Rethinking Approaches to Europeanization of Minority Politics
Publisher: ECMI Volume: 14 pages, pdf Description: Europeanization as a research agenda remains to be explored in minority studies. Earliest studies on the Europeanization of minority rights attracted scholarly attention with the three recent EU enlargement rounds (Ram, 2003; Kelley, 2004; Schwellnus, 2006; Rechel, 2009). The main reason for such interest was that minority protection became a key criterion for EU accession. Most studies therefore evaluated the EU’s role during the accession process in Central and Eastern Europe; the politics of conditionality was treated as the main mechanism of change and Europeanization came to be measured by the degree of compliance with EU law (Grabbe, 2005; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2005).