The Geopolitics of Tolerance: Minority Rights Under EU Expansion in East-Central Europe (2003) (original) (raw)
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Minority rights have been a paradoxical issue during the EU's eastward enlargement. While 'the respect for and protection of national minorities' was enshrined in the first Copenhagen criterion and is often singled out as a prime example of the EU's positive stabilising impact in CEE, the EU has in fact promoted norms which lack a foundation in EU law and remain controversial in the Member States. This paper will analyse the effectiveness of the 'minority condition' during the accession process and point towards some trends in the development of minority policies after accession. The inclusion of the post-accession period allows us to distinguish between short-term and long-term adjustments. Ultimately, only long-term policy diffusion, institutional adaptation and a change in underlying norms would testify to a lasting impact of the EU. The paper treats minority rights as political rights and distinguishes between the right to national autonomy (e.g. Hungary), the right to citizenship (e.g. Latvia) and the right to political participation (e.g. Slovakia, Bulgaria). Conceptually and empirically, these cases help us to disentangle the international and domestic conditions of effective minority policy, the rationale behind EU involvement, and the scope and limitations of EU conditionality.
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The USSR played a significant role in the adoption of the first CSCE instruments pertinent to minority protection, particularly the 1990 Copenhagen Document. The author argues why this East-West encounter was possible and why the two blocs were able to speak a common language on 'nationalities' issues. The author demonstrates that the communist party leaders managed to put forward a renewed doctrine of nationalities policy that included such elements as framing the country as a union of self-determining 'peoples'; asymmetric federation; recognition of all ethnicities' right to 'develop' their cultures and languages; protection of 'non-titular' ethnicities and people's right to organize themselves for the maintenance of their cultures and languages. This approach appears to have much in common with the new European minority rights regime, particularly because the underlying principles were open to ad hoc interpretations and both systems provide the governments with broad margins of discretion. The similarity between the 'Western' and 'Eastern' approaches can be explained in a way that the both were operating in the framework of modernist social engineering. The combination of symbolic policy and weak institutionalization of instrumental measures allows explaining the viability of the established system in Eastern Europe and broader post-Soviet space.