Introduction

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        How do states within the international system respond when other actors install policies that directly conflict with their own narratives? In the following pages, I intend to unpack one possible answer to this extremely complex question. This paper examines the politics of queer rights in Europe through the lens of homonationalism and asks what these dynamics reveal about how states construct and defend their identities. I focus specifically on the relationship between Western Europe and Hungary, addressing the following research questions: How does homonationalism shape Western European responses to Hungary’s anti-queer policies, and what does this reveal about the politics of queer inclusion in Europe? To what extent have Western European states used Hungary’s anti-queer legislation as a political tool to reaffirm their commitment to queer rights, with or without implementing substantive policy changes themselves? And finally, how do Hungary’s explicitly anti-queer, heteronationalist policies interact with Western European homonationalist narratives that present Western states as sexually progressive, tolerant, and more “developed”? 

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         The following pages will offer an in-depth definition and contextualization of homonationalism, Hungary’s recent anti-queer legislation, and the Western European response to that legislation. I approach this analysis through the theory of homonationalism, a concept developed by Jasbir Puar in her work, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Homonationalism describes how certain queer subjects are incorporated into a state’s nationalist agenda and used as evidence of a state’s modernity and progressiveness, while non-normative others within the international system are excluded, silenced, and erased from the narrative. The theory directs our attention to moments when states cite LGBTQ+ acceptance or tolerance as proof that they are more civilized, democratic, or “developed” than those they critique for failing to uphold similar values. In this paper, I use that framework to interpret Western European condemnations of Hungary as performances of sexual modernity and Western progressive superiority. This lens helps illuminate which queer subjects are considered acceptable within Western European societies, how queer rights are mobilized to draw boundaries between “proper Europeans” and “illiberal others,” and how these rhetorical commitments can perform progressivism without necessarily reshaping the lived realities of queer people across Europe. This paper argues that Western European responses to Hungary’s anti-queer policies are shaped by homonationalist logics: Western states mobilize Hungary as a homophobic “other” to reaffirm their own status as modern, sexually progressive nations. In doing so, they perform a commitment to queer rights that often remains symbolic rather than substantive, reinforcing East–West hierarchies while leaving many racialized, migrant, and non-normative queer subjects within Western Europe precarious and marginal.

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         The paper will proceed as follows. First, I will define homonationalism, pinkwashing, and related concepts, showing how they intersect with nationalism, sexuality, and race. I will then outline how this framework will be applied to the case study comparing Hungary and Western Europe. Next, I will examine Hungary’s legal and discursive assaults on LGBTQ+ Hungarians, tracing how these policies construct queerness as foreign, Western, and threatening to the Hungarian nation. I will also show how Hungarian leaders position themselves against what they describe as “Western gender ideology,” a narrative move that functions centrally within Hungary’s heteronationalist project [1]. Following this, I will turn to Western Europe and analyze homonationalism as a form of performed progressivism by examining Western European responses to Hungary’s anti-queer legislation, including EU infringement proceedings, CJEU hearings, joint declarations by EU member states, European Parliament resolutions, and high-profile diplomatic statements from Western governments. Through this analysis, I will show how these responses mobilize LGBTQ+ rights as markers of Western modernity and “true European values,” often without accompanying deep structural reforms at home [2]. These reactions ultimately reveal how only certain forms of queerness, typically white, citizen, gender-conforming subjects, are centered and protected within Western homonationalist narratives. 

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         Defining Homonationalism

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         This first section serves as a foundational introduction to the concept of homonationalism. Coined by Jasbir Puar in Terrorist Assemblages (2007), homonationalism refers to the dual process through which specific LGBTQ+ subjects are selectively incorporated into nationalist projects while, at the same time, participating in and reinforcing these projects themselves “behind the scenes [3].” Puar conceptualizes homonationalism as a historical shift in which certain queer subjects become “worthy of state protection,” a shift that reconfigures established understandings of the relationship between sexuality, modernity, and the nation-state [4]. Importantly, homonationalism is an analytical framework and a condition of contemporary geopolitics that reveals how sexuality is used to delineate proper citizenship, national belonging, and the boundaries of “civilized” modernity [5]. Scholars emphasize that homonationalism works by positioning LGBTQ+ rights as evidence of Western superiority while casting non-Western or illiberal “others” as inherently homophobic, backward, or culturally incompatible with queer inclusion that occurs in Western societies [6]. In this paper, I use homonationalism as the central theoretical lens for comparing how Hungary and Western Europe define queer belonging within their borders, mobilize LGBTQ+ rights discourse, and weave sexuality into competing visions of national identity. 

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         When discussing the origins, purpose, and core mechanisms of homonationalism, Puar identifies four central components, the first being the “founding mythology of US sexual exceptionalism,” in which the nation imagines itself as uniquely tolerant and sexually liberated, particularly toward specific, acceptable queer subjects [7]. This mythology allows the state to frame itself as inherently progressive, modern, and morally superior by selectively extending recognition and protection to certain LGBTQ+ citizens. For Puar, sexual exceptionalism emerges most visibly in the post-9/11 period, when the US mobilized queer tolerance as a symbol of its civilizational superiority [8]. After 9/11, the discourses celebrating the inclusion of “gay and lesbian citizens” functioned as national self-affirmation that positioned the US as the enlightened, democratic shining city on the hill in contrast to the “terrorist” others who were framed as sexually backward, homophobic, and culturally pre-modern [9]. In this context, queer subjects became folded into the national project as proof of the nation’s exceptional modernity, while simultaneously helping to justify militarism and racial profiling, utilizing LGBTQ+ acceptance for the benefit of the US security agenda, which actively harmed marginalized populations [10]. This same logic extends to Europe, where LGBTQ+ rights increasingly serve as a benchmark of what counts as a “modern European identity” and what does not [11]. The celebration of selective queer inclusion becomes a means for Western European states to portray themselves as progressive and culturally advanced when contrasting themselves with states, such as Hungary, which they frame as illiberal and outside the bounds of “true” European values. 

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         The second core mechanism is the regulatory function of queerness, in which homonationalism transforms queerness from a site of dissent into a disciplinary norm. Rather than positioning queer subjects as oppositional to the nation-state, homonationalism selectively embraces “good queer citizens” who align with whiteness, nationalism, and gender conforming identities [12]. These subjects become symbols of national pride and modernity, demonstrating that the nation is tolerant, so long as queerness remains assimilable and non-threatening. This expectation produces strict hierarchies within LGBTQ+ communities: white, upper-middle-class, and gender-conforming queer people are granted visibility and recognition, while queer migrants, racial minorities, sex workers, and gender-nonconforming people are cast as dangers to the nation, framed as too culturally “other,” or too politically disruptive to belong [13]. Puar illustrates this mechanism through the continuation of the post-9/11 valorization of openly gay and lesbian soldiers in the US military, whose inclusion became proof of national sexual modernity even as it strengthened militarized nationalism [14]. In this example, queer subjects were welcomed insofar as they supported the state’s security apparatus and aligned themselves against the “terrorist,” demonstrating how queerness could be used to reinforce state power, rather than resist it [15]. This way, queerness becomes a technology of governance and a tool through which the state defines the boundaries of proper citizenship, legitimizes pre-existing exclusionary practices, and distinguishes between queer bodies that “fit” the nation and those that must be policed or expelled completely. 

     

      The third core mechanism introduced by Puar is the ascendancy of whiteness. Puar identifies that homonationalism is fundamentally racially motivated, where white, “respectable” queer bodies are the ones most easily incorporated into the nation, celebrated as symbols of modernity, and mobilized to signal the state’s supposed inclusivity [16]. However, this incorporation is not only symbolic; it actively produces racial boundaries by marking those who fall outside those categories as sexually repressive, culturally backward, or inherently homophobic. In doing so, homonationalism reinforces longstanding Euro-American hierarchies that position whiteness as the default site of sexual progress and racial minorities as obstacles to queer liberation [17]. In their qualitative study, Homonationalism in Europe (2019), Freude and Bosch emphasize that “the sexual other is white and the racial other is straight,” meaning that within European political imagination, homosexuality becomes coded as an inherently Western, white, and modern identity, while migrants are discursively constructed as uniformly homophobic [18]. This binary enables European states to present themselves as enlightened defenders of LGBTQ+ rights in contrast to “illiberal” non-white communities, even when these same states fail to protect queer people within their own borders [19]. Queer inclusion becomes a marker of European cultural superiority, and LGBTQ+ rights are weaponized to police racial boundaries rather than dismantle them [20]. This dynamic is central to understanding how Western Europe narrates itself as sexually progressive while casting Eastern European or migrant communities as the “problem,” a pattern directly relevant to the case of Hungary examined later in this paper. 

 

         The fourth pillar is queer necropolitics, the broader political terrain within which homonationalism operates. Necropolitics refers to the state’s power to decide who is allowed to live, who is left to die, and whose lives are rendered ungrievable. When applied to sexuality, queer necropolitics highlights how the selective inclusion of certain LGBTQ+ subjects, typically white, gender-conforming, gay and lesbian subjects, depends on the targeted silencing, policing, and premature death of others [21]. As Puar argues, the celebrated figure of the “good gay citizen” emerges only alongside the construction of populations marked for disposal, like members of minority populations deemed “bad,” whose lives are rendered incompatible with national belonging [22]. Queer necropolitics, therefore, exposes how the state unevenly distributes opportunities to live, extending protection and recognition to those who reinforce national ideals while simultaneously subjecting others to structural neglect. States can use LGBTQ+ progress as a cover to deepen racial and sexual stratification, expanding regimes that place marginalized queer lives at heightened risk. Thus, homonationalism is not simply about inclusion or exclusion; it is about inconsistently valuing queer life itself, meaning some queer bodies are uplifted as symbols of national progress, whereas others are blatantly and intentionally erased.

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         To situate homonationalism within broader gendered and sexualized state strategies, it is helpful to examine its relationship to practices such as pinkwashing and nationalism. Read more about pink and purplewashing in Vivienne Arndt’s paper. Additionally, read more about corporate pinkwashing in Marco Cisneros-Farber’s paper. 

Homonationalism and pinkwashing must also be understood in relation to nationalism, which increasingly frames sexuality as a metric of civilization, producing a binary between a “civilized, tolerant, modern West” and “backward, homophobic others [23].” Nationalism refers to an ideology that organizes political belonging around the idea of a shared nation, asserting that people who share a common culture, history, or identity should form a unified political community with distinct interests and boundaries [24]. This concept also defines who counts as part of the nation and who falls outside of it, making inclusion and exclusion central to how states define themselves [25]. Scholars argue that the EU’s political identity is partly constructed through “sexual democracy,” where LGBTQ+ rights serve as proof of European modernity and moral superiority [26]. Thus, homonationalism, pinkwashing, and nationalism illustrate how queer rights become instruments of international self-presentation, allowing some states to position themselves as sexually progressive and “modern” while portraying others as outside that civilizational frame.

Within the homonationalist framework, gender and sexuality become highly symbolic political resources. States instrumentalize queer rights to justify exclusionary immigration policies, border control, or racist rhetoric [27]. At the same time, these rights serve to affirm a state’s self-representation as tolerant, civilized, or modern, which produces a sharp civilizational contrast with the “others [28].” Homonationalism thus disciplines queer subjects with other normative ways of life: individuals who conform to gender expectations, align themselves with the state’s patriotism, and embrace assimilationist norms are afforded recognition, whereas non-normative forms of queerness are rendered ineligible or threatening to national cohesion. This process reflects what Puar describes as the transformation of queerness into a regulatory norm, where the state no longer fears homosexuality per se, but rather embraces it strategically while using homonormative ideals to police community boundaries. 

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         In the following sections, I will use the framework of homonationalism to structure my comparative analysis, treating Hungary and Western Europe as mutually reinforcing sexual-political projects rather than as opposites. For Hungary, I will use this lens to examine the country as a case of heteronationalism, where the exclusion of LGBTQ+ subjects functions as national purification and deliberate rejection of Western influence [29]. This approach highlights how Hungarian leaders cast themselves as defenders of “traditional Europe” against “Western gender ideology,” which constructs queerness as foreign, corrupting, and incompatible with Hungarian nationhood [30]. Through this lens, Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ legislation and discourses become apparent attempts to define national identity through exclusion. 

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         On the other hand, Western Europe provides the comparative case where LGBTQ+ inclusion becomes a marker of sexual modernity, thus producing distinctly homonationalist dynamics. In this case, the framework allows me to analyze how Western states deploy queer rights through political rhetoric, EU statements, and symbolic gestures that work to consolidate national identity and draw racially motivated civilizational boundaries [31]. In this case, queer-friendliness serves both as a performance of progressiveness and as a tool for distancing the West from “illiberal others.” When we zoom out, we can see that Western homonationalism and Eastern European homophobia are mutually constructed instances [32]. Western states use Hungary as a foil to affirm their own modernity, while Hungary frames anti-queer nationalism as resistance to Western sexual exceptionalism. This relational approach avoids simplistic “tolerant West/intolerant East” binaries and reveals the transnational circulation of sexual politics that shapes both regions.

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         Hungary

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      Since 2010, the Fidesz–KDNP government has constructed a comprehensive anti-LGBTQ+ legal regime that embeds heteronormativity into Hungary’s constitutional order. What began as incremental reforms has evolved into a coordinated legal architecture designed to regulate family structures, erase gender diversity, and restrict queer citizenship. Orbán’s constitutional overhaul sits at the center of this project. Hungary’s 2011 Fundamental Law defines marriage exclusively as “the union of a man and a woman,” and subsequent amendments further specify that “the mother is a woman, the father is a man,” effectively excluding same-sex couples and non-binary parents from the legal concept of family [33]. A 2012 constitutional revision entrenched this model by foreclosing the possibility of same-sex marriage entirely, limiting queer couples to registered partnerships with significantly fewer rights and no constitutional protection [34].

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         The heteronormative foundations established in the early 2010s paved the way for more restrictions later in the decade. In 2020, the government introduced a legal change that made gender recognition impossible by requiring all state documents to record immutable “sex at birth,” eliminating any pathway for trans and intersex people to legally affirm their identities [35]. Simultaneously, adoption laws were tightened and stated that only married heterosexual couples may adopt without special ministerial approval, functionally blocking joint adoption and step-parent adoption for same-sex couples and single LGBTQ+ individuals, who are now subject to discretionary state veto [36]. These laws operate congruently to enforce a biologically essentialist, Christian-nationalist family model and to deny queer families the legal security afforded to their heterosexual counterparts [37].

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         In June 2021, Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ legislation reached a new level with the passage of the so-called “act on stricter actions against pedophile offenders,” a law that, despite its title, functions primarily as a sweeping censorship regime targeting any public acknowledgement of queer existence [38]. In practice, the law bans the “depiction or promotion” of “divergence from sex at birth, sex change, or homosexuality” in schools, media, advertising, and any commercial space where minors could be present [39]. By placing LGBTQ+ identities under the umbrella of “pedophile offenders,” the legislation collapses sexual and gender diversity into the categories of danger, deviancy, and harm, effectively institutionalizing a state-sponsored moral panic. The law explicitly classifies all LGBTQ+ content as harmful to children, automatically restricting it to 18+ audiences and equating queer representation with pornography and violence [40]. Hungary thus becomes the first EU Member State to directly import Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda” model, invoking the rhetoric of “child protection” to justify censorship while implicitly linking LGBTQ+ people to pedophilia and moral corruption [41].

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         This censorship extends beyond education into the regulation of literature. Government Decree 473/2021 requires children’s books featuring LGBTQ+ characters to be shrink-wrapped in plastic and prohibits their sale within 200 meters of schools or churches, thus rendering age-appropriate queer stories effectively inaccessible in public life [42]. The law is enforced through an extensive system of sanctions that include fines, temporary shop closures, advertising bans, delisting of media providers, and even up to 60 days of imprisonment for educators who use prohibited materials [43]. These ramifications create a pervasive deterrent to any queer-inclusive teaching or cultural expression [44].

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         Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, argue that the 2021 law violates core protections under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the European Convention on Human Rights, and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, specifically freedom of expression, the right to receive information, and the prohibition of discrimination [45]. In effect, the 2021 Propaganda Law does more than suppress information, as it constructs queer existence itself as incompatible with childhood, innocence, and the moral fabric of the nation.

In 2025, Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ+ legal project escalated further with a pair of aligned measures that were designed to erase queer public presence and harden the state’s heteronormative constitutional order. In March 2025, Parliament adopted a new law on freedom of assembly that requires authorities to ban any public event that “portray[s] divergence from self-identity corresponding to sex at birth, sex change or homosexuality,” an unmistakably targeted attack on Pride and any form of LGBTQ+ public gathering [46]. This measure transforms the mere visibility of queer and trans people into a legally prohibited act, framing public assembly itself as a threat to social order. 

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         Only weeks later, on 14 April 2025, the 15th constitutional amendment further entrenched the state’s anti-LGBTQ+ agenda. The amendment elevated “every child’s right to moral, physical, mental, and moral development” above virtually all other constitutional rights and simultaneously declared that a person is “a man or a woman,” codifying a rigid, biologically essentialist definition of sex [47]. In doing so, the amendment constitutionalizes the ideological foundation of Hungary’s earlier anti-LGBTQ laws, especially the Pride ban, by placing “child protection” in direct opposition to queer existence. It not only reinforces the statutory restrictions adopted in March but also provides a constitutional basis for suppressing LGBTQ+ assemblies under the guise of safeguarding children, similar to that of the 2021 propaganda law [48].

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         Given this, Budapest police moved swiftly to ban the 30th annual Budapest Pride march scheduled for 28 June 2025, designating it a prohibited “successor event” under the new assembly law [49]. While some initial police decisions were annulled for procedural errors, the Curia, or Supreme Court, ultimately upheld the core bans, refused to assess the law’s compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights, and declined to seek a preliminary ruling from the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU), which effectively aligned the judiciary with the government’s anti-LGBTQ+ agenda and foreclosed legal recourse for queer Hungarians [50]. Additionally, the assembly amendments expand state surveillance powers, authorizing the use of facial recognition technology to identify and fine Pride participants [51]. By extending mass-surveillance tools into the realm of political dissent, the government signals an intent to punish queer visibility, transform LGBTQ+ public life into a constitutional impossibility, and consolidate a legal regime in which queerness is framed as a threat to children, morality, and the nation itself.

 

         Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislative agenda is inseparable from the broader ideological project Viktor Orbán has constructed over the past decade, grounded in populism, anti-Enlightenment nationalism, and the strategic deployment of “gender ideology” as a political threat. Orbán routinely casts himself as the defender of “Christian values” against “Western liberalism,” asserting that liberalism, multiculturalism, and diversity have made Europe “old, rich and weak,” while migration purportedly brings “young, poor and strong” outsiders who endanger Europe’s cultural identity [52]. Orbán’s political vision is explicitly anti-Enlightenment. Rather than grounding the state in universal individual rights, he insists that the survival and homogeneity of the Hungarian nation must supersede minority protections [53]. Within this ideological framework, rights are conditional, not inherent, and extend only to those who align with the nation’s “natural” moral order. This logic justifies the exclusion of queer and trans people as necessary to preserve the integrity of the nation. In public statements, Orbán insists that Hungary is “tolerant,” yet he simultaneously emphasizes that LGBTQ+ people must not be treated according to “the same rules,” describing queer identity as a “different lifestyle” incompatible with “our own” norms [54]. This rhetorical move constructs heterosexuality as the unquestioned national default, while queerness becomes an external deviation.

         

         The cumulative effect of Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ+ legal regime is not only institutionalized discrimination, but the production of a social environment defined by fear, silence, and shrinking public space for queer life. Amnesty Hungary describes a pervasive “cloud of fear” generated by the 2021 propaganda law, which has pushed LGBTQ+ people “into the shadows” and triggered widespread self-censorship [55]. These structural barriers translate directly into lived precarity. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) survey data shows that 72% of Hungarian LGBTQ+ respondents avoid holding hands in public, 40% avoid certain locations due to fear of assault, and only 32% feel able to be open about their identity [56]. These figures are significantly worse than EU averages. Additionally, reporting to police rates remain extremely low, with only 5% of victims reporting physical attacks to the police and 6% reporting discrimination to equality bodies, reflecting deep mistrust of state institutions and the widespread perception that authorities are hostile rather than protective [57]. 

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      Yet Hungary’s society is not necessarily monolithically aligned with the government’s agenda. Polling consistently shows far greater public acceptance than state rhetoric suggests. Roughly half of Hungarians support same-sex marriage, and a large majority support legal gender recognition for trans people [58]. The government’s 2022 referendum, which was intended to validate the propaganda law, was rendered invalid when over 1.7 million citizens intentionally cast spoiled ballots, an unprecedented act of collective resistance against state-led moral panic [59]. Civil society organizations like Háttér Society, Szimpozion, and Amnesty Hungary continue to operate despite chronic underfunding, media restrictions, and smear campaigns that falsely link LGBTQ+ advocacy with pedophilia [60]. Hungary’s model is not confined to its borders. Activists report that political actors in Slovakia and Romania explicitly study Hungary’s legislation and are advancing similar proposals, treating Hungary as a regional pioneer of anti-LGBTQ+ governance [61]. In this sense, Hungary is not only constructing a domestic regime of enforced heterosexuality and constrained queer life, but it is also actively exporting a blueprint for dismantling LGBTQ+ rights across Eastern Europe.

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         The EU

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         Since the passage of Hungary’s 2021 “propaganda law,” EU institutions have consistently framed the legislation as a serious violation of EU values, particularly human dignity, equality, and non-discrimination [62]. In July 2021, the European Commission responded by launching an infringement procedure, arguing that the law breaches multiple internal market and media directives, including the Audiovisual Media Services and e-Commerce Directive, both of which ensure the free circulation of audiovisual and online content across the EU [63]. By attempting to censor all LGBTQ+ content accessible to minors, including material produced legally in other Member States, Hungary directly disrupts the EU-wide media market and violates the principle of free movement of services [64]. Additionally, the Commission grounded its challenge in Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU), which outlines the fundamental values all Member States must uphold as a condition of EU membership [65]. Invoking Article 2 in an infringement case is unusually forceful, as it signals that Hungary’s law threatens the very normative foundation of the Union [66].

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         The position was reinforced during the landmark November 2024 hearing before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for case C-769/22, where the Commission, sixteen Member States, and the European Parliament jointly argued that the 2021 law constitutes systemic, intentional, and widespread discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, incompatible with Article 2 of the TEU [67]. In June 2025, Advocate General Tamara Capeta issued an opinion supporting the Commission, emphasizing that Article 2 TEU contains positive obligations to protect marginalized groups. She stated that, “disrespect and marginalisation of a group within society represent ‘red lines’ set by the values of equality and dignity,” and therefore Member States cannot enact laws that structurally stigmatize LGBTQ+ people [68]. An interpretation with significant implications for future rule-of-law actions, her analysis further underscored that discrimination on this scale violates EU values even when no specific sectoral directive is breached. 

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         EU institutions have similarly condemned Hungary’s 2025 assembly law and the 15th constitutional amendment, which together authorize the banning of Pride marches, restrict all public LGBTQ+ gatherings, and constitutionally enshrine binary sex under the banner of “child protection [69].” The European Parliament have argued that these measures violate freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and the right to privacy, and directly contradict established European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) jurisprudence on comparable "propaganda laws,” including Bayev v. Russia, Alekseyev v. Russia, Macate v. Lithuania, and Glukhin v. Russia, all of which found such restrictions incompatible with democratic values [70]. In response, the European Parliament has repeatedly condemned “anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda laws,” declared the EU an “LGBTQI Freedom Zone,” and characterized Hungary’s actions as a clear breach of Union principles and of children’s rights. It has urged the Commission to employ the rule-of-law tools, funding conditionality, and further infringement procedures to address systemic discrimination [71]. 

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         A coalition of Western and Northern European states, including the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Finland, and Spain, has also issued joint diplomatic declarations condemning Hungary’s laws [72]. Some member states have gone further. The Netherlands, for instance, has supplemented formal EU processes with activist-centered initiatives, funding human rights training programs for Hungarian and regional LGBTQ+ activists and positioning itself as a site of “best practice” and practical solidarity [73]. This combination of legal, political, and diplomatic pressure reflects a broader Western European effort to frame Hungary’s actions not only as unlawful but as fundamentally incompatible with the moral identity of the EU.  

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    Within this framework, EU states leading the opposition against Hungary narrate themselves as defenders of “sexual democracy,” positioning their own societies as sexually progressive in contrast to Hungary’s illiberalism. Although it’s also accurate, EU institutions and several Member States repeatedly compare Hungary’s measures to Russia’s “gay propaganda" laws. This reinforces a symbolic geography in which liberal Western Europe is aligned with progress, while post-socialist states are associated with authoritarian homophobia [74]. This East-West framing mirrors homonationalist dynamics identified by Puar: queer rights become a civilizational threshold deployed to differentiate “modern” European nations from “backward” others [75]. Concurrently, pro-government Hungarian media flip this script by casting the EU as a sexually permissive, morally corrupt hegemon. This confirms that LGBTQ+ rights serve as a key symbolic terrain in struggles over sovereignty, identity, and Europeanness [76]. The result is a mutually constitutive relationship: rather than its own merits, Western Europe’s narrative of sexual modernity relies on Hungary’s illiberal foil, while Hungary’s heteronationalism relies on portraying the EU as an overreaching, decadent empire [77]. Thus, the perception of Russian influence is not inherently wrong, it just creates the perfect opportunity for civilizational framing.  

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       Freude and Bosch demonstrate that identifiable homonationalist clusters exist in several Western European states, including Great Britain, Austria, the Netherlands, and Sweden. For this analysis, I will focus specifically on the Netherlands. A particularly illustrative example, the Netherlands played a highly visible role in opposing Hungary’s measures by speaking at the CJEU hearing, publicly criticizing Hungary’s media censorship, and hosting Dutch-funded human rights training programs for Hungarian and regional activists through its foreign ministry [78]. These efforts position the Netherlands as a regional defender of LGBTQ+ rights and as a model of sexual modernity, reinforcing its reputation as an exceptionally progressive state [79]. Yet, as Freude and Bosch note, the Netherlands also contains homonationalist clusters in which LGBTQ+ friendliness coexists with racism and exclusionary nationalism [80]. They quantify homonationalism in numbers by providing variables for LGBTQ+ tolerance, racism, and nationalism. The Dutch had one of the highest nationalism scores at 6.58 points (on a scale of 1-10) and one of the largest homonationalist populations in the survey at 3.3% [81]. In homonationalist terms, Dutch activism around Hungary thus performs dual functions: it provides meaningful transnational support to Hungarian civil society while simultaneously reaffirming Dutch sexual exceptionalism by contrasting its own “progressiveness” with Hungary’s illiberalism [82].

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         Using Puar’s framework, the Netherlands offers one of the clearest empirical examples of Western European homonationalism. Dutch nationalism has long been structured around Puar’s three mechanisms that include sexual exceptionalism, the ascendancy of whiteness, and the regulatory function of queerness [83]. By the early 1990s, Dutch gay media was already crafting a narrative of sexual exceptionalism, repeatedly framing the Netherlands as tolerant, progressive, and a global pioneer in LGBTQ+ rights [84]. This is precisely the kind of “founding mythology of sexual exceptionalism” that Puar identifies: the celebration of queer rights not as a domestic achievement alone, but as a civilizational marker that distinguishes the Netherlands from supposedly less developed or less enlightened societies [85].

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         The same study shows how Dutch gay politics also reflected the ascendancy of whiteness. White, gender-conforming gay men became the normative representatives of “Dutch tolerance,” while queer migrants, especially Muslims, were implicitly and explicitly excluded from the national identity and portrayed as culturally backward, homophobic, or resistant to Dutch values [86]. This racialized boundary-drawing maps directly onto Puar’s argument that homonationalism hinges on whiteness: queerness becomes acceptable only when tethered to Western modernity and the bodies of those already recognized as proper national subjects [87]. Finally, the Netherlands exemplifies Puar’s third mechanism: queerness as a regulatory function. Dutch political and media discourse increasingly demanded that queer citizens demonstrate loyalty to secular-liberal national values, deploy their visibility to critique Islamic “intolerance, “and conform to assimilationist norms [88]. In this configuration, as the article clarifies, gay rights function less as emancipatory protections and more as tools for disciplining migrants and racial minorities.

Taken together, these three mechanisms demonstrate that the Netherlands is not simply a progressive champion of LGBTQ+ rights; it is a state where racial, cultural, and nationalist hierarchies have long structured queer inclusion. This makes its prominent role in condemning Hungary an act of solidarity, but also a performance of Dutch homonationalism, one that reinforces Western Europe’s self-image as sexually modern and morally advanced by positioning Hungary as its illiberal, regressive foil. EU institutions and Western governments present infringement actions, CJEU proceedings, and public condemnations as evidence that Europe will not tolerate anti-LGBTQ+ laws. Yet, these interventions have produced limited material change for queer Hungarians. Their rights remain curtailed, and their daily lives are shaped by fear, censorship, and legal erasure. The Dutch not only do nothing substantive to improve the lives of queer individuals in Hungary but also have very circumscribed spaces for queer individuals within the Netherlands.

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      From a homonationalist perspective, this gap between robust rhetorical defense of queer rights and weak enforcement underscores how LGBTQ+ inclusion becomes a discursive resource through which Western states perform modernity and moral superiority, even as structural inequities affecting queer communities persist within their own borders. Ultimately, this dynamic demonstrates that Western European responses to Hungary both resist illiberalism and reproduce East–West hierarchies: homonationalism enables Western actors to perform sexual progressivism on the international stage while leaving many queer subjects structurally vulnerable, revealing the limits of symbolic inclusion without substantive transformation [89].

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         Conclusion

        In conclusion, I want to revisit the core research questions that guide this analysis. How does homonationalism influence Western European responses to Hungary’s anti-queer policies, and what insights does this provide into the politics of queer inclusion across Europe? Homonationalism shapes Western European reactions by demonstrating that the EU tends to unite to condemn policies of fellow member states that do not align with its broader values of inclusivity. Nonetheless, EU member states tend to recognize and include queer bodies only when they conform to specific standards, reflecting mechanisms of sexual exceptionalism, regulatory queerness, and the dominance of whiteness.

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         To what extent have Western European states used Hungary’s anti-queer legislation as a political tool to reaffirm their commitment to queer rights, with or without implementing substantive policy changes themselves? Looking specifically at the Dutch response, they exercised surface-level efforts to combat Hungarian anti-LGBTQ+ policies while displaying homonationalist tendencies within their own society. By only being tolerant at home to queer bodies that conform to a specific norm, it appears clear that positioning themselves as more progressive than Hungary is at least partially a form of performative political opportunism.  

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      And finally, how do Hungary’s explicitly anti-queer, heteronationalist policies interact with Western European homonationalist narratives that present Western states as sexually progressive, tolerant, and more “developed”? Hungary's policies position the country as pursuing a heteronationalist agenda, thereby highlighting homonationalist norms within the broader EU context. The result is a mutually constitutive relationship: Western Europe’s narrative of sexual modernity relies on Hungary’s illiberal foil, while Hungary’s heteronationalism relies on portraying the EU as an overreaching, decadent empire.   

 

Works Cited

[1] Renkin, H.Z., Trofimov, V. “The Global Dialectics of Homonationalism and Homophobia.” Sexuality & Culture 27, 1987–1995 (2023).

[2] Winer, Canton, and Catherine Bolzendahl. “Conceptualizing Homonationalism: (Re‐)Formulation, Application, and Debates of Expansion.” Compass Online, February 15, 2021. 

[3] Williams, Georgie. “What Is Homonationalism?” Perlego Knowledge Base, October 3, 2023. 

[4] Puar, Jasbir. “Rethinking Homonationalism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (2013): 336–39. 

[5]

[6] Camille. “The Danger of Homonationalism.” The Feminist Club Amsterdam, February 11, 2023. 

[7] Puar, Jasbir. “Rethinking Homonationalism: International Journal of Middle East Studies.” Cambridge Core, April 25, 2013. 

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid

[11] Winer, Canton, and Catherine Bolzendahl. “Conceptualizing Homonationalism: (Re‐)Formulation, Application, and Debates of Expansion.”

[12] Puar, Jasbir. “Rethinking Homonationalism: International Journal of Middle East Studies.”

[13] Ibid

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid

[16] Ibid

[17] Winer, Canton, and Catherine Bolzendahl. “Conceptualizing Homonationalism: (Re)Formulation, Application, and Debates of Expansion.”

[18] Camille. “The Danger of Homonationalism.” The Feminist Club Amsterdam, February 11, 2023. 

[19] Ibid

[20] Ibid

[21] Puar, Jasbir. “Rethinking Homonationalism: International Journal of Middle East Studies.”

[22] Ibid

[23] Ibid

[24] Spencer, Philip, and Howard Wollman, eds. Nations and Nationalism: A Reader. Edinburgh University Press, 2005. 

[25] Ibid

[26] Winer, Canton, and Catherine Bolzendahl. “Conceptualizing Homonationalism: (Re‐)Formulation, Application, and Debates of Expansion.”

[27] Puar, Jasbir. “Rethinking Homonationalism: International Journal of Middle East Studies.”

[28] Winer, Canton, and Catherine Bolzendahl. “Conceptualizing Homonationalism: (Re‐)Formulation, Application, and Debates of Expansion.”

[29] Renkin, H.Z., Trofimov, V. “The Global Dialectics of Homonationalism and Homophobia.” 

[30] Ibid

[31] Puar, Jasbir. “Rethinking Homonationalism: International Journal of Middle East Studies.”

[32] Renkin, H.Z., Trofimov, V. “The Global Dialectics of Homonationalism and Homophobia.”

[33] “Hungary: From Freedom to Censorship: The Consequences of the Hungarian Propaganda Law.” 

[34] Ibid

[35] Ibid

[36] Ibid

[37] The Associated Press. “Hungary Passes Constitutional Amendment to Ban LGBTQ+ Public Events.” NPR, April 15, 2025. 

[38] “Hungary: From Freedom to Censorship: The Consequences of the Hungarian Propaganda Law.” Amnesty International, June 14, 2024.

[39] Ibid

[40] Ibid

[41] “Hungary’s Anti-LGBTIQ+ Policies.” RECLAIM. Accessed December 24, 2025. 

[42] Ibid

[43] Ibid

[44] Ibid

[45] Ibid

[46] Groot, David de. “European Parliamentary Research Service Briefing.” EU Parliament, June 2025. 

[47] Ibid

[48] Ibid

[49] Ibid

[50] Ibid

[51] “Hungary’s Anti-LGBTIQ+ Policies.” RECLAIM.

[52] Schijndel van, Mariska. “Viktor Orbán’s Anti-Enlightenment Discourse and Nationalism Stir Homophobia in Hungary.” Diggit Magazine, April 12, 2017. 

[53] Ibid

[54] Ibid

[55] “Hungary: From Freedom to Censorship: The Consequences of the Hungarian Propaganda Law.”

[56] “EU LGBTI Survey II A Long Way to Go for LGBTI Equality.” European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Accessed December 25, 2025. 

[57] Ibid

[58] “Voices of Hope: Hungarian Activists Fighting for LGBTQI+ Rights.” Ministry of Foreign Affairs, November 14, 2023. 

[59] Ibid

[60] Ibid

[61] Ibid

[62] Tamássy, Réka. “The Discursive Construction of the Relationship between Hungary and the European Union in Light of Anti-LGBTQ Legislation.” Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, December 2024. 

[63] Groot, David de. “European Parliamentary Research Service Briefing.” 

[64] Ibid

[65] Ibid

[66] Ibid

[67] “EU Member States Unite Against Hungary’s Anti-LGBTI Propaganda Law at Infringement Hearing.” ILGA, November 21, 2024. 

[68] Times, The Brussels Times with Belga. “Hungary Violated EU Law with Anti-LGBTQ Legislation.” The Brussels Times, June 5, 2025. 

[69] Groot, David de. “European Parliamentary Research Service Briefing.”

[70] Ibid

[71] Ibid

[72] Ibid

[73] “Voices of Hope: Hungarian Activists Fighting for LGBTQI+ Rights.”

[74] Groot, David de. “European Parliamentary Research Service Briefing.”

[75] Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007. 

[76] Tamássy, Réka. “The Discursive Construction of the Relationship between Hungary and the European Union in Light of Anti-LGBTQ Legislation.”

[77] Ibid

[78] “EU Member States Unite Against Hungary’s Anti-LGBTI Propaganda Law at Infringement Hearing.”

[79] “Voices of Hope: Hungarian Activists Fighting for LGBTQI+ Rights.”

[80] Freude, L., Vergés Bosch, N. “Homonationalism in Europe? A Quantitative Comparison of the Values of Europeans.” Sexuality & Culture 24, 1292–1314 (2020). 

[81] Ibid

[82] Ibid

[83] Brons, W. (2021). “The Birth of Homonationalism: An analysis of the development of Dutch Homonationalism.” 1990-2002.

[84] Ibid

[85] Ibid

[86] Ibid

[87] Ibid

[88] Ibid

[89] Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.