The Protection of Minorities at the EU Level: Policies and Initiatives
Similar to the Council of Europe and the OSCE, the EU has put particular emphasis on protecting national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe after communism collapsed in 1989. The adoption of the Copenhagen criteria by the European Council in 1993 marked a decisive step in the Maastricht and post-Maastricht era, since it required countries aspiring to join the EU to achieve a series of conditions, including inter alia the respect for and protection of minorities. The bundle below highlights some of the prominent publications of the ECMI with respect to EU policies and initiatives that have paved the way for minorities protection in Europe.
The Copenhagen criteria represented the first attempt by the EU to articulate shared norms on democracy and human rights. The accession process has thus presented itself as a good opportunity for the EU to ensure the adoption of those norms, which, in the opinion of Slobodchikof, works better with candidate States than with current Member States. To sustain this view, Slobodchikof analysed in 2010 the cases of Estonia and Latvia before accession and the case of Bulgaria and Romania after accession, which demonstrate that the influence of the EU is certainly limited in the latter example.
Needless to say that the enlargement of the EU in 2004 and 2007 tested the effectiveness of the Copenhagen criteria, whose implementation by candidate States brought on numerous occasions unsatisfactory results. Kyriaki Topidi explained in 2011 that the Copenhagen criteria formed retrospectively a loose framework of action, and the question of minority protection in the context of the EU, in her view, results in confusion and misunderstanding. Tamara Hoch Jovanovic acknowledged in 2014 the central position of the protection of minorities as a key criterion for EU accession, but she argued that less attention has been paid to the Europeanization of minority rights, basically because the EU lacks legal competences. Against this backdrop, Jovanovic proposed a new bridging of Europeanization and minority studies with a view to understanding the effects of European-level norms and rules pertaining to minority rights both on domestic policy and among minority groups.
Lastly, Katharina Crepaz reminds us that one of the innovations introduced by the Lisbon Treaty was the Citizen’s Initiative, which allows EU citizens to draft their own initiatives, and if these initiatives reach a certain threshold of support in a set number of Member States, the European Commission is obliged to take action. The Minorities SafePack Initiative is a good example of this instrument of direct democracy, which reached in 2018 the threshold of 1,128,385 validated signatures in 11 Member States.
List of Related Publications:
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The European Union and Interethnic Power-sharing Arrangements in Accession Countries.
Martin Brusis [JEMIE, 2003, Issue 1 (1.10.2003)] -
Monitoring the Monitors: EU Enlargement Conditionality and Minority Protection in the CEECs.
James Hughes & Gwendolyn Sasse [JEMIE, 2003, Issue 1 (1.10.2003)] -
The Lisbon Strategy and Ethnic Minorities: Rights and Economic Growth.
Tove H. Malloy [ISSUE BRIEFS, 1.4.2005] -
National Minority ‘Regions’ in the Enlarged European Union: Mobilizing for Third Level Politics?
Tove H. Malloy [RESEARCH PAPERS, 1.6.2005] -
The New European Union: Integration as a Means of Norm Diffusion.
Michael O. Slobodchikoff [JEMIE, 2010, Issue 1 (1.1.2010)] -
National minority groups in post-Lisbon Europe: the presence of Europeanisation and transnational human rights in one policy field.
Tamara Jovanovic [RESEARCH PAPERS, 25.1.2012] -
Defining the Indefinable: A Definition of ‘Minority’ in EU Law.
Gulara Guliyeva [YEARBOOK, Volume 9: 2010 (19.10.2012)] -
Are the Copenhagen Criteria Undermined by the Lisbon Treaty?
Kyriaki Topidi [YEARBOOK, Volume 10: 2011 (7.11.2013)] -
Introduction - Rethinking Approaches to Europeanization of Minority Politics.
Tamara Hoch Jovanovic [JEMIE, 2014, Issue 3 (8.10.2014)] -
The Minority Safepack Initiative – A European Participatory Process Supporting Cultural Diversity.
Katharina Crepaz [YEARBOOK, Volume 17: 2018 (9.4.2020)]
