ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how special legal orders adopted by national and regional governments to tackle the coronavirus outbreak have affected minority rights and relations between states and these regions and communities. We draw on empirical evidence from Szeklerland, in Romania; South Tyrol, in Italy; and Catalonia, in Spain, where the Covid-19 crisis provided central governments with an opportunity for recentralising decision-making, as well as securitising the management of the health crisis in the public perception. We argue that Covid-19 and the ensuing special legal orders, coupled with the abrupt securitisation of the public order, were not the genuine reasons for minority rights violations or the worsening of state-region or state-minority relations. Rather, these interventions revealed and amplified already existing problems, or they distinguished settled political orders, in which ethnic relations are desecuritised, from unsettled ones. In contexts where ethnic relations had been previously desecuritised, the crisis had a much milder effect on ethnic relations than in contexts where these relations had been or continue to be securitised. As we show, it is in the unsettled case that a public health crisis is more likely to get instrumentalised for political ends and can thus make an unsettled order even more unstable.
