Deepening Democracy or Defending the Nation? The Europeanisation of Minority Rights and Greek Citizenship

Abstract

This article examines the emergence of European norms and institutions of human rights and their impact on domestic policies and practices pertaining to citizenship and minorities in Greece. Since the beginning of the 1990s, with an intensification of Europeanisation processes in Greece, government policy towards minorities has undergone a process of liberalisation that culminated with the abrogation of Article 19 of the Greek Citizenship Code (GCC) in 1998, on which this article focuses. It presents an empirical analysis of the process that led to the abrogation of Article 19 of the GCC and it is primarily interested in the role European institutions played in it. Was its elimination a product of the reconfiguration of traditional Greek conceptions of citizenship and minorities, or was it an instance of instrumental change taking place within the given frame of national interests and identities

Notes

The overall population of Thrace is 340,000. The size of the Turkish Muslim population in Thrace is a matter of dispute due to their large-scale immigration over the years and the lack of an official census since the 1960s. Alexandris estimated the minority in 1981 to be about 120,000, with 45% Turkish-speaking, 36% Pomaks and 18% Roma (Alexandris 1988: 524).

Decision 106841/29-12-1982 of the Minister of Interior provided for the restitution citizenship to ethnic Greek individuals who had left the country as political refugees during the civil war (1946–49), but made it very hard to restore it to individuals who were from Slavic-speaking areas (Kostopoulos 2003: 68).

Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Memorandum of Alexis Heraclides, 26 February 1991; Evangelos Kofos, ‘Questions and Answers for our Minority Policy’, 29 April 1991.

See European Convention on Nationality, Summary of the treaty that opened for signature on 6 November 1997 and entered into force on 1 March 2000. See http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Summaries/Html/166.htm

This was also emphasised to this author by the Deputy Minister of Interior at the time Lambros Papadimas (Interview, Athens, 19.4.2004).