POLITICS & CULTURE
HOW LGBTQ FOREIGN POLICY SPURRED A NEW COLD WAR The conundrum of “traditional values” politics
MARCH / APRIL 2021
By Adam Zivo
Something big happened in the early 2010s. International LGBTQ advocacy, which had been around for decades without much government support, was suddenly incorporated within many Western states’ larger umbrellas of human rights projects. This was epitomized by a memorandum issued by US President Obama in 2011, which declared that advancing LGBTQ rights would be a foreign policy priority. Through that memorandum, US departments and agencies were instructed to fight against the criminalization of LGBTQ rights, and to provide support for human rights advocacy where possible. It was an enormous victory. Two years later, the European Union also formalized its support for integrating LGBTQ advocacy and foreign policy, through its “Guidelines to Promote and Protect the Enjoyment of All Human Rights by LGBTI Persons.”
frictions. However much the US and the EU advocated for LGBTQ inclusion, it could not suddenly undo local prejudices in developing countries. Their citizens resented being forced to accommodate sexual minorities, which they considered deviant, and especially so when this accommodation was implicitly coerced through foreign influence. Seeing an opportunity here, Russia led the retaliatory charge, pioneering a new kind of politics based on “traditional values.” Sodden with religiosity and nationalism, this worldview was explicitly antithetical to Western liberal secularism, turning instead to patriarchal conceptions of family and church. Western commitments to human rights were reframed as a homosexual conspiracy, a testament to the corrupting power of decadence, and a perversion to be defended against.
The vast diplomatic and financial resources of the US and EU were finally being put towards supporting LGBTQ rights advocacy. The importance of this policy shift cannot be overstated. Rights advocacy needs funding to thrive. The funds that can be provided through a government patron go far beyond what can otherwise be raised by civil society. Similarly, the tools of foreign policy – public condemnation of errant states, the threat of sanctions, diplomatic manoeuvring in multilateral fora – simply cannot be duplicated by activists working on their own. For the first half of the 2010s, it seemed as if the tides were moving decisively in favour of LGBTQ acceptance.
Concurrently, Russia worked hard to portray LGBTQ populations as illegitimate agents of foreign influence. As the country clamped down on LGBTQ rights, it also clamped down on foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) within its borders, drawing an explicit connection between the two. Abetted by the Russian Orthodox Church, Russia rejected the notion that its citizens could be naturally queer, and, in doing so, stripped its queer citizens of the basic protections that come with being a part of the body politic. The deep reservoirs of Russian homophobia were called upon to wash away Western “moral corruption,” putting an end to the brief window of LGBTQ progress that had begun in Russia in the 1990s. As an authoritarian state with a meagre history of liberalism, Russia’s fusion of homophobia and anti-Western nationalism was easily accomplished.
However, by the mid 2010s, the West’s adversaries took note of the fact that global LGBTQ advocacy ran up against important cultural 44
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