![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
The issue of national minorities in post-Cold War Europe has warranted considerable scholarly attention with regard to security, democratization and regional integration. The literature has focused on how European integration compelled host states to comply with obligations to protect a national minority within their borders. Missing from this debate, however, is a more comprehensive analysis of whether European integration has had an effect on the wider geopolitical relationship between the host state and the kin state over national minorities. Has European integration served to dampen or to intensify the salience of nationalist politics between host and kin states? To address this gap the range of host state–kin state relations in Central and Eastern Europe is explored corresponding to whether both states are EU members (at least one may be a candidate country) compared with when one state remains external to the EU for the foreseeable future. It is argued that, despite much of the Europeanization literature, European integration can have an amplifying effect on nationalism regardless of whether kin states are existing members, acceding states or outside the process altogether.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for their financial support of the project ‘The European Minority Rights Regime: Power, Interests, and Knowledge’ as well as the Editors and two anonymous referees for their comments on this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Association for the Study of Nationalities conference held on 23–25 April 2009.
Notes
See the Czech–German Treaty (1997) at http://untreaty.un.org/unts/120001_144071/25/4/00020676.pdf
See (2002) ‘Legal opinion Beneš Decrees’, prepared on behalf of the President of the European Parliament by Prof. Dr. Dres. h.c. Jochen A. Frowein, former president of the European Commission for Human Rights.
Although in Slovenia's case, this relates to relations with ‘old’ EU member states Austria and Italy.
The Baltic States had traditional Russian communities before their Soviet inclusion. Many of these traditional Russian communities were settlements of ‘Old’ Believers who found refuge in the Baltic provinces. When Estonia and Latvia passed the restrictive citizenship law, allowing only pre-war citizens to receive automatic citizenship, many Russians were able to take this option by right, leaving a split in the Russian communities between citizens and stateless persons.