A queer critique of EU LGBT+ rights promotion in the rise of the anti-gender movement: internal contradictions and external challenges

Abstract

LGBT+ rights have emerged as a visible component of the European Union's normative agenda, both within its borders and in its relations with neighboring countries and beyond. Institutionalist analyses have noted how the EU increasingly presents itself as a guardian of human rights, embedding Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, Expression and Sex Characteristics (SOGIESC) protections into legal instruments, policy frameworks, and enlargement criteria. However, this thesis critically interrogates the internal coherence and external projection of the EU’s LGBT+ rights agenda, and how it affects queer communities within and outside the EU through a queer theoretical lens. Focusing on the dynamics and framework of norm diffusion (the main mechanism through which the EU promotes LGBT+ rights) this study explores how these rights are adopted, negotiated, and contested across the EU and its periphery. Drawing on Queer Theory and Postcolonial-based critiques from IR scholars (e.g., Thiel, Velasco, Puar, Rao, Butler, Walter), it challenges the assumption that EU-led LGBT+ rights promotion is ideologically neutral, culturally universal, or politically uncontested. It scrutinizes both the symbolic and instrumental uses of LGBT+ rights in EU policy-making and enlargement strategies, highlighting internal contradictions, selective enforcement, and the persistent vulnerability of these rights to politicization, especially amid democratic backsliding and anti-gender mobilization. This thesis shows that the EU’s promotion of LGBT+ rights, while impactful, remains entangled in liberal, Eurocentric, and securitized frameworks that often instrumentalize queerness for geopolitical ends. Rather than offering fixed solutions, it argues for queering as a tool to disrupt liberal assumptions of rights and reimagine transnational solidarity beyond Eurocentric terms, grounded in mutual engagement, epistemic humility and intersectional and decolonial justice.