Abstract
Drawing on an empirical study of gender and sexuality politics in Ukraine, this article interrogates the civilizational and yet unspoken racialization that characterizes Europeanization projects in the context of EU enlargement. Its point of departure is that the boundaries of Europeanness coincide with the boundaries of whiteness in a civilizational frame. It argues that Europeanization involves more than merely the influence of EU policies and values on non-member states, simultaneously marking and unmarking civilizational whiteness. Europeanness is, in this meaning, a quintessential racialized identity marker, even as racial whiteness is unmarked as a ‘natural’ adjacency of the West. This dual mechanism is discussed in terms of racial displacement. More specifically, the article foregrounds how racialized power relations intersect with – while at the same time being obscured by – political instrumentalization of sexual rights and freedoms in ‘transitioning’ processes in Ukraine.
Highlights
In the context of European Union (EU) enlargement, linked to the vocabulary of ‘transition’, Ukraine has routinely been designated an East European or postSoviet state with a ‘European perspective’
EU-imposed symbolic politics often stands in stark contrast to actual transformative powers (Slootmaeckers et al, 2016b: 4), and most importantly for our purposes here, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) professionalization has limited the possibilities of local activism, as the above-cited comments by Shevchenko and Kirey indicate, as well as having other unintented effects
Our analysis has indicated that this is due to a reification of civilizational whiteness by way of secondary Eurocentrism
Summary
In the context of European Union (EU) enlargement, linked to the vocabulary of ‘transition’, Ukraine has routinely been designated an East European or postSoviet state with a ‘European perspective’. The so-called transition towards democracy, or rather ‘transitional diffusion of democracy’ (D’Anieri, 2015: 235), is often associated with ‘democratic revolutions’, such as the Ukrainian Orange Revolution in 2004 and the EuroMaidan (or Revolution of Dignity) ten years later In connection with the latter event in 2014, the newly elected president, Petro Poroshenko, proclaimed that Ukraine intends to move towards Europe, describing it as ‘a civilizational choice’: crossing the Rubicon to Europe, while leaving the Soviet past behind.. Goldberg (2006: 334) puts it, race – and racist implications – are silenced but assumed In this framing, any claim to Europeanness involves racial displacement, but as our paper attempts to show, this dual mechanism is forceful – and yet subtle – in the context of EU enlargement. To yield new knowledge in this empirical field and deepen our appreciation of racial displacement in relations to Europeanization, we shall highlight how racialized power relations intersect with – while at the same time being obscured by – political instrumentalization of LGBT rights and freedoms in post-socialist Ukraine
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