The Workings of the International Regime

The big bang enlargement of 2004 saw ten post-communist states joining the EU, completing the accession process just ten years after having applied for membership. In these countries, EU accession has also marked the end of formal conditionality processes, assuaging concerns about post-communist states' ability to fully respect the corpus of EU legislation transposed into domestic law and implementation capacity. In attempting to explain political and social change in candidate and later, member-states, much of the literature, however, treats a range of actors operating in domestic politics as if they form an homogenous whole, who possess a shared set of goals and domestically promote agendas set in the international arena, in the absence of individual input, achieved through either participation or consultation. While such analyses help us understand the dynamic of the policymaking process domestically, assess the response rate of domestic policymakers to international incentives and ascribe certain decisions to individual actors in domestic politics, they emphasise change over stability in political processes. Our main concern in this book is with issues that have remained little changed over the past twenty-five years of transition in the post-communist political space. This is why in this chapter we introduce the theoretical framework that will allow us to identify the underlying fundamentals of the contemporary minority rights regime in Europe and in later chapters illustrate how — despite the changes — many contentious issues pertaining to the policies of minority rights protections remain unresolved.

A wide array of process tracing and descriptions of policies/situations/ outcomes of the Europeanisation process posit causal relations between and empirical evidence in support of the view of 'games political actors play' without taking into account the background conditions that lead up to and determine actor choices that are of crucial interest for political analyses. This chapter introduces the core argument of our book, that attention to opportunity structures is largely absent from (much of the) research on the impact of Europeanisation processes on domestic change. This view precludes a systematic assessment of reasons for which attention has been granted to polities, politics, and policies, which have changed over time, but it has not assessed what has not changed. In our view, in order to explain the deficits of minority protection mechanisms in Europe, the origins of institutional stasis warrant greater attention.

This is important for several reasons. First, if our analyses were to offer a systematic assessment of interactions between actors at different levels of policymaking (international actors versus domestic actors), these would point directly to perceptions of opportunity structures as experienced by political actors, rather than as identified by researchers. Secondly, institutional contexts, in which political actors perceive choices of policies as realistic and desirable, would facilitate analytic distinction between anticipated outcomes that are declared and those that are realistically expected, allowing more specific predictions about the maximally effective behaviours.

As has been suggested in much of the literature to date, the changes in domestic policy dynamics were rational and in keeping with structural opportunities offered by domestic institutions. However, when domestic political institutions did not allow domestic political elites to toe the line on offer from the international community, the rationale for spurious change in policies was indeed legitimised only to reap the short-term benefits of EU accession. This distinction allows us to identify the sources of (lack of) change in domestic policies as sitting with the institution of the state. This helps us consider the expressed versus the covert compliance of domestic actors with institutional rules of the international cooperation game, as during the accession process.

1. THE INTERNATIONAL REGIME AS THE BACKGROUND FOR POLICY CHANGE

Across Europe, issues pertaining to minority protection are regulated by member-states and require nation-states to identify groups that may be eligible for minority protection on their sovereign territories. As such, this chapter argues that we ought to pay greater attention to the dynamics of policy changes in national institutions, as these are the drivers of policy innovation domestically and as such also are able to input international organizations' attention to specific issues, identities and interests. However, one must be extremely cautious as to the origins of domestic policy changes in nation-states and focus on institutions of that state as socialising and determining permissible and desired patterns of action that domestic actors choose to follow. Domestic political institutions are therefore primary points of reference for domestic political actors when they decide on policies best suited for their domestic situations, as well as those on which they should lobby international organizations. As a result, despite the fact that international organizations (such as the EU, OSCE or Council of Europe) outwardly project a set of internally agreed-upon norms, such norms reflect closely the values and perceptions that domestic political actors see as desirable and possible. With regard to issues related to minority populations across European member-states, these sets of norms constitute what has become known as the European minority rights regime.

The European minority rights regime provides a comprehensive agenda for identifying and recognising minority groups that find themselves in a situation requiring attention and perhaps in need of protection from the tutelage of the state where these groups reside. However, the European minority rights regime lacks autonomous capacity as it does not have the ability to engage with its constituent members (states) beyond the capacity to promote and leverage change with the reference to shared interests and rationale of its participating parties, and only as such legitimising its existence as a principle agent in resolving a collective action dilemma for participating countries. Thus, the European minority rights regime only has the capacity to act on the basis of the embedded reasoning and follow the rules agreed upon by its constituent parties. The regime exists as a complex actor established as a result of member-states' engagement in jointly solving collective action problems in pursuit of their collective interests.

Norms for and rules of minority protection as upheld and overseen by the European minority rights...