The Political Integration of Minorities in New European Democracies: The Uses of Inheritance in Democratic Competition

In the process of its “Eastern Enlargement,” the integrating European Union created arguably the most densely institutionalized minority rights regime in any region in the world. Although the specific forms that minority protection should take were not mandated by European institutions, a broadly shared expectation was that “Europeanization” and democratization together would moderate nationalist aspirations in post-communist Europe, where a history of competitive nation-building and shifting borders had made societies particularly vulnerable to “ethnic conflict.” Yet almost two decades after the beginning of the “transition” from Communism to democracy and from the Soviet bloc to the EU, we know remarkably little about the resulting patterns of majority-minority competition and minority integration in the region. In an effort to advance our understanding of those patterns, this paper explores the broader issue of minority integration by focusing on the way minorities use political resources to negotiate claims in the framework of democratic contestation. In the CEE countries that have joined the EU since 2004 as consolidated democracies, significant variation emerged in this respect, despite similarities in the considerable structural limitations that minority actors faced in shaping institutions. The paper addresses the question of how different types of minorities have participated in the institutions of democratic contestation, by exploring the distinction between historic/territorial and non-historic/territorial minorities. Perhaps the most consistent organizing principle of majority-minority relations in Europe has been the notion of inherited rights to institutions, according to which: (a) members of the state’s national majority have an a priori right to the state, while (b) the rights of minorities are structured by a hierarchical distinction between historic minorities and immigrant groups. The analysis focuses on four new EU member states: Romania and Slovakia (with historic Hungarian minorities); and Estonia and Lithuania (with Russian-speakers that are viewed as recent settlers in both states and a historic Polish minority in Lithuania). The comparative evaluation indicates that the notion of inherited institutions remains a significant source of political action for majorities and also helps explain the way minorities claim and “inhabit” political institutions in these newly consolidated European democracies.

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