Europeanization and Minority Political Action in Central and Eastern Europe

It is widely acknowledged that “Europeanization,” conceived as both the enlargement of the European Union (EU) and the diffusion of European norms and practices, has had a profound influence on the politics involving ethnic minorities across post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). A significant body of literature has emerged about this impact, focusing on the emergence of European documents of minority protection after 1990 and the activities of European organizations and actors that pressured dominant state elites to adopt more minority-friendly policies in the framework of the institutional changes adopted during European accession. The literature also recognizes the need to incorporate the European framework directly into research on change in state–minority relations (Smith 2002; Galbreath and McEvoy 2012a). Yet most studies exploring minority political activism have focused either on domestic contexts or on “triangular” relations involving minorities, the states in which they live, and the “kin states” engaged in their political mobilization (Brubaker 1996; Birnir 2006; Cordell and Wolff 2007; Csergő 2007; Jenne 2007; Stroschein 2012; Csergő and Goldgeier 2013). The question of how Europeanization has impacted the mobilization patterns and political agency of ethnic minority actors has received surprisingly little attention. The goal of this issue of Problems of Post-Communism is to direct attention squarely to that question.

The central argument of this introductory essay is that Europeanization has a deep impact on minority political action. From local and parliamentary politics to cross-border politics and transnational activism, European integration has shaped minority political interests, abilities, and modes of action. We present this argument as follows. First, we point to the underlying assumptions and implications of the inherent state-centrism of European approaches to minority policy. Second, we discuss the diverging effects that European integration has had on minority political action—in creating avenues for the articulation and negotiation of claims, and in constraining the achievement of claims. We highlight key insights that the six articles included in this issue contribute to a broader understanding of that dynamic.

THE STATE-CENTRISM OF EUROPEAN APPROACHES TO MINORITY POLICY

The post-communist decades were characterized by major institutional transformations directed by political elites committed to integrating CEE states into Western organizations—NATO, the Council of Europe, and eventually the European Union. European organizations had an unprecedented degree of influence on governmental decision-making during the period of membership conditionality, when candidate states had to fulfill requirements to demonstrate progress toward these goals and eligibility for membership (Kelley 2004; Vachudova 2005; Agarin and Regelmann 2012). In the context of the EU’s “Eastern enlargement,” candidate countries were expected to integrate their domestic political and legal institutions with the acquis communautaire, the EU’s legal body. Despite the absence of a comprehensive minority acquis, minority issues became a cornerstone of accession negotiations in post-communist Europe, supported by norms and documents issued by the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

The lack of minority policy criteria in the EU’s acquis and the limited “political conditionality” in this policy field provided Europeanization with limited leverage. Majority elites gained a blank check regarding the design of minority policy, while European organizations pushed only the most minimalist requests (for example, liberalizing naturalization laws for long-time residents in Estonia and Latvia). This left minority political actors to their own devices in highly centralized majoritarian democracies (Vráblíková 2014). New institutions of government were created in a top-down process, with little involvement of minority political actors and significant limitations on minority collective action. In the process, minority protection became a special area of contestation over the meaning and purpose of European norms.

Given the emphasis placed in European documents on the values of diversity and democratic inclusion, minority members demonstrated higher trust toward European institutions in the pre-accession period than dominant ethnicities. European actors agreed on the need for minority protection; but they linked this need directly to European security concerns, which were understood to depend on preventing minority rights from jeopardizing state sovereignty (Galbreath and McEvoy 2012b; Sasse 2008; Feldman 2005). In other words, minorities were considered to be problematic groups, sources of threat, in an already volatile region of Europe (Deets and Stroschein 2006; Kymlicka 2007). Moreover, the meaning of minority rights was highly contested in the established democracies of the EU, some of which rejected the notion of minority protection altogether (Kochenov 2011; Johns 2003). Against this backdrop, the notion of collective minority interests, and the very idea of minority political agency, remained suspect. Any initial hopes harbored by minority advocates in CEE that the reinvigorated Europeanization process might generate a strong transnational European minority-protection regime, remained unfulfilled in the actual process of “Eastern enlargement” (Nancheva 2016).

In place of structures of democratic governance proposed for minority accommodation, the focus of European actors lay on the transfer of broadly defined European norms of minority rights (Brosig 2010). The evolution of those norms reflected a set of strong assumptions about the logic of minority integration: first, that political elites in CEE (as rational actors) would follow a goal-oriented logic ensuring compliance with European conditionality; and second, that in the long run the norms of minority rights introduced in the accession process, which combined democratic individualism with limited minority accommodation, would lead to the kind of social integration that makes ethnic interests irrelevant (Brosig 2012). Thus, in the short term, majority political elites were expected to consider any domestic political costs associated with the adoption of “minority-friendly” policies (for example, a majority nationalist backlash) as an acceptable risk in exchange for the economic and security assurances they saw guaranteed in EU membership (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005). In turn, over the short term, minorities would also be satisfied (or satisficed) by the concessions European actors had negotiated “on their behalf” (Galbreath and McEvoy 2012b). Over the long term, after EU accession, state–minority relations were expected to normalize in an increasingly non-ethnicized political environment that would also mitigate future minority discontent (Checkel 2001). Social integration was expected to weaken minority interest in ethnic particularism.

These assumptions were also manifested in the European strategy of negotiating over minority accommodation bilaterally with governments, without the direct participation of minority actors. Ironically, while scholars of majority–minority relations in the expanding European framework broadened their analytical frameworks to include minority actors as political agents, European actors maintained a narrower focus, relying on nationalist majority state elites as agents of change. By doing so, European organizations in practice sponsored the implementation of majority ethnic interests in these states, which reinforced rather than weakening ethnic identities in general and stabilized the hierarchy between majority and minority groups by legitimizing nationalist discourse and institutionalization (Nancheva 2016).

DIVERGING EFFECTS OF EUROPEANIZATION ON MINORITY POLITICAL ACTION

In general terms, Europeanization is understood as the emergence of new, improved structures of governance in the framework of European political and social integration, through a democratically negotiated process involving European and domestic actors (Sedelmeier 2011). This interactive process requires the domestic actors’ commitment to and active engagement with shared goals. As discussed above, European law remains underdeveloped in the domain of minority rights, which are largely limited to norms, documents, and primary legislation that have yet to be translated into the acquis secondary law. Moreover, minority actors were rarely involved directly in the negotiating processes between European and domestic actors or in the design of domestic institutions affecting them.

Yet Europeanization has had a more significant impact on minorities’ democratic political agency than is acknowledged in the literature. First, European integration expanded opportunities for the articulation of minority claims, creating new arenas for minority actors to pursue a range of minority interests peacefully. Second, due to the state-centrism of European approaches described earlier, Europeanization reinforced domestic structural limitations on minorities’ ability to achieve the claims they articulated. The articles included in this issue offer important insights on this dynamic. The first set of articles (Vermeersch; Waterbury; Pogonyi) analyze the direct impact of Europeanization on creating new avenues for minority actors to pursue minority interests beyond domestic politics—at the European level and in cross-border interaction involving ethnic “kin” actors. The second set (Schulze; Cianetti and Nakai; Csergő and Regelmann) explores the indirect effects of these processes on minority political action.

Peter Vermeersch focuses on supranational activism on behalf of Roma in CEE—minorities generally recognized as being among Europe’s most vulnerable citizens. Not only have domestic institutional transformations across the region failed Roma minorities, but Roma have no “kin-states” or patron states to lobby in the region. Thus, Roma activists regarded the EU as the most significant source of external support for changing state policies and domestic social practices that perpetuate Roma marginalization. Vermeersch discusses the profound significance of European integration for Roma, arguing that the EU became for Roma “the most self-evident post-national avenue” for activism and that the EU “has indeed more or less accepted this role.” The European Commission has committed relatively large budgets for this purpose, and the EU has developed special frameworks such as Roma consultation mechanisms and monitoring of state practices toward Roma citizens. This agenda has enabled Roma activists to continue reaching beyond state borders and pooling mobilizational resources to articulate claims for changing Roma marginalization. Yet Vermeersch also finds that activism at the European level has had little impact in local settings, where in many cases marginalization and hatred toward Roma has increased. European institutions, such as the European Parliament, provide opportunities for minority activism, but they are also arenas for anti-minority nationalists. Moreover, Vermeersch identifies a risk inherent in minority actors’ focus on external mobilization. He argues that the discourse on Roma as a “European” minority, and the measures that promote Roma as European citizens, can obscure the fact that the structures necessary for improving the situation of Roma need to be put in place in local settings.

Myra Waterbury analyzes the contradictory ways in which simultaneous processes of “externalization” in minority activism—integration into both European institutions and cross-border institutions (through extra-territorial citizenship and voting rights)—affect minorities’ capacity to pursue political claims and achieve outcomes. She argues that externalization has broadened the arena for minority claims-making, created opportunities for alliance-building outside the domestic context, and enabled activism in the pursuit of mobilizational resources. From her analysis of Hungarians in Romania as a “critical case,” Waterbury also finds, however, that even the most consistently pursued minority activism in the expanded political space has yielded few concrete outcomes in European minority policy. Moreover, while participation in cross-border politics has increased identity-building resources, it has also reoriented minority actors’ attention to domestic politics in the kin-state, with the potential of deepening intra-minority cleavages and generating party fractionalization.

Szabolcs Pogonyi’s analysis sheds further light on the relationship between Europeanization and policies of cross-border political integration, and the way these developments impact potentials for minority political action. He argues that European law has effectively legitimized ethnically selective citizenship policies, as many post-communist European states have introduced non-resident citizenship for external “kin” for pragmatic and identitarian reasons. Based on a cross-regional survey and a case study of Hungarian trans-border nationalism, Pogonyi finds that kin-citizenship policies do not lead to minority radicalization. He also argues that, although extraterritorial citizenship and voting rights may expand the space for minority political action in the kin-state, they seriously constrain minorities’ claims-making potential in their countries of residence, ultimately reducing the ability of minorities to achieve goals at home. Minority calls for devolution become associated with the irredentist goals of a neighboring state, while engagement with kin-state governments can reduce interaction with governments at home, decreasing access to domestic resources—with a combined effect of reducing minorities’ overall influence domestically.

Jennie Schulze’s article then focuses on how majority political actors employ the regional framework created in a “quadratic” institutional setting in which minority claims are associated with irredentist strategies of a neighboring kin-state. She focuses on the ways majority political actors situated in the EU (Estonia and Latvia) frame domestic policy choices toward large minority populations with an increasingly more activist kin-state outside of the EU (Russia). Schulze’s analysis focuses on parliamentary debates over the naturalization of stateless children in Estonia and Latvia—a highly divisive issue in both states, one with which both European actors and Russian kin-state actors became engaged. She demonstrates that domestic policymakers are not mere recipients of external pressure but active participants in the construction of what external actors mean in the domestic arena. She argues that the presence of a kin-state provides strategic framing opportunities for domestic policymakers, who use the opportunity strategically, and with diverse purposes in each setting, for justifying and designing minority policy. This article provides deep insights into the way European norms on minority protection interact with domestic state strategies, and about the power of domestic state actors in shaping opportunities for minority political participation.

Licia Cianetti and Ryo Nakai offer important insights into the social dimension of how minority actors see their place in the European framework—the ways they understand the relevance of European organizations for minority policy and evaluate the opportunity structures created at the European level. The authors derive their findings from a combined quantitative–qualitative study in which they trace the evolution of minority attitudes to European institutions in Estonia and Latvia before EU accession, and analyze how minority activists interpret the importance of European institutions in their pursuit of a minority rights agenda. Quantitative data indicate a decline in minorities’ trust in European institutions and a withdrawal from political engagement among minority members, which the authors associate with perceptions of the EU’s backtracking from minority protection. The results of interviews with minority activists, however, suggest a change in the quality (rather than the quantity) of trust. The authors argue that minority activists have developed critical trust toward the EU—that is, a pragmatic perception that no longer harbors illusions about European intervention on behalf of minorities, but relies on European institutions to uphold principles of minority rights and expects European institutions to provide tools for minority activism in domestic settings.

Zsuzsa Csergő and Ada-Charlotte Regelmann then explore how minorities have employed the opportunities created by European, regional, and domestic processes of institutionalization since 1990, to influence policy change under conditions of structural disadvantage. The analysis focuses on minority voting, which has been the primary form of minority political activity in the region. The authors compare six large ethno-linguistic minorities in five EU states, involving three kin-states. They identify key aspects of Europeanization that contributed indirectly but significantly to the emergence of a cross-regional pattern of collective rationality in minority voting, despite different beginnings in the early 1990s, and defying expectations that Europeanization should de-politicize ethnic boundaries in increasingly integrated liberal democratic societies. Contrary to fears about the potentially conflict-generating consequences of collective minority mobilization, they argue that minority voters across the region have pooled electoral resources behind moderate parties they see as most likely to pursue minority interests through effective negotiation with mainstream parties.

It is the collective argument of these contributions that minority actors remain in a structurally disadvantaged position in the European framework, where EU expansion empowered state centers to design minority policy without the involvement of minority actors. Yet the institutions emerging through European integration created important opportunities for minorities to pursue claims in multiple arenas domestically and externally. Minority actors have not simply responded to emerging norms and structures. Rather, they have sought to shape the scope of institutions and policies, participating peacefully and pragmatically in contestations over the meaning and forms of democratic integration.