EU Enlargement and Minority Rights Policies in Central Europe: Explaining Policy Shifts in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland
Publisher: Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe Volume: 33 pages, pdf Description: An important debate among a number of contemporary political theorists is about whether countries in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) should grant group-specific rights to their national minorities (Kymlicka and Opalski 2001). This debate focuses in particular on the question whether Western minority rights policies serve as a useful guide to policy-makers in CEE. In other words – can such policies be ‘exported’? The term ‘minority rights policies’ in this context does not refer to a specific and uniform policy programme, but to a wide range of policies which have in common that they all in one way or another recognize and accommodate the demands of communities distinguishing themselves from majority populations by religious, linguistic, cultural and other characteristics that are considered ‘ethnic’.