated as such, they are best approached in
a number of venues simultaneously, with strategies that best fit the individ-
ual country and protects the affected constituency. A more radically queer,
anti-normative vision would be to abandon EU-dependent LGBTI rights
promotion altogether. Such an approach, however, would renege on human
rights norms and on a generally supportive international institution. It is
important to recognize that the policies generated inside the EU, no matter
whether by courts, civil societies, or the main institutions, have an impact
outside as well, be it through pull-factors created by the European rights
regime or the construction of developmental policies in coordination with
target countries. This work, therefore, contributes to finding more appropri-
ate ways of expressing EU solidarity with LGBTI individuals globally. The
analysis of this EU policy in its international repercussions, questions and
reconfigures what can be classified as domestic and international. In an age
in which ideas seem to float freely across the globe and reach more people
than ever before, an exploration of the EU’s international rights promotion
efforts constitutes an ideal case for capturing the transformation that IR are
undergoing in the 21st century.

Chapter previews
The question of the EU’s normativity in human rights matters has become
particularly pressing in the past few years as the EU’s international actor-
ness has diminished due to various economic and political challenges. At
the same time, the EU’s external relations have undergone significant re-
forms since the Lisbon reform treaty of 2009. LGBTI rights promotion also
operates in a difficult terrain, in which such normative overtures are en-
tangled with conditional geopolitical aid disbursements. The second chap-
ter establishes the theoretical framework by examining the often-criticized
16 Introduction
‘normative power Europe’ concept. It focuses on the conceptual emergence
of ‘LGBTI rights’, the incongruence of the EU’s normative advances, and
norm diffusion in IR more generally.
Chapter 3 highlights the extent to which a disparity among EU member
states exists when developing and implementing LGBTI rights promotion
strategies. A major East–West difference in domestic LGBTI rights across
member states conditions the rather weak EU consensus on the EU LGBTI
rights norm creation, with former communist EU member countries exhib-
iting a delimited tolerance for LGBTI rights. Many of these dispute the va-
lidity of the LGBTI rights pushed by Western member states and feel that
they themselves are closer to external states on this issue. In addition, each
EU member state has different relations with the recipients of these policies,
engaging particularly with their former colonies. A broad diffusion of all
kinds of EU foreign policies through the lens of each EU member states
interacting with non-EU states, be they former colonies or not, occurs. This
further weakens a uniform development and application of policies.
The fourth chapter uses analyzes the supposedly most successful case of
EU human rights norm promotion in countries that aim to join the Union.
In these cases, the accession criteria clearly specify a respect for fundamen-
tal and minority rights (the so-called ‘Copenhagen Criteria’), which pro-
spective candidates need to heed. The incentive for this change in policy is
EU membership. Once acceded, however, states sometimes opt to fall back
on more regressive, homophobe legislation, for example, through popular
referenda revoking initial parliamentary approval of certain LGBTI rights.
And in countries in the EU’s specified ‘neighborhood’, where the accession
perspective remains distant, the EU’s leverage diminishes significantly.
These countries, ranging from Ukraine to the states in North Africa, al-
ready feel that they have been distanced from the EU. In addition, since
there is no real incentive in exchange for trade or aid concessions, reform
in terms of LGBTI rights, there is rather slow or completely lacking. The
juxtaposition of both foreign policies, taking into account EUrophobia,
homophobia, and Islamophobia, aptly illustrates the dilemma the EU faces
when promoting LGBTI rights in a more adverse geopolitical environment.
Chapter 5 focuses on the EU’s conditional development and aid policies.
Varying commitments by EU member states to common EU ODA provi-
sions, different geographical preferences according to national interests,
and the primacy of establishing trade relations make a coherent develop-
ment policy difficult to achieve. The insertion of human rights conditionality
within most aid-related political agreements ensures, on the one hand, that
human rights more generally are seen as a broader aspiration. Disputes with
individual recipient countries such as examined in the case of Uganda, or
even more subtle tensions over LGBTI rights in the case studies of Indonesia
or Jamaica, evidence the volatile and particularistic strategy the EU pur-
sues. Such differences create a normative binary that is difficult to resolve,
particularly when the EU’s human and LGBTI rights agenda is viewed as
 Introduction 17
hypocritical in the face of its protectionist trade, ‘nationalist’ security, and
refugee policies. In this process, the EU, as well as its development partners,
create opposing normative narratives that entrench their own superior posi-
tion and make dialog and negotiation more difficult.
The next chapter analyzes how the EU accesses and strategically cooper-
ates with other intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) in the UN system.
It highlights normative, political, and institutional issues that make global
rights promotion more challenging. In the UN, the EU member states pur-
sue their own policies as well, but the EU’s diplomatic service is the main
connecting point in this regard. The UN system is well-placed to diffuse
LGBTI-friendly policies more broadly, yet less focused. The World Bank
consists of a more specific, narrow venue in terms of their relationship to
the EU and developing countries. And despite potential opportunities in en-
gaging other regional IGOs, the EU’s increasing emphasis on LGBTI rights
provisions in inter-regional relations has been met with resistance. Thus, it
seems unlikely that a stronger collaboration between these IGOs will achieve
a more adequate internationalized response to this normative challenge.
The final chapter synthesizes the previous ones and critically reflects
on the issues at hand. Given the normative disparities, geopolitical pres-
sures, and relative ineffectiveness of the EU’s LGBTI promotion thus far,
it questions whether or not subsuming LGBTI rights under more general-
ized civil society, human rights, and democracy promotion efforts would
be an improvement. While this would be a more generalist strategy with a
potentially less controversial normative content, such expanded foci can be
viewed as geopolitically problematic in their own right. Rethinking existing
LGBTI rights promotion, several pathways should be considered, and likely
all available means should be utilized simultaneously. The conclusion does
not purport to suggest a firm solution but rather points out that a change
of course may be more useful, as long as it emerges out of a self-reflective
process. The EU’s human rights promotion policies, in particular, where
LGBTI rights are concerned, have been beset with a number of issues in the
past, so that only gradual improvements can take place. Despite the chal-
lenges, reforms ought to take place given the current weakness of the EU’s
external role, its historical obligation, and the volatility of LGBTI popula-
tions around the globe.

Notes
1 Despite a number of possible variations and an ongoing debate about the in-
clusion of additional categories (see: Picq and Thiel 2015, 5), L(esbian), G(ay),
B(isexual), T(ransgender), and I(ntersex) (LGBTI) is used by EU institutions and
thus will be used in this book as well.
2 Twenty-eight states until 2020, when the United Kingdom officially left the EU.
3 A differentiation exists between human rights accorded to EU citizens and res-
idents called ‘fundamental rights’, and ‘human rights’ available to individuals
outside the bloc.
18 Introduction
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2 From norm diffusion to norm
contestation
Europe as a normative actor

We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights […] and a right to
belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people
emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new
global political situation.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Arendt’s (1951) famous quote highlighting the “right to have rights”, the
preconditioning of human rights as being recognized as a member of a po-
litical community, is quite in fashion these days. Originally, its meaning
was viewed as a qualification of the universality of human rights decreed
only a few years earlier in the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
Whether in the context of increasing migration, stateless ethnic minorities,
or in the case of LGBTI individuals, Arendt’s critical statement that one
first needs to claim and be awarded the fundamental right of participation
in a state in order to obtain any kind of human right foreshadows some of
the major issues of today’s internationalized norm diffusion politics. These
include the statist validation of constitutive rights, the performativity of
human rights advocacy, and the contention over the validity of rights, all
of which qualify the inherent dignity of human beings. The ‘right to have
rights’ insists that politics is about negotiating the participatory boundaries
of a political community (Degooyer and Hunt 2018), no matter how strong,
for instance, international norms for the adoption of LGBTI rights may be
institutionalized. Such differentiation is in large part based on the tension
between the stipulated universality of human rights and the co-existing right
of cultural difference, making human rights simultaneously universal and
particularistic. Viewed this way, a purely universal reaffirmation of LGBTI
rights has limited normative value if it comes before the domestic claiming
and recognition, of members of this community in their respective states. It
may end up being considered a baseless rights claim in the domestic context
in which rights-holders live and also viewed as a paternalistic-imperialist
project (Ingram 2008). Based on these insights, the scholarly field of hu-
man rights research has traced the ‘human rights revolution’ occurring in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003054627-2
 From norm diffusion to norm contestation 21
practice (Risse et al. 2013), but has also more recently developed a critical
view of human rights attainment (Hopgood 2013; Moyn 2018). This chapter
theorizes the complexities of contemporary internationalized rights poli-
tics, with a focus on the human and LGBTI rights genealogy and the EU’s
role in it.
Before examining the ambivalent promotion of human rights through the
EU and its member states more closely, a critical analysis of the genesis of
these rights needs to be established so as to avoid a narrow epistemological
outlook. Major milestones in the development of human rights in Europe
are said to be the British Magna Charta of 1215 and the French Declaration
of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Just as was true then, human
rights in the modern era have mostly been reserved for specific privileged
populations, with limitations set for women, foreigners, and ethno-religious
minorities or slaves, for example. Despite the relevance of European enlight-
enment thought for the evolution and expansion of these rights, earlier ru-
dimentary codices existed around the world that established justice among
non-European civilizations. Hence, the specifically European development
of a particular view of human rights marked by disenfranchisement and co-
lonialization limits the conceptual power of the notion of human rights that
so often characterizes a Western outlook on those. Barreto (2012) highlights
this contingency when declaring that:

contextualizing theories of human rights means showing the genealogi-

cal connection that ties the Eurocentric theory of rights to the historical
setting in which it was elaborated. Unveiling the linkage to the site of
emergence of knowledge weakens or destroys the legitimacy of claims to
universality. The dominant theory is no longer “the” theory of human
rights, but just a theory born in the background of the history of Europe
and, as a consequence, has no claim to be universally compelling.
(10)

Similarly, Picq (2018) states that “universalism is invoked to assert Euro-

pean superiority over other cultures: to cover up discrimination against
non- European cultures instead of recognizing claims for difference” (149).
Despite this particularistic construction of Eurocentric human rights, the
EU, with its self-proclaimed rights exceptionalism, aims to lead the rest of
the world according to its measure (Chakrabarty 2007). Recognizing this in-
adequate perspective, concepts such as universality, cosmopolitanism, and
‘the international’ are increasingly questioned and challenged by critical
International Relations (IR) scholars as outdated Eurocentric moderniza-
tion concepts (Barreto 2012; Bigo 2016). In acknowledging these limitations,
this chapter aims to contextualize a specifically European view of human
and more specifically, LGBTI rights, to establish how this particular per-
spective imprints on the reception of rights promotion attempts by the EU.
Rather than to universalize the EU’s rights stance, it may be essential to
22 From norm diffusion to norm contestation
‘provincialize’ EU policy (Chakrabarty 2007), as it reflects an inherent
Eurocentrism that cannot, but in practice does, expect the same results out-
side Europe as within its borders. As the next chapter shows, even within the
region, it produces inconsistent results. Consequently, this outlook prevents
the EU from being a more adaptable global actor by promoting policies that
do not resonate in dissimilar localities.
Emulating Krishna’s (2001) idea of willful amnesia, one could argue that
a universal view of abstract human rights conveniently sidelines Europe’s
problematic history in this regard and the idiosyncratic implementation of
those after the Second World War. This includes a lack of recognition by
liberal internationalists that human rights may not only be at risk in do-
mestic settings but can also be threatened by neoliberal or interventionist
global actors and structures as well (Rao 2010). These apparent blind spots
in European rights promotion can be generalized to the fields of European
and EU foreign policies as well as to IR more generally. Scholars have al-
ready prominently called for the emergence of a less Euro- and Anglocen-
tric ‘global IR’ that is less epistemologically and methodologically narrow.
The inclusion of more globally diverse analytical approaches necessitates
stressing theoretical pluralism and the rejection of singular-universal truth
claims (Acharya 2016). Thus far, however, relatively little attention has been
paid to the Eurocentricity of human rights norms, although post-colonial
theories, as well as critical race theory and feminist and queer theories, have
contributed to this emerging field of scholarly inquiry. The EU institutions,
however, have hardly incorporated any of this critical thought into their
internal or external rights promotion policies.
From the moment of its creation, the EU aimed to be a normative actor.
Born out of the aftershocks of the Second World War, the initial member
states of the EU’s precursor, the Coal and Steel Community, sought to unify
European countries. Economic interdependence was pursued in an effort
to maintain peace and liberty for their populations. Over time, the broad-
ening of the bloc’s objectives, alongside the increase in member states cov-
ering the large majority of European states, resulted in more political goals
added to pre-existing market-based ones. Hence a political ‘Union’ emerged
out of an economic community in 1993. Around the same time, the end of
the Cold War resulted in the establishment of largely normative member-
ship principles – the so-called ‘Copenhagen Criteria’ for aspiring members.
These prominently included “democracy, the rule of law, human rights and
respect for and protection of minorities” (European Commission 2016). At
the turn of the millennium, the European Charter of Fundamental Rights
established further civil, social, economic, and political rights for citizens
in relation to EU institutions. There have been concerns, however, about
the EU’s appropriation of national constitutional rights provisions (Smis-
mans 2010). These materialize in debates over the legitimacy of norm advo-
cacy by an international organization, for example during the discussions
about the EU’s rule-of-law monitoring for member states, which could lead
 From norm diffusion to norm contestation 23
to stricter internal rights conditionality for membership. Those discussions
have mainly been centered around the degree to which the EU institutions
should advocate values and principles against member states. While the next
chapter examines such EU-internal issues in the attempted construction of
a coherent LGBTI rights policy, here, the focus is on the normative frame of
the EU’s international norm promotion. Below, I conduct a genealogical in-
quiry into the human rights for LGBTI individuals as derived from women’s
rights, before critically interrogating the EU’s external promotion of these
rights in-between theory and practice.
Theoretically, EU values manifest in commonly held norms that are at
the same time constitutive-fundamental to its political identity (such as
consensus-seeking in negotiations, multi-institutional pluralist representa-
tion and adherence to democratic principles, rule of law and human rights) as
well as regulative-permissive (for instance, the EU’s binding treaties, or the
concrete policies emerging as a result of the EU’s political-legislative output
and Courts adjudication). These principles transgress the EU’s ‘domestic/
international’ divide as they often apply to both its regional and international
policies. Norms as such are defined in a number of ways, for example as
“standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obligations” (Krasner
1982, 185), which highlights the main point about the expected behavior and
also frames them through an interplay of rights and duties. Applied here, it
means that norm promotion entails the signaling of entitlements and obli-
gations that go hand in hand with behavioral standard-setting. As a result,
SOGI norms similarly contain a mix of constitutive and regulative compo-
nents, which makes them ambiguous promotion material.
As opposed to internal rights promotion, the role of values and norms in
the EU’s IR is of a different magnitude and has varying impacts. As Lucar-
elli and Manners (2006) explain, the bloc’s foreign relations have consistently
been characterized by the promotion and maintenance of values integral to
the Union in almost every area of politics from trade to development to se-
curity. Yet, they acknowledge that there are issues with the consistency with
which they are applied, especially when power politics come into play. For
instance, as Medinilla and Teevan (2020) have pointed out with regard to
the EU’s relations with African countries:

African leaders in particular have developed a certain normative fa-

tigue when it comes to the EU. The EU, in turn, appears to be caught in
an internal struggle between advancing its strategic interests in Africa
and projecting its normative model.
(16)

Because of the centrality of socially and politically clashing values in diplo-

matic exchanges, the question of the EU’s ‘normative power’ is central. This
inquiry has become particularly pressing in the past few years as EU’s inter-
national influence has diminished somewhat due to various economic and
24 From norm diffusion to norm contestation
political challenges, while its external relations have undergone significant
upgrades and reforms in the past decade. LGBTI rights promotion operates
in a difficult terrain, in which such normative overtures tend to be entangled
with conditional geopolitical offerings such as accession to the EU, trade
access, or aid disbursements, as the following chapters show. The following
sections establish the theoretical framework by critically interrogating the
linkage of SOGI-based rights to the heavily discussed ‘normative power Eu-
rope’ concept. As will be highlighted below, however, these rights are largely
neoliberally and homonormatively (i.e. depoliticized and hetero-centric)
conceived and justified and have emerged as a hallmark signature issue of
Europe’s human rights policy. Moreover, alternative conceptions will shed
light on norm-critical positions regarding moral international orders that
are advanced by Queer theory.

LGBTI rights grounded in feminism

Feminist theory and practice have in many ways set the stage for the vibrant
LGBTI advocacy, its normative prescriptions, and scholarly engagement
with the topic. Admittedly, just as gender perspectives have been margin-
alized in European politics, until recently, so too have LGBTI studies been
relegated to an inferior position within IR and even within gender studies,
based on their novelty, queerness, and apparent marginality. Even ‘gender’
as an umbrella term largely emphasizes women, at least as widely under-
stood in ‘gender equality’ or ‘gender mainstreaming’ policies, at the expense
of more diverse SOGI articulations. This parallels the gendered hierarchies
of power relations, which, applied to SOGI issues, highlight the varying de-
grees of visibility and equality that subjects experience based on their stand-
ing within the ‘LGBTI’ group. In her gender rights historiography, Towns
(2017) destabilizes a Eurocentric ascription of women’s rights to Europe,
as women exercised political power across the world at a time when those
were curtailed on the continent. Feminist movements in the 20th century
not only effectively targeted domestic governments and international bodies
such as the UN but they also saw the need to ally with related (labor, sexual
equality) movements and integrate gender policies into the larger emerging
human rights activity field (Caglar et al. 2013). Even within the UN’s evo-
lution of women’s rights, a distinct difference in emphases became visible:
Whereas Western/Northern advocates highlighted issues of sexuality and
equality with men, Southern feminists pressed the issue of women in eco-
nomic development and were hesitant to engage in more contentious issues
(Weitz 2019, 417). Given the EU’s smaller membership scope, and its supra-
national legal character, gender advocacy, using the same strategies, was
even more consensual and successful there (Van der Vleuten 2012). These
feminist movement tactics dovetailed with LGBTI movements: UN activists
based their rights claims on the UN’s 1979 established Convention for the
Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and connected
 From norm diffusion to norm contestation 25
their causes in the EU to establish gender equality regulations. They thus
managed to strategically frame and connect issues so that they would be
taken up by EU institutions and/or member states, aligned with similar
advocacy groups, and foregrounded general human rights provisions to
promote LGBTI ones within them. Among LGBTI activists and feminists,
however, divisions exist on issues such as reproductive policies, sex work,
and the inclusion of trans women and non-binary persons in emancipatory
movements (Ammaturo 2020).
On the institutional side, gender equality in the EU has been found to be
relatively successful, especially in terms of how ‘gender mainstreaming’ has
become a commonplace notion for the impact assessment of gender in vir-
tually every EU policy. The Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025 continues
this approach and builds upon the lessons learned over the past two dec-
ades (EU Gender Equality Strategy 2020). In practice, however, the macro-
economic structural conditions of a gendered labor market, required work
and family balance, etc. still continue to make women proportionately more
disadvantaged in mainstreamed EU policies (Prügl 2009). The same can be
said of LGBTI rights, although a decade-long attempt by ILGA to advance
‘equality mainstreaming’ through an official EU LGBTI strategy was only
achieved at the end of 2020. It remains to be seen if this strategy is more
effective than the previous declaratory ‘list of actions to advance LGBTI
equality’ published by the EU’s executive (Commission 2018). Even if the
strategy results in more tangible benchmarking and improvements, it may
still have ambiguous outcomes, as True (2011) states when critically reflect-
ing on similar gender strategies:

As teachers of norms, international institutions are not removed from

power politics or the perpetuation of global injustice. Indeed, efforts by
these institutions to mainstream and diffuse gender equality may end
up entrenching—rather than transforming—dominant gender norms
and international power relations.
(88)

Moreover, aside from activists or governance institutions as agents of

change, the larger societal public spheres need to be engaged in an attempt
to legitimize specific rights strategies and make those effective. Here, a
puzzle emerges that, despite the policy success of gender mainstreaming,
“increased acceptance of gender equality as a legitimate though vaguely
defined goal co-exists with disinterest in, or hostility to, ‘feminism’” (Cav-
aghan 2017). The latter, challenging the existing status quo, pursues im-
provements through a critique of patriarchal structures and advocacy for
alternatives. Similarly, equal rights for minorities are generally accepted in
the EU, although an increasing opposition to concrete SOGI policies and/
or advocates can be found throughout Europe. The political advocacy by
proponents as well as opponents of rights politicizes the issue in European
26 From norm diffusion to norm contestation
societies and public spheres, making them more salient and contested (de
Wilde 2011). Some have even suggested that, for ultra-conservatives, the
term ‘LGBT ideology’ is interchangeably used with the phrase “gender ide-
ology” as a newly emerged target of hostility (Korolczuk 2020, 166). The
latter strategic frame combines anti-SOGI positions with resistance to more
classical women’s reproductive and mainstreaming rights by opponents of
these reforms (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). Coincidentally, this attempted
fusion of sexual and gender rights is also conducted by LGBTI rights activ-
ists in attempts to legitimize newer SOGI rights.
The cognitive discrepancy between supporting generalized ideas about
equality and rejecting specific provisions lies in part in the fuzziness of
normative ideas, unless concretized in discourse or policy. Such ambiguity
is also rooted in the diverse meanings that one specific notion may carry
in specific national contexts, such as for instance, with ‘gender equality’
(Verloo 2007). They illustrate the complexity of such notions within multi-
ple country-specific representations that contain different emphases, mean-
ings, and constraints across Europe. Adding to this national variation are
the subtle ways by which gendered rights, LGBTI equality, and ultimately,
human security proclamations are connected to discourse, power, and rep-
resentation (Shepherd 2008). The way norms are socially reproduced, how
they are manipulated by governance institutions and other powerful actors,
and how they are reified and performed in often symbolic as well as ma-
nipulative ways contribute to the ambiguity surrounding their promotion.
Applied to the construction of transnational gender equality norms, Zwin-
gel (2016) foregrounds three complicating aspects in norm diffusion anal-
yses. First, international norms, especially in the human rights area, are
not firmly set in stone; rather, they are competitive and sometimes, contra-
dictory. Second, a linear adaptation logic cannot be assumed, and instead,
both the international and the domestic level engage over these norms based
on distinct national patterns. Last, rights norm promotion often creates a
simplistic binary of rights-compliant states and rights-denying detractors;
yet, in reality, ownership of the issue is much more complex: “when it comes
to [women’s] rights, it is more accurate to think of all states as somehow
contributing to the scope of the framework, and all of them deviating from
this ideal to varying degrees” (17). With gender equality so closely related
to LGBTI issues, these conceptual distinctions apply to the latter as well.
In a more structural view, Brown (2019) suggests that, in our (neo)liberal1
global system, conservative-religious forces have used the market-based
limitations put on governments in the past two decades to carve out anti-
progressive, including anti-gender and homophobic policies. These were
resituated in the private sphere of household and family, which, together
with the private sector, have gained an elevated standing in the contem-
porary depoliticized era. As such, she reminds us that we should not be
surprised that an allegedly tolerant (neo)liberal model of society has had
negative unintended consequences for minorities. With the EU justifying
 From norm diffusion to norm contestation 27
its rights norms promotion on its market-essentialism, how do SOGI pol-
itics as an emancipatory project respond to important questions of mate-
rial redistribution and inclusive recognition in an attempt to attain justice
(Fraser 2013)? This question led to discussions about the relative importance
of socio-cultural recognition of LGBTI people and economic redistribu-
tion by eminent social theorists such as Fraser and Butler. Both dispute the
relative weight of each aspect, but recognize that they are interconnected
components. These rights-related tensions inherent in the EU’s neoliberal
structure, which produce ‘heterosexist meanings, norms, and constructions
of personhood’ (179), apply equally to the EU’s foreign policies. While the
recognition of non-conforming SOGI individuals and cultures is present
there, a lack of economic justice promotion pervades the EU’s global hu-
man rights and development policies. These are built on neoliberal notions
of market primacy, with the EU having to connect rights attainment to ben-
efits for its single market in an attempt to legitimize action in this policy
field (Thiel 2015). As a result, the economic adjustment and liberalization
programs implemented in EU partner countries as part of their associa-
tion or partnership agreements prioritize heteronormative societal institu-
tions. Such generalized policies without due regard for the specific needs of
LGBTI populations, combined with economic liberalization, make it harder
for these people to be integrated, thus leading to further marginalization.
Given these complexities and idiosyncrasies, what parallels can be drawn
from global gender politics for LGBTI politics? Gender equality strategies
are not sufficient for LGBTI equality, as the latter entails added sexuality
rights, and women represent a larger and more visible population with a
longer history of activism. Feminism, however, has laid the groundwork for
LGBTI rights activism and has much in common in terms of generalized
human rights attainment and the combatting of androcentric chauvinism,
with attendant societal and political repercussions. It is unlikely that a
strong, legally binding LGBTI policy framework akin to the gender equal-
ity one will develop in the EU anytime soon given the early polarization
over LGBTI rights. But the advancement of gender equality strategies can
provide possible pathways to de-politicize LGBTI rights promotion in
Europe. Instead of narrowly focusing on anti-discrimination, hate-crimes,
and heteronormative inclusion measures for a specific constituency, it might
be necessary to develop a broader disaggregation of objectives that aims at
a more comprehensive attainment of inclusion or equality. For instance, the
12-point plan for EU gender equality acknowledges gender as one variable
in a number of policy areas ranging from economic development to envi-
ronment (European Parliament Research Service 2020). This broadened
mainstreaming strategy would then result in an impact assessment across
all sectors of private and public life.
In the disputes between rights particularity and universalism, Cren-
shaw’s (1994) notion of intersectional, overlapping systems of discrimina-
tion based on a person’s characteristics, provides for a theoretical expansion
28 From norm diffusion to norm contestation
of narrowly focused identity politics. Just as the recognition that gender,
race, and other categories of belonging may negatively impact one another
has received wide attention, so can it expand the scope of necessary policy
categorization; rather than abandoning this practice altogether as Queer
theory would suggest. “Recognizing that identity politics takes place at the
site where categories intersect thus seems more fruitful than challenging the
possibility of talking about categories at all” (Crenshaw 1994). On the one
hand, her approach calls for raising awareness among policy-makers that
rights cannot be promoted in isolation from one another. Thus, it opens the
door for activists to create broader social-justice-oriented coalitions that
can more easily connect transnationally and build more powerful move-
ments. On the other hand, queer theorists like Puar (2005) have criticized
the essentializing identity-additive content of intersectionality and suggest a
move toward – however vaguely defined – ‘assemblages’:

As opposed to an inter-sectional model of identity, which presumes

components—race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion—are
separable analytics and can be thus disassembled, an assemblage is
more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space,
and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency.
(127)

Without going into too much detail about the theoretical distinctions
between the two different ways to understanding SOGI politics, this
conceptual–theoretical dispute highlights a key concern in rights promo-
tion issues. It posits that an identity-driven classification of distinct ‘LGBTI’
rights may not be the most effective or legitimate option. In addition, it is
important to consider Puar’s implicit critique about the Western origin and
spread of intersectionality to describe non-Western experiences (Carasta-
this 2016), which closely mirrors the diffusion and appropriation of ‘LGBTI’
rights worldwide. This is also reflected in my survey of activists, who con-
nect human, gender and LGBTI rights strongly with each other. At the same
time, the majority rejects a broader intersectional promotion that subsumes
LGBTI rights under a less explicit human rights notion. Referring to this
problematic tension, one activist stated: “I definitely think an intersectional
approach is both needed and important, but I believe we still have some way
to go until we can stop putting so much emphasis on LGBTI rights” (I-9).

Cognitive shifts from human rights to LGBTI rights to human rights of

LGBTI persons
The literature on international human rights norms is vast. The refer-
ences here, therefore, are not exhaustive but represent some of the most
essential theoretical reflections. They trace the framing of the concept of
human rights to LGBTI rights as ‘reserved domain’ for a specific segment of
the population to a more recent acknowledgment of the inherent applicabil-
ity of human rights for LGBTI individuals. Before connecting to the human
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be allowed that such a confession as the following would be felt as
an irritant:

All those, I think, who have lived as literary men—working

daily as literary labourers—will agree with me that three hours a
day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then he
should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work
continuously during those three hours—or have so tutored his
mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen
and gazing at the wall before him till he shall have found the
words with which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this
time become my custom—and it still is my custom, though of
late I have become a little lenient to myself—to write with my
watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every
quarter of an hour. I have found that my 250 words have been
forthcoming as regularly as my watch went.

The reader may easily imagine the maddening effect of that

upon any ambitious young writer, indolent by habit yet conscientious
in his craft, reminiscent of hours spent in gazing at a wall for words
with which he wanted to express his ideas. How many times did
Plato alter the opening sentence of The Republic? How many times
did Gray recast the Elegy?
But time, which should bring the philosophic mind, will lead most
critics who follow criticism sincerely to the happy conviction that
there are no rules for the operation of genius; a conviction born to
save a vast amount of explanation—and whitewash. Literary genius
may be devoted, as with Milton; nonchalant, as with Congreve;
elaborately draped, as with Tennyson. Catullus or Burns may splash
your face and run on; but always the unmistakable god has passed
your way. In reading Trollope one’s sense of trafficking with genius
arises more and more evidently out of his large sincerity—a sincerity
in bulk, so to speak; wherefore, to appraise him, you must read him
in bulk, taking the good with the bad, even as you must with
Shakespeare. (This comparison is not so foolish as it looks at first
sight: since, while no two authors can ever have been more
differently gifted, it would be difficult to name a third in competition as
typically English.) The very mass of Trollope commands a real
respect; its prodigious quantity is felt to be a quality, as one searches
in it and finds that—good or bad, better or very much worse—there
is not a dishonest inch in the whole. He practised among novelists of
genius: Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, the Brontës, George Eliot,
Ouida were his contemporaries; he lived through the era of
“sensational novels,” Lady Audley’s Secret and the rest; and he
wrote, as he confesses, with an eye on the publisher’s cheque. But
no success of genius tempted him to do more than admire it from a
distance; no success of “sensation” seduced him from his loom of
honest tweed. He criticises the gods and Titans of his time. He had
personal reasons for loving Thackeray, who gave him his great lift
into fame by commissioning him to write the serial novel that opened
the Cornhill upon a highly expectant public. Trollope played up nobly
to the compliment and the responsibility. Framley Parsonage
belongs to his very best: it took the public accurately (and
deservedly) between wind and water. Thackeray was grateful for the
good and timely service; Trollope for the good and timely opportunity.
Yet one suspects no taint of servility when he writes of Thackeray
that “among all our novelists his style is the purest, as to my ear it is
the most harmonious.” (And so, I hope, say most of us.) Of Dickens
he declares with entire simplicity that his “own peculiar idiosyncrasy
in the matter” forbids him to join in the full chorus of applause. “Mrs.
Gamp, Micawber, Pecksniff, and others have become household
words—but to my judgment they are not human beings.”

Of Dickens’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is

jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules
—almost as completely as that created by Carlyle. To readers
who have taught themselves to regard language, it must
therefore be unpleasant. But the critic is driven to feel the
weakness of his criticism when he acknowledges to himself—as
he is compelled in all honesty to do—that with the language,
such as it is, the writer has satisfied the great mass of the
readers of his country.
 To the merits of Disraeli—whom he must take into account as
“the present Prime Minister of England,” who “has been so popular
as a novelist that, whether for good or for ill, I feel myself compelled
to speak of him”—he is quite genuinely blind. For the political insight
which burns in page after page of Coningsby, as for the seriousness
at the core of Sybil, he has no eyes at all. To him, dealing with the
honest surface and sub-surface of English country life, with the
rooted interest of county families and cathedral closes, all Disraeli’s
pictures of high society appear as pomatum and tinsel, false glitter
and flash. He had never a guess that this flash and glitter (false as
they so often were) played over depths his own comfortable
philosophy never divined. He just found it false and denounced it.
Upon Wilkie Collins and the art that constructed The Woman in
White and The Moonstone he could only comment that “as it is a
branch which I have not myself at all cultivated, it is not unnatural
that his work should be very much lost upon me individually. When I
sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much
care, how it is to end.”
Again, honest though he was, he accepted and used false tricks
and conventions calculated, in the ’eighties and ’nineties, to awake
frenzy in any young practitioner who, however incompetent, was
trying to learn how a novel should be written. The worst “stage aside”
of an old drama was as nothing in comparison with Trollope’s easy-
going remarks, dropped anywhere in the story, and anyhow, that
“This is a novel, and I am writing it to amuse you. I might just as
easily make my heroine do this as do that. Which shall it be?... Well,
I am going to make her do that; for if she did this, what would
become of my novel?” One can imagine Henry James wincing
physically at such a question posed in cold print by an artist; as in a
most catholic and charitable paper—written in 1883, when the young
dogs were assembling to insult Trollope’s carcase—he reveals
himself as wincing over the first sentence in the last chapter of
Barchester Towers: “The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s
dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar plums.”
James laments:
 These little slaps at credulity ... are very discouraging, but
they are even more inexplicable; for they are deliberately
inartistic, even judged from the point of view of that rather vague
consideration of form which is the only canon we have a right to
impose upon Trollope. It is impossible to imagine what a novelist
takes himself to be unless he regard himself as a historian and
his narrative as history. It is only as a historian that he has the
smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is
nowhere; to insert into his attempt a backbone of logic he must
relate events that are assumed to be real. This assumption
permeates, animates all the work of the most solid storytellers....

Yes; but on further acquaintance with Trollope one discovers that

this trick (annoying always) of asking, “Now what shall we make Mrs.
Bold do?—accept Mr. Arabin, or reject him?” is no worse than
“uncle’s fun,” as I may put it. Uncle is just playing with us, though we
wish he wouldn’t. In fact, Trollope never chooses the wrong answer
to the infelicitous question. He is wise and unerringly right every
time. You will (I think) search his novels in vain for a good man or a
good woman untrue to duty as weighed out between heart and
conscience.
Another offence in Trollope is his distressing employment of
facetious names—“Mr. Quiverful” for a philoprogenitive clergyman,
“Dr. Fillgrave” for a family physician, etc. “It would be better,”
murmurs Henry James pathetically, “to go back to Bunyan at once.”
(Trollope, in fact, goes back farther—to the abominable tradition of
Ben Jonson; and it is the less excusable because he could invent
perfect names when he tried—Archdeacon Grantly, Johnny Eames,
Algernon Crosbie, Mrs. Proudie, the Dales of Allington, the Thornes
of Ullathorne, Barchester, Framley—names, families, places fitting
like gloves.) And still worse was he advised when he introduced
caricature, for which he had small gift, into his stories; “taking off”
eminent bishops in the disguise of objectionable small boys, or
poking laborious fun at Dickens and Carlyle under the titles of Mr.
Sentiment and Dr. Pessimist Anticant. The Warden is in conception,
and largely in execution, a beautiful story of an old man’s
conscience. It is a short story, too. I know of none that could be more
easily shortened to an absolute masterpiece by a pair of scissors.
With Trollope, as with Byron, in these days a critic finds himself
at first insensibly forced, as though by shouldering of a crowd, upon
apology for the man’s reputation.

II
I do not wish to make a third with Pontius Pilate and Mr.
Chadband in raising the question, “What is Truth?” but merely to
suggest here that, as soon as ever you raise it over poetry or over
prose fiction, it becomes—as Aristotle did not miss to discover—
highly philosophical and ticklish. To begin at plumb bottom with your
mere matter-of-fact man, you will be asked to explain how in the
world there can be “truth” in “fiction,” the two being opponent and
mutually exclusive terms; and such a man will tell you that larkspurs
don’t listen, lilies don’t whisper, and no spray blossoms with pleasure
because a bird has clung to it; wherefore, what is the use of
pretending any such lies? Ascending a little higher in the scale of
creation, we come to another bottom, a false bottom, a Bully Bottom,
who enjoys make-believe, but feels it will never do “to bring in (God
shield us!) a lion among ladies.” Still ascending past much timber, we
emerge on the decks of argosies—
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
portlily negligent of all this bottom-business on which they ride,
carrying piled canvas over the foam of perilous seas. In short, the
man who hasn’t it in his soul that there is a truth of emotion and a
truth of imagination just as solid for a keelson as any truth of fact,
merely does not know what literature is about. As Heine once said of
a fat opponent, “it is easier for a camel to enter the Kingdom of
Heaven than for that fellow to pass through the eye of a needle.”
Now Trollope, if we look at him in one way, and consider him as an
entirely honest Bottom, simply saw Micawber as a grotesque
creation and Victor Hugo as a writer extravagantly untrue to nature.
He merely could not understand what Hugo would be aiming at (say)
in Gastibelza or in the divine serenade:

Allons-nous-en par l’Autriche!

Nous aurons l’aube à nos fronts.
Je serai grand et toi riche,
Puisque nous nous aimerons ...

Tu seras dame et moi comte.

Viens, mon cœur s’épanouit.
Viens, nous conterons ce conte
Aux étoiles de la nuit.

He could as little see—and yet who doubts it?—that the creator of

Micawber was absolutely honest in closing David Copperfield on the
declaration that “no one can ever believe this Narrative in the
reading more than I believed it in the writing.” What Trollope made of
Don Quixote (or of Alice in Wonderland) lies beyond my power to
imagine. But the point for us is that as an honest man who lived
through the vogue of Poe and Dickens and, in later times, of Ouida
(who will surely, soon or late, be recognised for the genius she was),
and was all the time, on his own admission, alive as anyone to the
market, Trollope kept the noiseless tenor of his way and, resisting
temptation this side or that, went on describing life as he saw it.
Thus, and in this easy, humdrum, but pertinacious style, he
arrived, much as he often arrived at the death of a fox. He was a
great fox-hunter; lumbering in the saddle, heavy, short-sighted,
always unaware of what might happen on t’other side of the next
fence—“few have explored more closely than I have done the depth
and breadth and water-holding capacities of an Essex ditch.” He
knew little of the science of the sport:

Indeed, all the notice I take of hounds is not to ride over

them. My eyes are so constituted that I can never see the nature
 of a fence. I either follow some one, or ride at it with the full
conviction that I may be going into a horse-pond or a gravel-pit. I
have jumped into both one and the other. I am very heavy and
have never ridden expensive horses.

“The cause of my delight in the amusement,” he confesses, “I have

never been able to analyze my own satisfaction.” He arose regularly
at 5:30 a.m., had his coffee brought him by a groom, had completed
his “literary work” before he dressed for breakfast; then on four
working days a week he toiled for the General Post Office, and on
the other two rode to hounds. In all kinds of spare time—in railway-
carriages or crossing to America—he had always a pen in his hand,
a pad of paper on his knee, or on a cabin table specially constructed.
As he sets it all down, with parenthetical advice to the literary
tyro, it is all as simple, apparently, as a cash account. But don’t you
believe it! The man who created the Barsetshire novels lived quite as
intimately with his theme as Dickens did in David Copperfield; nay,
more intimately. To begin with, his imaginary Barsetshire is as
definitely an actual piece of England as Mr. Hardy’s Wessex. Of
Framley Parsonage he tells us that

as I wrote it I became more closely than ever acquainted with

the new shire which I had added to the English counties.... I had
it all in my mind—its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes,
its members of Parliament and the different hunts that rode over
it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and
their parks, the rectors and their churches. This was the fourth
novel of which I had placed the scene in Barsetshire, and as I
wrote it I made a map of the dear county. Throughout these
stories there has been no name given to a fictitious site which
does not represent to me a spot of which I know all the
accessories, as though I had lived and wandered there.

Here Trollope asserts less than one-half of his true claim. He not
only carried all Barsetshire in his brain as a map, with every cross-
road, by-lane, and footpath noted—Trollope was great at cross-
roads, having as an official reorganised, simplified, and speeded-up
the postal service over a great part of rural England—but knew all
the country-houses, small or great, of that shire, with their families,
pedigrees, intermarriages, political interests, monetary anxieties, the
rise and fall of interdependent squires, parsons, tenants; how a
mortgage, for example, will influence a character, a bank-book set
going a matrimonial intrigue, a transferred bill operate on a man’s
sense of honour. You seem to see him moving about the Cathedral
Close in “very serviceable suit of black,” or passing the gates and
lodge of a grand house in old hunting-pink like a very wise solicitor
on a holiday: garrulous, to be sure, but to be trusted with any secret
—to be trusted most of all, perhaps, with that secret of a maiden’s
love which as yet she hardly dares to avow to herself. Here let us
listen to the late Frederic Harrison, who puts it exactly:

The Barsetshire cycle of tales has one remarkable feature;

8
for it is designed on a scheme which is either a delightful
success or a tiresome failure. And it is a real success. To fill
eight volumes in six distinct tales with the intricate relations of
one set of families, all within access to one cathedral city,
covering a whole generation in time, and exhibiting the same
characters from youth to maturity and age—this is indeed a
perilous task.... Balzac and Zola abroad have done this, and with
us Scott, Thackeray, Lytton, and Dickens have in some degree
tried this plan. But, I think, no English novelist has worked it out
on so large a field, with such minute elaboration, and with such
entire mastery of the many dilemmas and pitfalls which beset the
competitor in this long and intricate course.

8
I should prefer to say that it grew.—Q.

It is a strange reflection—as one turns the advertisement pages

of The Times, or of Country Life, and scans the photographs of
innumerable “stately homes” to-day on the market—that Trollope’s
fame should be reviving just as the society he depicted would seem
to be in process of deracination. I use the word “deracination”
because that society—with all its faults, stunted offshoots, gnarled
prejudices, mossed growth of convention, parasitic ivies—was a tree
of ancestry rooted in the countryside, not to be extracted save by
wrenching of fibres and with bleeding of infinite homely ties. To some
extent, no doubt, this sorrowful dislocation must follow all long wars.
A hundred years ago Cobbett rode our land and noted how its true
gentry, as a reward for their very sacrifices during the Napoleonic
struggle, were being dispossessed by bankers and “loan-mongers.”
So, to-day, are decent families—who, while “thinking too much of
themselves,” thought much for their neighbours—being uprooted and
exiled, and taking into lodgings a few portraits, some medals, and
the last framed piece of vellum conferring posthumously a D.S.O.
These times, at any rate, do not “strike monied worldlings with
dismay.” On the contrary, the war-profiteer and the week-ender with
his golf-clubs are smothering the poor last of the society that Trollope
knew; and in time, no doubt, their sons will go to Eton and
Winchester, learn in holidays the old English love of field and stream
and sea, and so prepare themselves in a generation or two to cast
off life at earliest call simply because this England, to which they
have succeeded, has come to be, in their turn, their country. Thus it
will go on again (please heaven) as the father’s hair wears off the
grandson’s hoof.
The fortunes and misfortunes of Trollope’s comfortable England
have always this element of the universal, that they are not brought
about by any devastating external calamity, but always by process of
inward rectitude or inward folly, reasonably operating on the ordinary
business of life. In this business he can win and keep our affection
for an entirely good man—for Mr. Harding, for Doctor Thorne. In all
his treatment of women, even of the jeune fille of the Victorian Age,
this lumbering, myopic rider-to-hounds always (as they say) “has
hands”—and to “have hands” is a gift of God. He was, as Henry
James noted, “by no means destitute of a certain saving grace of
coarseness,” but it is forgotten on the instant he touches a woman’s
pulse. Over that, to interpret it, he never bends but delicately. No one
challenges his portraits of the maturer ladies. Mrs. Proudie is a
masterpiece, of course, heroically consistent to the moment of her
death—nay, living afterwards consistently in her husband’s qualified
regrets (can anything be truer than the tragedy told with complete
restraint in chapters 66 and 67 of The Last Chronicle?). Lady
Lufton’s portrait, while less majestic, seems to me equally flawless,
equably flawless. Trollope’s women can all show claws on occasion;
can all summon “that sort of ill-nature which is not uncommon when
one woman speaks of another”; and the most, even of his maidens,
betray sooner or later some glance of that malice upon the priestly
calling, or rather upon its pretensions, which Trollope made them
share with him:

“Ah! yes: but Lady Lufton is not a clergyman, Miss Robarts.”

It was on Lucy’s tongue to say that her ladyship was pretty
nearly as bad, but she stopped herself.

Difference of time and convention and pruderies allowed for,

Trollope will give you in a page or so of discourse between two
Victorian maidens—the whole of it delicately understood,
chivalrously handled, tenderly yet firmly revealed—the secret as no
novelist has quite revealed it before or since. At any moment one
may be surprised by a sudden Jane Austen touch; and this will come
with the more startling surprise being dropped by a plain,
presumably blunt, man. For Trollope adds to his strain of
coarseness, already mentioned, a strain—or at least an intimate
understanding—of cheapness. His gentle breeding and his
upbringing (poverty-stricken though it had been) ever checked him
on the threshold of the holies. But he had tholed too many years in
the G.P.O. to have missed intimate acquaintance with

The noisy chaff

And ill-bred laugh
Of clerks on omnibuses.
Those who understand this will understand why he could not bring
himself to mate his “dear Lily Dale” with that faithful, most helpful,
little bounder Johnny Eames. He knew his Johnny Eames too well to
introduce him upon the Cathedral Close of Barchester, though he
could successfully dare to introduce the Stanhope family. He walks
among rogues, too, and wastrels, with a Mr. Sowerby or a Bertie
Stanhope, as sympathetically as among bishops, deans,
archdeacons, canons. His picture of Sowerby and the ruin he has
brought on an ancient family, all through his own sins is no less and
no more truthful than his picture of Mrs. Proudie in altercation with
Mr. Slope; while they both are inferior in imaginative power to the
scene of Mr. Crawley’s call on the Bishop. In the invention of
Crawley, in his perfect handling of that strong and insane mind, I
protest that I am astonished almost as though he had suddenly
shown himself capable of inventing a King Lear. In this Trollope, with
whom one has been jogging along under a slowly growing conviction
that he is by miles a greater artist than he knows or has ever been
reckoned, there explodes this character—and out of the kindliest
intentions to preach him up, one is awakened in a fright and to a
sense of shame at never having recognised the man’s originality or
taken the great measure of his power.
 INDEX

Addison, Joseph, 96, 128

Aeneid, 159
Alice in Wonderland, 228
All the Year Round, 18
American Notes, 17, 52
American Senator, The, 220
Antony and Cleopatra, 93
Arabian Nights, 41, 170, 187
Ariosto, Lodovico, 158
Aristophanes, 158
Aristotle, 42, 84, 139, 191, 226
Arnold, Matthew, 74, 100, 121, 161
Art of Fiction, The, James’, 81
Ashley, Lord (Lord Shaftesbury), 172, 174, 192
Aurelius, Marcus, 131
Austen, Jane, 31, 71, 164, 179, 200, 233
Autobiography, Trollope’s, 219, 221

Bacon, Francis, 4, 107

Bagehot, Walter, 114
Ballad of Bouillabaisse, 104
Balzac, Honoré de, 34, 135, 138, 219, 230
Barchester Towers, 220, 225
Barnaby Rudge, 52, 55
Barnes, William, 119
Barry Lyndon, 125, 126, 147
Battle of Life, The, 18
Beerbohm, Max, 149, 160
Belton Estate, The, 219
Bentham, Jeremy, 73
Berkeley, Bishop George, 128
Blackwood’s Magazine, 204
Blake, William, 128, 159
Bleak House, 11, 12, 33, 55, 69, 89
Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 70
Bolingbroke, Viscount, 197
Book of Snobs, The, 125
Boswell, James, 201
Boule de Suif, 139
Bright, John, 183
Brontë, Anne, 211, 222
Brontë, Branwell, 201
Brontë, Charlotte, 72, 201, 211, 212, 222
Brontë, Emily, 201, 211, 222
Brookfield, William Henry, 106
Browne, Sir Thomas, 112, 197
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 161, 167, 170, 204
Browning, Robert, 7, 21, 100, 128, 161
Brunetière, Ferdinand, 24
Bryant, William Cullen, 17
Buckle, Henry Thomas, 7
Bunyan, John, 71, 197, 225
Burke, Edmund, 4, 21, 22, 128, 149, 183, 197
Burney, Fanny, 164
Burns, Robert, 66, 128, 222
Butler, Samuel, 84, 85
Byron, Lord, 66, 128, 160, 226
Campion, Thomas, 19
Canning, George, 107, 183
Carlyle, Mrs., 10
Carlyle, Thomas, 7, 10, 21, 40, 74, 93, 107, 124, 128, 176, 177,
223, 226
Carols, 18
Carroll, Lewis, 78
Casa Guidi Windows, 161
Catherine, 125
Catullus, 222
Cervantes, Miguel de, 91
Chadwick, Sir Edwin, 167
Chapman, Frederic, 83
Chapman, Robert William, 200
Charles I, 4
Charlotte Augusta, Princess, 110
Chatham, Earl of, 183
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 8, 20, 66, 67, 98, 158
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 10, 33
Childe Harold, 66
Chimes, The, 18
Christmas Carol, A, 18
Cicero, 183
City Churchyards, The, Dickens’ essay on, 96
Clarendon, Earl of, 197
Clark, Sir Charles, 110
Claverings, The, 219
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 74, 132, 161
Cobbett, William, 68, 171, 231
Cochrane, Alexander Baillie, 193
Codlingsby, 188
Colenso, Bishop, 73
Coleridge, Hartley, 30
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 21, 56, 77, 128
Collins, Wilkie, 13, 127, 224
Comedy of Errors, The, 53
Compleat Angler, The, 71
Congreve, William, 222
Coningsby, 117, 193, 194–196, 208, 223
Conington, John, 123
Constitutional, The, 102
Coriolanus, 158
Cornhill Magazine, 212, 223
Country Life, 230
Cousin Phillis, 212–216
Coverly, Sir Roger de, in The Spectator, 71
Cowper, William, 107, 124, 128
Cox, Harold, 167
Crabbe, George, 107, 159, 204
Cranford, 126, 199, 200, 202, 203, 210, 212, 213
Cricket on the Hearth, The, 18
Croker, John Wilson, 192
Cry of the Children, The, 161, 168, 169

Dana, Richard Henry, 17

Dante, 28, 91, 134, 158
Darwin, Charles, 7, 73
David Copperfield, 52, 54, 67, 75, 76, 90, 93–97, 129, 228, 229
Defoe, Daniel, 49, 78, 163, 196
Denis Duval, 147
De Quincey, Thomas, 5, 38
Deserted Village, The, 159
Dickens, Charles, 3–99, 125–127, 129–141, 176, 210, 222, 223,
226, 228, 229, 230
Dictionary of National Biography, 203
Dinner at Poplar Walk, A, 5
Diocletian, 197
Disraeli, Benjamin, 116, 170, 171, 180–198, 206, 208, 210, 217,
222–224
Divina Commedia, 11
Dobson, Austin, 146
Dombey and Son, 11, 39, 42, 44, 69
Donne, John, 21
Don Quixote, 228
Dostoievsky, Feodor, 75
Dream, The, Byron’s, 66
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 142
Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions, 18
Dr. Thorne, 220
Dryden, John, 8, 20, 24, 25, 66, 128, 159, 197
Dumas, Alexandre, the elder, 24, 53, 54, 146, 196
Dunciad, The, 128, 129

Eclogues, Virgil’s, 159

Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, 222
Eliot, George, 7, 72, 211, 222
Endymion, Disraeli’s, 195, 210, 217
English Mail Coach, The, 38
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 27
Esmond, 96, 122, 123, 146, 147, 149, 152–156
Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 26, 159
Essay on Man, An, 159
Essays of Elia, The, 57
Eustace Diamonds, The, 219
Evelyn, John, 71

Ferrex and Porrex, 213

Fielding, Henry, 20, 71, 95, 139, 163, 179
FitzGerald, Edward, 106, 108, 122
Flaubert, Gustave, 12, 138, 221
Forster, John, 12, 13, 15, 16, 51, 59, 86, 89
Fox, Charles James, 183
Framley Parsonage, 220, 223, 229

Gaskell, Mrs., 179, 199–218

Gaskell, William, 199, 203, 205
Gastibelza, 227
Gay, John, 128
Georgics, 214
Gibbon, Edward, 21, 128, 197
Gissing, George, 12, 13, 96, 97
Gladstone, William Ewart, 183
Golden Lion of Grandpré, The, 220
Goldsmith, Oliver, 128
Gray, Thomas, 222
Great Expectations, 31, 74, 93
Greuze, Jean Baptiste, 140
Greville, Fulke, 41

Hallam, Arthur, 107

Hamlet, 49, 81, 144, 163
Hammond, John Lawrence, 172, 191
Hammond, Mrs., 172, 191
Handel, Georg Friedrich, 26
Handley Cross, 37, 68
Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 191, 206
Hard Times, 211
Hardy, Thomas, 31, 140, 229
Harrison, Frederic, 230
Hastings, Warren, 4
Haunted Man, The, 18
Hazlitt, William, 30, 78, 129
Heine, Heinrich, 227
Hemans, Mrs., 168
Henley, William Ernest, 9, 48, 134, 142
Hertford, Marquis of, 117
Higgins, Matthew James, 129
History of Civilisation in Europe, 7
History of English Prose Rhythm, Saintsbury’s, 150–151
Hoffman, Josiah Ogden, 17
Holly-Tree Inn, The, 18
Holy Tide, The, 19
Homer, 110, 139, 144, 217
Hood, Thomas, 161
Horace, 123, 124, 135, 158
Horner, Leonard, 178
Household Words, 13, 18, 211, 212
Howitt, Mrs., 204
Howlett, John, 191
Hugo, Victor, 227
Hunt, Leigh, 10, 89, 90
Hunter, Sir William, 109
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 7, 73

Infernal Marriage, The, 181, 182

Inge, William Ralph, 63, 64
Irving, Washington, 17

James, Henry, 40, 76, 81–83, 225, 232

Jefferies, Richard, 132
John Inglesant, 39
Johnson, Samuel, 21, 26, 37, 97, 101, 103, 110, 126, 128
Jonathan Wild, 163
Jonson, Ben, 20, 27, 128, 141, 226

Keats, John, 21, 128, 159, 160, 213

King John, 158
Kinglake, Alexander William, 107
King Lear, 29, 46, 139
King on the Tower, The, 130
Kingsley, Charles, 7
Kipling, Rudyard, 9, 49, 112

Lady Audley’s Secret, 222

Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 161
Lamb, Charles, 5, 31, 57, 78, 107
Landor, Walter Savage, 89, 90, 128, 220
Last Chronicle of Barset, The, 220, 232
Lear, Edward, 78, 105
L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), 168
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 144
Lewes, George Henry, 99
Life of Charles Dickens, Forster’s, 59
Life of Charlotte Brontë, 201, 203, 210–212
Life of Dr. Johnson, 201
Lincoln, Abraham, 183
Little Dorrit, 32, 43
London Magazine, 57
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 144
Longinus, 149
Lothair, 185, 186
Lycidas, 159
Lytton, Lord, 230

Macaulay, Lord, 172, 174, 183

Madame Bovary, 139
Malory, Sir Thomas, 196
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 167
Manners, Lord John, 193
Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward, 132
Marlowe, Christopher, 21
Martin Chuzzlewit, 17, 23, 51–53, 54, 74
Martineau, James, 74, 132
Marvell, Andrew, 124
Mary Barton, 205–209, 211, 212
Marzials, Sir Frank T., 117
Maupassant, Guy de, 138
Maurice, Frederick Denison, 7
Measure for Measure, 91
Meredith, George, 137
Mérimée, Prosper, 138
Merivale, Herman, 117, 119, 131
Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 30, 45, 46
Michelangelo, 26
Midsummer-Night’s Dream, A, 78, 149
Mill, John Stuart, 7
Milnes, Richard Monckton, 106, 107
Milton, John, 21, 66, 124, 127, 128, 136, 159, 212, 222
Molière, 28
Moll Flanders, 163
Moonstone, The, 224
Morning Chronicle, 37, 177
Morris, William, 162, 176