To paraphrase my colleague Gideon Rachman, gay rights and green values are the motherhood and apple pie of the European Union. Yet this, along with many other things, may be changing after the influx of eight former communist countries in 2004.

Poland has led the charge against these cosy "European values". Its current populist government has talked of bringing back the death penalty and launched an all-out assault on perceived communist collaborators. Other officials have the corrupting influence of western children’s TV in their sights.

Ewa Sowinska, a children’s rights watchdog, said last week she would have psychologists investigate whether Tinky Winky, the handbag-carrying Teletubby, was gay. “I noticed [he] has a lady’s purse but I didn’t realised he’s a boy…later I learned that this may have a homosexual undertone,” she told a news magazine.

Some of these views are shared elsewhere in the EU’s new neighbourhood. Take the ill-fated tour of the EU’s diversity bus. Sent on a mission from Brussels to promote equal opportunities and non-discrimination, it was barred by the mayor of Vilnius from entering his city in case it encourage homosexuality among the locals. It did at least manage to visit Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria. 

However, eurocrats did not even attempt to enter fortress Poland, or indeed, the Czech Republic, where social affairs commissioner Vladimir Spidla, the man behind the bus, was once prime minister.

Diversity does exist in Poland, however. As one activist circulating samizdat posters of the purple Teletubby defiantly swearing to continue carrying bags, said, “we have a long tradition of resistance”.

Others are circulating even more hilarious, such as this.

Of course it all depends on one’s definition of diversity. The idea of the year of equal opportunities for all is of course the European parliament, which, as Claude Moraes, a British Socialist, pointed out recently, has a rather unrepresentative eight non-white MEPs out of 785. And we have yet to see the first European commissioner from an ethnic minority.

June 4th, 2007 in Identity | Permalink