Conference report: Comparative Perspectives on Ethnic Minorities in 20th Century Europe, Berlin, June 14-16, 2001

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Subject: Conference report: Comparative Perspectives on Ethnic Minorities in 20th Century Europe, Berlin, June 14-16, 2001

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Conference report: Comparative Perspectives on Ethnic
Minorities in 20th Century Europe, Berlin, June 14-16, 2001


Conference Report: Voice or Exit: Comparative Perspectives on Ethnic
Minorities in 20th Century Europe, Humboldt University, Berlin, June
14-16, 2001
 
The conference "Voice or Exit: Comparative Perspectives on Ethnic
Minorities in 20th Century Europe" took place in Humboldt University,
Berlin (Social Science Department, Population Studies) on June
14-16th, 2001. The event was made possible through a generous support
from the German Marshall Fund, Office Berlin. The conference brought
together scholars from Europe, East and West, and the USA, often at a
different stage of their academic career. The presentations and
discussions reflected a variety of research subjects and
methodological considerations, originating from the distinct concerns
of history, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, social psychology,
political science, and human rights law.

The key-note lecture of Andreas Wimmer initiated the debate around the
"tyranny of the national." Wimmer criticized the "methodological
nationalism" of many disciplines, pointed out the interconnectedness
between nationalism and modernization, and analyzed the emergence of
the nation along the lines of legal definition, social security,
military considerations, political representation, and identity. He
examined nationalism as a compromise between the population and its
elites in which the weakness or strength of the state determines the
manifestation of nationalism as either ethnic chauvinism or
xenophobia/racism.
 
The conference proceeded in addressing nationalism and ethnicity in a
comprehensive yet context-specific way. The two initial panels
centered on historical aspects of minority-majority relations and the
complexity of inter-ethnic relations in interwar Europe. Daniel Miller
shed light on the Czechoslovak colonization policies in the Hungarian
and German border areas where Czechs and Slovaks, not Germans, Jews,
or Hungarians, were encouraged to create farming enterprises after
World War One. The land reform served economic and social
considerations but constituted mainly a weapon against the unfavorable
ethnic composition in the border areas. Chad Bryant described ethnic
"amphibians," or people who switch between identities, among the
Germans and Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia under Nazi occupation. The
policy to grant German citizenship to Slavs was superceded by a
concern about the "quality of the race" and inability to set strict
criteria for German-ness. Yet the 1945 Postdam Agreement reversed the
fate of the amphibians and many recent Germans were expelled from the
Czech Republic as traitors. The existence of ethnic unity was also far
from evident among the various German political organizations in the
three German-populated areas of Poland, as Winson Chu demonstrated.
The German governments also maintained the rift between Prussian and
non-Prussian Germans. Demographic trends, the Polish and German
states, and National Socialist ideology all influenced the expression
of Germanness in Poland.
 
Predictably, similar ambiguities of national identity were present in
the history of South-Eastern Europe. Onur Yildirim explored the
historiographical traditions concerning the Turco-Greek Population
exchange of 1923, emblematic for the experience of forced migration.
He criticized the cost-and-benefit historical analyses, approved of
scholarship highlighting the incomplete refugees' incorporation, and
demonstrated that the exchange was an important not only for Greek but
also for Turkish history. How the present modifies the past was
revealed by Theodora Dragostinova in an examination of the 1906
migration of Greeks from Bulgaria, distinguished by fluidity of
national identity, that has been traditionally interpreted as an
expression of historical hatreds between Greeks and Bulgarians. An
"erasure" of history started in the interwar period as a result of
property compensation negotiations, in which powerful elites "forgot"
and "silenced" examples of tolerant minority-majority interaction.
Mila Mancheva discussed Kemalism in the context of the Turkish
minority's place in Bulgarian society. She made clear how the minority
pursued distinct ethnic politics but not political secession from
Bulgaria. Though most Turkish leaders identified Kemalism as a
movement for secularization and modernization, Bulgarian officials
often depicted it as a manifestation of Turkish nationalism, a
strategy that allowed their intervention in the cultural matters of
the minority.
 
These "perspectives from the past" provided a nice continuity of
problematic and methodology from the interwar period to the
Post-communist present, discussed in the next two panels dedicated to
ethnic politics "under transition." Carina Korostelina focused on the
multiple identities in Ukraine and specifically Crimea, and examined
Soviet, national, ethnic, and regional identities in a comparison
between Russians and Crimean Tatars. Apparently ethnic identity
emerges as the most important for the Crimean Tatars while regional
and Soviet identity connected with ethnicity for the Russians.
Analyzing Ukraine as a "nationalizing state," Mykola Riabchuk
accentuated the existence of a "swing group" of Russophones and
Ukrainophones with no clear identity in contrast to the committed
Ukrainophones and Russians. Even Ukrainian rulers who define national
independence as their main objective often judge "cultural ambiguity"
as more welcome in the process of de-Sovietization. The dilemmas of
national minorities in Poland after the 1989 were reviewed in Slawomir
Lodzinski's presentation. He highlighted the interconnectedness
between Polish national identity and the presence of minorities in
Poland and concluded that the attitudes of ethnic minorities have
altered due to legal changes and policies oriented towards them. The
attitudes of the Poles towards minorities have become more open as
well, despite the existence of less favored minority groups, such as
the Roma and Ukrainians. Conversely, the process of democratization
caused deterioration in the relations of the Roma population with the
majority in the Czech Republic, as examined by Jana Barthel. Social
isolation is evident in education, housing, labor, and the limited
political representation. The author considered policy-making to be
the key to understanding the marginalization of the community, and
argued that only integration in national politics could improve their
social status. Irina Molodikova analyzed the reasons for the
immigration of ethnic Russians in Latvia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan to
the Russian Federation after 1989. Even though in surveys the wish to
join the motherland comes first, she claimed that not ethnic tensions
and discrimination, but the economic factor, was the major reason for
the outflow. An analysis of the relationship between decentralization
and ethno-territorial autonomy in Romania was presented in Narcisa
Grigorescu's paper. She explained the tension within policies
involving citizens in decision-making yet also reflecting ethnic
minority demands for rights. Grigorescu emphasized the challenge in
balancing the interests of the "core nation" and ethnic minorities,
and stated that Romania's failed transition from a centralized state
aggravated the feeling of disenfranchisement of the Hungarian
minority.
 
The "responses to ethnopolitical challenges" of the European Union as
well as the diverse institutional arrangements in individual
nation-states constituted the topic of the following two panels. The
European Union's encouragement for institutional representation of
minorities and monitoring of their rights vis-�-vis the majority was
judged as crucial. Melanie Ram addressed the EU influence on minority
rights in candidate states, taking as the example the Citizenship Law
in the Czech Republic and the Hungarian Language Law in Romania.
Focusing on legal amendments and governmental structures for minority
issues, she critically examined the timing of the reforms, the
character of the domestic debate, and the limits to EU influence.
Antoine Roger undertook another comparative study of EU influences,
analyzing Bulgaria, Romania, and Latvia. Noticing that minority
parties in each country adopt a different political stance, he
suggested that the economic situation of the 'motherland' and its
closeness to EU membership influence the policies of ethnic minority
parties in the host country. Christophe Scheidhauer illuminated the
limited enforcement mechanisms of the European Charter for Regional or
Minority Languages. As the main reason for its weakness, apart from
political factors, was considered the divergence about the nature of
the regional or minority languages. The author drew attention to the
vague nature of many terms employed in the Charter, including
"traditional", "group", "area", and "language." A new term was coined
by Zoltan Kantor who, starting from Brubaker, proposed the notion
"nationalizing minority" to describe the process through which the
minority develops as a nation and attempts to transform politically
the state. The author focused on the variety of competing minority
projects in the Hungarian communities in Romania that eventually
result in the nationalizing minority's politics. The role of the
Hungarian Ombudsman in regulating racial discrimination was explored
by Andrea Krizsan who made clear the different levels of
anti-discrimination politics: racial meanings, racially significant
practices, and racially tainted distribution. She pointed out that a
specialized body cannot per se solve discrimination problems because
of the absence of a workable definition of more complex forms of
racial discrimination, such as "indirect discrimination." The concept
of "ethnic unmixing" was scrutinized in Tobias Vogel's analysis of
territorial partitioning and population transfers as methods of ethnic
conflict resolution. Studying the events in the Balkans, he emphasized
that "ethnic unmixing" ignores the fact that, besides "ethnic groups,"
people are persons with individual preferences and inalienable rights.
Such political decisions constitute practical instruments of diplomacy
and blatantly contradict the concept of humanitarianism.
 
The last two sessions provided examples for the institutionalization
and representation of inter-ethnic interaction from various
"illustrative case studies." Ayse Betul Celik depicted Kurdish ethnic
life in Istanbul in the 1990s through a study of "hometown
associations" facilitating migration as well as more
politically-minded institutions and private companies. She revealed
the transformation of traditional, territorial identities into modern,
political institutions, demanding cultural rights for their members.
Robert Greenberg examined the contest over linguistic idiom among the
three Slavic-speaking communities, Slavic Muslim, Serbian, and
Croatian, in Bosnia. After the Bosnian War, an attempt at the
codification of new languages magnified linguistic differences,
previously treated as regional variations in the Serbo-Croatian
language. Analyzing Bosnian Serb identity, Greenberg argued that the
evidence for a separate ethnic identity based on language was
exaggerated. Sebastian Schroeder reminded how the Poles in Lithuania
are torn between several national (Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian)
and international (Soviet, European) identities. During the Soviet
era, the Poles showed patterns of assimilation to the Russian way of
life. After Lithuanian independence in 1991, the Polish minority did
not evolve into irredentism, largely for lack of support from Russia
or Poland, and developed into an ethnic party. The symbolic
competition between Hungarian and Romanian inhabitants in the
Transylvanian city of Cluj were the focus of Margit Feischmidt's
anthropological study. She explained how the state, the economy, and
ethnic institutions, especially education, define ethnic categories
and relations. The key question posed was the social organization of
ethnic differences, and, in particular, the relationship between
social class and ethnicity. Anahit Minasyan compared the experiences
after World War II of Armenians and Jews in France who emigrated to
Soviet Armenia or Israel respectively. The members of both groups were
dedicated to their new nation-states, and managed to increase their
international recognition and legitimacy. They faced harsh living
conditions and discrimination after resettlement yet while the
Armenians grew discontent with Soviet society the Jews were largely
satisfied. A lesson for an ethnic conflict resolution was proposed in
Jens Woelk's work that took as an example the autonomy of South Tyrol.
Emphasizing the impact of the international sphere on ethnic conflict,
his presentation traced the complex negotiation process between the
different political actors that resulted in a workable legal
arrangement for South Tyrol. A key feature of that process, according
to Woelk, was its essentially non-political character.
 
The variety of theoretical approaches and the abundance of examples
were the main strengths of the conference. A focus on Eastern Europe
apparently reigns in the field yet the discussions made clear that the
"under transition" status of these countries is not an indicator of
their historical peculiarity or theoretical distinctiveness. In this
respect, the critical examination of Western European politics and
influences was extremely illuminating. The participants agreed that a
focus on ethnic and cultural exceptionalism cannot explain the
manifestation and institutionalization of inter-ethnic relations
without the examination of the economic, social, and political fields.
The interconnectedness between identity and social relations, the
complementarity of individual consciousness and the social aggregate,
and the relationship between the cultural or discursive performance
and its socio-political roots were the unifying themes in the
discussions. Judging from the interests of the participants in the
conference, much of the new research in the field will gravitate
around these ideas.
 
Report by Theodora Dragostinova (University of Florida)
 
Conference website: http://www.demographie.de/minorities
All papers are available online (password protected).
Authors emails and thus permit to download the papers can be obtained
at:
 
Rainer Ohliger
HU Berlin
Bevoelkerungswissenschaft
Unter den Linden 6
D-10099 Berlin
Tel.: 0049/(0)30/2093-1937
Fax: 0049/(0)30/2093-1432
Email: [email protected]

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