NTA as a Democratization Tool

Abstract

AbstractHaving been implemented in several contexts and extensively discussed internationally during 1900–1940, NTA largely disappeared from the international legal and political agenda immediately after World War Two, only to again attract interest from scholars and policymakers from the 1960s onwards. This revived interest partly reflected the emergence of new multicultural models of state and citizenship—and attendant NTA-style arrangements for minorities—in some established Western democracies but was given further impetus by the start of democratisation in Central and Eastern Europe following the end of communist rule in the region. The adoption of laws and institutional arrangements bearing the NTA label in Hungary, Estonia, Russia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia (among others) coincided with the elaboration of new international standards on minority protection by European and Euro-Atlantic International Organizations, which today serve as a benchmark against which different forms of NTA can be assessed in terms of their potential to support democratization and the sustainable accommodation of ethnic diversity. This chapter first examines the origins and drivers of the new more contemporary variants of NTA, before sketching the main lines of how a democratic NTA arrangement should look. This ideal-type model is then used to assess contemporary examples of NTA and their potential to support democratization (or otherwise) in post-Cold War Europe.