When ethnicity is “national”: mapping ethnic minorities in Europe’s framework convention for the protection of national minorities

ABSTRACT

Legal and policy categorizations of group belonging play an important role in analysing lived experiences of discrimination, since the scope of minority protection requires individuals to prove their belonging to a minority group. This article maps the existing classifiers of minority identification as they are used in the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, Europe’s most comprehensive treaty designed to protect the rights of national minorities. I engage with the concept of ethnicity as a “knot of distinction”, looking at which minorities qualify as “national” in different countries. When is ethnicity used as a proxy for religion, when for race, and when for language? What categories are omitted? By inductively analysing the rationales presented by different EU countries of which minorities are “national”, and based on which grounds, this article reveals a messy, historically and politically driven picture, but one that can help us understand some regional patterns.

KEYWORDS:

• Framework convention
• national minorities
• ethnicity
• Europe
• recognition
• identification

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Marietta van der Tol for bringing together a great group of scholars –on multiple occasions and against COVID-19 odds–, offering a wonderfully stimulating environment, and to Elisabeth Becker for reading multiple versions of this article and significantly improving it.

I am also indebted to Anežka Brožová, Johana Wyss, Martin Fotta, Michal Šípoš and Zdeněk Uherek for their constructive feedback on a previous version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Since the adoption of the FCNM, there have so far been six cycles of reporting. Each cycle tends to last between four and five years, and it is structured in the following way. Each country first submits a state report in which it describes the status of minorities in its territory and how it addresses them, including the status of each and which policies it has in place to protect and promote their rights. The Advisory Committee of the CoE then typically organizes a delegation visit to assess whether the state report is an accurate description of the reality on the ground, and issues an Opinion. The country’s government then has the possibility to comment on the Opinion of the Advisory Committee, and finally the Advisory Committee issues a Resolution, in which it provides recommendations. A new cycle then begins, following the same structure. “The Fourth Report” therefore refers to the State report submitted by the Netherlands at the beginning of its fourth cycle in 2021.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Lumina Foundation: [Grant Number LQ300582201].