Transsylvanian Society of Hungarians on citizenship
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Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 08:53:19 +0300 (EET DST)
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Subject: Transsylvanian Society of Hungarians on citizenship
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Original sender: Panayote Elias Dimitras <[email protected]>
Transsylvanian Society of Hungarians on citizenship
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TSH - Transsylvanian Society of Hungarians
The institution of foreign resident citizenship, as a token for
diminishing ethnical tension
Statement by Miklós Patrubány - president
Geographic and national boundaries are often non-identical in Europe.
In the majority of cases, this situation is an outcome of modified
frontiers and not of voluntary migration. The culturally alien
language, legal, economic and political circumstances generate a state
of permanent frustration in generations of the population now
involuntarily or forcedly a minority. Contrary to the political drives
of this frustration, the majority nation will not consider the
acquired territory to be sufficiently secured as long as it is
inhabited by the (ethnically) alien community that poses revendicative
political potency. The proposed concept is to diminish the tension
raised by this contradiction.
During the first half of this century the majority nations intended to
reduce tensions through the ideology of national statehood and
homogenization, by assimilating or annihilating minorities. They were
in their right owing to the idea of total state sovereignity that
demanded unabridged and unconditioned loyalty of citizens. Citizenship
- in the spirit of the rousseauean Contract - was primarily a legal
relationship between the individual and the state. This paradigm
inflicted the sufferings of two world wars upon Europe.
The motivations of the European integration are of an economic and of
a pacifist nature. The precondition of both is stability, which -
according to historical testimony - is impossible to achieve based on
the withered principle of total state sovereignity.
Integration-oriented Europe transfers state sovereignity upwards to
supra-national, union structures and downwards to territories and to
localities. This transfer of sovereignity is based on the principle of
subsidy, according to which the problem-solving decisive (power)
competences are to be determined in the greatest possible vicinity of
the source and level of the problem. The superior decision level is
due to support (subsidize) the decision of lower (problem-close)
levels.
The institution of citizenship gains a new dimension. Instead of a
mere legal bond, the legal status of citizenship becomes more and more
weighty. As an outcome of the working capacity freely migrating across
the European Union, the citizenship of a citizen settling outside the
borders of his/her country but within the European boundaries has
merely a dimension of status - as the status of 'citizen of a
member-state of the European Union'. The legal relationship between
this person and his/her chosen country consists in obligations and
rights demanded and secured by the legal system of the country in
question - based upon his/her status as citizen of the home country.
On grounds of this existing European praxis and the historical
experience of multilevel British citizenship, one may generate the
institution of foreign resident citizenship, conceived first of all as
conveying status, not as securing legal bonds. This reduced
citizenship would be available on request for non-citizen co-nationals
of the home country, bound to live outside her boundaries. Foreign
resident citizenship would ease the diminishing of ethnical tensions
that spring from political mistakes of historic dimensions, or from
the impossibility of equitably drawing boundaries. The concept of
foreign resident citizenship offers the following advantages:
1. It is Euro-conform, while subsidiary.
2. Strengthens locality and regions. By the symbolic cultural,
economical and political space the home-country-bound status thus
acquired may compensate the frustration due to minority conditions and
at work in minority spheres, and thus may reduce tensions.
3. Economically, culturally or politically it does not harm the
majority. Thus majority states have no rational objections whatsoever.
4. Enforces the bridging role of nation parts that may thus perform
not only on symbolic and cultural levels but in the legal space as
well.
5. It does not contradict the aims of autonomy of the nations in
question, on the contrary, it supports them.
6. It does not demand autonomy, consequently its realization does not
depend on the will of the majority nation, but merely on the political
intention of the mother nation.
We ask the OSCE to promote studies and discussions about the
foreseeable impact of foreign resident citizenship upon the ethnic
tensions.
OSCE Reviev Conference, Vienna 28th of September 1999.
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