ABSTRACT
While ‘the respect for and protection of national minorities’ was enshrined in the first Copenhagen criterion and is often singled out as a prime example of the European Union’s (EU’s) positive impact on democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, the EU has in fact promoted norms which lack a foundation in EU law and remain controversial, even in the ‘old’ member states. This paradox points to the fact that the EU’s ‘minority condition’ is a political and social construct. Constructs can have very ‘real’ effects, both intended and unintended, and direct and indirect. It is important to understand the context and rationale underlying the construction of the EU’s minority condition in 1993, the dilemmas involved in translating the construct into EU policy, and the resonance of the construct in international and domestic politics in the pre- and post-accession periods. The EU’s minority condition has proven to be ‘sticky’: it is a powerful cognitive framing device for both international institutions and domestic actors in the accession countries. At first glance, EU conditionality may appear as something fixed and constant but its chameleon-like characteristics can turn it into a dynamic process itself. Through an empirical case study of the medium-term effects of the minority condition in Latvia (and Estonia), this article challenges some of the conceptual and empirical findings of previous research on conditionality.
