Koen Slootmaeckers’ book Coming in: Sexual Politics and the EU Accession in Serbia is certainly not the only book examining the promotion of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights in EU candidate countries.^[1] However, it may be one of the few to engage in depth with the agency of a candidate state, in this case Serbia, in the process of the EU’s (LGBT) norm diffusion. Underlining the apparent paradox of Serbia appointing its first female and openly gay prime minister in 2017 despite the overwhelmingly conservative public, one of the questions the author seeks to address is: “How are LGBT rights simultaneously promoted and resisted within Serbia’s EU accession process?” (174). The central argument of the book is that both the EU’s and Serbia’s utilitarian and formalistic approach to sexual politics have contributed to the LGBT community in Serbia “coming into” rather than “coming out” of the closet, thus increasing their invisibility, despite the ostensible improvement in LGBT advocacy.

To demonstrate this, the author employs the process-tracing method, drawing on his fieldwork in Serbia, which follows developments from the country’s democratic transition in 2001 all the way to 2015, when Serbia opened its first negotiation chapters with the EU. For the study, the author conducted semi-structured interviews with politicians, employees of public institutions, experts, and LGBT activists. Besides this, he also analyzed legislation and participated in Pride parades.

The book is innovative both owing to its theoretical approach (Chapters 1 and 2) and the richness of its empirical data (Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6). The first chapter argues that it is necessary to conceptualize Europeanization as a relational and transnational process in order to fully grasp how LGBT norm diffusion functions in Serbia, and within the context of EU enlargement in general. The relational aspects suggest that Europeanization is a political process of negotiations, filled with tensions between the two partners, which, when settled, can produce “pathological” or unexpected positions for both negotiators (48). Illustrative of this is what Slootmaeckers calls “perverted conditionality” on the part of the EU, as well as “tactical Europeanisation” on the part of Serbia. While the former allows the EU to “soften” or “temporarily forget” some of its accession conditions for the purpose of maintaining the momentum of integration, the latter enables the candidate state to engage in a “double-speak process” in which it presents itself as markedly “European” at the international level, but pursues a diametrically opposite approach domestically (40–7).

The transnational component of Europeanization, as the second chapter outlines, refers to the global embeddedness of the EU’s identity in what Slootmaeckers refers to as the “homonationalist moment” (67), which saw the EU transform from purely a peace project toward an (LGBT) fundamental rights protector as well. As a consequence of this transition, the EU increasingly started to treat the adoption of antidiscrimination legislation and the holding of Pride parades as (soft) measures of progress in its accession policy, an approach described in the literature as “pink-testing”. The problem here is that the lack of EU competences in the sphere of sexual and antidiscrimination policy meant the Union framed LGBT issues as abstract freedoms of expression and assembly, leaving vast scope for interpretation and manipulation on the part of the candidate state. Parallel to his discussion of this transnational EU identity, the author succinctly but cunningly depicts the patterns of Othering that underpin contemporary identity politics in Serbia (58–66). These, he argues, are rooted in a masculinity crisis following the collapse of state socialism in the 1980s, the nationalist revival of the Kosovo myth, and traditional Orthodox religious values. Combined, these three components create a markedly heterosexual (and patriarchal) public space (169).

Against this backdrop, the author engages in a thorough analysis of the collected material, convincingly demonstrating how the EU applied the “perverted conditionality” approach when temporarily shelving the condition of a comprehensive antidiscrimination law amid the rise of the nationalist, anti-EU opposition in the 2007 Serbian elections (Chapter 3). Similarly, in Chapter 4, he depicts the Serbian government’s “tactical Europeanisation” when organizing Pride in 2014. While, on the one hand, the Serbian government sent a pro-European message to the international audience, something that was much-needed after three consecutive years of Pride bans, on the other, it organized a military parade for “domestic usage” in response to the visit of Russian president Vladimir Putin just a few weeks later (126). The latter parade strengthened the domestic image of the government as the powerful protector of traditional Orthodox values.

Chapters 5 and 6 describe the disheartening consequences of these approaches for the lives of LGBT people in Serbia. On the one hand, the EU’s “pink-testing strategy” has pushed domestic LGBT activists to focus mainly on organizing Pride parades, rather than on empowering the local LGBT community to make use of the existing (and hard-won) legal framework, and increasingly report discrimination to the police. On the other, the government’s focus on demonstrating “Europeanness” and protecting the fundamental rights of freedom of assembly by mobilizing several thousand policemen to “guard” the Pride parade led to its depoliticization and the further marginalization of the local LGBT community. Slootmaeckers cleverly describes this marginalization through the metaphor of a “transparent closet” (167), created by the police deployed to “protect” Pride participants in the heterosexual public space. Such a “closet”, according to the author, further legitimizes the need to treat homosexuality as a private matter, something that should only be practiced within one’s own “four walls”. Consequently, the LGBT community is alienated and constantly reminded of the need to adapt their behavior to the characteristics of the space in which they function: for example, by removing the Pride symbols as soon as they leave the guarded Pride premises (169).

Despite the author’s rather bitter conclusions, I particularly appreciate his description of some of the latest positive developments in the civil society sphere in Serbia with regard to LGBT community empowerment (Epilogue). The author does not make a direct reference to the need for the EU to further expand its competences or to an increased role of the EU Parliament in achieving a more radical and enforceable LGBT policy, which would, as he suggests, put “people, rather than elites at its core” (187). Importantly, he misses out on the opportunity to position each of the “lived experiences chapters” immediately after their corresponding “historical development” chapters, that is Chapter 5 on the implementation of the antidiscrimination law immediately after Chapter 3 on adopting this law and Chapter 6 on the lived experiences of Pride after Chapter 4 on the historical development of Pride. Had he done so, it would potentially have enhanced the coherence of his argument even more. Nevertheless, the book represents a valuable source for scholars and practitioners of both European integration and global queer politics.