ABSTRACT
The main objective of this study – as I noted in the Introduction – is to find new ways through which minority groups can publicly legitimize their claims on policies that affect them. In my understanding, the available mechanisms for exerting such influences on institutions of political power do not work well. That is why it seems necessary to seek new possibilities for motivating the authorities to align their actions with the interests of minorities. In the first part of the book I outlined some problems which, in my opinion, are of critical importance for minority policies in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Their solution can be facilitated by legitimizing minority claims in a manner that is convincing enough to win the support of public opinion for making the necessary changes in public policies. These problems concern collective identities, especially with regard to education, language, the media, the arts, and religion. For example, should pupils from minority communities be taught in their mother tongue at school, or, at least, should they be offered some form of education in their mother tongue? Should the study of minority culture and history be introduced in school curricula, and if yes, in what form? Should official status be granted to alternative names of towns, villages, localities, rivers, and so forth, in areas where a large part of the population belongs to an ethnic or national minority? Should the minority language in such areas have the status of a second official language? Should the law allow the creation and operation of mass media that deal exclusively with the problems of a particular minority, which are managed mostly by members of this minority and, possibly, use the minority language? Should the public expression of religious identity – such as the wearing of headscarves by Muslim women in public institutions – be tolerated? Indeed, those questions are directly relevant only to the collective identities of minority groups; on a more general level, however, they are also important from a social and political point of view. As noted in Chapter 2 of this book, we have sufficient grounds to assume that cultural differences, group solidarity, and social and political relationships are closely interlinked in the area of minority issues. If a given country is enacting public policies that negatively affect the collective identities of minority communities, the resulting tensions – as reflected in group solidarity and intergroup rivalries – are bound to also affect the social status of the
members of those communities, as well as the overall political situation. Contemporary history abounds in examples, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, of the use of controversies that are not particularly significant in and of themselves – for example, disputes about the possibility of the official use of alternative place names, or of the daily broadcast on national television of a ten-minute news program in a minority language (currently a “hot” issue in Bulgaria: see, for example, Sega from October 2, 2000; Praven Svjat from December 16, 2009) – as a pretext for launching political campaigns on minority issues, which are designed more to “gain points” in the struggle for political power than to resolve conflicts. How could the policies in the above-mentioned areas be “fine-tuned” so as to secure a balance between the interests of society at large and those of minority groups? One of the most widely used ways of doing that currently is through struggles for recognition and the observance of human rights that go beyond the universal ones: specifically, collective, or – according to other interpretations – group, or group-specific rights. I have already mentioned that this approach has been subjected to serious criticism. It refers mostly to the dangers of the disintegration of public life (including the use of various situations related to collective rights as a casus belli by political forces), as well as to the restriction of freedoms of some individuals within their communities. In the context of this study, though, other arguments against this way of protecting the interests of minorities can also be presented. If we accept the constructionist interpretation of cultural identity and, at the same time, assume that public policies should take into account the complexity of minority issues (specifically, the above-mentioned interrelationships of cultural differences, group solidarity, and social and political factors), what we will see behind the overt disagreements, tensions, and conflicts between minority groups and society at large, is a complex picture of intertwined cultural and social interactions that give rise to the problems in this area. Undoubtedly, public policies should be directed more at the causes of the issues that the minority groups are facing rather than at their consequences. But, if at the causal level we find a whole host of interrelated, diverse, dynamic, and “fluid” social processes, how could they be reorganized and diverted in a socially desirable direction by applying such universalizing and equalizing instruments as collective rights? For, if in a certain context – in a certain country, in a certain area, regarding a certain aspect of minority issues, with regard to a certain ethnic (or religious, or national) community, and at a certain historical moment – the recognition and observance of collective rights indeed helps to balance the interests of a particular minority group and of society at large, then, in a different context, the need to regulate a given set of intertwined social processes through public input and political decision-making may be completely different. What will happen if someone tries to apply a “remedy” that was effective in a particular case to a case of a different sort, not knowing in advance what the effect would be? Moreover, it is precisely the discrepancies in actual cases between real needs and a priori recognized collective rights that provide pretexts for nationalist political leaders, as well as for minority ones, to instigate ethnic or religious conflicts.
