Ethnicization and European Identity Policies: Window-Shopping with Risks

Abstract

The politics of identity is a controversial and ardent topic in contemporary constitutional theory. As this paper is intended to show, East-European minority politics may provide an interesting angle to the study of this sensitive and complicated issue. The dilemma is the following: It is the Murphy-law of prejudice that when it comes to the maltreatment of members of various ethnic groups no serious definitional or recognition-difficulties arise. It is because when it comes to discrimination or ethnic hostility, it is always the daily practice of the majority that will define membership in the discrete and insular minority group. Defining qualification requirements therefore to minority groups seems to pose difficulties only in the context of minority-identity based preferences. This anomaly is however more then of theoretical jurisprudential interest, as in some cases the entire effectiveness of the aimed minority protection schemes may depend thereon. It is fearful that having a post-communist mentality towards state policies with an ethnicized system of preferences, due to the lack of political cultural and public moral restraints, these preferences will simply be seen as services provided by the (alienated, thus for no sympathy or co-operation eligible) state. What seems to be in the centerfold of East European minority politics is thus “ethnocorruption”, that is the utilizing and misusing of remedial measures for private and from the legislator's intentions independent means. In this paper, following a constitutional semantical analysis of the minority identity,the demons of ethnocorrpution will be demonstrated through a comparative assessment of a case study of a Hungarian legislation and its possible progeny.