The EU Accession Criteria in the Field of Minority Protection and the Demands of Ethnic Minority Parties 1

Over the course of the democratization of post-communist Europe, minority protection has been gradually strengthened. This study compares the positions of two key actors in this process. In particular, it examines how the EU accession criteria in the field of minority protection relate to the demands of minority parties. This article develops a categorization scheme of political positions on ethnic issues along three dimensions. As an example, the demands of the Hungarian minority parties in Romania and Serbia are compared with the conditions of the EU in relation to minority protection in Romania and Serbia respectively. The key finding of the study is that while the Hungarian minority parties in both countries have demanded cultural autonomy, the EU only has supported its establishment in Serbia. It is argued that, since the EU lacks internal standards on minority protection, it imposes criteria in the field of minority protection that mainly reflect domestic acceptance of certain demands of ethnic minority parties and pre-existing levels of minority protection.Key words: ethnic parties; national minorities; minority rights; EU accession; EU conditionality; Romania; Serbia; Hungarian minoritiesCountries in Central and Eastern Europe have a high level of ethnic diversity, and relatively homogenous nation states like Poland and the Czech Republic are rather the exceptions. The breakdown of multinational empires leftlarge, often compactly settled and politicized ethnic minorities in newly formed states. The end of communist regimes and subsequent regime transformation and democratization provided a political opportunity structure for ethno-nationalist mobilization (Moser, 2005: 6). Ethno-nationalist issues are thus highly salient and a potential root of conflict in the region. In several Eastern European countries, ethnic minority parties provide national minorities with political representation and participation in life, ethnic minority parties are often the most important and legitimate actors pushing for the adoption of legislation providing greater minority protection, and for its implementation (Bieber, 2008). The second-most important actor is the European Union (EU). The prevalent opinion in the literature is that the EU has succeeded in inducing higher levels of minority protection in Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) by including minority protection within a set of accession criteria, and making EU membership conditional on compliance with those criteria (see Sedelmeier, 2008). The EU imposed minority protection as a political condition of EU membership for CEECs in order to counter the potential risk of ethnic conflict and its negative consequences for democratic stability. However, the EU's minority protection conditionality policy was criticized for lacking internal foundation, for its inconsistent application and the absence of transparency in the monitoring process by the European Commission (Hughes and Sasse, 2003; Kochenov, 2007; Sasse, 2005). This article explores EU conditionality in the field of minority protection from a new angle. It assesses how the relevant conditions relate to the demands of ethnic minority parties during the accession process. It develops a scheme which categorizes the demands of ethnic minority parties and EU minority protection conditions. In the empirical part of the article, the demands of the parties of Hungarian minorities in Romania and Serbia are compared with the relevant EU conditions. The results indicate that, although the Hungarian minority parties have similar demands, the EU has imposed different conditions on the two countries. On the other hand, it also shows that the demands of the Hungarian minority parties are more far-reaching than the minority protection measures imposed by the EU.The structure of the article is as follows. Section two provides a current literature review of EU accession conditions in the field of minority protection, which emphasizes the uneven effects of EU conditionality. …