Introduction

Any overview and critical analysis of minority protection through national constitutional law and international law in the European context – as the first part of the title of this book indicates – cannot be limited to a chronological description of the development of legal standard setting and a legal-dogmatic analysis of respective case law of courts or reports of other monitoring mechanisms. Instead, we must raise the two fundamental questions from the very beginning:

Why should we protect minorities at all?

And, if we should, is it possible to effectively protect them?