Minorities and Minority Rights in the Balkans
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
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Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 09:50:49 +0200 (EET)
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Subject: Minorities and Minority Rights in the Balkans
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Original sender: Panayote Elias Dimitras <[email protected]>
Minorities and Minority Rights in the Balkans
Minorities and Minority Rights in the Balkans
Nafsika Papanikolatos
Greek Helsinki Monitor and Minority Rights - Greece
(17/3/1998, AIM Athens)
Unable yet to rid themselves completely of the legacy of authoritarian
sociopolitical structures and mentalities, democracies in Southeastern
Europe lack the experience for establishing viable democratic
republics which do not sacrifice individual rights for an arbitrarily
defined common good. This raises a serious problem relatively to the
demand of recognizing and respecting minority rights. Can minorities
themselves resist the conditions created by the legacy of an
authoritarian nation-state and articulate their rights as political
rather than as ethno-national rights? How can they struggle for the
recognition and protection of their rights using the means of a
democratic republic: constitutional guarantees for the exercise of
fundamental human rights as well as a public sphere where the
extension and recognition of new rights can be debated? A very
difficult question to answer since in Southeastern Europe almost all
the conditions necessary for the democratic process are still very
underdeveloped and can easily be manipulated and exploited towards
ends which can even be contrary to the principles of democracy.
Since modernity requires that our republics are democratic in order to
be viable and able to provide a non-arbitrary basis for the common
good of society, the protection of universal rights implies also the
infinite extension and recognition of new rights arising from the
debate within society. There are three interdependent and parallel
levels in the democratic process which are the basis for establishing
a viable democratic republic. First, the institutionalization of a
strong parliamentary system which legitimizes pluralism in the
political world and guarantees free and fair elections. This in turn
presupposes what some writers call "democratic consolidation", that is
the recognition, by the governed and the governors, of the legitimacy
of a democratically established constitution as the basis of the
political system. Democratic consolidation requires the integrity of
all those state institutions such as the judiciary, the legislative
and the executive, the educational institutions, trade unions,
pressure groups, local and regional administrations, political
parties. Last but not least to safeguard and strengthen democratic
consolidation, it is necessary to have a dynamic civil society, which
through various institutions, be they political parties, interest
groups, economic actors, mass media, alternative educational
institutions, non-governmental organizations and grassroots movements
working on local issues, is capable of counterbalancing the state and
preventing it from dominating and atomizing the rest of society, as
Ernest Gellner wrote. All these interdependent levels that constitute
the democratic process guarantee that the republic is democratic and
that democracy is republican, that it is based on democratically
obtained constitutional guarantees. The inability of any of these
levels to produce the necessary conditions for the others hampers the
democratic process and threatens the democratic republic.
The various instances in which Southeastern European countries have
failed to stand up to these conditions and the difficulties they
encounter in establishing viable democratic republics are generally
known. What must be nevertheless recalled here is that the weaker the
idea of the democratic republic the stronger becomes the idea of a
nation-state as European history has proven. And while the republic
may be compatible with the idea of a nation-state, because
constitutions are not always products of democratic debate and
consensus, it is impossible to institutionalize democratic principles
and an ongoing process of democratization along with the existence of
a predominant idea of the nation-state. They are by principle
incompatible and as it is well know the only thing that saved Western
societies from the predominance of the nation-state is that they
established well founded democratic republics which were able to
resist to the authoritarian conditions of the nation-state. This of
course was not always a successful story; there were several instances
of regression where the principles of the nation-state predominated
over those of the democratic republic. However, in the long run of
this struggle and having still great possibilities for further
democratization, Western democratic republics have obtained a long
term experience which guarantees and protects an ongoing democratic
process.
Southeast European countries are no longer authoritarian states,
nevertheless, they are not yet able to provide the conditions for
viable democratic republics. The question is must minorities be swept
by this authoritarian nation-state legacy and, if not, how can they
resist to it and struggle for the recognition and respect of their
rights by participating in the democratization of these states? All
Southeast European states embody, if not an explicit at least a
latent, authoritarian character because national majorities are not
only "permanent" but they are explicitly dominating all civil and
political institutions. At the same time these states since 1989 in
one way or another try to conform to the conditions of modern
democratic republics. That includes establishing both a constitution
which is a product of a debate involving all parts of society and an
unhampered democratic process which is able to incorporate and protect
individual and minority rights. Nevertheless, because the idea of a
democratic republic in Southeastern Europe is still very weak while
that of the nation-state is very old, most often it is the ideology of
the latter which dominates and determines the new constitutions and
sets limits over the democratic process. When national ideologies
dominate over all aspects of social and political life it seems almost
natural, so to speak, that minorities most often end up using the
means of their oppressors to articulate and to defend their demands.
In the absence of any democratic education and culture and faced with
predominating national majorities and their cultures, minorities tend
to embark into the use of ethno-nationalist language and symbols and
to ignore the fact that their real interlocutor is and ought to be the
democratic republic and not the nation-state. They thus forget or
don't want to know that minority rights, whether they concern
religious, linguistic or ethnic minorities, are above all political
rights which can and should be recognized and respected in the context
of any republic which wants to call itself democratic. Therefore,
instead of participating in the democratization of those governments,
in a paradoxical and deeply contradictory manner, minorities tend to
perpetuate and enhance the same authoritarian political culture which
they inherited from the previous regimes and which could be so easily
reproduced by wearing a nationalist costume. Too often they forget
their own responsibility in the democratization of these republics, an
essential condition for the recognition and protection of their
rights. Being excluded from the nation-state they often exclude
themselves from the struggle to develop the conditions for a
democratic republic. What becomes henceforth important is uniquely
what differentiates them and not what links them to the rest of
political society. Minority rights appear as rights which are to
legitimize their exclusion from society and not rights which will make
them equal members of the democratic republic respecting their
diversity. Whether we speak of Macedonians of Bulgaria, Bulgarians of
Macedonia, Turks of Greece and Bulgaria, Albanians of Macedonia, and
the list certainly does not end here, we find ourselves facing a
vicious circle which produces and reproduces nation-state and
ethno-national arguments. It matters little whether the states are at
the origin of this or whether minorities are equally responsible. One
thing however is certain: minorities pay a very high price at the end
because they fail to establish the legitimacy of their case while
justice is on their side.
As long as there is no minority human rights political culture, it
will be difficult to interpret minority rights in any other terms than
those ethno-national aspirations, in other words through the negation
of the "others". Most often, therefore, when minorities do use a human
rights language it is only to exclude and to be intolerant promoting a
kind of defensive, peripheral and parochial nationalism which is
foreign to the principles of a democratic republic. It is in this way,
that, instead of communicating with the democratic republic and
fighting for the respect and expansion of its principles, they end up
enhancing and often refueling the hegemonic and aggressive nationalism
of nation-states. Further on, strange as it may seem, there is a
significant and particularly conspicuous tendency in minorities, that
characterizes those who desire to exclude and dominate, which can be
summed up as the almost complete absence of solidarity among
minorities themselves. It is not strange therefore that at the end
they are forced to become vehicles of the so-called mother-country's
nationalism, in order to get a negative kind of support and
recognition.
Understanding minority rights not in terms of negating the majority
but in terms of expanding the political space within which both
majority and minority(ies) can coexist by respecting their particular
and general identities, their identity as a particular ethnic,
religious linguistic and/or other minority and their identity as equal
citizens, is a precondition for establishing a viable base for
demanding the recognition of minority rights in democratic republics.
It is certainly true that minorities cannot become politically equal
if they are not free to manifest and cultivate their particular
identities. On the other hand a republic can be considered democratic
to the extent that it is capable of expanding constantly the public
space where all members of society are recognized as equal not
disregarding their differences but acknowledging them and providing
for them the space in which they can enjoy their diversity. No modern
democratic republic is viable unless it includes all members of
society in the social contract and through constitutional guarantees,
in one way or another. Therefore, democratic constitutions must be the
product of debate within society, products of horizontal
communication, which presupposes the participation and the inclusion
of all different constituent members of society. They cannot be a
product of majority decision and, so long as they continue to be so,
they will be rightfully challenged in the name of the very principles
which they pretend to honor. Minority religions, cultures, or history
are not matters of the "private collective" but they should be
incorporated in the "public collective," so that they will cease to be
viewed with suspicion and anxiety by the majority (Michael Walzer). At
the same time, however, minorities must realize that all members of
their community are citizens with rights and obligations. Therefore,
minority institutions and organizations must provide democratic
guarantees for the respect of the rights of the individual members of
their community, and show towards the majority the same kind of
tolerance and respect of rights as they expect to receive.
This attempt to reflect upon certain contradictions concerning the
struggle of minorities to have their rights recognized and respected
in Southeastern Europe should nevertheless exclude the case of the
Albanians of Kosovo. There we have a clearly authoritarian
nation-state which makes any discussion over minority rights difficult
and closes beforehand the debate over the extent of human rights. As
the latest events have shown, the only way to escape from an
uncontrollable violent conflict, the end result of which no one can
predict, is through an arbitrary imposition of democratic guarantees
for this national minority by the international community. Something
similar happened in Bosnia too, which, in an attempt to become a
viable democratic republic, has in effect been turned into an
international protectorate. How this may be accomplished in Kosovo or
completed successfully in Bosnia, and what long term results it may
have in each
case, all that will be left to the specialists.
A more optimistic closing note is nonetheless required here. Debate
over minority rights in Southeastern Europe is not a debate which
concerns only the so-called Balkan region, but rather a more general
debate about the real conditions for democratic republics. A debate
which includes the whole of the European continent giving to the old
democracies an opportunity to think over the limits they have imposed
upon themselves. It is an opportunity to reinvent those public spaces
which will embrace the endless mosaic of cultures, religions,
languages and peoples or nations, allowing them to coexist peacefully
and communicate horizontally and freely.
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