Within the American setting, and the larger Anglo-Saxon legal word, the main defense of group rights and distinct community interest, has been achieved via strong constitutional and contractual traditions and garaantees. In the U.S.A. and Canada the concept of contract is ingrained in the political culture and enbedded in legal evolution. Unfortunately in East-Central Europe this tradition has been undermined by the legacies of the French Revolution, and the centralism championed by both the Fascism of the Right and the Left. Szalasi and Rakosi Antonescu and Ceausescu, Tiso and Husak are all part of this destructive legacy. For this reason, in the present context, within the last decade of the 20th century, as regimes, governments, states and nations come to a new sense of their roles within historic evolution, the most important lesson must be the entrenchment of law by contract, governments that become the defenders of rights rather than mechanisms of oppression and exploitation.
Minority rights mean civil and cultural rights.
Specific contract guarantees of cultural, territorial or personal autonomy may be the only way in which minorities might get to play on such a level field in East-Central Europe. The theory of nationality, therefore is a retrograde step in history. The quotation mentioned above by one of the classics of Anglo-Saxon Liberal traditions proves that this prominent representative of Liberalism was well aware of the daunting consequences of unsolved national and minority questions as early as the middle of the nineteenth century. His readers today might find it contradictory that Lord Acton had a realistic knowledge of the existing problems facing mankind and at the same time had an unrealistic expectation of the steady growth of welfare and happiness. Today we have more sober experience and fewer high-minded illusions.