Introduction to the special section: minority politics and the territoriality principle in Europe

Abstract

Territorial arrangements for managing inter-ethnic relations within states are far from consensual. Although self-governance for minorities is commonly advocated, international documents are ambiguously formulated. Conflicting pairs of principles, territoriality vs. personality, and self-determination vs. territorial integrity, along with diverging state interests account for this gap. Together, the articles in this special section address the territoriality principle and its hardly operative practice on the ground, with particular attention to European cases. An additional theme reveals itself in the articles: the ambiguity of minority recognition politics. This introductory article briefly presents these two common themes, followed by an outline of three recent proposals discussed especially in Eastern Europe that seek to bypass the controversial territorial autonomy model: cultural rights in municipalities with a “substantial” proportion of minority members; the cultural autonomy model; and European regionalism and multi-level governance.

Keywords:

• European minority regimes
• territoriality vs. personality principle
• threshold rule
• territorial and cultural autonomies
• European regions and multi-level governance

Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to Oriana Fodor for preparing the research materials of this paper. We thank Eric Guntermann for his excellent editing job.

Notes

1. Bourdieu (1991, 46–47) argues that dialectical variants of French were marginalized by the efforts of the local bourgeoisies after the French Revolution to promote the official language, the language of cultivated Paris, to the status of national language. In this way, the gains of the French Revolution could be secured via the control of language. This political attitude, rooted in the French Revolution, of excluding variants of the French language and minority languages from official domains for reasons of political control and social engineering has been the dominant approach for dealing with linguistic diversity in modern France.

2. Although the Ukrainian state demonstrated a monolingual, hegemonic attitude toward ethnically different minorities this attitude did not affect the Russians in the Eastern part of Ukraine. From the creation of an independent Ukraine, Russians, in the eastern part of Ukraine, were allowed to use their own language. Hence, the Russian minority was accommodated in the new Ukrainian state. We agree with Posen (1993, 38–43) that this was due to the fact that conditions preventing an “Eastern Ukrainian security dilemma” were present. These included: Ukrainians and Russians have no traumatic inter-group history; the presence of former Soviet nuclear forces in both Russia and Ukraine acted as stabilizers; geographic patterns created comparatively less pressure for offensive action: Russians in Ukraine are not settled in small vulnerable islands and can be protected in numerous ways; no violent bands engaging in communal terror emerged; no shifts in relative power were expected; external factors reinforced restraint in Russian–Ukrainian relations. Each side had reason to fear being seen by Europe and the USA as an aggressor in case of conflict, since neither side had strong external ties.

3. See Brubaker et al. (2006, 239–234) for a discussion of Romanian–Hungarian asymmetric bilingualism in Transylvania.

4. According to the last Romanian census in 2011, the percentage of Hungarians in Cluj-Napoca dropped to 15.9%. This, however, does not affect the argument developed here.

5. See the text of the historic agreement between Serbia and Kosovo, available at: http//www.europeanvoice.com/page/3609.aspx?&blogtemid=1723, accessed August 14, 2013.

6. The Greens/EFA, “EFA; Members”, EFA-Greens website, available at: http://www.greens-efa.org, accessed April 23, 2008.

7. EFA, “What is the EFA”, official webpage, available at: http://www.e-f-a.org, accessed August 31, 2013.