Trajectories of Minority Rights Issues in Europe: The Implementation Trap?

The interest in minority protection emerged during the period of democratic transition, particularly of ethnically segmented postcommunist societies after the end of the Cold War. Minority issues became prominent as postcommunist states lined up as potential candidates for EU membership as respect for and protection of minority rights was an essential part of the criteria these states had to fulfil before EU accession. Minority rights protection has constituted an important ‘gatekeeping’ criterion for EU membership. Its monitoring remains a powerful instrument to mediate tensions and to adjudicate discriminations in the present-day Europe. In many countries, minority rights standards have been transposed in domestic legislation, but whether these norms constitute a legitimate background which states accept, sustain and promote is the focus of this book.

This volume takes on the task of analysing the diffusion of minority rights norms across the European continent. It looks specifically at the oft-neglected process of compliance meaning not only the formal adoption of European laws but also their implementation within the domestic context. The contributions analyse the political rhetoric, legal transposition and behavioural compliance in a range of European states, East and West, to assess compliance to norms of minority protection.

This book was published as a special issue of Perspectives on European Politics and Society.

Timofey Agarin is a Lecturer in Comparative Politics and Ethnic Conflict in Queen’s University Belfast, UK, where he is also the Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict. His research interest is in ethnic politics and their impact on transition from communism in Central Eastern European states. He is interested in the interplay of social and institutional change in postcommunism in issue areas of non-discrimination, minority protection, migration and civil society. Timofey has published in Ethnopolitics, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, Ethnicities, Nationalities Papers and Journal of Baltic Studies. He authored A Cat’s Lick? Democratisation and Minority Communities in the post-Soviet Baltic (2010) and edited Minority Integration in Central Eastern Europe: Between Ethnic Diversity and Equality (2009, with Malte Brosig) and Institutional Legacies of Communism: Change and Continuities in Minority Protection (2013, with Karl Cordell).

Malte Brosig is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He received his PhD in 2008 at the Centre for International and European Studies Research at Portsmouth University, UK. He has published widely on questions of norm diffusion and minority protection in Eastern Europe. He is an Associate Editor of European Security and Co-chairing the Human Rights Working Group at the German Political Science Association. His work has been published in accredited journals such as: Journal of European Integration, International Peacekeeping, European Security, the European Review of International Affairs, the South African Journal of International Affairs, and the Journal of International Organization Studies at which he is also serving as an editorial board member.