Enlargement and Interethnic Power-Sharing Arrangements in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The surge of ethnic wars on the European continent during the 1990s led the European Union (EU) to put particular emphasis on protecting national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. The enlargement process endowed the EU with far-reaching powers in those countries that applied for EU membership. This chapter is less interested in how those powers facilitated the implementation of minority protection standards in accession countries, and focuses instead on the impact exerted by the EU on arrangements of domestic interethnic politics, that is, on the institutionalized relations between political actors representing ethnic minorities and majorities. The motivation to adopt this perspective is the assumption that ‘politics matters’ for the situation of national minorities because international norms of minority protection continue to be only weakly developed and specified. Faced with normative uncertainty, even actors in a weak position politically, such as the accession countries in relation to the EU, have a wide margin of discretion and can tailor normative reasoning to the needs of the political game.

This contribution was elaborated in the context of a project on ‘issues and consequences of EU enlargement’, jointly managed by the Bertelsmann Foundation and the Center for Applied Policy Research. The author wishes to thank Elitsa Markova, Gerhard Seewann and the library of the Südost Institute in Munich for their indispensable support and advice.