The Effective Protection of Minorities in the Wider Europe: Counterbalancing the Security Track

Abstract

What is clear from preceding chapters is that much of Western thinking on minority rights over the last decade and a half has been dominated by the perception that it was a dramatic breakdown in Minority-majority relations that provoked the wave of violence that spread across much of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Ethnic tensions are commonly regarded as having been at the heart of conflicts in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,¹ Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova and Chechnya. Consequently, regional organizations have formulated their approach to minority rights around the central notion that the management, resolution and, ideally, the prevention of ethnic conflicts is best (or least controversially) addressed through the diffusion of ethnic tension via the protection of minority rights.