Katrina Schwartz
Department of Political Science, University of Florida

"Retreat from Europe? Illiberal Populism and Homophobia in Latvia"

Thursday, 2 November 2006
4:00 p.m.
206 Ingraham Hall

 Sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies
and the
Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA)
Katrina Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute in 2002-2003, taught in the political science department at Penn State University in 2001-2002, and received her Ph.D. in political science in 2001 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her primary research interests are in environmental politics, nationalism, and the comparative politics of post-Communist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Her book, Nature and National Identity after Communism: Globalizing the Ethnoscape, explores the interweaving of discourses of nature and nation through case studies of nature management and rural development policy conflicts in Latvia. It will be published in November 2006 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has published articles on this topic in Environmental Politics, Political Geography, Cultural Geographies, and East European Politics & Societies (forthcoming). Her research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright-Hays, IREX, and the MacArthur Global Studies Consortium.

Abstract: In July 2005 some 100 people participated in Latvia's first gay pride parade, the second held in former Soviet territory. Thanks to aggressive opposition from prominent politicians and church leaders, this event unexpectedly became one of the most controversial and polarizing issues in Latvian politics. The march took place despite a last-minute effort to disallow it, and a heavy police presence was needed to protect marchers from at least 500 hostile counter-protestors. Most surprisingly, the event united two previously distinct and even hostile camps - radical Latvian nationalists and (often Russian-speaking) evangelical Christians - in a bilingual front against gay rights. A small "Christian values" political party went on to spearhead a successful parliamentary campaign to amend Latvia's constitution to ban gay marriage last fall, and throughout the year, along with other anti-gay MPs, the "preachers' party" continued wielding a stridently illiberal homophobic discourse to mobilize voters in the run-up to parliamentary elections in October 2006. This presentation will examine the discourse of Latvia's surprising wave of illiberal homophobia and discuss its implications for Latvian political development and ongoing integration into the European Union.