Ethnicity in Eastern Europe: Historical legacies and prospects for cohesion

Peculiarities of the international legal status determination of the national minorities within the Versailles system have been studied using the example of a number of Central and Eastern European countries. The governments of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary were asked, based on the norms of international law, to develop appropriate provisions for the protection of the rights of national minorities in order to prevent new conflicts and threats to peace. The system of treaties, declarations and agreements, which were supposed to ensure the observance of the rights of national minorities and whose guarantor was the League of Nations, has been analyzed. In practice, this was embodied in giving minorities the right to submit petitions to the Council or Assembly of the League of Nations, as well as in the activities of the Permanent Chamber of International Justice. The right to submit petitions was used at different times by representatives of the Ruthenian minority in Czechoslovakia, the Russian minority in Eastern Galicia, the Jewish minority in Hungary, the German minority in Poland, etc. The weaknesses of this system have been identified, which prevented the creation of effective international mechanisms for the protection of the rights of national minorities in the specified regions of Europe. In particular, it has been emphasized that the majority of treaties, conventions, treatises, etc. were openly sabotaged by the countries that were supposed to fulfill them. The governments of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe considered the proposed system unequal, because its conditions did not apply to a number of other multinational states that had similar problems. Conflict situations surrounding the problem of national minorities continued to arise. They were caused by various factors: from divided loyalties and irredentist movements to manifestations of governmental and social discrimination.

This chapter provides a detailed over-time analysis of religious groups’ attitudes on foreign policy issues. The chapter looks at religious groups’ attitudes on Britain’s international role in terms of two broad issue areas: Britain’s long-standing relations with the European integration process and the recent military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11. The intention here is not to provide comprehensive coverage of the multitude of long-running issues and short-run crises which have featured in Britain’s post-war external relations. Indeed, even if this was the intention it would be severely hindered by the lack of a regular or periodic foreign policy attitudes survey of British public opinion in the post-war decades. The chapter does, however, provide some insight into the over-time attitudes of religious groups towards issues of war – recent military interventions – and peace, specifically, Britain’s role in the European integration process. Policy-specific examples are therefore provided of the types of attitudinal measures which would fit into the broader opinion dimensions of ‘militant internationalism’ and ‘cooperative internationalism’ (Guth 2012). These two dimensions can be summarised as: Militant internationalism comprises a preference for security through military strength, national patriotism, and scepticism about international agreements. Cooperative internationalism, on the other hand, stresses the importance of diplomacy, multilateral agreements, and international cooperation on issues of world peace, world poverty, disease and environmental degradation (Guth 2012: 173).

The international controversy concerning the Hungarian ‘status law’ of 2001 attests to the vital importance of ethnic minority rights in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as within an enlarged European Union. The paper examines the unique challenges raised by the law from its initial adoption in June 2001 to its subsequent amendment in June 2003. It looks at the interaction between four principal kinds of actors: Hungary (a kin state legislating support for ethnic co- nationals in neighbouring countries), Romania and Slovakia (home states to sizeable Hungarian ethnic groups), the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia, and the European institutions that became involved in the dispute as mediators.

Nearly all developing countries actively seek capital and technology from the advanced countries. Although private direct foreign investment (mainly in the form of multinational enterprise) is viewed with ambivalence by many developing countries, it is nonetheless true that direct investment remains a substantial source of capital and is sometimes the only source of specific technologies. Indeed, given the slow growth in official external assistance, developing countries are becoming more, not less, dependent on direct foreign investment. While disbursements of official development assistance by the OECD countries rose 43% from 1961 through 1970, direct investment flows rose almost 90% over the same period. In the later year, the flow of direct investment was more than two-fifths of all official assistance, $3.2 billion compared to $7.8 billion.1 Furthermore, the United States and other major capital exporting countries would prefer, for economic as well as ideological reasons, to channel more of their capital outflows to developing countries through private investment. It is highly probable, therefore, that developing countries will continue to rely on direct foreign investment in the foreseeable future to carry out their development programs. It is against this background that the present study seeks to identify the empirical determinants of direct foreign-investment flows in the manufacturing sectors of developing countries. Our purpose is to select from the many economic, social, and political features of a developing country those features that are critical to making that country attractive or unattractive to private foreign investors. Available empirical studies are limited

Territorial autonomy is one aspect of power-sharing in multi-ethnic societies. Nevertheless, the multi-ethnic countries of Central and Eastern Europe are still among the most centralised in the European Union. This article analyses the failure of any attempts to establish (symmetric) federalism or (asymmetric) autonomy, creating self-governed regions by the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia. The analysis focuses on the positions of the main parties of the ethnic majorities and the Hungarian minority parties in the two countries. In both cases, the parties representing the Hungarian minorities have favoured territorial autonomy along ethnic lines, but this demand has been rejected by the parties of the ethnic majority. Against the historical legacy of unstable borders, the parties of the ethnic majority argue that territorial autonomy or federalisation might be a first step for a revisionist agenda and separatism. Instead, supported by the European integration, the parties have been able to agree on decentralisation as a half-hearted compromise.

SUMMARY: The history of ethnic relations in Western democracies contains many examples of injustice, oppression, coercion, discrimination and prejudice. Yet over the past thirty years, Western democracies have developed a number of interesting and effective models for accommodating ethnocultural diversity. One of these models involves the use of federal or-quasi-federal forms of territorial autonomy to enable self-government for national minorities and indigenous peoples. Kymlicka believes that these forms of territorial autonomy are in general a success, and contain potential lessons for other countries around the world struggling with issues of minority nationalism. In his article Kymlicka focuses on the possible application of Western models of federalism to ethnic conflict in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. In his view, what is happening today in Eastern Europe may be a harbinger of things to come elsewhere in the world. The decision of Western organizations to insist on respect for minority rights from Eastern European countries will be the first serious test case for the feasibility and desirability of “exporting” Western minority rights standards to the rest of the world. For this reason, it is worthy of careful consideration by anyone interested in the issue of minority rights. In the article Kymlicka analyzes the particular case of applying Western models to Eastern and Central Europe (ECE), and more specifically models of federal or quasi-federal territorial autonomy. If, as he argues, it is extremely difficult to apply Western models to Eastern Europe, despite the significant historical and cultural commonalties between Western and Eastern Europe, it will be all the more unlikely to work in Asia and Africa. Kymlicka begins by explaining what he takes to be the main outlines of a common Western approach to territorial autonomy (section 1). There are of course many differences amongst the Western nations, but he proves that there have been several important areas of convergence in recent decades, which can usefully be seen as defining a distinctively Western approach to the issue. He also argues that the success of this approach may be related, in complex way, to a particular view about secession (section 2). Then Kymlicka explains why this model has been resisted in Eastern Europe (section 3), and explores whether Western organizations can or should attempt to do more to pressure countries to adopt these models (section 4), including efforts to change their views about secession (section 5). Kymlicka concludes that there is no guarantee that federalism will not lead eventually to secession. And granting self-government to national minorities raises the danger that they will embark on their own illiberal forms of nation-building, restricting the rights of their own members or of other groups on the territory. There are all-too-many examples of this in the ethnorepublics of the Russian federation. It is an essential feature of a liberal-democratic conception of multination federalism that all governments – whether the central government or regional governments dominated by national minorities – be subject to constitutional restrictions that protect individual civil and political rights. It may be difficult to achieve this sort of democratic multinational federalism in ECE: majority nationalists too often resist granting self-government to national minorities; and minority nationalists too often exercise their self-government in illiberal and intolerant ways. But to say it is difficult is not to say it is impossible. In any event, he sees no feasible alternative to territorial autonomy in many of these cases.

Reviewed by: Foreign Firms, Investment, and Environmental Regulation in the People’s Republic of China by Phillip Stalley Jack Patrick Hayes (bio) Phillip Stalley. Foreign Firms, Investment, and Environmental Regulation in the People’s Republic of China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 289 pp. Hardcover $55.00, ISBN 978–0–8047–7153–5. The World Bank publication Clear Water, Blue Skies: China’s Environment in the New Century (World Bank, 1997) found in the mid–1990s that air and water pollution damages to health and agriculture alone could be valued at almost 8 percent of China’s GDP. No like publication has since attempted to quantify or develop the combined environmental costs and linkages of recent decades of rapid economic growth, environmental enforcement (or lack thereof), and the role of various political, social, and economic entities in either combating or adding to China’s substantial environmental issues. In Foreign Firms, Investment, and Environmental Regulation in the People’s Republic of China, Philip Stalley begins to address this hole in the policy–international economy–environmental literature. While the late 1990s and past decade saw the publication of a number of useful and interesting analyses of China’s environmental regulation, few really addressed linked international–domestic components in China’s environmental regulation beyond a nod toward Rio (1992) or Kyoto (1997), much less multinational or other foreign firms active in the Chinese market. At its best, this book is an interesting and readable analysis of multinational corporations’ influence on environmental regulation in China and should be necessary reading for those interested in environmental policy in general. In this more general sense, this book is also a cautionary for those that see (or misread) the power of market economics as a global force for environmental regulation. Just as domestic development and firms are important, there are few forces more important in China’s tremendous economic growth than foreign investment. As Stalley notes, by 2002 approximately one–third of China’s industrial output came from foreign invested enterprises. This raises the question, in a country expanding its economy at breakneck speed and beset by regular and serious environmental problems with hazardous by–products, air and water quality issues, as well as questionable environmental regulation and often factionalized environmental management: have foreign investments in the economy aided or hindered attempts to grapple with China’s environmental issues? Stalley provocatively demonstrates that the environmental impact of foreign investment is not simply a race to the bottom, but that foreign firms have and are effectively helping to raise standards and practices. This is, perhaps, the central strength of this book, as foreign, especially American and Asian, firms are regularly perceived as or blamed for adding to the environmental toll in China. After a blessedly concise and clear introduction to his argument and the theories underpinning the analysis, Stalley provides a useful analysis of the politics of China’s environmental regime with the important caveat that China’s greatest environmental regulation challenge is the problem of consistent enforcement. This [End Page 403] caveat reappears in most subsequent chapters as a key theme of the problem of environmental regulation in China. Following a discussion of the decentralization of enforcement procedures and standards, the second, third, and fourth chapters examine the development of Chinese laws that regulate foreign firms and try to control environmental impacts. These policies specifically target the behavior of foreign firms and reiterate the introductory comments about the power of and lack of enforcement at the local level—while Beijing can “trot out” a wealth of initiatives to foster positive economic and environmental development, companies still operate in a permissively regulatory setting that begins and ends at the local level (pp. 50–53). Nonetheless, China has actually developed such a national legal and administrative framework, from scratch, in a relatively short period of time. Compared to many other developing nations, China seems to take its environmental regulation relatively seriously. Based on this environmental legal framework, Stalley shows how the Chinese national government has transformed from functionally laissez–faire to a concerned and more proactive force in environmental and pollution control—at least as this regulation relates to foreign firms and investment. These chapters, in the tradition...

Urban struggles and theorising from Eastern European cities

Conclusions NATO (and EU) enlargement has been successful in establishing incentives for aspiring members to resolve border and ethnic minority issues. Hungarian bilateral treaties have stabilized the situation more in Romania than Slovakia because, unrelated to its treaty, Slovakia has been moving in autocratic directions. Both treaties have marginalized nationalist extremists and helped transform Hungarian minorities from being a potential bloc to becoming a bridge for Euro-Atlantic integration. If Hungary enters NATO with no clear prospect for Romania, it could undermine recent positive developments in Bucharest. Historical Legacy Hungarian minorities are the legacy of the defeat and collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. The Treaty of Trianon (1920) reduced Hungary's size by roughly two-thirds; the Romanian crown occupied Transylvania, the Serbs southern Hungary, and the new Czechoslovakia northern Hungary. Hence, the Versailles Peace settlement divided the states of Central Europe into winners and losers. During the 1920s Hungary's appeals to the League of Nations on behalf of minority rights were undermined by its irredentist aspirations and by France who allied itself with the Little Entente of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia to protect the status quo. Hitler's rise to power gave momentum for revision; the September 1938 Munich agreement accepted dismemberment of Czechoslovakia as the British and French policy shifted to appeasement. Hungary's revisionism occurred in stages. (1) In November 1938 an Italo-German returned to Hungary 4,600 square miles from Slovakia with predominantly Hungarian populations; and in early 1939 gave Hungary another Hungarian minority fragment--Ruthenia--from Slovakia. (2) In August 1940, the Second Vienna Award gave Hungary northern Transylvania, which left large numbers of Romanians and Hungarians on the wrong side of the border. (3) In April 1941 when Germany invaded Yugoslavia, Hungary followed suit and re-annexed the ethnically-mixed Vojvodina and formally allied itself with the Axis powers. At the end of World War II, neither Britain nor the USSR supported any change in Hungary's pre-1938 borders, and the 1946 Paris Peace Conference restored the partitions of the Trianon Treaty. While Slovaks, Romanians, and Serbs retained grievances against Hungary for its role in the pre-Trianon era and during World War II, Hungarians remained bitter about their treatment as minorities in the inter-war period and after 1945. During the Communist era, Marxist-Leninist ideology and Stalin's theory on nationalities considered nationalism to be a malady of Abourgeois capitalism. In Hungary, the minorities question disappeared from the political agenda. Communist hegemony guaranteed a facade of inter-ethnic peace while failing to secure a lasting accommodation of minority interests in unitary states. The fall of Communism aroused the expectations of Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries and left Hungary unprepared to deal with the issue. Hungarian politicians campaigned to formalize the rights of Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries, thus causing anxiety in the region. They secured agreements on the necessity for guaranteeing collective rights and formed new Hungarian minority organizations to promote cultural rights and political participation. In Romania, Slovakia, and Serbian Yugoslavia, former Communists secured popular legitimacy by accommodating nationalist tendencies that were hostile to minority rights. Contemporary Situation Some 3 million Hungarians live in neighboring countries; 2 million in Transylvania, 600,000 in Slovakia, 350-400,000 in Vojvodina, Serbia, and 160-200,000 in Ukraine (see Map). Extremes in the treatment of Hungarian ethnic minorities are evident in Ukraine, where no major issues prevail, and Vojvodina, where the situation of those who live in the north and south-central regions has deteriorated since Serbian President Milosevic stripped the province of autono-mous status in 1989. …

The role of state policy in the industrialization of Third World nations has become the subject of increasing interest in recent years. In the past, the debate over economic development has either focused on the traditional modernization approach' or the dependency theory of underdevelopment.2 Dependency theorists base their model of development on the belief that foreign investment from core countries is harmful to developing nations' long-term economic growth. Economic relationships between the core and the periphery are structurally detrimental for the latter because of the inherent dynamics of international capitalism. Yet, despite the claims of dependency theory, the recent experience of the East Asian newly industrialized countries suggests a wider range of development possibilities which include government policies specifically designed to attract foreign investment. These countries appear to have structured their domestic economies in order to mitigate the pernicious effects of dependent relationships with core countries. This raises new questions about the development process and the role of policy and foreign investment in the economic transactions between core and peripheral countries. Dependency theory, a neo-Marxist predecessor of world-systems research, claims that First World nations become wealthy by extracting surplus labor and resources from the Third World. Capitalism perpetuates a global division of labor which causes the distortion of developing countries' domestic economies, declining growth, and increased income inequality.3 Those countries on the periphery cannot become fully modernized as long as they remain in the capitalist world

This article examines how Slovenia’s post-communist approach to diversity management marginalizes minorities from the former Yugoslav republics. The constitution grants cultural rights and parliamentary representation to Italian and Hungarian minorities, but communities from Bosnia, Serbia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, and Croatia are excluded from these protections. Recognised mainly by religious affiliation, these groups have limited access to formal minority rights. Their fight for recognition is fragmented, lacking unified political representation, and the 1992 “erasure”—the removal of thousands from the permanent resident registry after independence—still undermines their sense of belonging. Drawing on theories of racialized citizenship, belonging, multiculturalism, and social mobility, the article examines how exclusionary legal frameworks create hierarchies of belonging that hinder mobility for these unrecognised minorities. The qualitative interviews with descendants of Bosnian migrants reveal intergenerational struggles with recognition, ambivalent experiences of citizenship, and discrimination. Set in the post-communist Eastern European context, the study argues that even under the pressures of EU integration, citizenship regimes remain divided along ethnic lines. This division maintains structural inequalities and marginalizes certain groups despite their long-term residence and formal citizenship. The study contributes to debates on ethnicised citizenship and diversity management by showing how legal exclusion, historical legacies, and fragmented minority politics limit belonging and mobility in post-communist societies.

Conceptual Problems in the Protection of Minorities: International Legal Developments Nigel S. Rodley (bio) I. Introduction Not since the close of the First World War has the issue of minority rights achieved the central place in international relations and their legal regulation that it currently occupies. The volatility of central European inter-communal conflict, epitomized by the assassination in 1914 of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, in the capital of what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina, is commonly considered as having spurred the outbreak of the “Great War.” A desire to attenuate that conflict and achieve respect for the post-war redrawn frontiers of the region led to the establishment of the minority treaties regime. It was a regime primarily imposed on the defeated powers by the victorious powers who were not interested in a general regime for the protection of minorities (that is, one that would restrict the victorious powers’ treatment of their own minorities). The regime declined with the fortunes of the League of Nations which was meant to supervise it. Present concern for minority protection arises from the post Second World War approach to the problem in Eastern Europe. After a period of massive forced population transfers, engaged or acquiesced in by the Allies that founded the United Nations, 1 minority movements were effectively suppressed. Despite the existence of constitutional structures, (as in Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union) of a federal nature, that could even envisage a right to secession, the reality of totalitarian one-party rule ensured that most social differences were prevented from finding political expression. In particular, minority aspirations were frozen. The ice that engulfed them [End Page 48] during the Cold War did not eliminate them. On the contrary, they remained an unfinished agenda preserved intact. With the demise of Soviet control in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, together with the ending of the Cold War, the door was open for a return to older agendas. From Bosnia to Azerbaijan, from Georgia to Macedonia, the lamentable results give us our daily headlines. It is not the purpose of this essay to add to the already extensive literature analyzing the causes of inter-communal conflict or schemes for dealing with minorities’ questions. 2 Neither does it seek directly to revisit the vexatious problem of the definition of a minority, 3 although the matter has unquestionable relevance to the issues under discussion. Neither, finally, does it review the questions relating to self-determination: which minorities constitute a people entitled to self-determination? When does self-determination imply a right to secession or merely to autonomy within an existing state? And in the latter case, what form should the autonomy take? The limited objective here is to consider how international law addresses three related problems that bedevil political and legal discourse in the field. The first is the problem of how to reconcile the demand for the provision of special rights for members of minority groups with respect to the rights of others, that is, with the principles of nondiscrimination and equality under the law. The second is how to reconcile special arrangements for minority groups with respect to the individual human rights of [End Page 49] members of the minority. The third is how to reconcile such arrangements with respect to the rights of minorities within the minority. II. Equal Rights Versus Special Treatment In 1894, Anatole France spoke of “[T]he Law’s majestic equality, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” 4 In this telling phrase, he captured the perennial tension between form and substance in law. The aphorism demonstrates the reality that a neutral norm applied to parties in an unequal condition can have an unequal effect. That unequal effect may be intentional or accidental. But it is real, and, once it is consciously perceived, is apt to generate a profoundly alienating sense of injustice. High sounding principles can have the ring of hypocrisy in their application. It may be hazarded that no single factor was more potent in the Marxist debunking of concepts such as the rule of law and human...

Pakistan is an Islamic republic as declared the equal rights to every citizen of Pakistan. In Pakistan lot of marginalized groups neglected by the society as they are religious minorities, transgender, special persons etc. In the diverts groups in a country are living and having a lot of issues in toleration of each other identity and that’s why the minorities are considered as marginalized. In all constitutions as 1956, 1962 and 1973 that everywhere minorities have mentioned with equal rights especially the constitution of 1973. As article 20 states that every Pakistani citizen have liberty to establish their religious institutions and practice their own religion. With all these equal rights mentioned in constitution the country has lack of implementation of state policies. The purpose of the research is to explore the realities about the Minorities rights and dealing with them by society. The constitution of 1973 provides the guarantee of equal rights of citizen, but some marginalized groups suppressed by the society. The focus of this research work is to elucidate minorities rights focused on Christian Minority mechanism in Punjab and to explore the difference between theory and practice. The data has been collected from primary and secondary sources. The primary data has been collected through questionnaire. The data was collected from 800 Christian minority people from Punjab. After analysis of data it has come to know that there is a difference in theory and its implications. The government should more focus on minorities rights mechanism and mindset of people should be change towards protection of minorities rights.

Research on democratic backsliding and illiberalism in Eastern Europe has largely focused on causes and consequences, while resistance strategies – particularly the use of courts to assert human rights – remain underexplored. This article examines how LGBTIQ activists in Hungary and Romania, despite hostile and heteronormative contexts, have managed to mobilize domestic judges, the European Commission, and the broader public to contest legislation limiting queer rights. We ask: how have human rights NGOs used legal framing to persuade these constituencies, and what strategies enabled them to do so? Drawing on socio-legal scholarship, we develop the concept of mixed legal framing innovations to explain this process. This highlights how NGOs rarely rely on a single framing strategy but instead combine, adapt, and sequence them across venues and audiences. We identify five such strategies: (1) integrating pro-queer frames into legal debates, (2) transforming frames during ongoing litigation, (3) building parallel court cases by framing the same issue through different legal rationales, (4) amplifying frames through transnational coalition-building, and (5) heresthetical manoeuvring – strategically reframing issues to divide opponents and broaden support. The article contributes to scholarship on legal mobilization and resistance under illiberalism by providing empirical insights into how civil society actors navigate hostile institutional contexts.

Making Equal Rights Real brings together leaders from around the world who have been working effectively to increase equal economic and social rights, ranging from rights in the workplace to property ownership and education. The contributors tell the detailed stories of effective approaches to implementing equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities in North America, women in Africa, children in the Middle East and sexual minorities in Asia. They also describe approaches taken around the world to increase equal rights for people living in poverty, for those living with disabilities and for all people seeking the information they need to hold their government accountable for implementing everyone's rights. The book addresses what can be done by policymakers, civil society, non-governmental organizations, lawyers seeking to implement equal rights legislation and advocates working in the community, as well as those developing constitutions and negotiating international agreements.