Divided Nations and European Integration 9780812208276

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Divided Nations and European Integration

NATIONAL AND E THNIC CONFLIC T IN THE T WENT Y- FIR ST CENTURY Brendan O’Leary, Series Editor

Divided Nations and European Integration

Edited by

Tristan James Mabry John McGarry Margaret Moore Brendan O’Leary

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Divided nations and European integration / edited by Tristan James Mabry ... [et al.]. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (National and ethnic conflict in the twenty-first century) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4497-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. European Union countries—Economic integration.

2. Ethnic

conflict—Europe. 3. Nationalism—Europe. 4. Group identity— Political aspects—Europe. government.

5. Europe—Politics and

6. European Union countries—Politics and

government. 7. Europe—Ethnic relations. 8. European Union countries—Ethnic relations.

I. Mabry, Tristan James.

II. Series:

National and ethnic conflict in the 21st century. JN30.D59 2013 323.14—dc23 2012038310

CONTENTS

Introduction John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary

1

Chapter 1. Divided Nations and Challenges to Statist and Global Theories of Justice Margaret Moore

33

Chapter 2. Forked Tongues: The Language Politics of Divided Nations Tristan James Mabry

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Chapter 3. Kin-State Activism in Hungary, Romania, and Russia: The Politics of Ethnic Demography Zsuzsa Csergő and James M. Goldgeier

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Chapter 4. European Integration and the Basque Country in France and Spain Zoe Bray and Michael Keating

127

Chapter 5. Albanians Divided by Borders: Loyal to State or Nation? Alexandra Channer

157

Chapter 6. The Kurds and EU Enlargement: In Search of Restraints on State Power David Romano

190

Chapter 7. European Integration and Postwar Political Relations between Croatia and the Bosnian Croats and Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs Marsaili Fraser 210

vi

Contents

Chapter 8. The Divided Irish Etain Tannam

251

Chapter 9. Germany and German Minorities in Europe Stefan Wolff

276

Chapter 10. Ties That No Longer Bind: Greece, Turkey, and the Fading Allure of Ethnic Kinship in Cyprus Tozun Bahcheli and Sid Noel

313

Conclusion: The Exaggerated Impact of European Integration on the Politics of Divided Nations John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary

341

List of Contributors

393

Index

397

Acknowledgments

405

INTRODUC TION

John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary

The subject of this book is the development of nations and national homelands divided by sovereign borders within and around the current and prospective frontier of the European Union (EU). No one should assume any inexorable march of the EU, though the short-run and longer-run incorporations of Iceland and Norway respectively are not difficult to foresee. We have avoided the EU’s North African hinterland because we see little likelihood that anywhere from Western Sahara to Egypt will join the EU in the next decades, but we include Balkan spaces and Eurasian borderlands to which the EU might expand in this horizon. It is well known that the final limits of the eastern border of the European Union may lie in the Ukraine, rather than Vladivostok. What is less well known is that upon the accession of Turkey the EU’s maximum feasible stretch of its southeastern border would extend into Kurdistan, a national homeland that is not now a state, though where it will eventually reach within Kurdistan is another matter, most likely not into the “Kordestan” province of Iran. The accession of Cyprus, with its special difficulties that are discussed here, may yet mark the EU’s final southeastern push in former Ottoman lands (see also Anderson 2008b). Contemporary economic events and crises remind us all that the European Union is capable of institutional collapse, either through the ill-digested expansion of unready member states or through poor political management in and between existing member states. No one doubts that a broken euro will threaten a broken as well as a broke EU. The continuing pattern of extensive federalization and delegation of functions without more democratization at either the member state or the EU level is storing potential crises. The EU’s current difficulties were triggered by the conjunction of a major global financial and economic recession emanating from the centers

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Introduction

of Anglophone capitalism with the teething difficulties of a premature and insufficiently planned monetary union, established without credible EU-wide fiscal powers, internal homogeneity of labor markets, or a credible debt management regime (see Krugman 1992). These crises are currently fully absorbing the major powers of continental Eu rope, not just the anxious smaller states, now rebranded as “peripheral.” There is speculation that Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and perhaps Spain will default on their public debts and leave the euro. Simultaneously continuing divisions over past and future definitions of external interests still threaten to render the EU’s new foreign and security institutions and policies either irrelevant or nugatory in their traces. Rather than hollowing out the nation-state, the European Union’s expansions since 1992 may yet serve to hollow out its own potential capacities as a polity. All of that, however, is in the realm of the known unknowns. Whether the Eu ropean Union expands, contracts, or stays the same, either in territory or in functions, the divided nations within and across its limits will remain of enduring importance. Our topic is the divided nations in and around the EU as it has expanded thus far, for example Hungarians in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia; and the Irish in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. We are also interested in those who may yet come into the EU, for example the Serbs in Serbia, Kosovo, and BosniaHercegovina (BiH), and other nations in similar geopolitical and geographic situations, such as the Kurds who would be profoundly affected by Turkey’s accession to membership. These divided nations live amid strikingly different political and demographic relations. Some are majorities in at least one state but are minorities elsewhere, as with the Hungarians, Irish, Slovaks, and Serbs. The Basques in France and Spain and the Kurds of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, by contrast, are currently political minorities wherever they live. Few nations have recently demographically dominated more than one European state, though the Germans did when they had two states between 1948 and 1989 (and three if we disturb some recent amnesia and count Austria). The German Democratic Republic was mostly made and controlled in Moscow rather than being an expression of authentic self-determination, and its past existence helps explain why German intellectuals rarely confuse nation with state. The Albanians in Albania and Kosovo now dominate two states, though the latter was still a state-in-waiting when we went to press. International organizations constrain the recognition of Kosovo’s independence; it is still recognized by no more than sixty-five of the member states of the United Nations, albeit by a majority of twenty-two of the

1. Europe and the European Union.

4

Introduction

twenty-seven member states of the European Union. Serbia stubbornly insists that Kosovo remains its Autonomous Region of Kosovo-Metohija thirteen years after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and flight removed most Serbs from its soil and after the International Court of Justice advised that Kosovo’s declaration of independence was not unlawful. Nearly all the European states that recognize Kosovo once feared the reformation of a greater Germany, but they could not block that vista. The powers of Europe are, however, all intent on blocking the formation of a greater Albania (which might encompass Albania, Kosovo, western Macedonia, and southeastern Serbia). States do not like other states, especially their neighbors, to get bigger, especially in the name of national unification, even if that unification is democratically endorsed. They also do not like small states unifying (or reunifying) under the banner of national integration, and that is because many states are not the nation-states they claim to be: divided nations often straddle their borders. All the nations examined by the contributors, regardless of their current political and demographic status, experienced the enforced partition of their homelands, usually in the aftermath of wars or the collapse of empires. This is the division of nations to which we refer. In this book all the authors defi ne divided nations as German people do, and that may be fitting as the  Germans are the largest nation in Europe, if the claims of Turks and Russians to that title are rejected. When an American speaks of a divided nation, she means what a German calls a divided state. The American usage covers all internal divisions, antagonisms, or cleavages within a polity. In German usage, a nation may seek or possess a state, and a state may encompass one nation or many. We follow German usage here; so for us, divided nations are nations separated by states. The concept of “a divided nation” makes ontological assumptions that some question too much (see Brubaker 1996c, 2006). Nations may be “social constructions,” in the jargon of our peers, but they are no less real than language communities, social classes, or religious collectivities. We do not take the ontology of nationalists for granted, but we do assume the realities of nations and their consequences—that they are human constructions provides no special intellectual illumination or helpful moral guidance. Moreover no sane person has ever presumed that nations are utterly homogeneous: they always contain variation in culture, language, and degree of identification. A currently existing nation does, however, presuppose a recognizable politically mobilized people, who have a named collective identity. A di-

Introduction

5

vided nation for us is therefore one that contains leaders and organizations that minimally aspire to establish or reestablish closer linkages between the segments of their nation partitioned among states. These aspirations may include irredentism, that is, the redrawing of borders to make state and nation congruent with the consent of the relevant conationals. But they may encompass a range of less dramatic objectives, such as the establishment of cooperative linkages across borders, support for their kin in other jurisdictions, or simply ensuring freedom of movement of persons or organizations across the “national territory.” There are several such divided national communities in European space. Divided nations are usually derived from, but are not necessarily coterminous with, divided ethnic communities. An ethnic community comprises members who share the belief that they are descended from similar people— in phenotypes, in actual ancestries, in ways of being, language, and customs, including religious customs. Ethnic communities have frequently been subjected to rival nation-building projects. Not all of those regarded as belonging to a divided nation because of their ethnicity, according to what are regarded as objective traits or historical associations, accept such claims. Some may identify with the divided nation, while others may possess, or come to possess, “partitioned identities,” in which they partly identify with the state in which they live, even if it is dominated by a different ethnic group (that is, they may adhere to a form of civic patriotism). Others may have nested national identities, that is, they believe they belong, rightly, to a nation within a nation; and yet others may not have any national identities. Thus some Russian speakers in Latvia identify with the state of Latvia, while others look to Mother Russia. Some Hungarians in Hungary identify with Hungary as it is now territorially defined in law, while others identify Hungary as the place and people divided by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. A divided nation may not insist on ethnic closure and indeed may reject it; such a nation may insist it is open to those who accept its minimal cultural terms of membership, including immigrants from afar. Moreover, if the relevant nation has at least one regional or state-based territorial jurisdiction which it dominates, it may be able to prove its inclusionary words through deeds. A state dominated by an insecure nation, by contrast, may constantly seek to assimilate and integrate all those who might cast their eyes longingly at the conationals with whom they empathize beyond the border. They may sometimes succeed. The sustainers of divided nations have to work to maintain a sense of nationhood after territorial division occurs. Whether

6

Introduction

they succeed is uncertain. Histories of competitive nation-building projects, and their successes and failures, are explored throughout this volume. One motivation behind this book, and of the conference that preceded it, was our contributors’ collective recognition that academic research usually ignores divided nations. That is partly because research tends to fall within the funding jurisdictions of sovereign boundaries. Where research does take place, however, it often assumes, without much argument, that the aspirations of divided nations are problematic, that is, destabilizing and subversive. Much of the extant literature on the management of diversity and on international relations is dominated by the Westphalian tradition that sees the world both positively and normatively as composed of states. In this worldview the relevant political communities are internal to states. Integrationists, for example, typically see the state as a “nation-state,”, either an accomplished one or one that is being built to supersede a more diverse past (see Haas 1997, 1968; see also Guéhenno 2000 [1995]). For them, nations should be congruent with states and should not exist beyond the states’ territories or as regions or communities within them. More surprisingly accommodationists, that is, those prepared to accept that states may have more than one ethnic or national community and that each of these should be politically accommodated, usually restrict their analysis to accommodation within the state, although many of the minorities that accommodationists seek to protect are part of larger national communities that exist across state borders (see McGarry, O’Leary, and Simeon 2008; and O’Leary and McGarry 2012). Insofar as either integrationists or accommodationists consider divided nations, it is usually to point out that their claims jeopardize internal integration or accommodation. Scholars from international relations who are concerned with relations between states are more likely than integrationists or accommodationists to notice the claims of divided nations but generally treat them as political problems that need to be addressed through full respect for traditional state sovereignty and recognition of the territorial integrity of existing states. Even scholars who reject realist international relations, who notice communities that transcend or straddle the state, such as those cosmopolitans who are concerned with global justice, tend to ignore the claims of “divided nations.” This volume challenges the prevalent perspective that national diversity can be wholly managed within the traditional (Westphalian) state system. The contributors examine the potential of the European “postnational” project, as it has been called, to manage the claims of divided nations in peaceful

Introduction

7

ways that fall short of the alteration of state boundaries (see Habermas 2000; also see critical discussions in Breen and O’Neill 2010). Whereas the international relations and global justice literatures ignore the possibility that divided nations have important normative claims, the European Union has been seen by some as having the potential to address the aspirations of divided nations through the promotion of new norms of sovereignty sharing, interstate cooperation, softer state borders, application of the subsidiarity principle, and the emergence of a European regime of minority rights protection (see Kearney 2003). The contributors were asked to evaluate such claims.

Divided Nations and the Existing Academic Literature The existing literature on the management of ethnic and national diversity is focused on the state and on the idea that meaningful communities are internal to states. This literature, we suggest, either pays scant regard to the issue of divided nations or dismisses their claims. Two main approaches exist, each based respectively on integration or accommodation (see Haas 1997, 1968; Guéhenno 2000 [1995]). These two schools of thought are treated in turn. Then we explore two other important types of literature, based on international relations (security studies) and global justice, which respectively take an interstate and a trans-state perspective, and we show that these literatures also largely ignore divided nations or their claims. Integrationism is the current globally dominant presumption among academics and policy-makers that states are or should be nation-states. In the French language the two words “nation” and “state” are seen as synonyms, while in the English language the compound noun “nation-state” refers to a singular entity. Competitions and borders between states are widely seen as “international” in character, and so are the organizations that represent states. The historian (Communist and integrationist) Eric Hobsbawm once put it that the nation “is a social entity only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the nation-state, and it is pointless to discuss nation and state except insofar as both relate to it” (1990, 9–10). Nation-states in this perspective are seen as the products of modern historical evolution, either through the consolidation of territories and their forging into unities or through the breakup of multinational empires, to produce “sovereign governments which have no critical regional or community cleavages” (Deutsch

8

Introduction

1966, 80). The former pattern is seen as dominant in the West, while the latter is usually associated with Eastern Europe. Integrationists believe not only that deep regional and community cleavages disappear under conditions of modernity but also that this is normatively desirable and essential for stability and justice. The nation-state, from this perspective, promises internal peace, civic equality, a participatory democracy, and a solidarity bolstered by the construction of welfare states in which people are encouraged to support redistribution across their national communities (see Miller 1995). This vision of a nation-state is not disposed to the accommodation of what are sometimes called “substate nations,” and possibly even less to nations that claim to be part of nations connected with other states. Integrationists attribute instability and injustice within states to the absence of an overarching public (national) identity, which in turn is usually blamed on a backward ethnonationalism (see for example Barry 2001; Brass 1991; Denitch 1994; Silber and Little 1996). Foremost, divisions are blamed on “nationalizing” states (Brubaker 1996a), captured by nationalist elites who claim to represent the state’s largest community. In nationalizing states, the state’s primary task is to serve the ethnonational needs of the Staatsvolk, rather than the citizenry or population as a whole. Nationalizing states practice policies of control or policies of coercive assimilation to enforce homogeneity (McGarry and O’Leary 2011). In the former policy the dominant community’s culture is privileged; in the latter it is imposed. In extreme circumstances, as in Serbia under Milosevic or Croatia in 1995, nationalizing states practice ethnic expulsions, or genocide. Nationalizing states are wrongly seen, at least in the West, as a preserve of the non-Western world, such as Eastern Europe. Western Europe’s own homogenization is often forgotten (see Marx 2003; Mazower 1998, 2008). Divisions within modern or modernizing nations are typically blamed by integrationists on “entrepreneurs” who seek to mobilize ethnic communities for self-interested purposes (for an exemplary statement, see Brass 1991, 69–108; also Brass 1996). Such entrepreneurs seek to foster and maintain a separate public identity because that provides the basis for the entrepreneurs’ political or cultural status and access to resources, so they call for autonomy, including separate schools and universities, and for public protections for languages and cultures that might otherwise fade away (see Breton 1964). Integrationists also often blame internal divisions on neighboring states, on their “irredentism” or “annexationism.” “Kin-states” mobilize discontent

Introduction

9

among those who would otherwise be integrated. Civic unionists in Northern Ireland attributed confl ict there to irredentist politics sponsored by the Republic of Ireland (see McGarry and O’Leary 1995, chapter 3). Ireland’s claim to govern Northern Ireland, as expressed in its 1937 constitution, allegedly kept Irish nationalism alive in Northern Ireland; otherwise, so it was argued, Northern Irish Catholics would long ago have accepted a single British public identity and the union between Great Britain and Ireland. Similarly Slovakia and Romania routinely blame the refusal of their Hungarian minorities to integrate on the irredentist politics of Hungary. Turkish officials have sometimes blamed Kurdish nationalist mobilization within Turkey on irredentist politics emanating from the Kurdistan region in Iraq and have falsely suggested that the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq supports the Kurdish Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan or PKK) guerrillas. These three “fields” of nationalizing states, entrepreneurs, and irredentist kin-states are sometimes seen by followers of Rogers Brubaker as a destructive, mutually reinforcing, relational nexus. Nationalizing states alienate minorities through discriminatory policies and facilitate nationalist countermobilization by minority entrepreneurs. The nationalizing agenda among the dominant community’s elites and public is then strengthened by perceptions of disloyalty and kin-state irredentism among the subordinate. Ethnic minorities are alienated by the state’s policies but are also whipped up by their own nationalist leaders and by kin-state interference. Irredentist politics in the kin-state is partly a response to the policies of the neighboring “nationalizing” state, and to the appeals of its nationally mobilized ethnic kin (see Brubaker 1996b). This potent nexus has been held responsible for a number of conflicts in Europe. The outbreak of war in Croatia in the early 1990s has been traced to the combustible mixing of the nationalizing policies of the Croatian state, minority secessionism among Serb leaders in Croatia, and irredentist politics by Milosevic’s Serbia (see Hayden 1992, 1999). The “triadic nexus” has also been seen as contributing to the outbreak of World War II, because Hitler used the treatment of German minorities in Poland and Czechoslovak ia to justify the invasion, partition, and annexation of those countries (see Blanke 1993). Integrationists are resolutely opposed to accommodation either through public support for minority or subordinate cultures, or any form of groupbased—corporate or territorial—autonomy, or through the fostering of links between conationals across neighboring states. Such policies are seen as incompatible with the idea of a nation-state and as boosting division and

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Introduction

ethnic nationalism. Integrationists oppose autonomy and cross-border relations because they believe these will encourage irredentism and interference by neighboring states. The primary integrationist prescription is the neutral civic state, which treats its citizens as equal members within a single civic or national community, rather than as members of substate nations or parts of nations that spill over borders. Integrationists support the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states against irredentist claims but are also supportive of the international protection of integrationist (individual or human) rights to maintain peace and justice. This position is the currently dominant international normative regime, put in place under American leadership during the foundation of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 (Schlesinger 2003). The UN abandoned the efforts by the League of Nations to protect minority rights, because these were seen as encouraging destabilizing ethnic nationalism among minorities (Jackson Preece 1998). Since 1945 integrationists in the United Nations and elsewhere have strongly resisted the idea that there are legitimate “national” communities that exist either at a level smaller than the state or across state borders. They have instead sought to promote the territorial integrity of states combined with the international spread of difference-blind, nation-state politics through a range of legal instruments, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), though even this covenant had to concede some minority rights in Article 27. Accommodationists generally share integrationists’ view that conflict results from partisan ethnocentric government but disagree with them on how diversity should be treated. Accommodationists believe that integration is biased toward the state’s dominant community and that justice and stability require the public accommodation of different communities. Accomodationists come in two main types: consociationalists and federal pluralists. Classical consociational theory was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a number of scholars, including Gerhard Lehmbruch, Jurg Steiner, Sid Noel, Eric Nordlinger, and Kenneth McRae, but it is rightly most closely associated with the innovative work of Arend Lijphart (see Lijphart 1969, 1975a, 1977, 1985, 2008). The key confl ict regulating mechanism in a consociation is a cross-community power-sharing executive, but consociationalists also prescribe autonomy for different communities (territorial or corporate), minority vetoes, and the proportional representation of different communities throughout the state’s public sector, including the army and police.

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Classical consociational theory, however, is focused on treating diversity within states. Moreover, although it is often overlooked, Lijphart and the other consociational pioneers did not focus on minorities as “national” minorities, never mind as parts of nations that exist across state borders. This outlook was likely a result of their focus on cases such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, or Belgium, which were not nationally divided, at least not when they were the objects of consociational research. The communities in question, at least for Lijphart, were not national communities but ethnic, religious, linguistic, or class communities. They were seen as “segments” of a pie, where the pie in question was the state or “divided society.” The focus on ethnic, religious, or linguistic, rather than national, communities is suggested by their primary preferred conflict-regulating device, namely power sharing within a state’s central government. Greater attention to minority national communities would have shifted the prescriptive emphasis toward territorial autonomy, and more attention to minorities that were part of divided nations would have shifted it further, to include interstate and transborder arrangements. Lijphart’s otherwise masterly analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict illustrates these difficulties (see Lijphart 1975b). With his background in the Netherlands, he initially underappreciated the fact that Northern Ireland’s conflict was based squarely on rival national movements, one of which wanted to unite with another state. He saw the groups in conflict in Northern Ireland as “Catholics” and “Protestants,” and the basis of the cleavage as “religious,” even though the groups gave virtually all of their support to Irish “nationalist” and British “unionist” parties respectively. Lijphart argued that the key difficulty was the absence of support for power sharing among Protestants because they were capable of exercising hegemonic power alone and were disposed to Westminster majoritarian practices. This analysis was accurate but limited. Northern Ireland’s Catholics, part of the divided Irish nation, were also opposed to power sharing solely within the United Kingdom. Radical Irish nationalists (republicans) wanted a complete withdrawal of the British state from Ireland, whereas moderates wanted political linkages with Ireland and a role for the Irish government. In 1998 Irish nationalists achieved not just internal consociational institutions within the United Kingdom but also a number of all-island and British-Irish political institutions, as well as language that expressed the people of Ireland’s right to self-determination. Unionists, by contrast, achieved the abolition of the

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Introduction

Republic of Ireland’s constitutional claim to Northern Ireland and a commitment from nationalists that Northern Ireland could not join the Irish republic without the consent of a majority of its citizens. A purely internal solution, within the bounds of the UK, as associated with classical consociational prescriptions, would not have worked. Pluralist federalism is associated with a number of prominent academics (see Gagnon 2009; Kymlicka 1996, 2007; Requejo 2005; Taylor 1992; Tierney 2004). These authors differ from classical consociationalists because they have considered at least some states as multinational. Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship, a title that shares the classical consociational view that states are culturally divided, actually suggests a division between “polyethnic” states and “multination” states. A polyethnic state is formed as a result of the immigration of different cultural or “ethnic” communities, with “ethnic” used in the sense prevalent in North America. Such communities typically seek to integrate into the larger society and a variety of rights that ease their path, including rights of nondiscrimination, exemption from laws and practices that disadvantage them (such as bans on religious dress in schools), and public funding for their cultural practices (such as community festivals). A multination state, by contrast, is composed of different national communities, where a nation is a “historical community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and culture.” On this understanding, multination states are formed, according to Kymlicka, either when a nation’s homeland is involuntarily incorporated in a state by military conquest or coercively overrun by settlers or when nations agree to federate their homelands. Minority nations, unlike ethnic communities, are said to seek autonomy or self-government “to ensure their survival as distinct societies,” and they also frequently seek language rights. Kymlicka criticizes political theorists for their “surprising neglect” of the distinction between minority nations and ethnic communities. Pluralist federalists also differ from consociationalists in their emphasis on the need for territorially based forms of autonomy, including multinational federations, federacies, and devolution within unitary states (see McGarry and O’Leary 2011). They think that territorial autonomy will ensure political stability in multinational states and undercut demands for secession. Normative philosophers emphasize the justice of minority claims for territorial autonomy; for example, Kymlicka claims that they have a moral claim to self-government in their homeland. The claim is based on a fundamental principle of equal treatment of individuals combined with the

Introduction

13

view that individuals have legitimate collective identities and that minority forms of collective identity are harder to reproduce and harder to support than majority forms, and that additional (group-differentiated) rights are necessary, among them rights to autonomy. He argues that members of minority nations typically aspire to self-government, and he suggests that they have often been forced into the state against their will or agreed to join a federal compact. Some pluralist federalists have focused not just on territorial autonomy but also on questions of constitutional “recognition” and status, that is, on the importance of express legal language that depicts the state as composed of equal nationalities. The focus of pluralist federalists on the claims of “national” communities suggests that they would be sympathetic to the aspirations of divided nations and more likely to discuss them than consociationalists would. However, they are generally just as focused on the state as the forum in which diversity should be managed as are integrationists and accommodationists. Thus Kymlicka is concerned with the accommodation of what he calls “minority” nations, that is, communities that exist within states (Kymlicka 2007, 177, 203, 211). His definition of a multination state implies that a “nation” is a historical community “more or less institutionally complete” (1996, 11, our italics), a formulation that forgets the fact that many multination states actually comprise a nation and a part of another nation, where the latter community is incomplete. Kymlicka’s prescriptive inventory is generous but exclusively internal in character, limited to substantive language rights, consociation, and autonomy within the state’s borders. Nowhere does he recommend interstate or cross-border arrangements that link segments of divided nations, though many, if not most, of the multination states that Kymlicka is concerned with contain communities that are parts of divided nations. Indeed Kymlicka cites ten cases where “claims relating to residence in a historic homeland” are at the heart of violent conflict, and yet most of these cases involve divided nations. In all ten cases the communities’ historic homelands are not restricted to the state they are living in but include territory in neighboring states. Autonomy for these nations within their existing states will certainly meet some of their aspirations, but it does not address aspirations for “collective” or properly national self-organization and government. Why should prescriptive, empirical, or normative analysis stop at the state’s borders? If a “substate” nation poses a threat to stability because its desire for some form of self-determination in its national homeland is

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Introduction

frustrated, it is not clear why the same logic should not apply also to nations that are territorially dissected. If a substate nation has a moral claim to selfdetermination because its national territory has been involuntarily incorporated, it is not clear why a nation that has had its territory involuntarily partitioned does not have some similar moral claim. Pluralist federalists have rightly criticized others for being generic in their prescriptions and for failing to distinguish between the claims of individuals who are from majority nations and those who are from minority nations, or between the claims of minority nations, indigenous peoples, and ethnic minorities (immigrants), but they themselves fail to address the distinction between encapsulated substate minorities and divided nations. Kymlicka’s early work focused on states’ responses to internal national and ethnic diversity. He has since shifted focus to the role that international and regional (interstate) organizations, such as the United Nations or the European Union, should play in the accommodation of diversity. This recent work in the interstate arena presented an opportunity for him to address the claims of trans-state national communities, but Kymlicka appears as focused as ever on accommodating minorities within particular states. He is not concerned with how the specific claims of national communities that exist across state borders can be assessed or accommodated but rather with how the international community can be brought to bear on how states deal with their internal minorities. His clearly expressed view that “claims relating to residence in a historic homeland” are at the core of minority aspirations should perhaps be taken as implicit support for cross-border arrangements, and the autonomy he prescribes is an institutional prerequisite for different segments of divided nations to cooperate with each other. But Kymlicka often gives the impression that drawing attention to cross-border ties by minority communities is counterproductive and inimical to internal accommodation. States often assume, he argues, that minorities with ethnic kin in neighboring states are irredentist and that these minorities would side with their kin-states if the latter sought to recapture the territory on which the minority lives, “as indeed some have done at various points in the twentieth century.” In consequence, “no state is likely to voluntarily accord self-governing powers to a minority under these circumstances” (Kymlicka 2007, 184). Kymlicka believes that the important reason why Eastern European states are reluctant to accommodate minorities is that they have more communities with cross-border ties than has Western Europe. While “triadic relationships” between states, minorities, and kin-states are central to Eastern

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Europe, he argues, “many of the paradigmatic examples of national minorities in the West do not have a kin-state (e.g., Catalans and Basques, Scots and Welsh, Quebecois, Puerto Ricans). Even the French and Italians in Switzerland are not, strictly speaking, appropriately viewed as kin-state minorities.” This empirical stress on the role that irredentism plays in blocking the claims of divided nations is accurate but is much more closely related to the security concerns of realpolitik than of justice (Kymlicka 2007, 184n8). Even if one concedes that a political claim has adverse consequences from a stability perspective, one might still argue that the claim has some basis in justice. An accommodationist might observe, for example, that it would likely be counterproductive to intervene militarily in China on behalf of the Muslims of Xinjiang but at the same time that it should be emphasized that Xinjiang’s Muslims have a just claim to self-government. The classical consociationalists, notably Lijphart and Nordlinger, anticipated Kymlicka’s stress on the dangers posed by kin-state ties. While Lijphart believed that external threats may facilitate power sharing, he argued that the threat had to be seen as such by all the relevant communities. One-sided engagements, such as those posed by irredentist neighbors, would, he believed, antagonize interethnic relations and reduce the prospects for power sharing (Lijphart 1977, 66– 68). The late Eric Nordlinger acknowledged that external threats could bring “divided societies” together, but only if the external threat was common to the internal parties. When one community sought “incorporation into another state” or when the “differences between conflict groups [were] more salient than the differences between one conflict group and the external state, we would not expect external pressures to give rise to conflict regulating motives” (Nordlinger 1972, 44). Such perspectives support the state’s territorial integrity more than the idea of national selfdetermination. The two main schools of accommodation therefore have little or nothing to say about the claims of divided nations, as opposed to substate nations or ethnic communities, and what they do say suggests that such claims are believed to pose credible threats to regional and global order and therefore should remain marginalized. Integrationists and accommodationists neglect divided nations partly because they are focused primarily on the insides of states. However, the claims of divided nations are also neglected in two other important bodies of literature, namely global justice theory and international relations (security) theory, which are based, respectively, on normative commitments that transcend states and on empirical relations between states.

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Global justice theory represents an important part of a larger body of literature that focuses on “globalization” and argues that its effects cannot be understood or managed appropriately within the narrow confines of the state and the “methodological statism” of modernist social science (see Archibugi and Held 1995; Goodin 2002a, 2002b). Global justice theory is deeply critical of the statist perspective of conventional liberal justice theory (see Beitz 1999; Caney 2005; Pogge 1997; Rawls 2001; Tan 2004). It has criticized the most famous modern liberal theory, John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, the best-known philosophical basis for integrationist thinking, for being preoccupied with justice within the state and for ignoring the claims of communities that exist beyond it. Global justice theorists criticize conventional liberal accounts for beginning with the assumption of the equal moral worth of persons but ending up with a conception of justice that affirms the equal moral worth of citizens. State borders, global justice theorists claim, represent a significant embarrassment to the universality and moral worth of persons that underpins most liberal theory, because people’s life chances, opportunities, well-being, and exercise of autonomy—and indeed the protection of their rights—currently depend on where they are born (Kymlicka 2001). One might therefore expect global justice theorists to contribute to the question of divided nations. In principle one might have a conception of a globally just world based on an idealization of Woodrow Wilson’s speeches, in which the equality of all nations would become a fundamental tenet of international decision-making bodies. In fact, however, global justice theorists have nothing to say about the claims of divided nations, or about how they are disadvantaged by current state borders. Rather they are cosmopolitan, focused on the injustice of state borders in principle, not just current borders, and their focus is on global distributive justice, which should, they think, lead to resource transfers from the wealthy countries of the world to the less developed. There is no room here for particularistic attachments, whether of the citizens of integrationist theory, the ethnic and national communities that are emphasized by accommodationists, or—the focus of this volume—divided nations. In short, the dominant conception of global justice accepts the fundamental assumptions of statist justice but extends them across the globe: the world is conceived of as a state writ large. The relevant shortcomings of global justice theory are set out more fully in this volume by Margaret Moore (Chapter 1).

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International relations theory (especially security studies) has generally had a squarely exogenous focus on relations between states. It is focused on stability, power, and order. It takes the state, seen as a “nation-state,” as the fundamental unit of analysis and the building block of the international order. It flows out of the Westphalian system that sees peace as requiring respect for state sovereignty and existing state borders. In this conception the internationally acknowledged right of peoples to self-determination relates only to states and the administrative units of colonial empires, and not to communities that are subsets of these units or that exist across their frontiers (see Mayall 1990; Weller, Metzger, and Johnson 2008). Most international relations theorists who have examined the subject of divided nations have seen their claims in an entirely negative light—as contributing to irredentism, understood to mean an annexationist ambition by one state to take some of the territory of another. One recent book on irredentism, written by two international relations scholars, sees it as responsible for virtually every major conflict in the twentieth century, including both world wars as well as the Balkan wars of the 1990s (Saideman and Ayres 2008). Irredentism is seen as contributing to the intractability of current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; as continuing to destabilize the Balkans, Caucasus, and Horn of Africa; and as threatening a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan (over Kashmir). The Cyprus problem is identified as a result of Turkish irredentism, while the Northern Ireland conflict, we are confidently informed, was “essentially an irredentist problem,” which flowed from the “demand . . . to unify the island—to bring Northern Ireland under Ireland’s sovereignty” (Saideman and Ayres 2008, 4). As with the literature on integration, accommodation, and global justice, there is therefore no sign in mainstream international relations literature to suggest that the claims of divided nations have any legitimacy, or that the denial of these claims might contribute to instability, or any examination of how these claims might be treated, including in ways that might avoid the redrawing of state boundaries. The realist international relations perspective defends the Westphalian system, where the stability and hardness of borders are fundamental to the system’s overall stability and states are the relevant order-maintaining political communities. Th is approach differs from the global justice literature in having a (moral) argument for boundaries, based on the peacepreserving merits of order, but it has no argument for where borders should be drawn or any deeper argument that entitles people or authorities to

18

Introduction

dismiss the moral value of ties of membership and community that transcend the state. All four bodies of literature briefly examined here therefore share a common failure to take seriously the claims of divided nations, or they base their negative dismissal of such claims on what we would regard as selective evidence. There is one other body of literature, which we have not addressed here, that might seem pertinent: namely territorial regionalism (see Hooghe, Marks, and Schakel 2010; Jeffery and Wincott 2010). It shares some of our criticism of the “integrationist” and “globalization” schools and indeed empirically observes a globalization-induced move to “regional” and “local” politics, focused on progressive local democracy and the protection of the (local) welfare state (see also Colomer 2007). These thinkers condemn the “methodological nationalism” of integrationist social science and find inadequate the “methodological cosmopolitanism” of the globalization literature, arguing instead for a “methodological regionalism.” They have something in common with the pluralist federalism writers, but most of these scholars are interested in local or regional politics that have little to do with ethnicity and nationalism, and they still remain focused within the state and not on nations that cross state borders.

The Contribution of This Book The current volume is therefore significantly different from the existing literature in the political and social sciences. Most obviously it is focused on divided nations. Moreover the authors do not assume that divided nations are necessarily negative phenomena that threaten domestic or international stability, or that should be treated as irrelevant in considerations of justice. They understand, of course, that kin-state politics can often be manipulative and deeply problematic, and Bahcheli and Noel take the view in their chapter that “kin-state relations” are necessarily poisonous (Chapter 10). But the general theme across the volume is the recognition, both empirical and normative, that divided nations may be durable (intergenerational) political communities with legitimate claims, and that diplomatic and political failures to address these legitimate claims often contribute to instability and injustice. Even though what is required to accommodate the claims of divided nations may sometimes suggest the danger of disorder, it is not clear that this risk automatically negates their claims for justice. Rather, as a small

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number of realists recognize, the current statist order is achieved only through perpetuating some forms of injustice against certain nations, by denying their just or legitimate claims to collective self-determination, to control over their internal life, and to self-government across state borders. We and our coauthors here are not committed, however, to the reverse normative bias of accepting all the claims made on behalf of all divided nations, but neither are we automatically hostile to them in advance. We treat the claims of states with equal skepticism. It is a striking feature of divided nations that they generally make their claims in the language of justice rather than of status assertion. They typically argue that their ties to conationals and to their homeland are legitimate and should be recognized, rather than ignored, denied, or explained away. We do not here directly elaborate these normative arguments, but we do insist that if such arguments can be made in defense of the accommodation of nationals within the state—namely that they are communities with shared identities and interests, that they need some common jurisdictional authority to govern themselves, and that they have important ties to place and to homeland—then such arguments must also have some plausible muster among divided nations. Moreover there are forms of accommodation that can address these claims without altering state borders and that can soften rather than abolish states’ sovereignty. The other distinctive focus of this volume is on how global and international organizations may be affecting the fate and opportunities of divided nations. Specifically we are interested in whether the organizations associated with European integration, including the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and particularly the European Union, might allow the claims of divided nations to be accommodated. There are arguably several ways in which European integration has affected or may come to affect the claims of divided nations. European integration was a response to World War II (see inter alia Haas 1968; Hoffmann 1995; Judt 1996; Milward 1992, 2005). It is typically seen as having championed respect for existing state borders and as having delegitimized irredentism and aggressive kin-state nationalism. The fact that borders are questioned less than they were in Europe, suggest some, may have facilitated the more recent sanctioning of greater cross-border linkages between different segments of divided nations. As Michael Keating has suggested, “Wider experience shows that one condition for transcending and penetrating borders is . . . that they should not be under political

20

Introduction

challenge, so that every move, even on apparently innocuous cultural or economic cooperation, is seen as a threat to the stability of the polity” (2008, 9). Interstate cooperation in a Euro-federalist direction, in the famous neofunctionalist theses, is also hypothesized to have been encouraged by economic and technological change and by indirect and incremental adaptation (see Haas 1968). In addition there is alleged to be “increasing acceptance that policies and agencies operating only on a nation-state basis cannot possibly cope with wider economic and technological forces and trends,” as one future Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner put it (Hume 1993, 229). It is claimed that norms of “sovereignty-sharing” and “sovereignty-pooling” have developed as a result of these functional demands and the experience of cooperation in the European Union, the European Common Defense and Security Policy, and the European Convention on Human Rights (Keating 2006; for such arguments applied to Ireland, see Hume 1996; Kearney 2003; Meehan 2000). The EU directly encourages cross-border initiatives through its programs, including INTERREG, while the Council of Europe, through the Madrid Convention, has produced a legal instrument for establishing crossborder partnerships (Keating 2006). Such European-induced cross-border cooperation provides obvious political potential for divided nations, and these incentives have been credited, rightly or wrongly, with a number of cross-border agreements, including those that exist between Italy and Austria for the German speakers of South Tyrol and between Britain and Ireland for Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland. The alleged increasing plethora of cross-border arrangements across Europe makes it easier for divided nations to promote cooperation on functional rather than directly political grounds, as the sort of development that is becoming routine within Europe (Alcock 2001, 177). European integration is said to have “softened” state borders that cut across nations, making it easier for their members to mix and possess multiple residency and citizenship rights of property and employment, thereby reducing the importance of national possession of a state (Danspeckgruber 2002, 51). The Single European Act has reduced the significance of borders within the EU by removing restrictions on the flow of capital, goods, services, and labor, turning them, in John Hume’s strongly worded opinion, into little more than “county boundaries” (1993, 227). It is true that within the Schengen Treaty countries there is now no need for visas or passports— though other forms of ID are required. There is now a monetary union, with a single currency within a majority of the EU’s twenty-seven member

Introduction

21

states, that makes it even easier and less costly for persons to move back and forth across member-state boundaries. European integration is also directly associated with the promotion of minority rights by a number of European organizations. Members of the Council of Europe have voluntarily made themselves legally subject to the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights. Since the early 1990s a number of international documents and policies have promoted the international protection of national minorities. These include the Copenhagen Declaration (Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe [CSCE]); the Council of Europe’s European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages (1992); the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National and Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1992); and the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1995). In 1993 the CSCE, having become the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), was deeply concerned by the violence that accompanied the breakup of the Soviet Union and especially Yugoslavia. In consequence it established the office of the High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM). The HCNM’s function is to monitor the treatment of national minorities and to encourage, through quiet diplomacy, member states to adopt policies conducive to stable intergroup relations (Kemp 2001). These initiatives to protect minorities have become connected to the EU (and NATO) through the device of “conditionality.” Since the meeting of the European Council at Copenhagen in 1993, respect for “minority rights” has allegedly become one of the four conditionality criteria that candidate member states must meet before they can accede to the European Union. Positive assessments of the impact of this conditionality on minority rights are numerous (see Brusis 2003; Galbreath 2003; Jurado 2006; Kelley 2004; Vermeersch 2003). There are, however, more skeptical assessments too, based on careful empirical research (see Hughes, Sasse, and Gordon 2005). We asked the contributors to evaluate these arguments in their respective case studies. These developments in international minority rights protection in Europe sought to modify a major weakness of the international order established by the United Nations after 1945, namely the fact that minorities were dependent solely on the state in which they resided for protection, with the highly arguable exception of protection against genocide (Schabas 2000). Even where such rights protections were provided in the legal regimes of

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Introduction

individual states, in the post-1945 period they were typically tied to nationbuilding integrationist projects, in which there was protection for classical individual rights and liberal freedoms but no substantive protection for the culture of national identity of minorities (see Choudry 2009). We therefore asked our contributors to consider whether the existence of an external European regime of rights protection has made it easier for divided nations to accept existing political borders or reduced the incentives for kin-states to engage in irredentist politics. The European Union is sometimes seen as facilitating autonomy for minorities. States that have been prepared to share sovereignty with Brussels are said to be prepared to share it with their regions, including those dominated by minority nations (see for example Danspeckgruber 2002; Miall, Ramsbotham, and Woodhouse 1999). The European principle of subsidiarity is seen as pushing in the same direction. Since the European Union Treaties of Maastricht (1992) and Amsterdam (1997), the doctrine of “subsidiarity” has allegedly become a “sophisticated legal mechanism . . . that can be used to help avoid nationalistic tensions by permitting devolution in areas of cultural identity,” and as the EU expands, it looks set to “become a condition sine qua non” for a functioning Union (Danspeckgruber 2002, 180). The “demonstration effect” of decentralization by large EU member states such as Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain is seen by some as promoting the same trends. Membership in transnational bodies, such as the EU and NATO, is hypothesized to reduce fears of security threats, irredentism, and distortion of markets that might occur through granting autonomy to minorities (Keating and McGarry 2001; McGarry and Keating 2006). Autonomy not only permits segments of divided nations more control over their collective existence but also facilitates the construction of cross-border “regional” political communities (Danspeckgruber 2002, 185). Together all these changes are being hypothesized to erode classical limitations on self-determination, in which the “integrity” and “unity” of sovereignty, territory, nationality, and state were jointly insisted on in domestic and international law. The changes are believed to be opening up opportunities for members of divided nations that do not require the disruption, chaos, and possible bloodshed historically associated with redrawing sovereign borders. In some views, these hypothesized changes are also promoting the possibility of more fluid identities and of more multiple allegiances, both within states and across them. In the new Europe people are said to be free

Introduction

23

to identify not just with their nations, or no nation, but also with their functions, localities, regions, and states, in Europe and beyond. Europe’s “postWestphalian,” “postnational,” or “neomedieval” order is said to provide the space to move beyond both the integrationist vision of a nation-state of undifferentiated individuals and the multiculturalist’s alleged vision of relatively fi xed ethnic and national communities, toward a more complex web of multiple and overlapping allegiances that can incorporate those who identify with divided nations and a range of other identities. To assess these hypothetical effects of European integration on and its limits and opportunities for divided nations, the contributors to this book examine how matters have and are unfolding in the cases with which they are familiar. These cases include communities that are within the borders of the European Union, such as Irish, Basques, and Germans; communities that are partly within the European Union, such as Hungarians; and communities that are not yet within it but are on its borders and near its prospective borders, such as Albanians, Serbs, and Kurds. The findings of the various contributors are summarized and analyzed in the concluding chapter. Notes 1. It is Kosova in Albanian, though known as Kosovo (Косово) in Serbian and, so far, in English. We generally call nations and states what they officially call themselves, except where that may cause confusion. 2. The Roma are an ethnic minority spread across multiple European states, but we do not treat them as a “nation,” though we do not deny that they may develop such consciousness. Currently they lack collective institutions or the ambition to achieve self-government as a nation, even in the states in which they live, and they also lack cultural and linguistic unity. 3. Even those who want to include Turks and Rus sians within the adjectival embrace of “European” should not automatically accept such claims to demographic primacy. The Turks are a majority of Turkey’s population, but not all of that state’s people are Turks, contrary to the country’s recent constitutions. The large numbers of minorities slowly being re-recognized in Turkey warn us that there are fewer Turks, for now, than there are Germans. If Turkey is regarded as of Europe, irrespective of views on whether it should be in the European Union, then there may be more Kurds already in Europe than there are Danes, Norwegians, Irish, and Scots combined. There are 115 million ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation, but Russians comprise a large majority of the 45 million citizens of that federation who live in and east of the Urals, one standard definition of the frontier of Europe. On Russia’s demographic trends, it is correct to argue that there are more Germans in Europe than there

24

Introduction

are Russians—if Eu rope is the peninsula of Asia that begins in the western slopes of the Urals. 4. Irredentism is not the same as annexationism, the desire forcibly to incorporate a territory into a state irrespective of the inhabitants’ wishes. Irredentism is a project of conationals who agree that a politically unified nation is desirable—such a project may, of course, coerce or ignore others’ wishes, but it derives its impetus from a mutual will to unity across majorities in the segments of the divided nation. 5. The Basques of Euskadi (the autonomous community of the Basque Country), once fiercely ethnically exclusionary, are now generally open to the inclusion of immigrants of non-Basque origin, particularly if they learn Basque (however superficially). The Irish nation derived from Ireland’s Gaelic and “old English” Catholic peoples is a “territorialized national community” in independent Ireland, open to the inclusion of Irish Protestants of English or Scottish forebears and, more recently, to immigrants from Eastern Europe that were the fruits of Ireland’s two-decade-long experience as the “Celtic Tiger.” 6. There are also hypocritical integrationists. They hail from the state’s dominant community and use integrationist arguments to resist accommodation. Some combine civic nationalist arguments in their own states with an ethnically based irredentist politics directed at their neighbors. Think, for example, of those Turkish nationalists who use integrationist arguments to resist the accommodation of Turkey’s Kurds but use ethnic arguments to press their ties with the Turkish Cypriots. The arguments made by Kurds in Turkey about autonomy, group rights, and peoplehood are the same arguments that Ankara has used to press for a two-state solution or a “bizonal, bicommunal federation” for Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus. 7. Poland is generally seen as having been more “nationalizing” toward its German minorities than the more “liberal” Czechs were, but the interwar Czechs have had better press. 8. Integrationists happily recognize private diversity; it is public recognition of differences that is discouraged, with the possible exception of temporary affi rmative action schemes. Integrationists counsel against the ethnicization of political parties or civic associations and favor electoral systems that discourage the mobilization of parties around ethnic differences, preferring systems that require winners to achieve broad-based support. They back executive systems that favor candidates who rise above religious, linguistic, and ethnic factions. Integrationists frown on the delegation of public policy functions to minority nationalities, or ethnic or religious groups. They encourage the establishment of schools and jurisdictional authorities that encourage ethnic communities to mix and to integrate. They oppose publicly funded religious school systems or any form of autonomy, territorial or nonterritorial, that is based on groups. These are seen as strengthening separate identities among minority populations, promoting resentment among groups that are not privileged, and in the case of territorial autonomy, facilitating discrimination against local minorities. Integrationists point to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovak ia, and Yugoslavia for a glimpse of the fate

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of states that accommodate national minorities through territorial arrangements (see Bunce 1999; Leff 1998; Roeder 2007; Snyder 2000). 9. The agreement was more popular among nationalists than unionists and was supported by the latter’s elites in part because the British government had made it clear that without agreement, Northern Ireland would be governed not just from Westminster alone but from Westminster in cooperation with Dublin (see O’Leary 2004). 10. More recently Kymlicka has added “consociational power-sharing” as sometimes sought by national minorities (2007, 215). 11. Quotations in this paragraph are from Kymlicka 1996, 11, 10, 20. 12. For example, Kymlicka (1996, 27–30) explains that national minorities seek “self-government” rights, with self-government understood as internal to the state, and he supports international protection for minority rights within states, not international protection for the rights of nations that exist across state boundaries. 13. Kymlicka writes that “it is precisely claims relating to residence in a historic homeland that are at stake in all of the violent ethnic confl icts in post-communist Europe—for example, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Georgia, Chechnya, NagornoKarabakh. Indeed, homeland claims are at the heart of most violent ethnic conflicts in the West as well (e.g., the Basque Country, Cyprus, Corsica, and Northern Ireland). In all of these cases, minorities claim the right to govern themselves in what they view as their historic homeland” (2007, 202). Most of these cases involve segments of divided nations: the Basque Country (Basques in Spain and France); Bosnia (Croats and Serbs); Kosovo (Albanians and Serbs); Macedonia (Albanians); Georgia (South Ossetians); Nagorno-Karabakh (Armenians); Cyprus (Cypriot Turks); and Northern Ireland (Irish nationalists). 14. Kymlicka distinguishes between indigenous peoples and “substate national minorities.” The latter include “the Scots and Welsh in the United Kingdom; the Catalans and Basques in Spain; the Flemish in Belgium; the Corsicans in France; the German minority in South Tyrol” (2007, 177). This category can, however, be usefully subdivided further into groups, such as the Scots, that desire nationhood wholly within one existing polity and others, such as the Basques of Spain, Catalans of Spain, and South Tyrolese, that are part of larger partitioned communities and that seek ties among these communities. Indeed the former category can be subdivided in the same way. Some indigenous communities are internal to states, while others, for example the Mohawks of the Iroquois confederacy, are found on both sides of the Canada-US border. The Mohawks’ aspirations for ties across state borders have been accommodated: Their reservations exist as single entities straddling the international border. 15. This shift introduces another distinction between Kymlicka’s work (2007) and classical consociational theory. The latter was developed during the Cold War when international organizations or outside actors rarely concerned themselves with the management of diversity, and consociational theory, as a consequence, has had little to say on the subject (McGarry and O’Leary 2006). It treated political systems as if they were sealed entities, impervious from exogenous forces.

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16. Elsewhere Kymlicka argues that “states will never voluntarily accord rights and powers to minorities if they think this will increase the likelihood of minorities acting as potential collaborators with, or as a ‘fi ft h column’ for, a neighboring enemy” (2007, 118, 256–57). He appears to see this resistance as always understandable, acknowledging these fears as “credible” (2007, 118, 213, 256–57). 17. Kymlicka also criticizes international institutions and states for conceding self-government only to minorities who can fight for it, rather than to all national minorities as a norm or legal right, and he concludes that “the differential treatment of minority claims to autonomy can only be explained as a concession to realpolitik” (2007, 243). 18. Several writers use the term “methodological nationalism” to describe the nation-state assumptions that underwrite much of modernist social science, including history, sociology, law, and political science (see Beck 2007; Jeffery and Wincott 2010; Wimmer and Schiller 2002). We believe, however, that the term “methodological statism” is more appropriate, because what social scientists have really been fi xated on is the state (which may often be multinational). 19. Mainstream international relations theory might usefully be seen as the exogenous branch of integrationist theory. 20. Kin-state nationalism describes a state dominated by a par ticu lar nation that seeks to play a role in the affairs of national kin in neighboring states. It falls short of irredentism, which seeks to redraw boundaries, and should be distinguished from it. Kin-state nationalism involves such policies as transferring funds to national kin in neighboring states to help them maintain their culture or standard of living, or that facilitate the access of the kin to the state dominated by their nation. In principle such policies can be conducted in cooperation with neighboring states, but they are often pursued unilaterally and thereby occasion confl ict. 21. For credit across Ireland being given to “Europe,” see Hume 1993 and Meehan 2000; for credit across Austria and Tyrol, see Danspeckgruber 2002, 192–94. 22. There are also no such requirements between the UK and Ireland, though this fact preceded Eu ropean Community membership. The UK and Ireland are not,  however, part of the Schengen treaty area, which also contains states outside the EU. 23. The principle is usually rendered as one of decentralization in everyday speech. In fact it is a normative principle, first articulated within the Roman Catholic Church, which requires decisions to be made at the appropriate level in any hierarchy. Because it stipulates that it is wrong for a higher level to usurp the authority of a lower level, it is usually glossed as supporting decentralization. The principle can, however, also mean that a region should not usurp the functions of a member state and that a member state should not usurp the functions of the EU. 24. This is how we gloss and composite arguments made inter alia by Anderson (2008a), Beck (2006), Beck and Grande (2007), Danspeckgruber (2002), Hume (1993), Kearney (2003), Linklater (1998), and Meehan (2000).

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25. The idea that European integration is producing a “post-Westphalian,” “cosmopolitan,” or “neomedieval” order is associated respectively with Linklater (1998), Beck and Grande (2007), and Bull (1977). References Alcock, Antony. 2001. From Conflict to Agreement in Northern Ireland: Lessons from Europe in Northern Ireland and the Divided World. In The Northern Ireland Agreement in Comparative Perspective, ed. J. McGarry, 159–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, James. 2008a. Partition, Consociation, Border-Crossing: Some Lessons from the National Conflict in Ireland/Northern Ireland. Nations and Nationalism 14 (1): 85–104. Anderson, Perry. 2008b. The Divisions of Cyprus. London Review of Books 30 (8): 7–16. Archibugi, Daniele, and David Held. 1995. Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Barry, Brian. 2001. Culture & Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism. Oxford: Polity. Beck, Ulrich. 2006. Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge, MA: Polity. ———. 2007. The Cosmopolitan Condition: Why Methodological Nationalism Fails. Theory Culture & Society 24 (7–8): 286–90. Beck, Ulrich, and Edgar Grande. 2007. Cosmopolitan Europe. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Beitz, Charles R. 1999. Political Theory and International Relations. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blanke, Richard. 1993. Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland 19181939. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Brass, Paul R. 1991. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison. New Delhi: Sage. ———, ed. 1996. Riots and Pogroms. New York: New York University Press. Breen, Keith, and Shane O’Neill, eds. 2010. After the Nation? Critical Reflections on Nationalism and Postnationalism. Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave. Breton, Albert. 1964. The Economics of Nationalism. Journal of Political Economy 72 (4 (August)): 376–86. Brubaker, Rogers. 1996a. National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External National Homelands in the New Europe. In Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, 55–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996b. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996c. Rethinking Nationhood: Nation as Institutionalized Form, Practical Category, Contingent Event. In Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, 13–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2006. Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brusis, Martin. 2003. The European Union and Interethnic Power-Sharing Arrangements in Accession Countries. Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 1 (1): 1–20. Bull, Hedley. 1977. The Anarchical Society. London: Macmillan. Bunce, Valerie. 1999. Peaceful versus Violent State Dismemberment: A Comparison of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovak ia. Politics & Society 27 (2): 217–37. Caney, Simon. 2005. Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Choudry, Sujit. 2009. Bills of Rights as Instruments of Nation-Building in Multinational States: The Canadian Charter and Quebec Nationalism. In Contested Constitutionalism: Reflections on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, ed. J. B. Kelly and C. P. Manfredi, 231–50. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Colomer, Josep M. 2007. Great Empires, Small Nations: The Uncertain Future of the Sovereign State. London: Routledge. Danspeckgruber, Wolfgang. 2002. Self-determination and Regionalization in Contemporary Europe. In The Self-determination of Peoples: Community, Nation and State in an Interdependent World, ed. W. Danspeckgruber, 165–200. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Denitch, Bodgan. 1994. Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deutsch, Karl. 1966. Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundation of Nationality. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gagnon, Alain-G. 2009. The Case for Multinational Federalism: Beyond the AllEncompassing Nation. London: Routledge. Galbreath, David. 2003. The Politics of European Integration and Minority Rights in Estonia and Latvia. Perspectives on European Politics and Society 4 (1): 35–53. Goodin, Robert E. 2002a. Justice in One Jurisdiction: No More. Philosophical Topics 30 (2): 29–48. ———. 2002b. What Is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen? In Patriotism, ed. I.  Primoratz, 141–66. New York: Humanity Books. Guéhenno, Jean-Marie. 2000 (1995). The End of the Nation-State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haas, Ernst B. 1968. The Uniting of Europe. 2nd ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1997. Nationalism, Liberalism, and Progress. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2000. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Trans. M. Pensky. 1st ed. Oxford: Polity. Hayden, Robert M. 1992. Constitutional Nationalism in the Former Yugoslav Republics. Slavic Review 51 (4): 654–73.

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———. 1999. Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflict. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoff mann, Stanley. 1995. The European Sisyphus: Essays on Europe, 1964–1994. Boulder, CO: Westview. Hooghe, Liesbet, Gary Marks, and Arjan H. Schakel. 2010. The Rise of Regional Authority: A Comparative Study of 42 Democracies. New York: Routledge. Hughes, James, Gwendolyn Sasse, and Claire Gordon. 2005. Europeanization and Regionalization in the EU’s Enlargement: The Myth of Conditionality (One Europe or Several). London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Hume, John. 1993. A New Ireland in a New Eu rope. In Northern Ireland and the Politics of Reconciliation, ed. D. Keogh and M. H. Haltzel, 226–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. A New Ireland: Politics, Peace and Reconciliation. Boulder, CO: Roberts Rinehart. Jackson Preece, Jennifer. 1998. National Minorities and the European Nation-States System. New York: Clarendon. Jeffery, Charlie, and Daniel Wincott. 2010. The Challenge of Territorial Politics: Beyond Methodological Nationalism. In New Directions in Political Science: Responding to the Challenges of an Interdependent World, ed. C. Hay, 167–88. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Judt, Tony. 1996. A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe. New York: Hill & Wang. Jurado, Elena. 2006. Liberalizing Estonia’s Citizenship Policy: The Role of the Eu ropean Union, OSCE and Council of Eu rope. In European Integration and the Nationalities Question, ed. J. McGarry and M. Keating, 258–72. London: Routledge. Kearney, Richard. 2003. Britain and Ireland: Towards a Post-nationalist Archipelago. In Contextualizing Secession: Normative Studies in Comparative Perspective, ed. B. Coppieters and R. Sakwa, 97–111. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keating, Michael. 2006. Europe, the State and the Nation. In European Integration and the Nationalities Question, ed. J. McGarry and M. Keating, 23–34. London: Routledge. ———. In press. Territorial Autonomy in Nationally Divided Societies: The Experience of the United Kingdom, Spain, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Assessing Territorial Pluralism, ed. J. McGarry and R. Simeon. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Keating, Michael, and John McGarry. 2001. Introduction. In Minority Nationalism and the Changing International Order, ed. M. Keating and J. McGarry, 1–18. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelley, Judith. 2004. Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Kemp, Walter. 2001. Quiet Diplomacy in Action: The OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. Berlin: Springer. Krugman, Paul R. 1992. Currencies and Crises. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kymlicka, Will. 1996. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 2001. Territorial Boundaries: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective. In Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, ed. D. Miller and S. Hashmi, 249–75. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Leff, Carol S. 1998. The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation versus State. Boulder, CO: Westview. Lijphart, Arend. 1969. Consociational Democracy. World Politics 21 (2): 207–25. ———. 1975a. The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1975b. Review Article: The Northern Ireland Problem; Cases, Theories and Solutions. British Journal of Political Science 5 (3): 83–106. ———. 1977. Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1985. Consociational Theory and Its Critics. In Power-Sharing in South Africa, 83–117. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2008. Thinking about Democracy: Power Sharing and Majority Rule in Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Linklater, Andrew. 1998. The Transformation of Political Community. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Marx, Anthony W. 2003. Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mayall, James. 1990. Nationalism and International Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mazower, Mark. 1998. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane–Penguin Press. ———. 2008. Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Penguin Press. McGarry, John, and Michael Keating. 2006. European Integration and the Nationalities Question. London: Routledge. McGarry, John, and Brendan O’Leary. 1995. Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2011. Territorial Approaches to Ethnic Conflict Settlement. In The Routledge Handbook on Ethnic Conflict, ed. K. Cordell and S. Wolff, 249–65. London: Routledge. ———. 2006. Consociational Theory, Northern Ireland’s Conflict, and Its Agreement: Part One; What Consociationalists Can Learn from Northern Ireland. Government and Opposition 41(1): 43–63.

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McGarry, John, Brendan O’Leary, and Richard Simeon. 2008. Integration or Accommodation? The Enduring Debate in Conflict Regulation. In Constitutional Design for Divided Societies: Integration or Accommodation?, ed. S. Choudhry, 41–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meehan, Elizabeth M. 2000. Britain’s Irish Question: Britain’s European Question? British-Irish Relations in the Context of the European Union and the Belfast Agreement. Review of International Studies 26 (1): 83–97. Miall, Hugh, Oliver Ramsbotham, and Tom Wood house. 1999. Contemporary Conflict Resolution: The Prevention, Management and Transformation of Deadly Conflict. Oxford: Polity. Miller, David. 1995. On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milward, Alan. 1992. The European Rescue of the Nation-State. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. Politics and Economics in the History of the European Union. London: Routledge. Nordlinger, Eric A. 1972. Conflict Regulation in Divided Societies. Vol. 29. Cambridge, MA: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. O’Leary, Brendan. 2004. The Nature of the Agreement. In The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements, by J. McGarry and B. O’Leary, 260–93. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. O’Leary, Brendan, and John McGarry. 2012. The Politics of Accommodation: Surveying National & Ethnic Conflict Regulation in Democratic States. In The Study of Politics and Ethnicity: Recent Analytical Developments, ed. A. Guelke and J. Tournon, 79–116. Leverkusen Opladen: Barbara Budrich. Pogge, Thomas. 1997. The Bounds of Nationalism. Internationale Gerechtigkeit 7: 55– 90. Rawls, John. 2001. The Law of Peoples: With the Idea of Public Reason Revisited. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Requejo, Ferran. 2005. Multinational Federalism and Value Pluralism: The Spanish Case. London: Routledge. Roeder, Philip G. 2007. Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Saideman, Stephen M., and R. William Ayres. 2008. For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism, and War. New York: Columbia University Press. Schabas, William A. 2000. Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schlesinger, Stephen C. 2003. Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations; A  Story of Superpowers, Secret Agents, Wartime Allies and Enemies, and Their Quest for a Peaceful World. Boulder, CO: Westview. Silber, Laura, and Alan Little. 1996. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. London: Penguin Press. Snyder, Jack. 2000. From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict. New York: W. W. Norton.

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CHAPTER 1

Divided Nations and Challenges to Statist and Global Theories of Justice Margaret Moore

Introduction This chapter examines the conceptual resources and limitations of two dominant traditions in political theory regarding cases of nationally mobilized groups that straddle borders. The first tradition encompasses fairly traditional, state-centric, and liberal-democratic justice theories, of which John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971) is a leading example. The second tradition involves more recent theories of global justice, such as those advanced by Thomas Pogge (2002) and Simon Caney (2005). Although there is not space here for a full exposition of this point, one of the reasons why both types of justice theory are limited is that both focus on individual equality. On the state-centric view, a just state comprises equal citizens, enjoying equal political rights and equality under the law; and on the global (cosmopolitan) justice view, justice is conceived of in terms of equality (of condition) of all people in the world. Neither focuses on, or even theorizes, more particularist attachments that national groups have (for comembers or for land). It is implicit in my argument that if justice theory proceeded from the perspective of such groups, the primary focus would not be on individual equality, understood in terms of a metric for relating individual well-being, but on the relationship between individual equality and particularist attachments. There are several distinctive features of the groups with which this chapter is concerned. They are nationally mobilized in the sense that each group has

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some nationalist leaders, who aspire to collective self-government but are thwarted by the fact that the group is dissected by state borders. Th is aspiration usually emanates from or is indicative of an overarching national identity that encompasses as conationals people on the other side of the border, with whom they do not share a citizenship arrangement but which is not a global identity either, since it is a particularist, special relationship with other members of the group, most of whom they have never met. Such groups are internally heterogeneous. As with any group of people, there is a plurality of conceptions of the good, both individual and collective; and many people who are ascriptively members of the group may not share the aspiration for such a political project or even self-identify as members of the group. In many cases the identity as a member of a group exists alongside many other competing identities, including positional ones within the group. Even when they share an identity as group members, they may have quite different conceptions of their relationships in the group and with each other, depending on their positions as defined by the border. For example, people who are majorities in the state but who have conationals on the other side of the border may have a quite different conception of themselves and their conationals than do people who are minorities in a state dominated by another group but whose conationals are dominant in an adjacent state. These kinds of variability are entirely to be expected and not important to the argument. However, it is important to the definitional category that there is a generally shared conception of a group as constituting one group, even if that group is internally differentiated and heterogeneous in various ways. If that generally shared conception of being a group is not present at all, then that group is not the kind with which this chapter is concerned. In many cases, however, this internal plurality and heterogeneity does not negate the fact that a reasonably large number of people do seem to share an aspiration that the group be collectively self-governing: that is, nationalist leaders command support (win seats) in free and fair elections; or, where elections are marred by fraud and violence (or they are nonexistent), moderate to high levels of support can be imputed from the fact that nationalist leaders seem to have a following; they shape the political discourse; and so on. When this condition holds, the question remains of the extent to which the dominant political theories of justice can accommodate or even theorize the aspiration for collective self-government for groups in this position.

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The second characteristic of the groups under consideration is that there is a strong territorial dimension to them. They are not diasporic people who are scattered to many lands but originate in one. In contrast, they have a conception of a national territory, or homeland, that extends beyond the jurisdictional authority of the state in which they live, to an adjacent state in which they (or nationalist leaders of the group) claim particular (historic) attachment. Such minorities are often viewed by state actors as a source of instability, as targets of irredentism, or simply as traitorous if they make claims to territorial self-government. Even normative political philosophers, who are primarily interested in the requirements of justice and the policies, practices, rules, and rights of the just political order, have not theorized their conceptions of justice from the perspective of such groups. There are many examples of such groups: Albanians in Albania, Kosovo (Serbia), and Macedonia; the Irish in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; Basques in Spain and France; Greek and Turkish Cypriots; Hungarians in Hungary, Serbia, and Romania—to name a few in Europe. Outside Europe there are many more: Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria; Azeris in Azerbaijan and Iran; indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. The goal in this chapter is not to examine any particular group but primarily to show how categories and theories, dominant in normative political philosophy, fit with the situation of such groups. The claims of people who see themselves as a single homeland people but whose homeland and membership are straddled by state borders challenge the two dominant schools or traditions of political philosophy—both statecentric and global justice theories—in two different ways. First, such groups raise questions about the basic legitimacy of the state, where legitimacy is understood as raising questions about people’s identification with the state and where this is often (in the literature) equated with the question of the justice of the state. Second, neither tradition in political philosophy deals well with attachment to territory. States assume jurisdictional control over territory, and cosmopolitan justice theories tend to view land as akin to natural resources, but both fail to consider attachments that many people have to particular territories (even territories that are not resource rich). This chapter then outlines the central positions in political philosophy, using Rawls’s argument in A Theory of Justice and developed subsequently in other works as typical of a statist liberal-democratic conception and the arguments of Pogge, Caney, and others, who are deeply critical of the statist

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framework, as typical of a global justice perspective. One might assume that theories of global justice, which are critical of the state order, hold out more promise for addressing the situation of such groups. An argument in this chapter is that the evidence does not support this hypothesis. Two challenges posed by such groups to both types of theories are examined, with a view not simply to develop a negative critique of these theories but to look at the resources available to such theories to accommodate or fully understand the issue.

The Scope of Justice Normative political theory’s initial preoccupation with the state and justice within a state has been replaced by a concern for global justice largely based on the increasingly globalized character of the world. In traditional liberaldemocratic political theory, morality is conceived of as interested in the appropriate rules, practices, and behavior of individuals in their dealings with other people and possibly occupants of the life-world (animals, the environment, and so on). It is much broader than but inclusive of justice, including such things as virtue ethics and the actions and attitudes that individuals should express toward each other. Justice, by contrast, is typically narrower; it is concerned with the principles that ought to govern the basic institutional structure of the society. Rawls’s theory of justice, for example, is quite explicit that justice is concerned primarily with the justice of institutions or what he calls the “basic structure” of society. This account of justice as “the first virtue” of social institutions confines questions of justice to the governing arrangement of particular societies; and indeed Rawls explicitly argues in The Law of Peoples that his principles of justice do not apply globally. This is because the global order does not constitute a “basic structure of society,” which is characterized by the presence of two features: (1) it is coercive; and (2) it is an important or formative structure or institutional arrangement in the society. Much has been written about what should be included in the basic structure of society. Some feminist scholars—most notably Susan Moller Okin— have argued that the family should count as part of the basic structure of society (and it certainly meets the second of the two conditions), but others have argued that it is not coercive in the appropriate way (Okin 1989, 89–109).

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More recently theorists of global justice have disagreed with Rawls about limiting the scope of justice to the state and have suggested that the global realm is an arena where not only the strictures of morality but also rules of justice apply, and they have developed two distinct justificatory arguments for this move. There are two rival cosmopolitan theories of distributive justice that are both positioned against the view that the state is the appropriate object of justice claims. Charles Beitz’s argument (1979) is a form of institutionalism, in the sense that he accepts Rawls’s basic view that justice applies to a set of institutions, but Beitz argues that in this increasingly globalized world the global order constitutes a set of institutions, and membership in institutional systems is of moral relevance. By contrast, Pogge argues that justice applies globally because of the increasing networks and webs of interactions that link people together. The appeal in this case is not to a single set of institutions but to the extent of global interdependence (Pogge 2002, 504–7). This interactionist argument is also found in Iris Marion Young’s comments (2006) about global justice, where the applicability of justice claims rests on the networks of interaction between the global rich and the global poor. For both Pogge and Young, distributive justice claims apply only to those linked by interaction, a condition that they argue is met in an increasingly globalized world. This move to describing the world as a sphere in which justice claims apply simply extends the argument for justice in the state in a global direction, by saying that the world now meets the conditions that were once thought to be confined only to the state: the world is like the state writ large. In the sections that follow, I argue that this tendency to theorize global justice as simply a larger or more extensive version of the contemporary state has missed a real opportunity to rethink what a just global order would look like, especially from the point of view of groups that express claims and aspirations that cannot be theorized adequately in the liberal democratic state model.

(State-Centric and Global) Justice Theories and Legitimacy The groups with which this chapter is concerned reveal central problems in the contemporary treatment of conceptions of legitimacy, according to which

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legitimacy is either conflated with justice or conceived of as a less rigorous standard than justice. It is important first to be clear about the terms, especially since “legitimacy” is used in a number of different senses. I argue here that the standard treatment of the issue fails to explain or capture what is raised as problematic by the situation of such groups. On the conception of legitimacy that is often advocated and accepted by social scientists and international lawyers, states are legitimate if they achieve certain kinds of international recognition and are accepted into the community of states. This is not the subject of this chapter, which assumes a basic distinction between “internal” and “external” legitimacy (Walzer 2000, 82). “Internal” legitimacy refers to the moral standing of a governing regime or state in relation to its people. “External” legitimacy has to do with the moral standing of a state with respect to other states. In the “external” or international relations sense, a state is legitimate if it is recognized as an actor among like actors in the Westphalian order of states. The argument here is concerned with internal legitimacy only, understood in terms of the moral relationship between the state and the people over whom political power is wielded. In much political philosophy—such as that deriving from Immanuel Kant and Rawls—to show that a state is justified and to show that it is legitimate require the very same kind of argument. This is true in Rawls’s argument in A Theory of Justice, where the issue of state legitimacy is pursued entirely by examining the conditions of justice and the rules and rights that attach to the just state. The focus is the character of the just state on the assumption that such a state would be legitimate. State-centric justice theories—including Rawls’s Theory of Justice as well as those of Christopher H. Wellman and Allen Buchanan—tend to assume that the unjust state is illegitimate and that the just state is legitimate. In (statist) justice theory, then, the dominant way to view the relationship between justice and legitimacy is to view justice as the primary conceptual category and legitimacy as simply a feature attached to all just states. Drawing on both normative political philosophy and international relations, Buchanan has argued in favor of a conception of “recognitional legitimacy” that distinguishes sharply between justice and legitimacy. On this view, legitimacy represents a (lower) standard than full justice. In Buchanan’s terms (2002), “recognitional legitimacy” refers to the minimum necessary for a state to be recognized as a legitimate player in the global order (even if not fully just). In both versions it is possible to have a just state (which by definition is legiti-

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mate) or a legitimate state (which is not fully just), but not a state that is just but still illegitimate. There is a similar range of treatment in the global justice literature. Many scholars of global justice theory do not explicitly deal with the relationship between justice and legitimacy; but it would seem from the structure of their argument that justice and legitimacy are treated as requiring similar arguments. Pogge, for example, frames his discussion (2002) in terms of the obvious distributive injustices in the current global order—by which he means distributive inequalities of wealth and resources, inequalities of power, and inequalities of input into decision-making. This is the context in which he raises the question of the fundamental moral claims that people have on the global order, and the responsibilities these entail for the people who impose the order (where “impose” is conceived of rather loosely). Pogge’s central concern is with the injustice of the global order, and legitimacy, to the extent that this is raised at all, is derivative on the question of the justice of the global order. Similarly the principal philosophical argument of Caney’s 2005 book on global justice, on which his other arguments are built, is that the internal logic of both rights and the standard theories of distributive justice generates cosmopolitan (universal) principles. This is the logic of contractarian accounts (1979; Richards 1982), consequentialist accounts (Goodin 1988; Singer 1972), and rights-based theories (Pogge 2002; Shue 1980). What is common to all these arguments, he writes, is a “universalist conception of moral personality according to which persons’ entitlements should not be determined by their nationality or citizenship” (Caney 2005, 122). The structure of all these arguments is to defend a valid claim to X based on features or characteristics Y. Caney argues that this rationale therefore applies universally, to all people who share the morally relevant feature(s). This places the burden of argument on those people who seek to limit the scope of application of the theory. This scope argument is crucial to the success of Caney’s general theory of global justice. It allows him to claim that if we accept these principles at the domestic level and if we accept the argument he has just given (namely that these principles have a universal scope or logic), then we have no choice but to accept these principles at the global level. Among these are rights and an equality of opportunity principle. This allows Caney to convert civil and political rights into human rights and to endorse a global equality of opportunity principle. The main feature of this account, as with Pogge’s account, is that the central category is justice, rather than legitimacy: he is not concerned

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with the relationship between the state and its citizens but thinks that this can be entirely explicated in terms of the moral quality of the state (or interstate order), rather than an examination of the relationship, attitudes, and aspirations of people subject to the state. Rawls, in The Law of Peoples, departs from his 1971 treatment of legitimacy as entailed by justice, and also from the other justice theories considered above (Pogge, Caney), by employing the concept of legitimacy as a threshold concept, at least in considering the legitimacy of states for the purposes of developing an international political theory. In this respect it is similar to Buchanan’s concept of “recognitional legitimacy.” Rawls argues in The Law of Peoples that “decent hierarchical peoples” might not be perfectly just but that their government is legitimate at least in the sense that their authority is recognized by those subject to it, and it meets the conditions of (peaceful) compliance (not to be confused with consent). “Decent hierarchical peoples,” unlike pariah states, can be brought within the scope of the law of peoples. It is arguable whether the decent consultative hierarchies are legitimate only in the international relations sense that they have control of their societies or they are legitimate in the sense under consideration here, namely that the moral quality of the relationship between the people and the state is sufficiently good that it merits inclusion in the law of peoples. In summary, most discussions of political legitimacy in contemporary political philosophy tend either (1) to collapse questions of the justification of the state with that of the legitimacy of the state or (2) to treat justice as the more rigorous standard and legitimacy as in some way derivative. This means that there is either no gap between justice and legitimacy or the distinction is treated as equivalent to a distinction between an ideal and less ideal standard. Rawls in A Theory of Justice, as well as Pogge and Caney, assume that the just state (of affairs) is also a legitimate one: the only question at issue is whether a less than ideally just state can also be legitimate. Regarding the first characterization, it is not at all clear that the question of justice and that of legitimacy are identical. To see that there is indeed a gap between these questions, consider Locke’s argument, which justifies the state in natural law terms and legitimates the exercise of its political authority in terms of individual consent. According to A. J. Simmons, arguments that bear on the state’s justification (for example, whether it achieves moral goods) often fail to show that the state has the moral relationship with particular subjects that confers on it political legitimacy in the sense of a right

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to rule them. For Simmons (2001), questions of the justifiability of the state are connected to a comparative assessment of whether a state is better than no state (in response to an anarchist objection), whereas questions of the legitimacy of the state focus more directly on the moral relationship between the state and those people subject to its laws. The second characterization of the relationship between justice and legitimacy, from Rawls in The Law of Peoples, is motivated almost entirely by the need to bring in states other than liberal democratic ( just) states into the international political theory. It addresses not the question of the relationship of groups of people, or the people, to the state but rather the question (at the heart of recognitional legitimacy in international relations or international political theory) of the threshold for requiring recognition. For most justice theories, recognition should track justice (Buchanan 2004), but there may be reasons of toleration and effectiveness, outlined by Rawls in The Law of Peoples, for extending recognition to less than ideally just states. This, however, is a different question than the one of the moral relationship of the governed to the state that exercises coercive authority over them.

National Groups That Straddle Borders and the Two Theories Both treatments of the relationship between justice and legitimacy (in both the state-centric and global justice literature) are problematic for groups such as the kind with which this chapter is concerned. Consider a state X that is just on a minimal conception of justice because, say, it now has a charter of rights, an independent judiciary, adequate democratic input, and so on. However, this state also has a history of antagonism between its two major groups— A’s and B’s—and the minority group B has comembers that are dissected by the border, and many of these people live in an adjacent state. In this case the minority group B may be disaffected from the otherwise just state by three features. First, it is a minority group, so that if it is a majoritarian democracy and if, in this society, voting follows group lines (a condition that is often met in cases where there has been historical antagonism between groups), the minority group can be consistently marginalized from political power. It can be outvoted and outbid in the political process, so that the group perceives that the state is not its state but the state of the majority group. In this case the majority group has the demographic basis to

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control the state—to elect the government, to enforce its policies and extend the dominance of the group in the public sphere—for example, by making its language the language of political and economic power, the language of the courts, the bureaucracy, and so on. Further, the usual democratic mechanisms to ensure that the smaller cultural group has some mechanisms for collective self-government are not available to groups of this kind. The usual mechanisms include granting political space to minorities through internal boundaries, which are designed to give it some institutional recognition of its identity as well as devolved power in which to exercise self-government, and power sharing in the executive and in other levels of government. These are not available to such groups. It is possible to have self-government and power sharing for those members who fall within the state border but not collective self-government, even of a limited kind, for the whole group. Conationals who live within the adjacent state are not included in this arrangement. The second problem is the legitimacy of the borders of the state themselves. Most theories of justice are confined to the rules of the state, to the individual rights accorded to citizens within the state, and to the generality of the rules and the impartiality of the government. But they do not conceive of the justice of the borders as a question within the theory. This was true of Rawls’s theory—which famously (or rather notoriously) confi ned his problem of justice to the basic structure of society “conceived for the time being as a closed system isolated from other societies” (1971, 7). This simplifying assumption had the effect of setting aside the difficult issue of what normative principle ought to be followed in establishing boundaries (between states or even administrative units within states). It also had, in practice, a majoritarian bias since, while the normative ideal in liberal democratic theory is one of equal citizenship and equal rights under the law, in practice, where there are strong national lines of identification (which is often tied to ethnic/ linguistic/cultural lines of affi liation), this might not be possible: in the context outlined above, equal citizenship typically translates into majority control of the state. The borders themselves are structural features of the state: they are not simply reflective of governmental rules and policies, which might be changed by a new regime, but rather are literal and figurative barriers that prevent the group from realizing self-government, even though other groups can. In addition the justice of these borders, and the structure of the state itself, is not theorized or even subject to standard justificatory arguments.

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Third, in cases of nationally mobilized groups where, we are imagining, the people consistently vote for nationalist parties, who seek greater selfgovernment than the state is prepared to offer, the legitimacy of the state is clearly in question. This is not simply the democratic legitimacy of the state that is questioned—where legitimacy is equated with the procedural mechanisms to consider community preference—but legitimacy in the sense that the relationship that exists between the state and (a section of) the people is open to question because these people reject the state in this form. What does this mean for the distinction between justice and legitimacy? At the minimum it does not deny a basic insight of justice theory: that if a state is not justified in relation to a baseline in which there is no state at all, it can hardly be thought to exercise its authority legitimately. However, it fails to demonstrate the reverse: that a justified state (where the pattern of justification is mainly in terms of securing justice) is also a legitimate one. It suggests that the moral quality of the relationship of the people to the state may be poor, even in cases where the state meets the standards of justice. Now, one might object to the argument just outlined and say that it works by assuming that the substantive content of justice is minimalist and/or is purely individualist. If we think that justice is concerned not only with the just treatment of individuals but also with that of groups—and so we have a conception of multinational or multicultural justice—the gap between justice and legitimacy would disappear. I agree with this move, but it is not one that either of the theories canvassed above makes; and the move also incorporates questions of legitimacy—questions of the moral quality of the relationship of the people with the state and how they view the state—into the conception of justice. In this section I have argued that, unlike the case of minority groups within the state, who can be accommodated through territorial autonomy arrangements and power sharing at the center, nations that straddle states find that it is the very structure and boundaries of the states that are contested. This may lead to disaffected citizens, who have legitimate aspirations to collective self-government beyond the state and outside of the state, and whose aspirations raise questions about the very structure and borders of the state itself. As suggested in the first section, it might seem that global justice theory has the resources to deal with this problem insofar as global justice theories bring the boundaries of the state into question and so challenge the status quo dimension of most kinds of justice theory. However, because it treats issues of

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global justice the same as justice within the state, except extended in scope (across the globe), it fails to provide a theory about the appropriate boundaries for collective self-government. This is precisely what is needed in the case of nations that straddle borders. The issue is not simply the illegitimacy of all borders but the illegitimacy of current borders. Stateless nations or segments of divided nations that, ex hypothesi, seek some form of collective selfgovernment require borders in which to be collectively self-governing. Global justice theory, like its statist counterpart, is strangely silent on this. In conclusion, there is much that is right in the two dominant versions of justice theory: they are right to argue that if a state is not justified because it fails to provide the goods that we (rightly) expect, this tends to reflect on the moral quality of the relationship between the state and the citizens; perhaps it suggests that relationship is characterized by force, exclusion, or exploitation. However, I have also argued that a state may be justified in some sense (say, because it provides some moral goods or benefit, for example justice) but may nevertheless lack legitimacy in the sense that the moral quality of the relationship of the people to the state is problematic. This is true of the groups with which this chapter is concerned, and this is the reason why they bring into stark relief the gap between justice and legitimacy.

Land, Natural Resources, and Territory The aspirations, self-conceptions, and demands typical of nations that straddle borders also challenge both state-centric and global justice theories’ treatment of land or territory. In both versions of justice theory territory is viewed in instrumental terms, as a geographical domain in which self-government is exercised and in which the rules of justice apply, and as a source of natural resources over which sovereignty is exercised. In this section I argue that both state-centric and global justice theories’ treatments of land or territory are inadequate in making sense of the claims and aspirations of nations that straddle borders. According to the modern treatment of land or territory, territory refers to the domain of jurisdiction, that is, the geographical area in which selfgovernment operates, rights are respected, and justice is dispensed. The state is conceived as belonging to all the people and for the benefit of all the people, but there is no special theory or normative principle to individuate boundaries. The central issue, then, is connected to justifying the state in the exercise

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of its powers ( justifying the state, as discussed above), rather than delimiting the geographical domain as such. With few exceptions (Miller 2012; Meisels 2005; Stilz 2011), there are no clear principles or procedures to delimit boundaries (and hence the units in which justice should be dispensed) in which self-government should operate or even what normative principle should be applied to suggest how certain pieces of territory X might attach to certain peoples or governments Y. Boundaries are either completely untheorized or, when they are considered, they are acknowledged as the result of historical contingency, conquest, and/or political alignment but not themselves subject to considerations of justice. Indeed it is difficult within the terms of liberal (state-centric) justice theory to raise questions about boundaries, since they are treated as simply an empirical given but not subject to the theory of justice. Many liberals assume, for pragmatic reasons, the existence of boundaries as a baseline from which theory proceeds, since political cosmopolitanism is not likely in the foreseeable future. Similarly democratic theory views rights to territory as implicit in the idea of self-government. On this view, territory is a necessary condition for self-government and self-government is an important good: it gives expression to political communities; it reflects a people’s identity; it constitutes a forum in which citizen autonomy can be expressed, in which citizens are empowered to shape the context in which they live and realize their political aspirations. When a group is deprived of its territory, it is also deprived of the institutional conditions or means to exercise self-government. Although it is possible to conceive of nonterritorial self-government (such as separate family courts for Muslims in India, though this is very limited compared to self-government), most forms of self-government have a territorial dimension. The empirical evidence suggests that (demographically) significant and territorially concentrated minorities will not be satisfied with nonterritorial autonomy, particularly if they have a history of territorial autonomy (McGarry and Moore 2005). The capacities that groups who aspire to forms of collective self-government typically seek, including control over the economy, policing, population influxes, and language policy, require control over territory. This is connected to the territorial nature of the modern state and the fact that the exercise of authority is typically within geographical domains in which everyone is treated equally. While the democratic element of justice theory has the capacity to express the moral good associated with territory, it can do so only for territory in

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general, not for particular bits of territory. It has no clearly articulated normative theory of boundaries. This point is often made in relation to debates on the ethics of secession. The central problem here is that democratic theory has no clearly democratic way for specifying borders or where borders are drawn. The classic statement of this problem was articulated by Ivor Jennings (1956, 56), in relation to Woodrow Wilson’s appeal to the concept of selfdetermination in 1919; according to Jennings, “On the surface, it [the principle of self-determination] seemed reasonable: let the people decide. It was in fact ridiculous because the people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people.” Democratic theory presupposes a defi ned people who can constitute a  majority for the purposes of democratic decision-making; however, it is not clear that there is a standard internal to democratic theory for defining the relevant territorial unit, and hence people, who should exercise collective self-government. More accurately, there are at least two distinct conceptions of who “the people” are who are entitled to self-determination. Throughout the nineteenth century until the end of World War I, “the peoples” who were entitled to be self-determining were conceived of in ethnic terms. In his famous Fourteen Points speech, then American president Woodrow Wilson argued that the United States aimed to secure a “fair and just peace” by employing “the principle of national self-determination.” On this principle, the peoples entitled to self-determination were the ethnic groups that composed the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires, which could be carved up along broadly ethnic lines. Of course this principle, at least as it is understood here, is not a democratic one but can be justified— if  it is justified at all—in terms of a nationalist account of the creation of particular communities. In the post–World War II period, the “peoples” in question, who were entitled to self-determination, were not ethnic or national groups but rather multiethnic peoples under colonial rule. Self-determination was conceived in international law as “the right of the majority within an accepted political unit to exercise power,” and boundaries were drawn without regard for the linguistic or cultural or ethnic composition of the state (Emerson 1971). Borders themselves are not the subject of democratic decision-making but are often arbitrary—the result of historical conquest, imperialism, and/or political power brokers drawing lines on a map. Since the rejection of the national principle as a boundary-drawing mechanism, there is no similar principle (and certainly no principle internal to democracy) to individuate

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boundaries or to attach territory to particular groups. Nevertheless implicit in liberal-democratic justice theory is an underlying theory of the moral good of territory, as a domain in which justice is dispensed and self-government is exercised. Many global justice theories are sensitive to the deficiencies of statecentric justice theories outlined above. They are acutely aware that (statecentric) justice theorists (which include both liberals and democrats, on the assumption that democracy is itself a requirement of justice) have had very little to say about the legitimacy of borders. Indeed it is often remarked that liberals begin by talking about the equal moral worth of persons but then end up with a conception of justice that affirms the equal moral worth of citizens (Kymlicka 2001). Boundaries, it is claimed, represent a significant embarrassment to the universality and moral worth of persons that underpins most liberal theory, insofar as it is clear that people’s life chances, opportunities, well-being, and exercise of autonomy—and indeed the protection of their rights—depend on where they are born. As Joe Carens has argued (1987), people born on one side of the Rio Grande are born into the modern equivalent of the nobility, while people on the other side of the river are born into the modern equivalent of serfdom. This is indeed at the heart of Caney’s argument for a global political theory, where he points to the universality of both rights discourse and distributive justice arguments (and implicitly the lack of normative argument in defense of political communities and boundaries) to support his conception of global justice. It is implicit also in Pogge’s treatment of global inequalities. After all, they both suggest, what can the justification be for this sharp difference in life chances, well-being, and so on from one side of a border to another if the border itself is not normatively grounded? This point is made to question all state borders, and to make political cosmopolitanism (or at least moral cosmopolitanism with no real moral weight attached to political communities) more defensible. In addition theorists in the global justice tradition have been very good at bringing to the fore another undertheorized element in the division of the world into states and its relation to global inequality. They have pointed out that embedded in the idea of state sovereignty is the idea of territorial right. Territorial right involves the right of the sovereign authority to make decisions over the geographical domain, including extraction of natural resources and so on. This is discussed extensively, as a source of global inequality, in global justice theories.

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Charles Beitz has extensively discussed the special problem of natural resources and distributive justice. He has argued that the people who live on the territory have no special moral claim to the valued resources found under or on it, such as oil, coal, iron and diamonds. He therefore proposes, in line with Rawls’s original contractarian argument, a global original position where the parties do not know the resource endowments of their own societies and so “agree on a resource redistribution principle that would give each society a fair chance to develop just political institutions and an economy capable of satisfying its members’ basic needs” (Beitz 1979, 141). This argument regarding resources is not developed to suggest a separate principle of distributive justice for natural resources, but rather to criticize Rawls’s own argument that limits his principles of justice to the domestic context. However, the justificatory argument that he relies on suggests a purely instrumental view of resources and the fact that territorial right, especially including control over natural resources, is undertheorized by state-centric liberal justice theories.

Conclusion In this chapter I point to some significant limitations in both state-centric and global justice theory and argue that these limitations are exposed by  (but not limited to) the par ticu lar situation and aims and aspirations of  nations that straddle borders. I characterize what I mean by national groups that straddle borders and also distinguish between the two kinds of justice theory in terms of the scope of the principles and the appropriate subject of justice. I argue that most discussions of political legitimacy either collapse questions of justification of the state with that of legitimacy or treat legitimacy as a lesser standard. They do not consider the possibility that a state might be just and yet not legitimate. The situation of national groups that straddle borders, who contest the institutional structure and borders of the state, suggests that it is possible to have a fully just state (where just is equated with individual rights protection and the rule of law) and yet a state that is not legitimate (at least not for a section of the population). I also argue that both statist and global justice theories tend to view territory in purely instrumental terms—as necessary to self-government, as a

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domain in which justice is dispensed, and as a source of raw materials for the creation of wealth and the fulfi llment of particular conceptions of the good—but do not consider the more expressive function of territory. They do not consider the possibility that there might be identity-related interests in (particular) bits of land or territory. This means that the dilemma facing such groups is inadequately theorized within these traditions. Although there is not enough space here for a full exposition of this point, one of the reasons why both types of justice theory are limited is that both focus on individual equality. On the state-centric view, a just state comprises equal citizens, enjoying equal political rights and equality under the law; and on the global (cosmopolitan) justice view, justice is conceived of in terms of equality (of condition) of all people in the world. Neither focuses on, or even theorizes, more particularist attachments that national groups have (for comembers or for land). It is implicit in my argument that if justice theory proceeded from the perspective of such groups, the focus would not exclusively be on individual equality, understood in terms of a metric for relating individual well-being. It would also incorporate conceptions of group differentiation and people’s plural and overlapping memberships in political communities. National groups that straddle borders challenge both the status quo (state system) and theories of global justice, where the main unit is individual well-being. Such groups require forms of accommodation, where sovereignty is viewed as a bundle of rights, jurisdictional authority, and so on, that can be dissembled and reassembled in a variety of different ways, and the forms of accommodation involve more than one state. If global justice theory began from these facts instead of simply global individual inequality, these would be important building blocks in theorizing a more just global order. Notes 1. Gerry Cohen (1997, 22–23) and Liam Murphy (1998, 280) both reject the division between justice and morality, social institutions and personal morality. 2. On this view, justice as an individual virtue is derivative of justice as a social virtue, because the just individual is to be understood as someone with an effective or “regulative” desire to comply with the principles of justice. 3. There have been arguments (Buchanan 2004) that “external” legitimacy should depend on “internal” legitimacy—in other words, governments should refuse to recognize states or governments that lack “internal” legitimacy (perhaps because they are murderous or tyrannical regimes). That argument, however, assumes that the two

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conceptions of legitimacy operate independently (but it then goes on to make the argument that this is not a good practice for developing morally progressive international institutions). 4. There is also a dispute about what constitutes political power. In this chapter I follow Buchanan’s terminology, where political power is defined as an “attempt to exercise a monopoly, within a jurisdiction, in the making, application and enforcement of laws” (Buchanan 2002, 689–90). Buchanan’s definition of political power is deliberately inclusive. It covers not only the actions of a just liberal democratic government that enjoys wide popu lar support but also that of an occupying military force. This is in order to develop a noncircular conception of legitimacy: it would not be appropriate to insert the conditions for legitimacy in the definition of political power. It is still an open question whether the occupying military force is legitimate or not. 5. In Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1996), the argument seems to be pursued a little differently: there he argues that the state is legitimate if its coercive institutions are so structured that reasonable members of society could reasonably accept them. This move, at least as it is explicated by Rawls, has the effect of conceiving of aspirations for collective self-government of groups of the kind under consideration here as unreasonable in the sense that reasonable people would agree to set aside the questions of the borders of the state and consider only the appropriate ( just) distributive arrangement, rules, and political rights. 6. For a good argument about recognitional legitimacy, see Buchanan 2004. 7. The term “legitimacy” does not appear in the index, which also suggests that it is not a term that bears any independent weight. Considerations of justice are primary, and just institutional arrangements are legitimate; presumably unjust ones are illegitimate. 8. The argument of this essay does not attempt to assess the various relations between the justifiability of the state and its legitimacy, except that its focus on legitimacy does tend to assume that the central issue is the relationship of the people to the state, rather than the qualities of the state per se. 9. Another prominent example of the contemporary treatment of justice is found in the works by Allen Buchanan and Christopher H. Wellman. In both their works the crucial concept is that of justice. In Wellman’s version of the argument, which can be viewed as a partial response to A. John Simmons’s argument, consent is not deemed necessary if the state is necessary to protect people “from peril,” and this is grounded in a natural duty of justice to protect other persons from peril (Wellman and Simmons 2005). Wellman argues that there is no need to legitimate the state through a consent argument: consent is not needed to establish relations of authority when the state is just, because people already have a moral duty of justice to protect other persons from peril (so long as doing so is not excessively costly). This yields a fairly minimal state, but it also makes the legitimate state equivalent to the just state (the state which, through its functions, protects people from peril). 10. The lack of interest among political phi losophers in this question is staggering, especially when one considers the grievances that many groups often claim about

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boundary drawing and the effect of boundary drawing on the individual and collective well-being of the people within or left behind the boundary in question. 11. Although I consistently refer to “national” identities and “national” groups, understood in terms of groups that aspire to exercise collective self-government, these are often tied to, and identified by, markers of other kinds: ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic, inter alia. Thus recognition of these markers is important to identifying the state as a state in which both groups can be at home (both religions have equal status; both languages are official languages of the state, and so on). 12. Political empiricists in general—and comparativists especially—also implicitly accept the same flawed assumptions of political theorists who either implicitly or explicitly address states (and their borders) as eternal. For an exception, see Mabry 2008, which explores the universality of “popu lar sovereignty” and the need for illiberal national identities to define the demos before exercising democracy. 13. The distinction is between modern and premodern conceptions (I do not discuss here postmodern views). The premodern conception often viewed territorial jurisdiction as subject to dynastic alliances and marriages, and also as part of the “spoils” of war. On this view, there is a partial analogy to the relationship of a property owner to his property, where the transfer of land associated with royal lines or houses was crucial to the territory of the state. Many dynastic marriages were controlled and transferred by inheritance, and carried with the sovereign into marriage, just as individual property holdings might be. They were unlike property, however, since the sovereign king was not typically an absolute monarch but one whose power was limited in various ways, most notably by the historic privileges of certain nobles and regions of the country. Many of the current boundaries of European states have been shaped by this premodern conception: modern-day Spain is largely a product of the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon with Isabella of Castile. The Union of England and Scotland was facilitated by the ascension of James VI, king of Scotland, to the English throne. 14. This view is promoted in Moore 1996, ch. 7, and endorsed by Yack 1996. 15. These views are held by a number of liberal nationalists (Margalit and Raz 1994; Miller 1995). 16. Language policy can be according to territorial or personal principles (Patten 2003). But even the personal principle has a territorial component since language requires a public space, and there are usually riders about “where numbers warrant,” and the numbers are numbers within a par ticu lar area—a municipality, a school district, and so on. The fact is that people occupy physical space—they are situated somewhere—and this has nontrivial consequences. 17. Indeed the main proponents of nonterritorial autonomy arrangements are state elites, who invoke peace and stability considerations. They involve a negative judgment about the secessionist dangers of territorial autonomy, while recognizing the need to go some way to accommodating the linguistic, ethnic, or religious diversity of the population. Estonia, Slovakia, and Croatia have all rejected schemes of territorial autonomy but have implemented schemes of nonterritorial autonomy. Israel’s

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Menachem Begin was prepared to consider cultural autonomy, but not territorial autonomy, for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. In Russia, where there is a system of territorial autonomy, critics promoted nonterritorial autonomy as an alternative or at least as a countervailing force. Gavriil Popov, the first directly elected mayor of Moscow (1990–92), linked it to a proposal for scrapping Russia’s system of ethnofederalism and restoring the czarist system of ethnically neutral administrative units. 18. There is a way out of this dilemma. If we imagine a legitimate, democratically elected world government, it would be possible for it to specify borders of subunits within which certain functions can be performed. This is to extend the Indian federation view of boundaries across the globe. Unlike most federations, the central government has the capacity to make and remake boundaries of federal units and even to collapse units into other units. 19. For a discussion of this problem as it applies to self-determination disputes, see Moore 1998, 1–13. 20. One of the proposals in Pogge’s book (2002, 202–21) for redistributing wealth involves what he terms “the global resources dividend.” The basis for this proposal is deliberately left unclear: he suggests that it is an easy source of taxation to correct serious deficiencies, an argument that does not rely on a par ticu lar conception of territory, or even on a strong version of global equality, but only on the idea that we have obligations to ensure that people (others) have a basic minimum, and this proposal is an easy or efficient or fairly self-contained way to do this. References Beitz, Charles. 1979. Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Buchanan, Allen. 2002. Political Legitimacy and Democracy. Ethics 112 (July): 689–719. ———. 2004. Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caney, Simon. 2005. Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carens, Joe. 1987. Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders. Review of Politics 49 (3): 251–73. Cohen, G. A. 1997. Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice. Philosophy & Public Affairs 26 (1): 3–30. Emerson, Rupert. 1971. Self-Determination. American Journal of International Law 65 (3): 459–75. Goodin, Robert. 1988. What Is So Special about Our Countrymen? Ethics 4 (98): 663–86. Jennings, Ivor. 1956. The Approach to Self-Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, Will. 2001. Territorial Boundaries: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective. In Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, ed. D. Miller and S. Hashmi, 249–75. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Lustick, Ian. 1993. Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank–Gaza. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mabry, Tristan James. 2008. Who Are “the People”? Why Ethnic Politics Matter. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 8 (3): 13–21. Margalit, Avishai, and Joseph Raz. 1994. On National Self-Determination. In Ethics in the Public Domain, ed. Joseph Raz, 125– 45. Oxford: Clarendon. McGarry, John, and Margaret Moore. 2005. Karl Renner, Power-Sharing and NonTerritorial Autonomy. In National Cultural Autonomy and Its Contemporary Critics, ed. E. Nimni, 74–94. London: Routledge. Meisels, Tamar. 2005. Territorial Rights. The Netherlands: Springer. Miller, David. 1995. On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. Territorial Rights: Concept and Justification. Political Studies 60 (2): 252– 68. Moore, Margaret. 1996. The Ethics of Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1998. National Self-Determination and Secession. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Liam. 1998. Institution and the Demands of Justice. Philosophy & Public Affairs 27 (4): 251–91. Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, Gender and the Family. New York: Basic Books. O’Leary, Brendan. 2001. The Elements of Right-Sizing and Right-Peopling the State. In Right-sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders, ed. Ian S. Lustick, Brendan O’Leary, and Thomas Callaghy, 15–73. New York: Oxford University Press. Patten, Alan. 2003. Liberal Neutrality and Language Policy. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31 (4): 356–86. Pogge, Thomas. 2002. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms. Cambridge: Polity. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 1996. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1999. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Richards, David A. J. 1982. International Distributive Justice. In Ethics, Economics and the Law, ed. J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman, 275–99. New York and London: New York University Press. Shue, Henry. 1980. Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and U.S. Foreign Policy. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Simmons, John. 2001. Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singer, Peter. 1972. Famine, Affluence and Morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (3): 229– 43. Stilz, Anna. 2011. Nations, States, and Territory. Ethics 121 (3): 572– 601. Walzer, Michael. 2000. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. 3rd ed. New York: Basic Books.

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Wellman, Christopher H., and A. John Simmons. 2005. Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? New York: Cambridge University Press. Yack, Bernard. 1996. The Myth of the Civic Nation. Critical Review 10 (2): 166–82. Young, Iris Marion. 2006. Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model. Social Philosophy and Policy 23 (Winter): 102–30.

CHAPTER 2

Forked Tongues: The Language Politics of Divided Nations Tristan James Mabry

Every time the question of language surfaces, in one way or another, it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore: the formation and enlargement of the governing class, the need to establish more intimate and secure relationships between the governing groups and the national-popular mass, in other words to reorganize the cultural hegemony. —Antonio Gramsci, 1935

Introduction As Europe entered the twenty-first century, a number of regional observers found that the social and political integration of the European Union (EU) signaled the demise of the state in the very part of the world where this institutional entity first evolved out of medieval muck. They claimed that a major change was in the offing: for those peoples who lacked the protection of their own nation-states, such as the Basques or the Sámi, or minorities stranded on the other side of their fatherland’s border, for example Hungarians in Romania or Russians in Baltic states, it was reasonable to expect that the elevation of an authority higher than their own country’s capital would open a new arena of competition for regional recognition, or even resources, that would not be obtainable otherwise.

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David Laitin, for one, argued that a minority culture in the EU should anticipate “some autonomy from its former political center and recognition in an extra-state organization that is more or less equal to the recognition accorded to its state.” Moreover regimes in such states should prepare to accept the viability of “layered national identities” that may sound innocuous, but in practice require a redefi nition of a previously coherent—and unchallenged—nationality (Laitin 2001, 85). In some quarters of the continent, these expectations were met: subordinate peoples secured greater status and protections by receiving the regional imprimatur of EU recognition. Perhaps the most visible (or audible) sign of elevated status for regional minorities was the official acknowledgment of subordinate languages as the EU opened “a new window of opportunity to widen the rights of persons belonging to linguistic minorities” (Sagüés 2000). Indeed as far back as 1990 the European Parliament signaled its relatively strong support of linguistic minorities (compared to other bodies in Brussels) with the Resolution of the Situation of Languages in the Community and on the Catalan Language (Ó Riagáin 2001). Ultimately in 2006 the mother tongues of stateless Basques, Catalans, and Galicians were granted special status as official regional languages of the European Union. Yet the invocation and implementation of minority language rights in Europe is entirely inconsistent. The recognition of Basque by Brussels, for example, was granted despite objections from Paris. To date, the Basque in France, as well as other sizable ethnolinguistic minorities in Brittany and Occitan, continue to lobby unsuccessfully for group language rights (Cartrite 2009). In the most recent round of proposed amendments to  the republic’s new draft constitution, the National Assembly voted to include a modest phrase recognizing regional languages (Breton, Corsican, Occitan, and so on) as part of the heritage (patrimoine) of France. The Jacobin response was swift and sharp: l’Académie française urged parliament to reject the measure as an attack on French national identity and a “denial of the Republic” (Le Monde 2008). Accordingly on June 18, 2008, two-thirds of the senators in the upper chamber voted to strike down even this token measure of tolerance. An editorial in Le Monde applauded the move because Une langue vivante n’a pas besoin d’être constitutionnalisée pour exister (“a living language need not be constitutionalized to exist” (Le Monde 2008). Nonetheless, and without irony, the editorial added that French is protected as the only language of France because it is recognized in Article II of the constitution. Plus ça change.

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Map 2.1. Language communities of Europe.

Why is it that minority language communities in Spain and France, among many others, should encounter such distinct openings and obstacles in their pursuit of recognition from the European Union? Certainly there are differences in state structure that make it easier or harder to devolve language capacities. For one, Spain, unlike France, has federal qualities (Williams 2005; cf. Encarnación 2008, 103; Linz and Stepan 1996, 99), but as Zoe Bray and Michael Keating argue in this volume, the views of the French and Spanish political classes are essentially polarized vis-à-vis the institutionalization of minority nationalities. In the context of all twenty-seven EU states (and beyond), I argue here that two sets of political phenomena may explain the variation in general. The first is the enduring power of member states in the EU to

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recognize or reject claims of group rights within their own territories. While individuals who charge that their liberties are violated by their state may independently seek redress in Strasbourg (European Court of Human Rights of the Council of Europe) or Luxembourg (Court of Justice of the European Communities), groups may make no such move without the express permission of their own regimes. Why a regime may or may not grant such permission hinges on the second phenomena considered in this chapter: the normative position of member states regarding the relationship between the rights and freedoms of their individual citizens, the primacy of a dominant nationality, and the recognition of minority groups who claim rights distinct from either. In the pages that follow, the definitions of different classifications of language are adopted as described below. The meanings of “state” and “official” languages are those employed by Eurostat, the statistics agency of the EU (European Commission 2006). The meaning of “regional/minority” language is adopted from the Council of Europe’s European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992), a document examined at length below, which is now a standard point of reference for most institutions in the EU as well.

National Languages

National languages are state languages, and therefore official, but also the mother tongues of nations, that is, communities that claim the right to national self-determination based on their existence as unique peoples, which are in turn defined by a range of identity markers including shared cultures, which in turn are most commonly linked to specific languages.

State Languages

These are languages that have official status, legally and institutionally, throughout countries. Thus state languages are always official languages.

Official Languages

These include languages used for legal and public administration purposes within specified areas of countries, such as Welsh in Wales or Hungarian

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and Italian in the border regions of Slovenia. Thus all state languages are official languages, but not all official languages are state languages.

Regional/Minority Languages

As defined by Article 1 of the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, these are “languages that are traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the State’s population and are different from the official language(s) of the State,” and also different from “either dialects of the official language(s) of the State or the languages of migrants.” These include languages traditionally used by part of the population of states, such as Breton in France, or languages that are spoken by a minority in one state but are official languages in another state(s), such as Hungarian in Slovakia. Note, however, that the necessary condition of being used “within a given territory” excludes nonterritorial languages such as Yiddish and, most problematically, Romani.

Nonindigenous Languages

These are languages from other parts of the world spoken by immigrant communities in the EU, such as Turkish in Germany or South Asian languages in the United Kingdom. The principal focus of this book is the effect of regional integration in Europe on divided nations. Here the effect on languages takes center stage. In most cases at least one segment of a divided nation has been a subordinate minority in at least one state. This is not, however, the case for all divided language communities in Europe. English, for example, is the mother tongue of the great majority of citizens in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The same can be said for German in Germany and Austria. This is not to suggest that the language politics of these countries is never contentious: far from it. Irish is the official national language of Ireland and takes precedence over English in supreme court interpretations of the constitution, and sovereign Ireland’s efforts to promote the revival of Irish are nearly a century old. The Welsh community in England and the Sorbian community in

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Germany are frequent and vociferous advocates for greater rights and recognition in London and Berlin respectively. Indeed in the summer of 2008 members of the Cymdeithas yr laith Gymraeg (Welsh Language Society) repeatedly vandalized storefronts with monolingual English signage, while hundreds of Sorbians staged a rally in Berlin (May 29) to protest budget cuts that threatened their language and cultural programs (Hicks 2008; Jones 2008). This is of interest, certainly, though the Welsh and the Sorbians are contained entirely within the borders of single states and are not divided across state frontiers. Thus they are not examined here. In the context of internationally divided language communities in Europe, it is useful to apply a typology of four scenarios. Type I, postimperial states, are those that share the same dominant language as a territorial legacy of the former empire, such as British imperialism in Ireland or the German Empire (Deutsches Reich) across most of Central Europe. Type II, nationstate satellites, are the most common type of divided language communities and include populations that are a dominant majority in a homeland state and a minority population in one or more bordering states. This is not to say that such nation-state satellites cannot also be legacies of imperialism: Hungarian speakers in Romania, for example, were once privileged subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; yet they are distinct because at least one part of the community is subordinate in a separate state. Type III, stateless homelands, are neither legacies of imperialism nor satellites of nation-states because such populations have had no modern state of their own (Basques in Spain and France, Sámi in Finland, Sweden, and non-EU Norway). For Type IV, dispersed populations are divided among many states either as a legacy of a nomadic culture (Roma) or as a diaspora immigrant population (for example, Turks in Germany or Algerian Arabs in France). This chapter considers the effects of regional integration on each type save the first. The reason is that the question posed here is whether or not the integration of the European Union is, as was once expected, granting each subordinate population autonomy from its state by way of an “extra-state organization that is more or less equal to the recognition accorded to its state” (Laitin 2001). For language communities that are divided yet still dominant in separate states, such as English and German, the question of greater autonomy in an extrastate organization—for example, does the EU advance the status of German beyond the capacity of Berlin or Vienna?—is relatively unimportant, at least in contrast to those ethnolinguistic communities that are culturally and politically marginalized, mobilized, or both.

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Table 2.1. Typology of Ethnonational Language Divides Majority

Minority

TYPE I: Postimperial States

State I State II+

X X

TYPE II: Nation-State Satellites

State I State II+

X

TYPE III: Stateless Homelands

State I State II+

X X

TYPE IV: Dispersed Populations

State I State II+

X X

X

Examples a) English in the UK (I) and Ireland (II) b) German in Germany (I) and Austria (II) a) Hungarians in Hungary (I) and Romania (II) b) Swedes in Sweden (I) and Finland (II) a) Basques in Spain (I) and France (II) b) Sámi in Sweden (I) and Finland (II) a) Nomadic: Roma in 21 out of 27 EU states b) Migrant: Turks in Germany, Bulgaria, etc.

So the focus here is on the status of minority language communities. While nation-state satellites, such as Swedes in Finland, are not minorities everywhere (namely in Sweden), the question of European integration and territorial autonomy is relevant only for those Swedes on the other side of the Finnish border. Hence regional innovations, both legal and institutional, are examined insofar as they relate to minority language communities. However, as is argued here, diplomatic instruments need not specifically target language as the objective of some normative or policy development because minority language rights are often incorporated within more general agreements regarding minority rights. This chapter proceeds in four sections. The first is an evaluation of developments in the international arena affecting language rights. The second identifies the current characteristics of a rapidly changing European arena. The third and most critical section is an examination of regional intergovernmental institutions and how they may or may not affect minority language communities. These include the EU, the Council of Europe (COE), and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). I argue that the thrust of most international initiatives affecting language rights, whether from the UN, the EU, or any other organization, is to establish that language

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use is not sufficient grounds for state discrimination across any number of legal realms or policy areas. In other words, international protections for minority language communities are typically negative, in the sense that they address the negative liberty of nondiscrimination. These protections are entirely distinct, however, from the question of whether minority language communities have greater autonomy as a result of initiatives to promote these protections. The short answer is, no. While the COE and the OSCE are pursuing measures to afford some protections to ethnolinguistic communities cross-cut by state borders, the EU—counter to the optimistic expectations of Brussels boosters—is either indifferent or, as is more often the case, ineffective. As outlined in the fourth section of this chapter, none of these European institutions—the EU, the COE, the OSCE— can actually enforce any of the provisions outlined in their brokered regional agreements affecting minority rights and minority language communities. This chapter concludes that a principal impediment to the efficacy of such initiatives is the simple fact that membership in European intergovernmental organizations is restricted to states, not societies. As such, efforts to afford group rights to substate communities are entirely at the discretion of individual governments with a wide range of views on the subject.

Language Divides and Minority Rights: The International Arena The dividing line between language rights, minority rights, and human rights is blurry at best (Kymlicka 1995, 2001, 2007; Kymlicka and Patten 2003; May 2001, 2003b). When international rights agreements make specific mention of “language,” the word is almost invariably buried within a long list of identity components. The point is simply to state that universal rights are just that: no markers of historical discrimination, such as “race,” may be used to justify the restriction of such rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 set a tone that is now formulaic: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” (Article 2, emphasis added). In this specific usage the word “language” appears in many more United Nations decrees, from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007).

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Table 2.2. United Nations’ Instruments Addressing Language Rights Acting Body

Legal or Normative Instrument

Year

UN General Assembly

Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Recommendation Concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Access to Cyberspace Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Convention against Discrimination in Education Universal Declaration of Human Rights

2007

UNESCO

UNESCO UNESCO

UNESCO UNESCO UN General Assembly

UN General Assembly UNESCO UN General Assembly

2005

2003 2003

2001 1996 1992

1966 1960 1948

In recognition that “genuine multilingualism promotes unity in diversity and international understanding,” the UN declared 2008 the International Year of Languages. It would be reasonable to expect that such a declaration would especially emphasize the global heritage of humanity’s range of nearly seven thousand languages (Gordon 2005). But it does not. Instead the proclamation emphasizes the need for parity among the six official languages of the UN (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish) with a second goal of enhancing access to UN resources in some additional official languages. It makes no mention whatsoever of regional or minority languages. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), on the other hand, explicitly emphasizes the need not only to protect the mother tongues of regional linguistic communities but also to promote their acquisition and enhance their profi le in the public sphere. Koïchiro Matsuura, the former director-general of UNESCO (1999–2009),

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did, however, urge “speakers of a dominant language to master another or regional language” (Matsuura 2007).

Language Divides and Minority Rights: The European Arena As the European Union (and its antecedents) evolved and expanded, the number of its official languages, that is, those recognized for use in and among the institutions of the orga nization, expanded as well. From the current membership of twenty-seven states, there are now twenty-three official languages of the EU (some are shared by more than one state) and three recognized regional EU languages, all from Spain. As of 2006, for example, Spanish citizens may submit complaints to the European ombudsman in Catalan, Basque, or Galician. To a great degree the official languages of European states are also the dominant majority languages of most citizens in those states. (A notable exception is Ireland, though when it joined the European Community in 1973 there was no demand for language recognition; recognition of Irish emerged as a policy question after the recognition of even smaller language groups, such as Basque and Maltese.) Despite the effort expended to both expand and restrict language rights across disparate states in Europe, there is no doubt that the primacy of national languages in nation-states is demographically

Table 2.3. Official Languages of the European Union and Its Antecedents Year

Language Recognized

1958 1973 1981 1986 1995 2004

Dutch, French, German, Italian Danish, English Greek Portuguese, Spanish Finnish, Swedish Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak, Slovene Bulgarian, Irish, Romanian

2007

Added

Total

~ 2 1 2 2 9

4 6 7 9 11 20

3

23

Note: Catalan, Basque, and Galician were also recognized as official regional languages of the EU in 2006.

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secure. Consider the results of a 2005 poll on language issued as a Eurobarometer special survey, a product of the Public Opinion Analysis sector of the European Commission (EC), in what are now the twenty-seven member states plus Croatia and Turkey (European Commission 2006). In effect, the language populations of nation-states are, as expected, comprised to a great extent of mother-tongue speakers of the national languages. For example, in Germany and Austria the proportion of German speakers is 90 percent and 96 percent respectively; in Italy 95 percent of the population claims Italian as a first language; in Greece the figure is 99 percent; and so on. Typically the hegemony of a single language in a single state is the product of voluntary and coercive assimilation through instrumental rationalization, that is, the systematic adoption of uniform rules regarding spelling, orthography, pronunciation, and the like to enhance the efficiency of a bureaucracy and secure the power of a center that dictates which usage is “right” or “wrong.” This process in toto is called “language planning,” which includes corpus planning (the work of language academies that issue rulings on linguistic correctness), status planning (whether something is official or unofficial), and acquisition planning (language policy in public schools). In concert, language planning is a critical component of both nation-building and state-building (Fishman 1973; Gellner 1983; Millar 2005). Over time the various layers of what had been a language continuum—changing dialects distributed across populations and territory—are homogenized, and the earlier cacophony is soon forgotten. In other words, the easy acceptance of a term such as “Greek” elides a long history during which there were at least two very distinct high and low varieties. The slow elimination of this diglossia, appropriately a Greek term meaning split tongues, in which ancient Greek was used formally and demotic (vernacular) Greek was transmitted organically did not occur until the 1970s (Frangoudaki 2002). Other states, however, started such policies much, much earlier. The institutional effort to homogenize the languages of France, for example, is one of the oldest continuing rationalization programs in the world. In 1539 the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts displaced Latin with French (namely a simplified version of the Francien dialect of the time) as the official language of courts (tribunals) and, in effect, much bureaucracy. This process accelerated in the nineteenth century as public education penetrated the outer edges of the Hexagon (continental France), promoting the exclusive use of standard French at the expense of all other vernaculars. For example, as detailed in

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Eugen Weber’s magisterial Peasants into Frenchmen (1976), students who spoke Breton, Alsatian, or Occitan, inter alia, would be punished for using their mother tongues in the classroom. Nonetheless a majority (56 percent) of modern Europeans can hold a conversation in a language other than their first (European Commission 2006), but the range of second languages studied is very narrow. Nearly all secondary-school students (95 percent) study one of only five dominant languages: English, French, German, Spanish, and Russian. Moreover there is a “clear pre-eminence” of demand for English classes “often to the detriment of the share of pupils choosing to learn German or French” (European Commission 2008, 170). Of course not all students in all states are equally motivated to acquire another language: the two countries with the smallest share of plurilingual citizens are both majority Anglophone (and islands): in the United Kingdom the figure is 38 percent; in Ireland, just 34 percent (European Commission 2006). It is the rapid ascendance and expanding utility of English that has led some authors to speculate on the possibility that the most pressing question about language policy in Europe is whether anything should be done to preclude the hegemony of English (Phillipson 2003). As for mother-tongue speakers of minority languages, it is generally estimated that among the 450 million people of the European Union, some 55– 60 million people speak one of sixty distinct minority languages. The numbers are necessarily estimates because the collection of ethnolinguistic minority demographic data is typically either inconsistent or absent. This is explicable: in a democracy a census is often a mandate, the results of which may challenge the structure of a state or the legitimacy of a regime. Hence a search of the most recent Eurostat Yearbook for the term “Basque” or “Sorbian” yields nothing. Language is mentioned, but only in regard to the learning of “foreign languages.” To be fair, the systematic collection of regional data across so many states is a Sisyphean task. According to Eurostat, the definition of a “region” is necessarily indeterminate: a tract of land with more or less definitely marked boundaries, which often serves as an administrative unit below the level of the nation state. Regions have an identity which is made up of specific features such as their landscape (mountains, coast, forest), climate (arid, highrainfall), language (e.g. in Belgium, Finland, Spain), ethnic origin (e.g. Wales, northern Sweden and Finland, the Basque country) or shared

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history. Most, if not all, of the above features may be particularly noticeable in one location but are usually to be found to some degree over such a wide area that they cannot be used in themselves to mark off one region from another; in other words, the boundaries are “fuzzy” (Eurostat 2007, 2). Hence the agency has developed a system for categorizing regional data that started in the 1970s according to a series of “gentlemen’s agreements” but was not granted legal status until 2003. The system (wonderfully) is called NUTS, an acronym adapted from the term “Nomenclature of Statistical Territorial Units” (Eurostat 2007, 4). It is possible to estimate the total number of mother-tongue speakers of the official languages of the EU across the entire region (European Commission 2006). They are, in descending order, German, French, English, and Italian. However, it is fair to say that the relatively close count of Italian, English, and French—all about sixty million people—renders the ordinal ranking important only, perhaps, in Rome, London, or (most probably) Paris. It is often noted that more people speak Catalan or Galician, for example, than any of the Baltic languages, though Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian are all official languages of the EU. What is noted less frequently, however, is the size of minority language populations comprised of immigrants or what the EU calls “non-indigenous” peoples. More people in the EU speak Turkish, for example, than any of seven official EU languages. While some of these communities are essentially contained within a single state, such as the half-million speakers of Punjabi in the UK, others are distributed across the continent. There are Turkish speakers in eleven EU states that together account for some 3.7 million people.

Language Divides and Minority Rights: European Institutions The integration of Europe is a multidimensional phenomenon affecting the functions performed and the perceptions of states, as they interact with each other and with regional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) such as the EU. Perhaps most importantly, there is also a daily, high-volume interaction of interstate institutions regulating all manner of capacities, a system that Anne-Marie Slaughter calls “government networks” (2004). In the context

Table 2.4. Mother Tongue Populations of Official European Union Languages, 2006

Member States

MotherState Percent Tongue Language Speakers 1st Populations of Speaker Language = State Population State Language Population EU Languages

German

Germany Austria Belgium Luxembourg

82,437,995 8,254,298 10,511,382 469,086

90.0 96.0 0.4 4.0

74,194,196 7,924,126 42,046 18,763

82,179,131

French

France Belgium Luxembourg

63,229,635 10,511,382 469,086

93.0 38.0 6.0

58,803,561 3,994,325 28,145

62,826,031

60,409,918

92.0

55,577,125

English

United Kingdom Ireland Malta

4,208,156 405,006

94.0 2.0

3,955,667 8,100

Italian Spanish Polish

Italy Spain Poland

58,751,711 43,758,250 38,157,055

95.0 89.0 98.0

55,814,125 38,944,843 37,393,914

55,814,125 38,944,843 37,393,914

Dutch

Belgium Netherlands

10,511,382 16,334,210

56.0 96.0

5,886,374 15,680,842

21,567,216

Romanian

Romania

21,610,213

95.0

20,529,702

20,529,702

Greek

Greece Cyprus

11,125,179 766,414

99.0 98.0

11,013,927 751,086

11,765,013

10,569,592 10,076,581 10,251,079

100.0 100.0 98.0

10,569,592 10,076,581 10,046,057

10,569,592 10,076,581 10,046,057

9,047,752 5,255,580

95.0 5.0

8,595,364 262,779

8,858,143

7,718,750 5,427,459 5,255,580 5,389,180 43,758,250 3,403,284 43,758,250 2,294,590 2,003,358 1,344,684 4,208,156 43,758,250 405,006

90.0 97.0 94.0 88.0 9.0 88.0 5.0 88.0 95.0 82.0 11.0 1.0 97.0

6,946,875 5,264,635 4,940,245 4,742,478 3,938,243 2,994,890 2,187,913 2,019,239 1,903,190 1,102,641 462,897 437,583 392,856

6,946,875 5,264,635 4,940,245 4,742,478 3,938,243 2,994,890 2,187,913 2,019,239 1,903,190 1,102,641 462,897 437,583 392,856

Official EU Language

Portuguese Portugal Hungarian Hungary Czech Czech Republic Swedish

Sweden Finland

Bulgarian Danish Finnish Slovak Catalan Lithuanian Galician Latvian Slovenian Estonian Irish Basque Maltese

Bulgaria Denmark Finland Slovakia Spain Lithuania Spain Latvia Slovenia Estonia Ireland Spain Malta

59,540,892

Sources: Population data is from Eurostat (figures for 2006); mother-tongue language data (figures also for 2006) from European Commission 2006.

Table 2.5. Principal Immigrant Language Communities in the European Union, 2005 Language Group

State

Turkish

Germany Bulgaria Netherlands Cyprus France Austria Belgium United Kingdom Denmark Sweden Finland

Population per State

EU Population

2,107,426 845,550 192,000 177,000 135,000 68,000 63,600 60,000 30,000 20,000 1,000

3,699,576

Moroccan Arabic

France Spain Belgium Germany

492,700 200,000 105,000 44,200

841,900

Algerian Arabic

France Germany Belgium

660,000 26,000 10,800

696,800

Kurdish (Kurmanji dialect of Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan)

Germany United Kingdom Austria Belgium Greece Denmark Italy Finland

541,311 23,766 23,000 22,000 20,000 8,000 3,000 1,293

642,370

United Kingdom

573,520

573,520

Urdu

United Kingdom Germany

400,000 23,000

423,000

Bengali Indonesian

United Kingdom Netherlands

400,000 300,000

400,000 300,000

Tunisian Arabic

France Netherlands Germany Belgium United Kingdom

212,900 30,000 26,000 8,900 5,800

283,600

Punjabi (Eastern, Mirpur, and Western dialects)

Note: Data adapted by the author from Gordon 2005 and Eurostat 2007.

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of regional languages, however, the principal concern is the possibility of a subordinate community leapfrogging over its own state and obtaining regional international status and protection. Below I consider the record of the three most important such institutions regarding the rights of minorities in general and their language rights specifically: the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The most obvious distinction among the three is size: the EU has twenty-seven members; the COE forty-seven; and the OSCE fift y-six. A more subtle distinction, however, is apparent in their views on regional minorities. The EU is most concerned with interstate relations, the COE with state-society relations, and the OSCE (as befits an organization especially concerned with preventing regional confl icts) with state-minority relations. The relative attention paid to minority language rights by each institution reflects their priorities, with the OSCE most forceful, the COE most active, and the EU most indifferent. Before addressing their relative positions on minority language issues, it is important to note that their principal contributions, that is, charters, conventions, declarations, and the like, are not comparable to treaties that carry the threat of sanctions or a military response but rather function as normative instruments. There are, to be sure, other domestic statutes in EU states that affect minority language rights, though these are typically symbolic with little substance (Kjær and Adamo 2011). This is addressed at length below.

The European Union

In much the same fashion as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the EU’s European Charter of Fundamental Rights states only (Chapter III, Articles 21–22) that “any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, color, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited” and that “the Union respects cultural, religious and linguistic diversity.” The term “linguistic diversity,” however, is problematic. If we substitute the word “ecological” for the word “linguistic,” the problem becomes clear: does ecological diversity mean a range of habitats, a range of species, or a range of

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taxonomy (birds, mammals, reptiles, fish)? Thus “linguistic diversity” could be interpreted as a range of national languages, a range of state languages, a range of official languages, a range of regional languages, or even a range that includes the “non-indigenous” languages of immigrant cultures. In the parlance of the Eurocracy, two words are most commonly associated with the word “language”: “equality” and “respect.” In January 2007 the European Commission created a new office to handle EU language policy. The first (and only) EU commissioner for multilingualism, the Romanian diplomat Leonard Orban, invoked the pair of key words in a speech on the policy of his office, stating, “first, the equality of all official languages is and must remain a building block of European integration”; second, “there is also a need to respect all languages, including those of national and immigrant minorities. We must ask ourselves: what are we doing to integrate these immigrants, these citizens who speak regional or minority languages? What are we doing to acknowledge the value of these languages and cultures

Table 2.6. Formal Declarations Regarding Language Rights in Europe Body

Legal and/or Normative Instruments

Year

EU OSCE

European Charter of Fundamental Rights The OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life The OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities European Social Charter, Revised The OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) European Cultural Convention European Convention on Human Rights

2000 1999

OSCE

Council of Europe OSCE

Council of Europe Council of Europe Council of Europe Council of Europe

1998

1996 1996

1995 1992 1954 1950

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to our communities?” (Orban 2007). It is not unfair to observe that providing answers to these questions is, in essence, his responsibility. In 2010 Orban retired from the post, which was then expanded with a broader portfolio as Eu ropean commissioner for education, culture, multilingualism and youth, now held by the Cypriot politician and former European commissioner for health Androulla Vassiliou. Nonetheless the EU is active in (1) promoting language education and (2) funding the study of minority language policies. The European Commission has established a range of institutions dedicated to improving language pedagogy and to researching policy prescriptions for various language demographics. However, as the data on language ability in Europe indicates, the multilingualism enthusiastically endorsed by the EU is the acquisition of multiple dominant languages. In fact EU support for language resources has been described as a paradox, in that such support is available only “because of the strong monolingualism of its member states” (O’Reilly 2001, 10). As a result the EU is experiencing a “retrenchment of formal multilingualism” (May 2003, 216). This is explicable if only for the fact that a number of Europeans have a very hard time making sense of what it is to be Italian or Danish and Table 2.7. Language Divides and Institutional Initiatives of the European Commission (EU) Organization

Function

Based

Est.

Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity www.npld.eu Network of European Language Planning Boards www.languageplanning.eu European Center for Modern Languages www.ecml.at Erasmus Program ec.europa .eu/education

Minority language planning (general)

Brussels, Belgium

2007

Minority language planning (education)

Cardiff, Wales, UK

2001

Language acquisition planning (general) Language acquisition student/teacher exchange network Minority language policy research (education, legislation, and media)

Graz, Austria

1995

Brussels, Belgium

1987

Ljouwert, Friesland, Nether.; Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain; Aberystwyth, Wales, UK

1987

Mercator Network www.mercator-central.org

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European: maintaining a threshold of interstate language status remains a formidable challenge on its own, even without introducing additional challenges from substate groups (Mole 2007; Checkel and Katzenstein 2009).

The Council of Europe

The European Convention on Human Rights (1950) makes provisions for people arrested, charged, and tried for criminal acts to be informed of the charges and legal proceedings in a language they understand, but otherwise it mentions language only once to prohibit discrimination on such grounds (Article 14). Its progeny, the European Social Charter, Revised (1996), also explicitly prohibits discrimination based on language, but not much else. In fact other than an endorsement of teaching the children of migrant workers in their mother tongue (Part II, Article 19, Sections 11–12), the charter mentions language just one other time: “The enjoyment of the rights set forth in this Charter shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national extraction or social origin, health, association with a national minority, birth or other status” (Part V, Article E). The preamble of the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) invokes the precedent of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. But it goes well beyond stating simply that human rights may not be discriminated against based on language (Nic Craith 2003). The ECRML endorses language rights as a civil liberty and states that the “right to use a regional or minority language in private and public life is an inalienable right.” The inclusion of the word “public” sets this document apart from all other statements issued by either the Council of Europe or the European Union. Nonetheless the ECRML, like every other European agreement on minority language rights, fails to confer a right to territorial autonomy of any kind, arguably a necessary condition for any meaningful implementation of an effective language policy. Moreover the charter is arguably flexible to a fault: “The Charter’s main characteristic is its á la carte approach. Not only are state parties free to indicate which regional and minority languages they choose to protect under the terms of the Charter, but they also have considerable discretion in picking and choosing from among the many, rather

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detailed, substantive provisions of the Charter. The Charter is, therefore, a  very flexible instrument, requiring the contracting states to undertake only those obligations that they are positively willing to undertake” (de Witte 2011, 174). While the normative invocation of an “inalienable right” suggests that the document is motivated by morals, the “Charter does not advocate the maintenance of linguistic diversity in terms of rights” (Grin 2003, 194). It is an “unusual document” in that “it does not speak of the rights of national minorities or of ethnic groups. It does not speak even of the rights of linguistic communities. It confines itself to languages and their use” and therefore “confers very concrete and specific rights” (Ó Riagáin 2001a, 35). In essence the document is driven by “a welfare-based ideology, according to which diversity is worth preserving and developing because it constitutes a contribution to the general quality of life” (Grin 2003, 194). In this view protecting and promoting minority language rights is good public policy: a means to preclude potentially expensive or explosive conflict and to consolidate democratic participation by including disparate segments of a multiethnic of multinational population. Since the drafting of the ECRML in 1992, thirty-three of the forty-seven council member states, together comprised of some eight hundred million people, have signed the charter; of these thirty-three signatories, twenty-five (more than half) have now ratified the treaty. Notable holdouts include the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), each home to sizable populations of ethnic Russians; perennially bifurcated Belgium; and Turkey, where the language of its persecuted Kurdish population (some 20 percent of the country) remains taboo. France initially signed the charter in 1999, but its ratification was blocked amid public cries that France was to be “Balkanized.” More importantly a review by the Conseil Constitutionnel found that the charter was incompatible with the French constitution because it countered an article that describes France as une et indivisble (Judge 2007, 141). Similarly France has also shrugged at the Council of Europe’s 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM), a broader document addressing a range of recommended protections and privileges. Regarding language, the FCNM (Section II, Article 5) invokes the conventional clause of language nondiscrimination among other identity markers, such as religion. But the document also develops a detailed and wide-ranging categorization of contexts that specify group language rights

Table 2.8. Council of Europe Member States: ECRML Status, December 2011 State Albania Andorra Armenia Austria Azerbaijan Belgium Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macedonia Malta Moldova Monaco Montenegro Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia San Marino Serbia Slovak Republic

Year Signed

2001 1992 2001 2005

1997 1992 2000 1992 1992 1999 1992 1992 1999

Year Ratified

Year Enforced

n/a n/a 2002 2001

2002 2001

n/a 2010

2011

n/a 1997 2002 2006 2000 n/a 1994 n/a 1998 n/a 1995

1998 2002 2007 2001 1998 n/a 1999 1998

n/a 2000 1992 1992 1996 1992 2002 2005 1992 1992 2003 1995 2001 2005 2001

n/a 1997 n/a 2005 n/a n/a n/a 2006 1996 1993 2009 n/a 2008 n/a 2006 2001

1998 2005

2006 1998 1998 2009 2008 n/a 2006 2002 (continued)

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Table 2.8 (continued) State Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom

Year Signed

Year Ratified

Year Enforced

1997 1992 2000 1993

2000 2001 2000 1997 n/a 2005 2001

2001 2001 2000 1998

1996 2000

2006 2001

in education, commerce, the courts, and other arenas, both public and private. The ninth article, for example begins with a proviso that a national minority has the right to “hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas in the minority language.” Yet because the interpretation of such a statement may be very wide or very narrow, the Framework Convention continues to clarify that national minorities therefore have the right to create their own media, including publications, films, and broadcasting content (radio or television). Article 10 states that minority citizens have the right to request government ser vices, including criminal proceedings, in their own languages. Having established the right to use a language in public life, Article 11 specifies that this shall include the right to name themselves or their businesses or, in the case of a municipality, their street signs in their own language. Details on rights to learn minority mother tongues (Articles 12, 14) specify the necessary provision of teacher training and textbooks; a separate provision explicitly states that education in a minority language should not preclude the possibility of also studying the official language of the state. To date, the FCNM has been signed by forty-three of the forty-seven member states and ratified by thirty-nine. The four states that have signed the Framework Convention but not yet ratified the agreement are Belgium, Greece, Iceland, and Luxembourg. The four holdout countries that still refuse to sign the document include a pair of microstates, Andorra and Monaco, as well as two very large states with a clear aversion to the recognition of minority group rights, France and Turkey. The Council of Europe, far more than the EU, is transparently concerned with the relationships between languages, identities, and the partici-

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pation of citizens in a democracy. At a conference on this topic in 1999, Joseph Sheils, then head of the modern languages section of the COE (and current head of the Language Policy Division in the Secretariat of the COE), emphasized that balancing interests between the official languages of European states is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for a healthy civil society. “Access to informal as well as formal communication networks is the right of everyone. This requires particular effort as treating everyone equally does not necessarily lead to equality” (Sheils 1999, 130).

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

The mandate of the OSCE is the prevention (and sometimes regulation or resolution) of group conflict. As such, when the fifty-six members of the OSCE consider questions of language rights, the focus is on practical means for preventing language disputes. For example, under the auspices of the OSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM), the landmark Oslo Recommendations regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities issued in 1998 are much more than statements of support for linguistic diversity (however defined) and tolerance (Packer 2003). Rather the recommendations essentially comprise a practical guide for language policy and planning in divided societies, “especially in the public sphere” (OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities 1998). It is this focus that distinguishes the Oslo Recommendations from more generic statements of nondiscrimination based on language among any number of other markers of identity, for example, gender, ethnicity, or faith. The OSCE makes a point of prodding states to do more than protect the existence of minority languages and also to encourage the participation of minority language speakers in civil life. The recommendations begin (Number 1) with a provision allowing parents, entrepreneurs, and municipalities the right to choose names for their children, businesses, or streets “in their own language according to their own traditions and linguistic systems” (OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities 1998). Similarly the OSCE argues that positive language liberties should be afforded to minorities who wish to use their mother tongues to pray, publish newspapers, broadcast media content, conduct commerce, or secure permits from state bureaucrats. In other words, “in regions and localities where persons belonging to a

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national minority are present in significant numbers and where the desire for it has been expressed,” members of a minority language community should be afforded the same rights as members of the majority. While the Oslo Recommendations are most explicit regarding language rights, they were preceded by the 1996 Hague Recommendations regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities. Here also the document begins (Article 1) with a clear focus on language, in this case its use in the classroom: “The rights of persons belonging to national minorities to maintain their identity can only be fully realized if they acquire a proper knowledge of their mother tongue during the educational process.” Moreover states inclined to a narrow reading of extant international agreements are reminded that such obligations are “minimum standards” and should instead “approach minority education rights in a proactive manner,” including government funding (OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities 1996; see also Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). Similarly another set of provisions, the 1999 Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life, also identified “issues of minority education and use of minority languages in particular as matters of great importance for the maintenance and development of the identity of persons belonging to national minorities” (OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities 1999, 3). Thus OSCE member states are advised (Articles 17–18) to provide public services in minority languages and, when necessary, devise communal or “non-territorial forms of governance” to protect and promote “education, culture, use of minority language, religion, and other matters crucial to the identity and way of life of national minorities.” Thus all three sets of HCNM recommendations are clearly conscious of the potential for language disputes to mobilize national minorities and precipitate broader group confl ict. As such, the line between language rights specifically and minority rights in general is of little relevance. Indeed ten years after the promulgation of the document, the current high commissioner, Norwegian Knut Vollebaek, noted that “linguistic rights are the quintessence of minority rights. The prevention of inter-ethnic conflicts goes hand in hand with the establishment of an adequate system of protection for linguistic rights” (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe 2008). In other words, language rights are a necessary condition for minority rights, and minority rights are a necessary condition for human rights. This is nominally true for any civilized state but is formally expected from any member state of the OSCE.

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One of the only other European IGO’s taking this proactive stance on language is the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI), a joint project of the Danish and German governments established in 1996. Based in Flensburg, the heart of the Danish-speaking region of northern Germany, the ECMI launched a research initiative in 2007 called Language and Cultural Diversity. The avowedly normative goal is to find policy measures to overcome “obstacles to participation in political and public life based on language barriers” (European Centre for Minority Issues 2007). The organization is explicitly critical of both the EU and the Council of Europe for failing to develop “a concept that takes into account the strategic importance of promoting linguistic and cultural inclusion,” that is, the promotion of language rights as a component of conflict prevention in divided societies. Rather the ECMI advocates the provision of “education services in the minority language at the national, regional and local levels,” assistance to “media outlets that broadcast in minority languages,” and the creation of “opportunities for democratic participation.”

Enforcement In the international arena, intergovernmental organizations would be relatively pointless if too many member states routinely and egregiously flouted the rules of the body without consequence. For the United Nations, this means that any member state that invades another member state invites the collective punishment of the entire UN. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, for example, the UN Security Council first condemned Iraq’s action (Resolution 660), then authorized economic sanctions (Resolution 661) followed by a shipping blockade (Resolution 665), and ultimately approved “all necessary force” (Resolution 678). However, when a member state breaks a UN agreement by mistreating a segment of its own population, as in violating the Convention against Genocide, the UN is frequently flaccid. This was illustrated painfully by its failure to prevent or effectively punish the perpetrators of genocidal acts in Srebrenica, Rwanda, or Darfur (LeBor 2006; see also Power 2002), as well as its much delayed support of a “no-fly” zone over the Kurdish region of Iraq (Resolution 688) in 1991, five full years after the peak of the Al-Anfal Campaign (1988), which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Kurds (Human Rights Watch 2004). This is not to say that “international enforcement” is an oxymoron but rather to observe that a member state of an intergovernmental organization

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is much more likely to face a penalty from injuring another state than it is from harming its own citizens. To put it another way, it may be illegal to shoot anyone’s dog, but it is probably riskier to shoot your neighbor’s dog than your own. In the European Union, violations of intergovernmental agreements are not uncommon. For example, any state using euros as official currency must not exceed a budget deficit of 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), but this rule has been broken repeatedly by states small and large. Violators of the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) could be sanctioned (fined) or even ousted from the currency zone, but most receive nothing more than international opprobrium (and perhaps a slap from the invisible hand). Nonetheless there are statutory consequences for breaking the rules of economic integration. Th is is not the case in regard to minority rights in Eu rope, including the rights of minority language communities, since most agreements in this area are guidelines or recommendations, such as the Oslo, Hague, and Lund recommendations on national minorities promulgated by the OSCE. There are no legal consequences for refusing to follow any of the OSCE recommendations. Similarly the COE’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities states that signatories will “undertake” and “endeavor” to “encourage” minority protections and “refrain” from coercion, but breaking the covenant triggers no penalty. There are requirements to report efforts to implement the FCNM on “a periodical basis” to the secretary general of the Council of Europe, but failure to meet the requirement is not punishable. Moreover a state may “at any time denounce” the FCNM (Article 31) and withdraw simply by notifying the council. As for the instrument that most explicitly addresses the status of minority language communities in Eu rope, the Eu ropean Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, the text also requires parties to “undertake” and “endeavor” to protect and promote such languages and again does not stipulate any consequences for failing to implement the charter. It is distinct in that its reporting requirements to the council are more explicit—they must be triennial and they must be public—but identical in its omission of any formal penalties for noncompliance. If this is the case, why is such effort expended to reach consensus on essentially normative statements that are legally toothless? Will Kymlicka, surveying the global evolution of multicultural politics and policies in the early twenty-first century, offers the following explanation: “In most cases, these

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Declarations and Conventions are not in fact judicially enforceable—that is, individuals or groups cannot go to any international court to force their government to comply with these norms. But these norms do have some bite. States are increasingly monitored and judged for how well they comply with these norms, and failure to comply has resulted not only in criticism, but also, in some cases, in tangible consequences” (2007, 4). The utility of this explanation was demonstrated in September 2009 when Slovakia enacted its State Language Act, making Slovak the exclusive language of the civil ser vice and other public employees, including doctors, teachers, police officers, and firefighters. More problematically it also addresses the use of Slovak in “public” venues, a term that is ill defined and conspicuously vague, thereby permitting a great deal of latitude in enforcement. Hence the use of a non-Slovak language in any official or public capacity could be punished with a fine of up to five thousand euros. The act was widely interpreted as a consequence of ethnic outbidding in the Slovak Parliament, where stoking resentment against the minority Hungarian population was an easy way to bolster patriotic credentials. It was this tactic that helped the xenophobic Slovak National Party into prominence, and into the governing coalition, in 2006. The act triggered formal protests from the Hungarian and European Parliaments and informal street demonstrations on both sides of the SlovakHungarian border. The OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Knut Vollebaek, was engaged to monitor meetings of the Slovak-Hungarian Joint Commission on Issues of National Minorities. Ultimately, in January 2010, Slovakia released a new document, the “Principles for the Implementation” of the State Language Act: Vollebaek claimed that they were drafted on his recommendation not only to “address ambiguities, add clarity and provide a single authoritative interpretation on the Law” but also to “respect the principles of non-discrimination.” While the language debate quieted, it was supplanted by an even louder row over mutually antagonistic citizenship laws. The laws are largely moot (since both states are members of the EU and their citizens are free to travel and work at will), but in the context of each nation’s narrative they are politically incendiary. It is important to note that Slovakia chose to restrict the use of minority languages in spite of the fact that it signed and ratified both the ECRML and the FCNM: there were no legal consequences for doing so. Nonetheless Slovakia also chose to formally modify its stance, albeit slightly, on the rigorous enforcement of the act and the probability of leveling severe fines. Arguably

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this is a tangible consequence of a normative agreement, signifying political protection of minority language rights, though this level of protection is still very weak and cannot be enforced by any European institution. In other words, Kymlicka is correct that these “norms do have some bite,” but their fangs are dull.

Conclusion Despite a growing global awareness that good language policy is a necessary condition of good governance—the UN declared 2008 the International Year of Languages—evidence from the European Union indicates that the status of any particular language remains above all a competency of the state. Yes, the UN and the EU espouse the rights of persons to use their mother tongues, and both praise the virtues of multilingualism and diversity, but this is a long way from requiring states to promote the inclusion of minority language speakers in the public sphere and to provide the necessary resources— institutional and financial—to accomplish such a goal. Just as ethnic minorities fighting for regional autonomy reach few open ears in the UN General Assembly—comprised, naturally, of representatives from mutually recognized states—proponents of minority language rights remain at the mercy of their own regimes. Minority populations hoping to secure group recognition and collective rights in the European Union are frequently disappointed because “the principles of individual rights and state sovereignty seem to have won out in most EU institutions and documents” (Waterbury 2008, 227; see also Trenz 2007; Deets 2002; Jackson Preece 1997). Addressing minority language rights as an extension of individual human rights is, however, legally expedient since it requires only a demonstration of unequal treatment under extant international or state law, rather than drafting new legislation and official recognition of a particular population. More often than not the challenge for petitioners and solicitors is to enlighten leaders who show profound “ignorance of the very real and serious disadvantages state language preferences have on some individuals” (de Varennes 1996, 2). However, the results of such litigation are limited at best, particularly in comparison to the “far more effective” results of domestic political mobilization (de Witte 2011, 171). Following a decade of research on majority-minority relations in Slovakia and Romania (vis-à-vis the Hungarian minority), Zsuzsa Csergő (see her con-

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tribution, with James M. Goldgeier, in this volume) found that subordinate populations did indeed view European integration as a singular opportunity to secure greater autonomy. Yet she also found that the regional integration of states was in no way a guarantee of minority rights. In specific regard to language use, she demonstrates that post-1989 confl icts in each case were resolved only as a result of intrastate negotiations: “Changing international norms about minority protection and the membership opportunities promised by the European Union reinforced commitments to democracy, but it was primarily the domestic process resulting from that commitment that helped these actors resolve divisive issues” (Csergő 2007, 2). In Europe the normative interpretation of minority language rights varies widely across territories of the EU, representing “major differences in the various ideologies underpinning the role of language in different states” (Nic Craith 2005, 182). Some, for example Spain, slowly accepted the recognition of minority languages as a necessary but relatively innocuous element of modern state-building and regional integration. Others, such as France, are resolute in their determination to block any such measures. Yet France may be prudent to consider a clear warning from the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, who cautions that efforts to elevate a dominant language at the expense of another are especially ill-advised and often counterproductive: “Such thinking is harmful not just to minorities but also to majorities. When a majority demands mindless obedience and submission from a minority, this is usually regarded as subjugation and increases the chances of that majority not being respected” (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe 2008). This is a lesson not lost in that part of Europe most recently beset by civil war and ethnic cleansing; the successor states of the former Yugoslavia all recognize the languages of divided nations within their borders. Ultimately a sincere effort to support minority language rights cannot depend solely on legal protections per person. In the European context, the effect of modest liberal dispensations “remains minimal and disappointing,” while more robust protections require “a certain level of internal selfdetermination” for minorities (Henrard 2003, 53). In other words, for a state to successfully protect a minority language it must step back and surrender at least some autonomy to the subordinate group. While the integration of Europe has afforded some limited opportunities to divided language communities, they are contingent on the cooperation of what remains the final arbiter of group rights: the state.

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Table 2.9. Language Recognition in Balkan States State

Official Language(s)

Albania

Albanian

Bosnia & Herzegovina

Bosnian Croatian Serbian

Croatia

Kosovo

Croatian

Albanian

Recognized Minority Languages

Capacity/ Jurisdiction(s)

Greek Macedonian

Municipal Regional (Korçë)

n/a

n/a

Italian Czech, Hungarian, Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak Rusyn, Ukrainian

Regional (Istria) Municipal

Bosnian, Romani, Turkish

Municipal

Communal*

Macedonian

De jure: languages spoken by 20 percent of a municipality De facto: Albanian, Romani, Serbian, Turkish

Municipal

Serbia

Serbian

Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian, Rusyn, Slovak Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Romani, Ukrainian

Slovenia

Slovenian

Italian, Hungarian Romani

Municipal Communal*

Macedonia

Municipal

Communal*

*Languages recognized as “communal” are protected under the provisions of the ECRML.

Notes 1. Robin Adamson (2007) argues that the French are par ticu lar in their perception and practice of defending their language and that this habit dates to medieval Europe. A more recent example, however, is a claim by French president Nicolas Sarkozy (speaking at the fortieth anniversary of the International Orga nization of La Francophonie) that his language is “under siege” (Kimmelman 2010). 2. See also a specialized journal that considers the social and political scenarios of this phenomenon, Current Issues in Language Planning, published by Multilingual Matters since 2000.

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3. The Council of Europe maintains a robust Web site dedicated to news and information about the progress of ratification and implementation of the ECRML in its member states: http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/minlang /. References Adamson, Robin. 2007. The Defence of French: A Language in Crisis?, Multilingual Matters. Clevedon, UK and Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters. Cartrite, Britt. 2009. Minority Language Policy in France. In Culture and Belonging in Divided Societies, ed. M. Ross, 128–50. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Checkel, Jeff rey T., and Peter J. Katzenstein. 2009. European Identity, Contemporary European Politics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Csergő, Zsuzsa. 2007. Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. de Varennes, Fernand. 1996. Language, Minorities and Human Rights. International Studies in Human Rights, Vol. 45. Cambridge, MA: M. Nijhoff. de Witte, Bruno. 2011. Language Rights: The Interaction between Domestic and European Developments. In Linguistic Diversity and European Democracy, ed. A. L. Kjær and S. Adamo, 167–88. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Deets, Stephen. 2002. Reconsidering East European Minority Policy: Liberal Theory and European Norms. East European Politics and Societies 16 (1): 30–53. Encarnación, Omar Guillermo. 2008. Spanish Politics: Democracy after Dictatorship. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity. European Centre for Minority Issues. 2007. Annual Report. Flensburg, Germany: ECMI. European Commission. 2006. Eurobarometer: Europeans and Their Languages. Eurobarometer 243. Brussels: Public Opinion Analysis sector of the European Commission. ———. 2008. Eurostat Yearbook. Brussels: European Union. Eurostat. 2007. European Regional and Urban Statistics. Brussels: European Commission. Fishman, Joshua A. 1973. Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Frangoudaki, Anna. 2002. Greek Societal Bilingualism of More than a Century. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 157: 101–7. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 15th ed. Dallas: SIL International. Grin, François. 2003. Language Policy Evaluation and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Henrard, Kristen. 2003. Minority Protection in the Area of Language Rights. In Minority Languages in Europe: Frameworks, Status, Prospects, ed. G. Hogan-Brun and S. Wolff, 37–55. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hicks, Davyth. 2008. Sorbs Demonstrate in Berlin. Eurolang 2008 [cited June 7, 2008]. Available from http://www.eurolang.net. Human Rights Watch. 2004. Claims in Ethnic Confl ict: Reversing Ethnic Cleansing in Northern Iraq. Human Rights Watch 16 (4): 1–78. Jackson Preece, Jennifer. 1997. National Minority Rights vs. State Sovereignty in Eu rope: Changing Norms in International Relations? Nations and Nationalism 3 (3): 345– 64. Jones, Huw. 2008. Four Arrested in Language Rights Protest. Eurolang 2008 [cited June 7, 2008]. Available from http://www.eurolang.net. Judge, Anne. 2007. Linguistic Policies and the Survival of Regional Languages in France and Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kimmelman, Michael. 2010. Pardon My French. New York Times, April 21. Arts 1. Kjær, Anne Lise, and Silvia Adamo, eds. 2011. Linguistic Diversity and European Democracy. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press. ———. 2001. Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, Will, and Alan Patten, eds. 2003. Language Rights and Political Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Laitin, David D. 2001. National Identities in the Emerging European State. In Minority Nationalism and the Changing International Order, ed. M. Keating and J. McGarry, 84–113. New York: Oxford University Press. Le Monde. 2008. L’Académie française ne veut pas reconnaître des langues régionales dans la Constitution. Le Monde, June 18. www.lemonde.fr/web/recherche_breve/1, 13-0,37-1040405,0.html?xtmc=langues_regionales_constitution& xtcr=6. Accessed June 12, 2012. ———. 2008. La langue et la loi. Le Monde, June 19. www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACH ATS /acheter .cgi ?offre=ARCHIVES & type _item=ART _ARCH _30J & objet _ id=1040838& xtmc=la _langue _et _la _loi& xtcr=7. Accessed June 12, 2012. LeBor, Adam. 2006. Complicity with Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Linz, Juan J., and Alfred C. Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Matsuura, Koïchiro. 2007. Languages Matter! New York: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). May, Stephen. 2001. Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language. Ed. C. N. Candlin. Language in Social Life Series. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.

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———. 2003a. Language, Nationalism and Democracy in Europe. In Minority Languages in Europe: Frameworks, Status, Prospects, ed. G. Hogan-Brun and S. Wolff, 211–32. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2003b. Misconceiving Minority Language Rights: Implications for Liberal Political Theory. In Language Rights and Political Theory, ed. W. Kymlicka and A. Patten, 123–52. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Millar, Robert McColl. 2005. Language, Nation, and Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mole, Richard C. M. 2007. Discursive Constructions of Identity in European Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nic Craith, Máiréad. 2003. Facilitating or Generating Linguistic Diversity: The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In Minority Languages in Europe: Frameworks, Status, Prospects, ed. G. Hogan-Brun and S. Wolff, 59–72. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2005. Europe and the Politics of Language, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ó Riagáin, Dónall. 2001a. The European Union and Lesser Used Languages. International Journal on Multicultural Societies 3 (1): 33– 43. ———. 2001b. Many Tongues but One Voice: A Personal Overview of the Role of the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages in Promoting Europe’s Regional and Minority Languages. In Language, Ethnicity, and the State, ed. C. O’Reilly, 20–39. New York: Palgrave. O’Reilly, Camille. 2001. Introduction: Minority Languages, Ethnicity and the State in Post-1989 Eastern Europe. In Language, Ethnicity, and the State, ed. C. O’Reilly, 1–19. New York: Palgrave. Orban, Leonard. 2007. European Multilingualism Policy. Brussels: European Commission. Orga nization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. 2008. Respect for Minority Language Rights Key to Inter-ethnic Peace, Says OSCE Minorities Commissioner. Oslo. OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. 1996. The Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities. Oslo: Orga nization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. ———. 1998. The Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities. Oslo: Orga nization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. ———. 1999. The Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life & Explanatory Note. Oslo: Orga nization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Packer, John. 2003. The Practitioner’s Perspective: Minority Languages and Linguistic Minorities in the Work of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. In Minority Languages in Europe: Frameworks, Status, Prospects, ed. G. HoganBrun and S. Wolff, 73–98. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Phillipson, Robert. 2003. English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy. New York: Routledge. Power, Samantha. 2002. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. Sagüés, Elena García. 2000. The EU: A New Window of Opportunity to Widen the Rights of Persons Belonging to Linguistic Minorities. Europa 3 (2). Sheils, Joseph. 1999. Next Steps. Paper read at Linguistic Diversity for Democratic Citizenship in Europe: Towards a Framework for Language Education Policy, May 10–12, Innsbruck, Austria. Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. 2000. Linguistic Genocide in Education, or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 2004. A New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Trenz, Hans-Jörg. 2007. Reconciling Diversity and Unity: Language Minorities and European Integration. Ethnicities 7 (2): 157–85. Waterbury, Myra A. 2008. Uncertain Norms, Unintended Consequences: The Effects of European Union Integration on Kin-State Politics in Eastern Europe. Ethno politics 7 (2–3): 217–38. Weber, Eugen Joseph. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Williams, Glyn. 2005. Sustaining Language Diversity in Europe: Evidence from the Euromosaic Project. Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 3

Kin-State Activism in Hungary, Romania, and Russia: The Politics of Ethnic Demography Zsuzsa Csergő and James M. Goldgeier

Although kin-state nationalism is neither new nor specific to Europe, the postcommunist world in Central and Eastern Europe provides particularly fertile grounds for this kind of national competition. Modern state-building in this region unfolded under conditions created by Great Power politics that engendered dramatic shifts in territorial borders and a political landscape of weak multinational states with “external minorities.” As André Liebich writes, “West European political and linguistic boundary changes over the centuries have been moderate compared to those in East Central Europe. . . . The implications of these historical processes are significant, for both majorities and minorities in East Central Europe” (2002, 120). Under these conditions, state- and nation-building became highly competitive, as each newly dominant political elite sought to consolidate and legitimize its ownership of its territory by asserting control over administrative institutions and institutions of cultural reproduction (primarily the educational system) and promoting national stories to link populations to states defined as “national homelands” (Brubaker et al. 2006; Csergő 2007a). Crises in the former Yugoslavia demonstrated the high costs of not fi nding viable solutions to questions of multinationalism, especially in situations that involve kin-states; in the 1990s there was remarkable growth in the adoption of international documents of minority protection. An underlying goal of these documents was to compel governments in Central and Eastern

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Europe to protect minority cultures on their territory, making it unnecessary for minority leaders to seek assistance from kin-state governments or for kin-state governments to seek involvement in the fate of their “external minorities.” The essence of this approach was articulated in the Pact on Stability in Europe, signed in 1995, which stated, “The objectives of stability will be achieved through the promotion of good neighborly relations, including questions related to frontiers and minorities, as well as regional cooperation and the strengthening of democratic institutions” (Council of the European Union 1994). The rationale behind these international efforts was based on the notions that (a) state dismemberment resulting in large external kin populations can lead to future demands for border revision, which in turn can lead to violent conflict; but (b) if successor states are democratic, they will protect their minority populations; and (c) transnational integration will provide further incentives for governments to practice good neighborly relations and maintain peaceful relations. Against the backdrop of these expectations, the proliferation of kin-state politics in postcommunist Eu rope presents significant puzzles for both theorists and policy-makers (Csergő and Goldgeier 2004). European integration and democratic consolidation have been surprisingly weak predictors for the relative appeal of kin-state nationalism in this region. Although most of the new democracies have already joined the European Union and minority protection has improved throughout the region, governments continue to design policies that aim to maintain, reproduce, or even construct cross-border “national” ties. These policies express two goals that kin-state governments seem to share in Central and Eastern Europe: (1) strengthening of external kin communities culturally, socioeconomically, and institutionally; and (2) encouraging cross-border interaction (social, economic, cultural). Kin-state strategies have gone beyond indirect modes of influence, such as bilateral treaties with minority protection clauses (for instance, the so-called Friendship Treaties that Hungary signed with Ukraine, Romania, and Slovakia) or efforts to influence the content of international law, especially European law, in the direction of increased minority protection (for instance, during the debate over the European Constitution). A number of countries in the region have adopted policies that represent direct engagement with “external kin,” such as benefit laws that provide various educational, cultural, and economic benefits to ethnic kin; and citizenship laws

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that provide opportunities for citizenship to ethnic kin living abroad even without residency requirements. The Slovene parliament adopted a resolution in June 1996 that defined Slovenes in Slovenia and historic Slovene communities as part of “a common Slovene cultural zone” and specified those regions where ethnic Slovenes are “aboriginal” (historic) communities. This resolution provides subsidies for the activities of nongovernmental organizations (sports, cultural, research, educational) that cooperate with Slovene minorities abroad and establishes a state secretarial position and funding to coordinate policy and related activities of various Slovene ministries. The Slovak parliament adopted a benefit law in 1997 for “Slovaks living abroad,” providing for a Slovak identification card based on ethnicity, issued by the Slovak Ministry of Culture. Benefits included educational opportunities, employment in Slovakia, transportation for the elderly and handicapped, and residency in Slovakia without an otherwise requisite permit. The following year, Romania adopted a benefit law that provided for a budget to be used at the discretion of the prime minister and established a Ministerial Council for the Support of Romanian Communities around the World (that is, not just those in neighboring states). Russia adopted a benefit law in 1999, and Bulgaria did so in 2000. The Hungarian parliament adopted a benefit law in 2001 (later amended in 2003). Citizenship laws that become elements of kin-state policy either provide preferential naturalization for those coethnics who want to repatriate to the kin-state or grant citizenship for those who do not reside in the kin-state or do not currently want to move there. During the Cold War, for instance, the West German state provided preferential naturalization to ethnic Germans who requested “repatriation” on the basis of ethnicity. This policy resembled traditional nationalist efforts to create congruence between the boundaries of state and nation. The granting of citizenship to nonresident ethnic kin, however, emerged as an important policy also in the repertoire of transsovereign nationalism. In Central and Eastern Eu rope, Croatia was the first country to use citizenship law as a measure to connect external kin to the state. In 1993 the Croatian government granted citizenship rights to the four million ethnic Croatians living abroad. In May 2003 Romania changed its citizenship law to grant citizenship to those who held Romanian citizenship before December 22, 1989, or their descendants who lost their citizenship involuntarily,

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regardless of whether they intended to repatriate to Romania. The following month Moldova lifted its constitutional prohibition on dual citizenship. What drives the continued appeal of kin-state nationalism? Are states designing policies in response to the call of “divided nations”? What accounts for variation in kin-state strategies, and should we expect EU integration and increased democratic consolidation to decrease the appeal of such strategies? To shed light on these questions, we compare the kin-state policies of postcommunist Hungary, Romania, and Russia—three states that repeatedly experienced dramatic border changes in the twentieth century resulting in large “external kin” populations and competing narratives of state- and nation-building. Historic Hungary lost large territories with Hungarian populations after World War I and again after World War II. The biggest of these territories went to Romania and is now home to the largest population of minority Hungarians. The largest ethnic Romanian population outside of Romania lives in Moldova, a territory that shifted from Greater Romania to the Soviet Union during World War II. Moldova is a nation-state that also encompasses a sizable Russian-speaking population. In 1992 Moldova faced a forceful challenge presented by Russian speakers in its Transnistria region who, with the Kremlin’s backing, declared their own state (King 1994; Iordachi 2004). Overall the collapse of the USSR left twenty-five million Russians outside the post-Soviet Russian border. Russia, Hungary, and Romania pursued kin-state politics from the beginning of the 1990s in ways that defied initial expectations about the effects of dismembering states, democratization, and transnational integration. These states represent different trajectories of “Europeanization,” which for the states emerging from the Soviet Bloc involved both democratization and a reconfiguration of national sovereignties in the context of regional realignment. Hungary was among the front-runners of postcommunist democratization and EU accession, and it joined the EU in 2004 as a consolidated democracy. Romania obtained EU membership only in 2007 and remains categorized as a “semi-consolidated democracy” (Walker 2011, 48). In Russia, democratization faces an increasing number of challenges, and the country’s relationship with the European Union is limited to a “Partnership and Cooperation Agreement,” in the framework of which cooperation can take place in four broad areas (the so-called EU-Russia Common Spaces). Russia does not participate in the somewhat more coherent European Neighborhood Policy. If increased EU integration, coupled with democratization,

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significantly decreased the salience of ethnically driven kinship policies, then we should expect lower levels of kin-state activism on the part of Hungary and a higher level of activism on the part of the Russian kin-state. As the pages that follow demonstrate, however, the relationship between “Europeanization” and kin-state activism has shown a reverse pattern. As norms of sovereignty are reconfigured in Europe—with the advent of  European citizenship, increased acceptance of multiple citizenship, and other forms of “expansive citizenship” (Bauböck 1995; Horváth 2006)—kinstate politics are becoming a significant arena in which political elites (governments, leaders, and parties) compete for people’s allegiances. Irregular ethnonational geography makes this region particularly susceptible to kinstate competition. It is generally acknowledged that a sudden shift in state borders can mobilize irredentist politics. As the Czechoslovakian “velvet divorce” exemplifies, however, where shared nationhood is absent or weak, the consequences of state dismemberment are less traumatic or long lasting. It is similarly acknowledged that larger minority populations present a stronger challenge to state-building or nation-building than smaller minority populations do. Yet neither the trauma of border changes nor the size of external kin populations sufficiently explains the dynamics of kin-state politics. Rather, “nationhood” features in kin-state strategies in two important ways: (1) the place of external kin in a modern national story (reproduced in a shared national canon); and (2) the political resourcefulness and demands of external kin populations.

The Place of External Kin in a Modern National Story The effectiveness of kin-state elites in “playing the kin-state card” at home and abroad is affected by the place of ethnic kin in a broadly shared national canon, and this varies widely in the region. A national canon incorporates “the national literature, including classical and modern authors who wrote in the national language, the historiography that narrates the story of the nation, and the geography that maps the connection between the nation and the national territory” (Csergő 2007b, 147). Hungarians and Russians, for example, both viewed as “imperial minorities” in the successor states of Austria-Hungary and the Soviet Union, differ significantly in this respect. Hungarian minorities living outside of Hungary today are much more likely

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to consider themselves part of a common Hungarian national story and to reproduce a shared Hungarian national canon than Russians living in Russia’s neighboring states. The territories on which Hungarians live (the Transylvanian region of Romania, southern Slovakia) are important elements of  national historiography and geography: they contain spaces that have become building blocks of the national canon. For Russians, the geographic link is weaker: the territory of longest standing in the national story lying outside the current boundaries of the country is Kievan Rus, considered the birthplace of modern Russia, but Russia’s affi nity for Ukraine after the Soviet collapse was due as much to concerns about the demographic balance between Slavs and Muslims or about the strategic use of the naval base at Sevastopol as it was to nostalgia for historic Russian lands.

The Resourcefulness of External Kin Populations The degree to which external kin populations are politically organized, the institutional and economic resources they possess, and the way they formulate their demands on the kin-state and their home state are also significant. Hungarians in Austria, Slovaks in Hungary, and Turks in Romania, for example, are neither well organized nor insistent that their kin-states support them politically. Minority demands and resources are defined to a great degree by the institutions and minority policies in effect in their resident states. The absence of minority accommodation or the introduction of policies that weaken available minority institutions can heighten interest in kin-state activism. For more than a decade after the Soviet collapse, Russian governments have consistently linked their foreign policies toward the Baltic States—troop withdrawal, border demarcations, and efforts to block or slow down the prospects of these states’ accession to the EU and NATO—to the treatment of Russian-speaking minorities in those states. Similarly Hungarian political elites linked their foreign policies toward neighboring states, such as the signing of bilateral friendship treaties, to minority policies in those states. There has been great variation in the region in degrees of minority accommodation. None of the new member states of the European Union has adopted a minority policy comparable to the territorial autonomies available in Spain or the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, some states are more willing than others to accommodate national minorities—by allowing minority-

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language educational and cultural institutions and by adopting policies of bilingualism at local levels of government. In Hungary, a national minority self-government system allows thirteen national and ethnic minorities to form their own elected bodies that work in partnership with local and national levels of government. In Romania, policies of increased minority language accommodation were introduced after 1997 in the system of education, local government, and the courts. Slovakia moved in a direction of increased minority accommodation in preparation for EU membership, but a restrictive language law adopted in 2009 has raised questions about the future of minority accommodation in the state and triggered intense criticism in Hungary (Solymosi 2009). In the Baltics, where Latvia and Estonia adopted policies at the beginning of the 1990s that excluded the great majority of Russian speakers from citizenship, the membership conditionality applied by the European Union before 2004 resulted in policy changes that enabled a greater number of Russians to become citizens; language and education policies in neither of these states, however, have become inclusive of minority languages. Russians in the Baltics have protested against citizenship restrictions and language laws, and there were riots in Estonia in 2007 to protest the removal of a Soviet-era war memorial. Yet Russians in general have demonstrated relatively weak interest in kin-state support for their rights claims, especially when compared to Hungary’s “external minorities.” Although kin-state policy is designed primarily in the “national center,” the effectiveness of this strategy depends a great deal on the degree to which external kin populations are likely to respond positively to these efforts. The relative economic status of external kin also shapes the dynamics of kin-state nationalism. Baltic Russians emerged from the Soviet breakup in a much better economic position than their counterparts elsewhere in the former Soviet space, which may help account for the relatively weak appeal of kin-state nationalism among them. Similarly, Hungarians living in Austria have been far less susceptible to entreaties from Budapest as a national center than those living in less affluent states, where Hungarian minorities found themselves in a weakened economic position. Economic conditions alone, however, would be insufficient for explaining the appeal of nationalism across state borders. Romanians in Moldova, comprising a majority in their state, have demonstrated low interest in national unification with Romania— even though economic conditions in Romania are significantly better (and a ready model is available vis-à-vis German reunification). To gain a better understanding of both the continuing appeal of kin-state nationalism and

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the variation in this type of nationalism, we need to consider the policies designed in the “national center” and the conditions under which external kin populations participate in processes of “shared nationhood.”

The Politics of Ethnic Demography in the New European Framework Russia’s Kin-State Strategy: The Dog That Did Not Bark

With twenty-five million ethnic Russians living outside the Russian Federation when the USSR collapsed, many feared that it would be only a matter of time before Moscow moved aggressively to ensure that the rights of Russian minorities from northern Kazakhstan to Eastern Ukraine (Crimea) and the Baltics were protected. Such fears were not unwarranted. Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev stated in April 1995 that “[t]here may be cases when the use of direct military force will be needed to defend our compatriots abroad” (cited in Quigley 1997, 462). A decade later, in his annual address to the Federal Assembly in April 2005, Russian president Vladimir Putin argued: Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. . . . As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. . . . We consider international support for the respect of the rights of Russians abroad an issue of major importance, one that cannot be the subject of political and diplomatic bargaining. We hope that the new members of NATO and the European Union in the post-Soviet area will show their respect for human rights, including the rights of ethnic minorities, through their actions. (Putin 2005) The Russian government, however, has made less robust efforts on behalf of its “compatriots” abroad than many expected, although the 1999 Law on Compatriots Abroad has maintained an expansive definition of kin, stating that “compatriots are people born in one state who are living or who have lived in it, and who possess general familiarity with the language, religion,

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cultural inheritance, traditions and customs, and also direct descendants of  such people” (Ziegler 2006, 107–8). The fate of Russian-speaking minorities continues to feature prominently in political rhetoric in Moscow, and the Kremlin was alleged to have promulgated cyber attacks and fueled the “Bronze Statue” riots in Estonia in 2007; the Russian government has also interfered in the domestic politics of neighboring states (such as the 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections) and has armed secessionists in Transnistria and other “frozen conflict” areas. But even the most explosive of these efforts, the war with Georgia in August 2008 that resulted in Russian declarations of independence for Abkhazia and South Ossetia, was seemingly conducted for the larger diplomatic game being played: Russia’s desire to control events in neighboring countries rather than a coherent strategy for building a larger national community. When Putin told U.S. president George W. Bush in 2008 that “Ukraine is not even a state”  or referred to the country using the imperial term “Little Russia,” he was asserting Russian political dominance and warning the West to limit its drive to draw Ukraine closer to the EU and NATO, but he has not accompanied these threats with a coherent nation-building strategy. Relations between Russia and the EU deteriorated after the 2008 war in Georgia and have continued to founder; expectations of European integration building greater regional cooperation do not include Russia (except to the extent that the EU conditioned Latvian and Estonian accession to the treatment of their Russian minorities). Russia’s failure to integrate into Western institutions, its posturing as a recovering great power, its declining interest in pleasing the EU, its growing assertiveness as a regional power, and its increasingly authoritarian domestic politics make the relative weakness of its kin-state strategy puzzling. Numerous scholars have explored the question of why the Soviet government in 1990–91 did not attempt to use massive force to keep the Soviet Union together. (There were only limited uses of violence in the Caucasus and the Baltics before the breakup.) At the moment of collapse, it appeared to many Western policy-makers as though the emerging new leadership of Russia took the dismemberment of the Soviet state as an opportunity finally to establish an independent, democratic, and Western-oriented Russian nation-state. But Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s vision of a democratic Russia freed from the constraints of the Soviet legacy and willing to forge a new partnership in the region—the Commonwealth of Independent States—was

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rooted in his strategy for how to outmaneuver Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the darling of the West. This strategy required an even less assertive Russia than Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, one that limited Moscow’s sovereignty to the territory of the Russian Federation. To claim authority over the fate of Russians outside of those borders would have reinforced efforts to keep the Soviet Union together. In this context, at the start of independence in 1992, the Russian government’s attitude was that those living in the Russian Federation were citizens of Russia, and those living in other republics were citizens of those republics (Melvin 1995, 11–12). By the end of 1992 the most liberal pro-Western figures in the Russian government were already losing their influence and position, and Russian politicians on all sides were calling for a more active engagement with Russian minorities (Khychikov and Miall 2002, 199–200). In an effort to consolidate political control, the Yeltsin leadership turned to a more vocal Russian nationalism, focusing especially on Russians living in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where governments had shown no interest in joining the new commonwealth but instead actively pursued NATO and EU membership. The independent Baltic States provided the first test for the Yeltsin government’s intent to make a dramatic shift from empire to nation-state. When the Soviet Union collapsed, over one hundred thousand Red Army troops were stationed in the Baltic republics. Russia had quickly agreed to a deadline (August 31, 1993) for withdrawing troops from Lithuania, which had a small ethnic Russian population, no important Russian military facilities, and more accommodative minority policies than the other two Baltic States. In Latvia and Estonia, however, where significant Russian populations lived, the new governments adopted exclusive citizenship policies, leaving great numbers of Russian speakers in “liminality”  outside the political community of both Russia and their adopted states. As important Soviet military facilities were left on the territory of these states (a radar site in Latvia and a nuclear submarine facility in Estonia), the Yeltsin government initially proposed to link the withdrawal of troops from Estonia to the naturalization of Russian speakers in that country. However, the proposition received no support from officials in the United States or the EU (Khychikov and Miall 2002, 199–200). Eventually Yeltsin reluctantly but decisively fulfilled his pledge to withdraw from both of these states as a result of pressure from the U.S. government and promises of Western financial assistance for officer housing for

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returning Russian troops and for dismantling a radar site in Latvia after a transition period. Under Putin’s leadership, the general thrust of the Russian government has been to seek increased control both inside and outside of Russia, but this process has yet to translate into a forceful policy of kin-state nationalism. Within the borders of the Russian Federation, Putin’s desire for control has meant eliminating opposition in politics, in the media, and in business. In foreign policy, it has meant using economic, military, and political contacts to influence the orientation of Russia’s neighbors. While Russia has used its leverage in the region—dramatically demonstrated, for example, in its periodic cutoffs in the supply of natural gas and electricity to Ukraine—the policy is not designed specifically to support an ethnic diaspora; rather it appears to be designed to control resources and strengthen the Russian state. There have been no indications that the Russian government wants to reclaim lost Soviet territories on grounds of protecting ethnic Russians. The fears of a divided Ukraine that appeared in some reports during the 2004 presidential elections quickly subsided—as the Russians in Ukraine did not attempt to secede, and the government of Russia, after tremendous ineptitude during the election, tried to make peace quickly with new president Viktor Yushchenko. Yushchenko’s failures, which allowed Viktor Yanukovych to gain the presidency in 2010, also left Russia in a more advantageous position than seemed possible during the Orange Revolution. Rather than reclaiming land, there has been more interest among Russian policy-makers in using citizenship policy to reclaim some “lost” Russian populations—although the messages from Moscow have confl icted at times, indicating an absence of coherence in this strategy. Whereas the 1992 citizenship law provided for relatively easy access to Russian citizenship for populations of the former Soviet Union, Russian citizenship laws were tightened in 2002 in order to prevent unwanted migration from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Only twenty thousand individuals were granted Russian citizenship in 2003, as compared with more than three hundred thousand the year before. Yet the Russian government, responding to demographic trends showing a population decline of one million people each year, later eased restrictions and in January 2006 extended fast-track citizenship processing for former Soviet citizens. The fast-track procedures allow individuals to obtain citizenship without the need to have lived continuously in the

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country for five years or even to demonstrate proficiency in the Russian language (Bigg 2005; RIA Novosti 2004; Torbakov 2006).

Russia’s External Minorities: Limited Interest in a “Russian Nation”

Numerous scholars have pointed out the weak interest of Russians outside Russia (in the country’s so-called “near abroad”) in belonging to a common ethnocultural nation centered in Moscow. Contrary to commonly held assumptions about ties between external minorities and “external homelands,” a study conducted in 1998 that included Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, and Ukraine indicated that the majority of Russian speakers in these states did not see Russia as their “homeland,” nor did they see themselves as part of the same ethnonational community. The authors conclude, “Identifying oneself as Russian ‘by nationality’ (natsional’nost’) does not represent a declaration of affiliation or a sense of shared historical fate with Russia” (Barrington et al. 2003, 300; see also Ziegler 2006). An important impediment to a more coherent Russian kin-state policy is the absence of a consistent Russian “national canon” that sufficient numbers of Russian speakers inside and outside of Russia would share. Russia’s history was so intertwined with the history of empires that until 1991 Russians had never formed a nation-state. Even before the Soviet period, the vast land of czarist Russia expanded into all sorts of territories clearly not “Russian” in character. According to Geoff rey Hosking (2006), Russians remained an “unmarked nationality” and never developed “their own” nationalism during the Soviet period. Language has not played the same role as a national marker for Russians that it did for most other nationalities in the region. The Russian language had emerged as a lingua franca in Eurasia already during the czarist period, when Russians were sent to far-flung places in the empire to help control the territories. During the Soviet period, Russian became a lingua franca not only within the federation but also in the Communist bloc. Many East European Communist leaders were trained in Russia, and large populations in Eastern Europe speak related Slavic languages—making the learning of Russian easier. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russian language remained a bond between Russian speakers inside and outside of Russia, but without a widely shared national canon associated with the language. Few

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scholars today use the term “national minority” to describe Russians in the other former Soviet republics, and many debate the appropriateness of the term “ethnic Russian” in place of simply “Russian speaking” (see, for example, Rudensky 1994; Melvin 1995). David Laitin (1998) has described the differences in Russian language use in the non-Russian republics of the Soviet period. In Ukraine, Ukrainian and Russian were relatively equally used prior to the end of the USSR. In Kazakhstan, upward mobility required use of Russian. In Latvia and Estonia, the native languages were used extensively. Thus after the breakup Russians in different parts of the former empire found themselves in very different situations. Those speaking Russian in Kazakhstan have not been disadvantaged; in Ukraine, the situation has been more mixed; in Latvia or Estonia, learning the native language has been critical for advancement. Regarding Latvia, Robert Saunders (2005) has distinguished three different types of Russians. First there are the “Latvianized” Russians, those who are fluent in Latvian, have become citizens, have official access to state jobs, but continue to face informal barriers to opportunities. They support European integration and “are still emotionally bound to the Russian nation but typically not the Russian state.” Then there are the Russians who are not citizens, are not allowed to take state jobs, cannot vote, and have a hard time traveling. They are marginalized in Latvia, are anti-Latvia and antiEU, and have a strong identification with the Russian state. Third there are the globalists, the web-savvy, English- and Latvian-speaking Russians who travel a great deal, maintain contacts in both the West and Russia, and have plenty of opportunities. “These globalist Russians have a patently deterritorialized view of their identities,” writes Saunders (2005, 186). In response to majority-minority conflict over language rights in the Baltics, there are indications that the Russian language is emerging as a “national” boundary marker. The language issue, specifically the language of education, remains the most divisive in Latvia, where a new bilingual curriculum was introduced in 2002–4, against tremendous Russian opposition (Kalnins 2004). At the same time, while Russians oppose language restrictions and alleged violations of their “national identity,” the socioeconomic benefits of living in an EU member state (and, for some, the political benefits of living in a democratic state outside an increasingly authoritarian Russia) continue to provide incentives for Russians to remain in the Baltic States and attempt to claim a place for themselves in the new polities (Barrington et al. 2003, 310). The continuing role of the Russian language as a regional lingua

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franca adds to the value of this language for Russian speakers and contributes to their continued interest in maintaining it, even without the kind of link between the Russian language and a Russian national identity that is a usual element of European nation-building processes.

“A Highly Fragmented Community”

The weakness of group solidarity and mobilization among Russian speakers, even when faced with shared exclusion from citizenship in newly established polities, continues to puzzle many analysts. Sergey Khychikov and Hugh Miall point out that in the early 1990s, when Estonia’s Russian-speaking population comprised more than 30 percent of the country, this “Russophone” community had a “weak identity” and was “a highly fragmented community” (2002, 198; see also Smith 1996). Although Russian speakers were often viewed as a “suspect group” in the Soviet successor states (Quigley 1997, 458), they expressed high levels of support for the independence of the states in which they lived. Even in the former republic most connected to a Russian national story, support among Russians for an independent Ukraine was quite strong; in Russian-dominated Crimea a majority approved the December 1991 referendum on Ukrainian independence (Golovakha, Panina, and Churilov 1994, 64). The most significant examples of Russian mobilization occurred in Estonia. An important landmark was the adoption in June 1993 of the Law on Aliens, which required that each noncitizen obtain a temporary residency permit that would become permanent only after three to five years. This legislation triggered the first significant mobilization among Russians in northeastern Estonia, including demands for territorial autonomy. The Russian government grabbed the opportunity and began a strong international campaign against the Estonian government, including warnings about the possible ethnic cleansing of Russian speakers from the country. President Boris Yeltsin said, “Russia will take steps to defend its national interests in Estonia” (quoted in Khychikov and Miall 2002, 196). As a result of the ensuing international mediation (primarily by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe [OSCE] High Commissioner on National Minorities), the Estonian government revised the law, promised to make it possible for all noncitizens to apply for citizenship, and eased requirements on the

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language test, thus averting the intensification of the confl ict. Since then Russian speakers in Estonia have fragmented politically. Until 1995 Russian speakers were not eligible to vote in sufficient numbers to participate meaningfully in the electoral process. In the 1995 elections, a majority (62 percent) voted for a joint Russian-speaking alliance called “Our Home is Estonia.” This alliance, however, remained extremely ineffective, and in 1999 only 55 percent of Russian speakers voted for expressly “Russian” parties. Michele Commercio (2008, 81) provides a compelling answer to the puzzle of the weakness of mobilization among noncitizens in the Baltics. While Latvians and Estonians have consolidated political control, they have allowed Russians to succeed in the private sector, where they have done very well. Explaining why political mobilization against the government has not been more substantial over the past two decades, she calls this a “system of partial control.” Political fragmentation among Russian speakers continued despite their increased access to democratic institutions in the framework of European integration. Estonia and Latvia are often portrayed as success stories of EU membership conditionality, due to the effectiveness of preaccession pressure on these governments to change citizenship and language policies in order to make citizenship more accessible to Russian-speaking minorities (Kelley 2004; Galbreath 2005). Recent research suggests, however, that “Eu ropeanization” in the policy domain has not led to the softening of identity boundaries on the ground. The Estonian government, for instance, introduced a state integration policy in 2000 in response to explicit pressure by European officials. The aim of this policy was to increase Estonian language proficiency among Russian speakers and thereby facilitate their integration into Estonian society. The increase of bilingualism among Russian speakers, however, has not decreased interethnic distance on issues of cultural reproduction. In the late 2000s tensions escalated over language and education policies and over official interpretations of Soviet history (Schulze 2010). Against this backdrop, continued efforts by the Russian state to empower Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltics, particularly by supporting their mobilization efforts and advocating for their rights in international fora, reinforce “titular” majority perceptions that Russia works against minority integration and aims to destabilize the newly restored states. Although Russia’s involvement does not represent a robust strategy of nation-building across borders, it does manifest the significance

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Map 3.1. Hungary.

of kin-state politics on the dynamics of democratic consolidation in the region.

Hungary’s Postcommunist Elites and Multiple Uses of the Kin-State Card

Unlike the scenario for most Russians in the Baltic States, citizenship was not an issue for Hungarians living in Hungary’s neighboring states. With the exception of Romania (and non–Soviet bloc neighbor Austria), each of these states (Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, and Ukraine) was established after the breakup of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. Hungarian minorities participated in great numbers in the party-building and electoral processes of their states, and by the year 2000 minority rights in Hungary’s neighboring states had improved significantly (Csergő 2007b), with the exception of Serbia’s formerly autonomous Vojvodina province (Hungarian Human Rights Foundation 2004; European Parliament 2004). However, SlovakHungarian relations deteriorated significantly toward the end of the decade as a result of consecutive legislative acts that appeared almost as a sequence of political cards played in a game of nationalist competition. In 2009 amend-

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ments to the Slovak language law reinforced the dominance of the Slovak language and heightened Hungarian concerns about the protection of minority language rights in Slovakia. In 2010 amendments to the citizenship law in Hungary made it possible for ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries to become Hungarian citizens without becoming residents of Hungary. In response, a bill adopted by the Slovak parliament in 2010 would strip Slovak citizenship from anyone who chose to become a citizen of another state. In the aftermath of both countries’ EU accession, this sequence of events raised concerns about reemerging tensions between political elites in Slovakia and Hungary and demonstrated the fragility of a consensual approach to minority policy even in the framework of European integration. Although perceptions of Hungarians as formerly dominant minorities have persisted in the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, post– Cold War Hungary was simply a small state in Central Europe with one of the most consolidated democracies in the region. Welcomed as a front-runner for transnational integration, Hungary joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004 and was one of the first members to ratify the EU Constitution. It was therefore surprising when the Hungarian parliament adopted the so-called “Status Law” in 2001 to benefit Hungarians in neighboring countries, triggering renewed fears of Hungarian irredentism and prompting a European-level investigation of kin-state nationalism in Central Europe. However, in 2004, after a number of other states in the region adopted citizenship laws benefiting ethnic kin populations abroad and Hungarian minority leaders were seeking support for dual citizenship, the Hungarian government actively campaigned against the idea. Later a new Hungarian government in 2010 made it a priority to amend the citizenship law to make it easier for ethnic kin living abroad to acquire Hungarian citizenship. So what accounts for these dynamics? Are Hungarian governments responding to the call of a “divided nation” or do kin-state policies serve alternative political purposes? Political elites played a key role in raising the salience of kin-state nationalism in postcommunist Hungary. After the first democratic elections in 1990, the Antall government recognized Hungarians in the Carpathian region as part of the nation. The Hungarian constitution incorporated an article declaring the state’s responsibility to “care for Hungarians abroad.” The Governmental Office for Hungarians Abroad (HTMH) began coordinating efforts to build a web of cultural, educational, and economic institutions (governmental agencies and government-sponsored foundations) to

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link Hungarians living in neighboring countries to Hungary and encourage them to remain Hungarian “in their homeland,” in regions and settlements that ethnic Hungarians had historically inhabited (Csergő and Goldgeier 2001, 76–77). As soon as Hungarians abroad became an important political issue for the governing parties, their cause became a key political battleground. Governments in Hungary have changed character during the postcommunist period, with socialist-liberal and center-right coalitions taking turns in power after each parliamentary election between 1990 and 2002 (2006 was the only year in which a governing party won reelection.) Beyond basic agreement on the necessity of caring for Hungarians abroad, these coalitions represented different approaches to kin-state strategy and used two major debates over this question as primary arenas for party-building and electoral battles. These debates were over the 2001 Status Law and the 2004 referendum about dual citizenship. FIDESZ, the party that led the governing coalition from 1998 to 2002, raised the significance of Hungarians abroad in an effort to build its party base and define its political profile as the champion of Hungarian national interests. The leaders of MSZP, the party that had formed consecutive governing coalitions since 2002, used the dual citizenship debate in 2004 to discredit political opponents and construct an image of a pragmatic government focused on issues of real significance (that is, Hungary’s economic prosperity) rather than symbolic politics. In both cases the audience of the kin-state policy debate has included Hungarians outside the country and Hungarians inside of Hungary as potential constituents. Officially named the Law Concerning Hungarians Living in Neighboring Countries number LXII, the Hungarian “Status Law” was adopted in 2001 with an overwhelming majority of parliamentary votes (93 percent) to provide benefits to external kin. The law declared that approximately 2.5 million Hungarians living in the states of Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine are members of the Hungarian “nation,” culturally defined. The Status Law also outlined a comprehensive legal framework for linking members of this nation to each other across state borders, and thereby strengthening their economic and cultural status. This legislation represented neither new policy in the region nor a substantial policy shift in the Hungarian context. Nonetheless it attracted unprecedented attention from European officials and scholars of nationalism. An obvious source of interest was that this law brought Hungary’s re-

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lations with two of its neighbors, Romania and Slovakia, to a low point just as they were lining up to join the European Union. Although these governments had recently adopted their own benefit laws, they adamantly opposed the Hungarian law (Deets 2002; Halász and Majtényi 2002). The Romanian prime minister turned to the Eu ropean Commission for Democracy through Law (known as the Venice Commission), created by the Council of Europe, requesting that the commission investigate the compatibility of the Hungarian law with European and international norms, primarily regarding state sovereignty. The controversy contributed substantially to the formulation of a European norm on the legitimacy and limits of kin-state activism. For the first time a Eu ropean institution conducted a serious comparative evaluation of kin-state legislation, including the 1979 Austrian law on the equation of South Tyroleans with Austrian citizens the 1997 Slovak law on Slovaks abroad, the 1998 Romanian law on Romanians around the world, the 1999 Russian law on conationals abroad, the 2000 Bulgarian law on Bulgarians abroad, the 2001 Italian law on Italian minorities in Slovenia and Croatia, and the 2001 Hungarian Status Law. The outcome was the first articulation of common “European norms” on kin-state policy in the form of a series of recommendations. In its October 2001 report, the Venice Commission (aka the European Commission for Democracy through Law) stated that kin-state laws are acceptable only if they do not violate territorial sovereignty, and that one state’s extraterritorial provisions are acceptable only with the consent of the other state concerned. The report also argued that international legal practice places the responsibility for minority rights on the states where the minorities reside, and the international community is in charge of monitoring whether states fulfill that duty. On Hungary the commission recommended that the kin-state may not appoint organizations inside another state to act on its behalf, and such laws should be unilateral only if all bilateral means have been exhausted without success. The norms against discrimination and extraterritoriality were later reinforced in the evaluation of the law by a special rapporteur of the European Parliament (Jürgens 2003). Thus the sanctioning of the legitimacy of kin-state policy came coupled with limitations that reinforced the primacy of states’ territorial sovereignty and that of bilateral agreements over unilateral activism. Following the 2002 elections, a new Hungarian parliament developed an amended version of the law, which was adopted in June 2003. Hungary

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and Romania signed an agreement ensuring (among other things) that any petitioning, approval, processing, and use of the Hungarian ID card had to occur on the territory of Hungary; meanwhile Romania would accept educational benefits from Hungary for ethnic Hungarians on its territory. The resolution of the Status Law controversy, however, did not decrease the political salience of Hungarian kin-state activism. The next debate that highlighted the continued significance of Hungarian nationbuilding emerged in summer 2004 and concerned the question of granting citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries. Again a policy that was relatively uncontroversial in the case of Croatia and Romania (two states in the region that had adopted citizenship legislation to benefit external kin) gained heightened significance in the Hungarian case, but this time the involvement of international actors in the controversy was limited. Instead, vicious disagreements between opposing elites highlighted deep political divisions within Hungary and within the Hungarian “divided nation” that kin-state policies were supposed to integrate. Dual citizenship had been weighed as a solution before the drafting of the Status Law but was no longer considered viable. The most influential voices among political elites in Hungary argued that dual citizenship would weaken Hungarian minority claims for autonomy and that autonomy was a better way to assure Hungarians’ ability to maintain themselves as “complete social structures” where they live. The only organization that remained wedded to the dual-citizenship idea was the World Alliance of Hungarians: in August 2003 it began collecting signatures for a public referendum on the question of whether the Hungarian parliament should adopt a law granting citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living in the neighboring countries. By July 2004 a sufficient number of signatures had been collected, which by law required parliament to hold a referendum. Preparations for this referendum turned into a fiercely divisive political campaign in which both the governing parties and their opposition portrayed themselves as the true defenders of the Hungarian nation. The government (the Socialist Party in alliance with Free Democrats) led the “no” campaign by publishing frightening (and unsupported) figures about the potential costs of dual citizenship and rushed to design an alternative proposal that it coined “Homeland Program Package.” The package offered a Hungarian passport without citizenship and a “Homeland fund” to help

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these neighboring Hungarians thrive in their homelands. The opposition, headed by the formerly governing party that had designed the Status Law (FIDESZ), led the “yes” campaign—reversing a formerly skeptical stance on the question of dual citizenship. The new rationale was that denying citizenship to external kin would send a devastating message of exclusion from the Hungarian nation. The majority of the citizens of Hungary, however, did not vote: they could not say “no” and did not want to say “yes.” Instead only 37.5 percent of those eligible to vote did so, with nearly 19 percent of those eligible voting “yes.” The most important outcome politically was actually the reinforcement of divisions in Hungary and expressions of bitter disappointment among Hungarians outside Hungary. After the failed referendum, the Gyurcsány government took important steps to fulfill the promises of the “Homeland Program Package” and to rebuild relations with Hungarians across the border. The citizenship law was amended in June 2005 to ease preferential naturalization of ethnic Hungarians who move to Hungary. (Eligible applicants no longer have to prove a period of prior residency in Hungary, and the citizenship exam is waived for those who graduated from Hungarian-language educational institutions abroad.) The idea of the Hungarian passport without citizenship materialized in January 2006 with the so-called “national visa” for citizens of four neighboring states. This visa enabled those who could satisfy eligibility requirements (a letter of invitation, proof of residence, and financial support in Hungary) to spend unlimited time in Hungary within a five-year period, without entitlement to employment, study, or other professional activities in Hungary. The purpose of the visa was to enable Hungarians “to nurture family, language, and cultural relations.” Kin-state strategy regained its salience as a political tool in the context of the May 2010 parliamentary elections, which resulted in a major electoral victory of FIDESZ, the party that had most actively branded itself as the voice of the Hungarian nation in its entirety. As a demonstration of this image, the new Orbán government immediately adopted an amendment to the Hungarian citizenship law in 2010, eliminating the residency requirement for descendants of Hungarian citizens living abroad and seeking to acquire citizenship, thereby making citizenship more easily available to members of Hungary’s “external kin.” Given the weakness of the political opposition, both in parliament and in society, this act triggered remarkably little controversy in Hungarian politics, especially when compared to the divisiveness of the debate over “dual citizenship”

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only six years earlier. Even beyond Hungary’s borders, the Slovak government became the only forceful opponent of this policy.

“Hungarians Abroad”: Continued Presence in the National Story

Hungarian minorities living in Hungary’s neighboring states have expressed strong interest in a common ethnocultural Hungarian nation. The high number of applicants for the Hungarian certificates made possible by the 2001 Status Law suggests that a significant part of the ethnic Hungarian population outside Hungary maintains a concept of shared nationhood despite the separation of these territories from Hungary after 1918. (In Romania alone, seven hundred thousand cards were issued by mid-July 2003.) This sense of common nationhood is anchored in shared institutional history. The territories that ethnic Hungarians consider their “homelands” outside of Hungary were part of the historic Hungarian kingdom: between the late nineteenth century and the collapse of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I, they were incorporated into other polities. These territories, including Transylvania and southern Slovakia, feature prominently in the Hungarian national canon (literature, historiography, and art) despite dramatic changes in state borders and political regimes. During the interwar period, when Hungarians became reluctant minorities in the successor states of Austria-Hungary, Hungarian politics focused on revisionism, trying to reclaim lost territories (Bárdi 2004). The notion of common Hungarian nationhood persisted among Hungarians even during the communist period, despite the relatively weak interest of the Kádár government in maintaining kinship ties. It appears that the Hungarian postcommunist national project was able to build on a shared national myth that was constructed before 1918. Signaling that it understood the strength of this myth, the Romanian government refused to recognize Kosovo’s independence in February 2008, fearing a precedent for Hungarian mobilization.

Variations on Division and Unity

After the collapse of communist regimes in 1989–90, Hungarian minorities throughout the region were subjected to conflicting nation-building strate-

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gies. In their resident states, majority nationalist governments designed institutional means for their cultural assimilation. The spectrum of postcommunist majority nation-building included harassment and acts of violence in Serbia, and the exclusion of minority languages from the institutions of cultural reproduction in Romania and Slovakia until the late 1990s (though in 2009 the latter reintroduced a policy of minority exclusion with the 2009 language law). In Croatia and Ukraine, however, there were also more accommodative policies of integration. Meanwhile, in Budapest consecutive kinstate governments designed various means to help these minorities maintain their Hungarian culture. The 2001 Status Law addressed “Hungarians living abroad” as Hungary’s external minorities. The Romanian and Slovak opposition to this law reinforced that Hungarian minorities were primarily these states’ internal minorities (Csergő 2007b, 74–116). As they were minorities (internal or external), the demands they were able to articulate and pursue and the success with which they were able to negotiate their demands depended on how resourceful particular minorities were: how large their ethnic constituencies, how strong their organizations, and how skillful their leaders were in managing allies and opponents in their home states, in Budapest, and within European institutions. The divisiveness of the 2004 dual-citizenship debate highlighted the difficulties of managing the tensions inherent in minority status, whether internal or external. Differences in domestic conditions were reflected in the different responses of Hungarian minority elites to the idea of dual citizenship. When the campaign about the public referendum began in Hungary in 2004, Romania was considered a strong candidate for EU membership within three years, and Croatia was expected to follow soon. Hungary’s other neighbors were already EU members, except for Serbia and Ukraine, the states where the two least resourceful Hungarian communities lived at the time. As expected, the most enthusiastic proponents of Hungarian dual citizenship were the Hungarian parties in Serbia (specifically the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina), where a Hungarian passport would have provided the possibility of escape from anti-Hungarian harassment and criminal activities (such as random beatings of Hungarians and desecration of their cemeteries and sites). Hungarian minority leaders in Ukraine (where the Hungarian minority was the poorest in the region) were divided for a number of reasons, including a Ukrainian constitution that does not allow dual citizenship.

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The leaders of the two largest and most resourceful communities—the Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia—were wary of the negative consequences of dual citizenship (as an incentive of ethnic Hungarians to move to Hungary) and became supporters of the policy only in reaction to the negative campaign that unfolded in Hungary. After the December 2004 referendum failed, the leaders of ethnic Hungarian parties from Hungary’s neighboring countries joined together in January 2005, in Vojvodina, and signed an agreement that Hungary’s external minorities would be entitled to preferential Hungarian citizenship. These minority leaders formed a new regional organization called the Forum of Hungarian Organizations Abroad (Határon Túli Magyar Szervezetek Fóruma or HTMSZF) and called on the Hungarian parliament to adopt a citizenship law that would enable Hungarians in Hungary’s neighboring countries to obtain Hungarian citizenship without moving to Hungary. After its formation in January 2005, HTMSZF met regularly in cities outside of Hungary (Kántor 2006). Regardless of these Hungarian minority leaders’ initial or underlying disagreements, the unity of this agreement projected strength, and their message was that any future government of Hungary had a continued responsibility to take external minorities seriously. The extent to which Hungarians in Hungary and its neighboring states are on the same page as their elected political leaders on matters of nationalist strategy remains an open question. The 2004 dual-citizenship referendum in Hungary demonstrated a spectacular failure on the part of political elites in mobilizing the voters of Hungary, both for and against the cause, over cross-border Hungarian “national unity.” As for the mobilization of the Hungarian minority, an impressive study conducted by four sociologists demonstrates considerable disconnect between the politics of nationalism (kin-state or otherwise) at the level of elite debates and policies and the everyday ethnicity as it is practiced in Cluj, a major city in Transylvania that features prominently in both the Hungarian and Romanian national canons (Brubaker et al. 2006). Sociological research also reveals a strong sense of alienation from “the Hungarian nation” among young Hungarians who migrate from neighboring states to Hungary in search of labor (Fox 2007). Moreover, the great failure of the FIDESZ government’s efforts to influence the electoral choices of Hungarian minority voters in the 2012 Romanian local elections indicated a growing disconnect between the political games of Budapest-centered elites and the local interests of Hungarian minorities.

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Cluj

Map 3.2. Romania.

Romania’s Low-Profile Kin-State Strategy: Lack of Demand

Since its establishment in 1859, the Romanian state has experienced major border changes (Iordachi 2002): from the union of the principalities Moldova and Wallachia; to a dramatic expansion after World War I (when Transylvania, Bessarabia, and southern Dobrudja—the latter a former province of the Ottoman Empire—were incorporated into Greater Romania); through the loss of territory in 1940 (when Hungary regained part of Transylvania, the Soviet Union regained Bessarabia, and Bulgaria regained southern Dobrudja); to the redrawing of state frontiers at the end of World War II (when Romania regained Transylvania from Hungary, held on to northern Dobrudja, but failed to reclaim Bessarabia from the victorious Soviet Union). As a result, large numbers of Romanian-speaking populations remained outside of Romania’s borders, a majority in Moldova and smaller minorities in Ukraine. As borders and populations shifted, modern nation-building presented a formidable task for Romanian political elites, especially since they adopted the French model of a unitary nation-state. Nation-building became the primary goal of the state during the interwar period in Greater Romania and remained a top priority during the Communist period, especially during the time of Ceauşescu (Livezeanu 1995; Verdery 1991). Due to the unmatched

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centralizing and repressive capacities of the communist state, the policies of cultural homogenization were quite successful (Tismaneanu 2003), especially in northern Dobrudja (Iordachi 2002). However, when the regime collapsed in December 1989, Transylvania contained the largest national minority in the region: Hungarians accounted for 7 percent of the country’s total population. Formed by Hungarians, one of the first political parties in Romania went on to win a majority of votes in every parliamentary election since 1990, presenting a significant (though peaceful) challenge to the Romanian unitarystate design and demanding institutional means for the reproduction of a Hungarian minority culture in Romania, including autonomy (Craiutu 1995; Csergő 2004). As none of the major Romanian political parties was willing to consider any form of minority autonomy (territorial or cultural), the focus of Romanian nationalizing strategies remained on Romanian-Hungarian relations (the Roma and other ethnic groups attracted comparatively little interest). In sharp contrast to Hungary, in Romania the fate of external kin populations did not become a major battleground for party building and electoral policy. Regarding Romanians abroad, the platforms of mainstream Romanian political parties have been low-key. For instance the Social Democratic Party, the most successful political party in the postcommunist period (although with important transformations of name and strategy), advocated the state’s promotion of Romanian values. The Christian Democratic National Party, the largest governing party in the 1996–2000 period, called for increased Romanian cultural dominance in the parts of Moldova where Russian and other minorities demanded language pluralism. The absence of significant political debate over the fate of Romanians abroad did not mean that Romania’s postcommunist elites paid no attention to external kin. In fact, the Romanian parliament was one of the first in the region to adopt a benefit law (in 1998) and one of the first to change its citizenship legislation to benefit Romanians abroad (adopted in 1991, modified in 2003). Beginning in 2005, Romanian president Traian Băsescu increased emphasis on the fate of Romanians abroad (especially those in Moldova but also those in Ukraine) in Romania’s foreign policy. On January 12, 2005, the Romanian newspaper Ziua (The Day) cited Băsescu as follows: “The same as we granted all rights to the Hungarians, we also have the right to ask that the Romanians’ rights be observed, both in Valea Timocului, and in the Republic of Moldova.”

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Kin-state interest in the standing of Romanian communities abroad is also reflected in successive national security documents promulgated by the Romanian government. A 1999 document lists among its foreign policy priorities, “supporting the Romanian communities outside the national borders to preserve their national, cultural and spiritual identity and identifying their capabilities for supporting the goals of the Romanian diplomacy.” The country’s official national security strategy of February 21, 2006 declares that Romania has a “political and moral obligation” to support Moldova, a commitment based on the “principle of one nation–two states.” Although relations with Moldova are listed among the priorities of Romanian foreign policy, there is no indication of a unification plan in either state. This apparent lack of interest in unification is surprising given the initial strategy of gradual political integration between the two states. According to Constantin Iordachi (2004, 247), “in the immediate period following Moldova’s independence, it became apparent that decision-makers in the two countries tacitly assumed the ideal of political integration, while recognizing at the same time the need for taking only gradual ‘small steps’ toward the union.” The first post-Ceauşescu government emphasized pan-Romanianism and discussed the possible incorporation of Moldovan territory. President Ion Iliescu in December 1990 decried the “injustices committed against the Romanian people” in 1940, when Bessarabia, which had become part of Greater Romania after World War I, was retaken by Moscow. In early 1991 the Romanian National Salvation Front portrayed a map of Romania that included Moldova, and Foreign Minister Adrian Năstase referred to “the German model” of unification. To facilitate cross-border travel, the Romanian state provided Moldovans visa-free and passport-free travel to Romania. After Moldovan independence in August 1991, however, Moldovan president Mircea Snegur moved quickly to make clear that while cultural ties could be strengthened, two states should continue to exist (King 2000, 149–50). As a result the Romanian leadership adopted the language of “two Romanian states.” Given its pursuit of membership in both NATO and the European Union (the former was achieved in 2004; the latter in 2007), Romania was not in a position to engage in a more aggressive project of national unification vis-à-vis Moldova, especially against the expressed interests of Moldova’s political leaders. Instead, the leadership in Bucharest continued a gradual and lowkey strategy of employing kin-state policies already available in the region:

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the use of benefit laws and citizenship policies to support nation-building. The benefit law adopted in July 1998 established a fund “to ensure the financing of the activities supporting the Romanian communities on the territories of other states.” Such activities include Romanian-language education, cultural and artistic activities, and civic education. The law established a center in Bucharest under the Ministry of National Education and an interministry council, a consultative body made up of representatives from various ministries, including those for foreign affairs, cultural affairs, national education, finance, and religious affairs. The primary benefit was free higher education in Romania. The 1991 Law on Romanian Citizenship represented a dramatic policy shift. Since 1859 citizenship legislation under each Romanian regime had ruled out dual citizenship. (Although ethnic Romanians who moved to Romania obtained preferential nationalization, they had to renounce their previous citizenship.) The new citizenship law enabled ethnic Romanians to acquire Romanian citizenship without having to renounce their previous citizenship or even to resettle to Romania. The adoption of this law had major consequences for cross-border relations, as Moldovans and Ukrainians rushed to obtain dual citizenship despite issues of compatibility between the Romanian legislation and citizenship laws in Moldova and Ukraine. (The Moldovan citizenship law was changed in 2003 to allow dual citizenship; in Ukraine, however, a constitutional amendment would be necessary to allow for multiple citizenships.)

Romania’s External Kin: Outside of the Modern National Story

The largest Romanian-speaking populations outside of Romania live in Moldova, where they make up the state’s majority (according to the 1989 Soviet census, 64.5 percent of the total population). During the Soviet period, official policy claimed that Romanians and Moldovans were two distinct peoples speaking related but separate languages. Since independence the question of whether this population is Romanian or Moldovan has been the subject of vehement debates (King 2000; Ihrig 2008). The battle between “Romanianists” and “Moldovanists” has more than mere linguistic significance; it serves as an arena of competition for domestic political power in Moldova and determines the future of political integration within the state as well as its relations with Romania. Leadership interests have featured significantly in this com-

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petition. As Donald Horowitz has observed, “Irredentism re-merge[s] not just populations but leadership pools” (1991, 16). In the years following postSoviet independence, initial interest in Romanian nationalism was quickly abandoned as the Moldovan political elites that shaped the state’s post-Soviet evolution found little appeal in becoming part of a larger pool. Official Romanian kin-state policy (embodied in a set of institutions that have been reorga nized repeatedly in recent years) includes in the category of “Romanians living abroad” not only the ethnic Romanian populations of Moldova, Ukraine, and smaller diasporas in Romania’s neighborhood (Hungary, Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia) but also the Vlach populations of the Balkans, including those in Greece, Albania, and Macedonia. Despite its impressive breadth, however, there is no shared concept among this population that they represent a Romanian “divided nation.” The construction of greater Romania with a unifying concept of nationhood began in earnest only after 1918 (Livezeanu 1995). Ethnic Romanians who lived outside Romania after 1918 could not become part of this modern nation-state project. With no institutional means or even memories of nationhood to tie them to the Romanian state, ethnic Romanians living in neighboring states either assimilated to the majority culture in significant numbers (as in Hungary, Serbia, or Ukraine) or became subjects of separate nation-building processes (as in the Soviet Republic of Moldova). Nor were the lands on which Romanian speakers lived “abroad” incorporated into a common Romanian national canon. Although the first modern Romanian state created at the end of the nineteenth century incorporated part of contemporary Moldova, the Romanian-speaking population of then Bessarabia was overwhelmingly illiterate and very poor, and political elites failed to apply the modernization-cum-cultural-homogenization formula successfully for nation-building in that region (Petrescu 2001; see also King 2000). When the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia in 1940 and divided it between the Moldovan and Ukrainian Soviet republics, there was similarly little effort in the Romanian national center to integrate Bessarabia in Romanian “national memory” and make it part of the national canon.

The Power of Dual Citizenship

The weakness of the postcommunist Moldovan state and economy plays a significant part in the dynamics of nation-building. Besides the divisiveness

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of the debate over national identity between Romanianists and Moldovanists, Moldova is divided internally also in a more tangible sense along the borders of the self-proclaimed Transnistrian “state” that Russian-speaking secessionists established in 1992 with Russia’s support. Neither the Moldovan government nor the international community recognized this entity as a state, but the reincorporation of this land and people appears an almost insurmountable challenge and remains a key focus of the Moldovan government’s stateand nation-building strategy. Despite limited interest among Moldovan political elites and the public in political unification with Romania, Romanian kin-state policies have been remarkably successful in linking external kin to the Romanian state through dual citizenship. Rather than reannexing the territory of Moldova, Romania has in effect “annexed” a large segment of Moldova’s population: in 2000 approximately 300,000 Moldovan citizens held Romanian citizenship (about 7 percent of the state’s 4.32 million inhabitants). Iordachi argues that dual citizenship “undermined, rather than strengthened” the desire for political union with Romania by offering Moldovan elites an exit option from the political and economic problems they face at home (2004, 249– 50). Nonetheless, despite the seemingly low demand for shared Romanian “nationhood,” dual citizenship has brought large numbers of Romania’s external kin into the Romanian political community: Romanian dual citizens vote in Romanian elections and are even eligible to hold public office in Romania.

Conclusion European integration does not appear to weaken competitive nationalism to the degree that had been anticipated by many scholars and policy-makers at the beginning of the 1990s. Nation-building remains powerfully appealing among political elites. A significant impact of increased “Europeanization,” however, is that the kin-state nationalism prevalent in the region since the mid-1990s is no longer aimed at redrawing territory and/or moving populations into or out of the country, as was the case typically for the past two centuries. Some authors view this as a decrease in territoriality. We argue that territoriality remains significant in a very “modern” sense: Governments maintain keen interest in consolidating their territorial sovereignty. At the same time the link between states and people is dramatically reconfigured

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by the realities of “liminality” (for example, Russian speakers in the Baltic States), citizens with multiple passports (a growing segment of Moldova’s citizenry), and the emerging idea of Eu ropean citizenship in Eu rope. In this context, governments increasingly turn to nation-building as an arena of political competition. The ethnocultural definition of nationhood is now prevalent in the region: governments fi nd themselves compelled to keep nonnationals out of their states and to ensure the allegiance of nationals inside and, frequently, outside their states. In all cases politics plays the leading role in kin-state projects. The emergence of democracy in the formerly communist world meant that elites had to develop successful strategies for gaining and holding power in countries that were defining their futures as independent. They could emphasize state sovereignty or cultural pluralism, promote centralization or decentralization. Much depended on the nature and the demands of the external and internal minorities as described above. But their choices reflected their own political calculations of what would prove most successful with their constituencies. Playing the kin-state card (“we are the defenders of the nation”) has varied greatly as a political strategy across borders as well as within them; this reflects the nature of political life, especially the extent to which political leaders choose to turn the cause of external kin into a major battleground. In Hungary, kin-state policy became one of the most prominent themes of postcommunist politics. In Romania, internal minorities (Hungarians) were in the center of debates about nationhood: the issue of external kin was rarely politicized. In Russia, kin-state policy has gained more space over time, as Putin has pushed a more nationalist foreign policy than did Boris Yeltsin, illustrated vividly by the Bronze Statue riots in Estonia that were organized with Russian government support. But where Russia has been most aggressive, namely in defense of the populations of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria, the impetus has not been nation-building (other than to prevent nation-building in Georgia and Moldova). Rather, Russia’s interest has been to maximize its leverage over the foreign policies of those two former Soviet states (and in Georgia’s case, deter its efforts to join NATO) and to continue the lucrative illegal trade involving Russian organized crime. Similarly Russian concerns about Crimea largely revolved around the fear that Ukraine would follow through on a policy not to renew the lease on the Russian naval base in Sevastopol in 2017, but the election of President Viktor Yanukovych in early 2010 led swift ly to an agreement to extend the lease by twenty-five years.

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Russia’s efforts across the former Soviet space demonstrate that politicians cannot turn “external kin” into nations where ingredients for nationhood remain ephemeral. Kin-state policies are not a one-way street. They require a coherent elite strategy as well as enthusiasm among external kin to participate in a project designed and run by a national center. In the Baltics, Russians have used their language as an important cultural marker but have not seen themselves as central to a national canon. After all, they were sent there after 1940 to help carry out an occupation. Hungary’s policies have had more resonance because Hungary’s external minorities share a common national story and are more likely to seek closer ties with the kin-state. Hungarian minorities are also more resourceful and better organized politically in formulating their demands both in their home states and in relation to the kin-state. At the same time, the Hungarian example indicates that kin-state politics can reinforce and engender division, undermining the professed goal of integration. Overemphasis on “the national question” can lead to demobilization. Moreover, the Romanian example suggests that the degree of mobilization may not be an adequate measurement of a kin-state’s appeal to external kin. Instead of demonstrating high levels of political organization or mobilization in favor of national unity, many Romanians in Moldova and Ukraine appear to make choices about state allegiance that manifest the “nationbuilding” power of economic resources and incentives over that of a more vocal kin-state activism. While kin-state policies appear to be primarily elite-driven processes rather than responses to the call of “divided nations,” people are more likely to respond to a kin-state’s call where incentives are more tangible. From this perspective, an integrated Europe appears like a shell in which nation-building strategies remain both powerfully appealing and contentious. If a minority is included only partially and unequally in the political community of one state but features prominently in the national canon of a neighboring state, kin-state strategies can more effectively build on ethnic demography and sustain cross-border national loyalties. Notes The authors thank Katherine Arcieri, Elizabeth Franker, Tigran Martirosyan, Joe McReynolds, Philippe Roseberry, and Ilona Teleki for their research assistance and are grateful to Jennie Schulze and participants at the Divided Nations conference in Kingston, Ontario, July 2007, for comments on an earlier draft. 1. These documents include the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (CSCE) Copenhagen Document (1990), known also as the European Constitu-

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tion on Human Rights, which included a chapter on the protection of national minorities; the Council of Europe’s (CE) European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages (1992); the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National and Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1992); the CE’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1995), which is commonly considered a major achievement as the first legally binding international tool for minority protection; and the OSCE’s (the CSCE became an organization, the OSCE, in December 1994) Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities (1998). 2. The text of each of these laws is available in English translation (Kántor et al. 2004). 3.“EU-Russia Common Spaces”: http://www.eeas.europa.eu/russia/common _ spaces/index _en.htm. Accessed on July 18, 2012. 4. As reported by the daily Russian business newspaper Kommersant (cited in Marson 2009). 5. On the Gorbachev-Yeltsin battle and the role of the West, see Goldgeier and McFaul 2003, chs. 2– 4. 6. About the concept of liminality in nation-building, see Malkki 1995. 7. For further discussion of these events, see Goldgeier and McFaul 2003, ch. 7. 8. Khychikov and Miall (2002, 203) argue that the demobilization of Russian speakers is the outcome of the Estonian electoral system: proportional representation (PR) with single transferable vote (STV), which encourages cross-ethnic voting. 9. Iordachi (2004, 263) calls them “high-status” minorities, together with Germans and Jews. 10. For a comprehensive analysis of kin-state nationalism as a domain of party politics, see Waterbury 2006. 11. For a discussion of the dual-citizenship debate as a reflection of a domestic political debate about democracy, see Kovács 2005. 12. For a comprehensive volume about the Status Law, see Kántor et al. 2004. 13. The report stated that unilateral legislation for kin abroad is appropriate only if the laws respect the principle of state sovereignty, ensure good neighborly relations, and uphold the principles of basic human rights and nondiscrimination. 14. For an analysis of these policies, see Kántor 2006. For details about the “Homeland package,” see http://www.szulofold.hu, accessed on July 18, 2012. 15. During the political campaign that led up to the 2012 local elections in Romania, leading members of the Hungarian government campaigned on behalf of Hungarian minority parties and politicians that challenged the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR), the party that had gained the overwhelming support of Hungarian minority voters in that country since 1990. However, the outcome of the 2012 local elections suggested that this external involvement had a counterproductive effect: instead of shift ing their votes to the challengers endorsed by kinstate elites, Hungarian minority voters chose to reinforce support for DAHR.

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16. Documents from the Social Democratic Party are available (in Romanian) on the party’s Web site: http://www.psd.ro, accessed on August 2, 2009. 17. See documents under “Cauza Naţională” (the national cause) on the party Web site at http://documents.pntcd.ro, accessed on August 2, 2009. 18. The document is available at http://english.mapn.ro/stratsec/index.php, accessed on August 2, 2009. 19. The text of the law is reprinted in Kántor et al. 2004, 601–3. 20. Iordachi (2004) details the evolution of dual citizenship policies in Romania and Moldova as well as Hungary. 21. For a detailed analysis of the institutional evolution of Romanian kin-state policy, see Kiss 2005. 22. For a discussion of how nineteenth-century intellectuals constructed the idea that Moldova is central to the Romanian story, see Goina 2005. 23. Another 200,000 Moldovan citizens hold Russian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian dual citizenship (Iordachi 2004, 253). References Bárdi, Nándor. 2004. Tény és Való. Pozsony, Hungary: Kalligram Könyvkiadó. Barrington, Lowell, Erik Herron, and Brian Silver. 2003. The Motherland Is Calling: Views of Homeland among Russians in the Near Abroad. World Politics 55 (2): 290–313. Bauböck, Rainer. 1995. Expansive Citizenship: Voting beyond Territory and Membership. PS: Political Science and Politics 38 (4): 683–87. Bigg, Claire. 2005. Russia: Putin Asks Parliament to Ease Citizenship Rules, December 2. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. www.rferl.org /content/article/1063460 .html. Accessed on July 22, 2012. Brubaker, Rogers, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, and Liana Grancea. 2006. Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Commercio, Michele E. 2008. Systems of Partial Control: Ethnic Dynamics in PostSoviet Estonia and Latvia. Studies in Comparative International Development 43 (1): 81–100. Council of the European Union. 1994. 94/367/CFSP: Council Decision of 14 June 1994 on the Continuation of the Joint Action Adopted by the Council on the Basis of Article J.3 of the Treaty on European Union on the Inaugural Conference on the Stability Pact. Official Journal of the European Union 50 (165): 2– 6. Craiutu, Aurelian. 1995. A Dilemma of Dual Identity: The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania. East European Constitutional Review 4 (2): 43– 49. Csergő, Zsuzsa. 2004. Beyond Ethnic Division: Majority-Minority Debate about the Postcommunist State in Romania and Slovakia. East European Politics and Societies 16 (1): 1–29.

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———. 2007a. Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Expansion of Democracy. In Central and East European Politics: From Communism to Democracy, ed. J. L. Curry and S. L., 87–112. Wolchik. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2007b. Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Csergő, Zsuzsa, and James M. Goldgeier. 2001. Virtual Nationalism. Foreign Policy no. 125: 76–77. ——— . 2004. Nationalist Strategies and European Integration. Perspectives on Politics 2 (1): 21–37. Deets, Stephen. 2002. The Hungarian Status Law and the Specter of Neo-Medievalism in Europe. Ethnopolitics 7 (2): 195–215. European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission). 2001. Report on the Preferential Treatment of National Minorities by Their Kin-State Adopted by the Venice Commission at Its 48th Plenary Meeting (Venice, 19–20 October 2001). Strasbourg: Council of Europe. European Parliament. 2004. Resolution on the Harassment of Minorities in Vojvodina, P6_TA(2004)0016. Strasbourg: European Parliament. Fox, John. 2007. From National Inclusion to Economic Exclusion: Ethnic Hungarian Labour Migration to Hungary. Nations and Nationalism 12 (1): 77–96. Galbreath, David J. 2005. Nation-Building and Minority Politics in Post- Socialist States: Interests, Influences, and Identities in Estonia and Latvia. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag. Goina, Călin. 2005. How the State Shaped the Nation: An Essay on the Making of the Romanian Nation. Regio: Minorities, Politics, Society 1: 154– 69. Goldgeier, James M., and Michael McFaul. 2003. Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Golovakha, Evgenii, Natalia Panina, and Nikolai Churilov. 1994. Russians in Ukraine. In The New Russian Diaspora: Russian Minorities in the Former Soviet Republics, ed. V. Shlapentokh, M. Sendich, and E. Payin, 59–71. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Halász, Iván, and Balázs Majtényi. 2002. A magyar státustörvény a kelet-közép-europai jogi szabályozás tükrében. In Tér és terep – Tanulmányok az etnicitás és az identitás kérdésköréből, ed. L. Szarka and N. Kovács, 391–436. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. Horowitz, David L. 1991. Irredentas and Secessions: Adjacent Phenomena, Neglected Connections. In Irredentism and International Politics, ed. N. Chazan, 9–22. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Horváth, Enikő. 2008. Mandating Identity: Citizenship, Kinship Laws and Plural Nationality in the European Union. Alphen aan den Rijn: Wolters Kluwer. Hosking, Geoff rey. 2006. Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Hriban, Anca. 2005. Romania’s Băsescu Signals New Domestic, Additional Foreign Policy Goals. Bucharest Ziua (Romanian), January 12.

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Hungarian Human Rights Foundation (HHRF). 2004. Chronology of Recent AntiMinority Incidents in Vojvodina. New York: HHRF. Ihrig, Stefan. 2008. Wer sind die Moldawier? Rumänismus versus Moldowanismus in Historigraphie und Schulbüchern der Republik Moldova, 1991–2006. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag. Iordachi, Constantin. 2002. Internal Colonialism: The Expansion of Romania’s Frontier in Northern Dobrogea. In National Borders and Economic Disintegration in Modern East Central Europe Berlin, ed. H. Schultz and U. Müller, 77–105. Berlin: Berlin Verlag. ———. 2004. Dual Citizenship and Politics toward Kin Minorities in East-Central Europe: A Comparison between Hungary, Romania, and the Republic of Moldova. In The Hungarian Status Law Syndrome: A Nation Building and/or Minority Protection, ed. Z. Kántor, B. Majtényi, O. Ieda, B. Vizi, and I. Halász, 239– 69. Sapporo, Japan: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University. Jürgens, Eric. 2003. Preferential Treatment of National Minorities by Their Kin-States: The Case of the Hungarian Status Law of 19 June 2001. Brussels: Council of Eu rope. Kalnins, Ojarrs. 2004. Latvia: The Language of Coexistence. Transitions Online, September 1. http://www.tol.org/client/article/12813-the-language-of-coexistence .html. Accessed on July 22, 2012. Kántor, Zoltán. 2006. Nemzetpolitika, 2005. In Magyarország politikai évkönyve 2005-ről, ed. S. Péter, V. László, and T. Ágnes. Budapest: Demokrácia Kutatások Magyar Központja Közhasznú Alapítvány. Kántor, Zoltán, Balázs Majtényi, Osamu Ieda, Balázs Vizi, and Ivan Halász, eds. 2004. The Hungarian Status Law: Nation Building and/or Minority Protection. Sapporo, Japan: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University. Kelley, Judith. 2004. Ethnic Politics in Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Khychikov, Sergey, and Hugh Miall. 2002. Conflict Prevention in Estonia: The Role of the Electoral System. Security Dialogue 33 (2): 193–208. King, Charles. 1994. Eurasia Letter: Moldova with a Russian Face. Foreign Policy 97 (Winter): 106–20. ———. 2000. The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Kiss, Ágnes. 2005. Románia határon túli románságpolitikája az 1990–2004 közötti jogszabályok tükrében..http://www.jakabff y.ro/magyarkisebbseg /index .php ?action= cimek&cikk=2005_1-2 _22.htm. Accessed on July 22, 2012. Kovács, Mária. 2005. The Politics of Non-resident Dual Citizenship in Hungary. Regio: Minorities, Politics, Society 1: 50–72. Laitin, David D. 1998. Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Liebich, André. 2002. Ethnic Minorities and Long-Term Implications of EU Enlargement. In Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union, ed. J. Zielonka, 117–36. New York: Routledge. Livezeanu, Irina. 1995. Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, NationBuilding and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Malkki, Liisa. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marson, James. 2009. Putin to the West: Hands off Ukraine. Time, May 25. http:// www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1900838,00.html. Melvin, Neil. 1995. Russians beyond Russia: The Politics of National Identity. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs. Petrescu, Cristina. 2001. Contrasting/Conflicting Identities: Bessarabians, Romanians, Moldovans. In Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian and Hungarian Case Studies, ed. B. Trencsényi, D. Petrescu, C. Petrescu, C. Iordachi, and Z. Kántor, 153–78. Budapest: Regio Books. Putin, Vladimir. 2005. Annual Address to the Federal Assembly, April 25. http://www .globalsecurity.org /military/library/report /2005/putin -federalassembly_2005 .htm. Accessed on July 22, 2012. Quigley, John B. 1997. Russian Minorities in the Newly Independent States. ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law no. 3: 455– 64. RIA Novosti. 2004. 20,000 Foreigners Granted Russian Citizenship in 2003. June 21. http://en.rian.ru/onlinenews/20040621/39763321.html. Rudensky, Nikolai. 1994. Russian Minorities in the Newly Independent States: An International Problem in the Domestic Context of Russia Today. In National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, ed. R. Szporluk, 58–77. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Saunders, Robert A. 2005. Between Assimilation, Irredenta, and Globalization. Russia in Global Affairs 3 (4): 177–88. Schulze, Jennie. 2010. Estonia Caught between East and West: EU Conditionality, Russia’s Activism, and Minority Integration. Nationalities Papers 38 (3): 361–39. Smith, Graham. 1996. The Ethnic Democracy Thesis and the Citizenship Question in Estonia and Latvia. Nationalities Papers 24 (2): 199–216. Solymosi, Judit. 2009. Opposition Mounts to Slovakia’s Language Law. July 22. European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages (EBLUL). http://www.eblul.org/index.php ?option=com_content& task=view& id=225&Itemid=1. Tismaneanu, Vladimir. 2003. Stalinism for All Seasons. Berkeley: University of California Press. Torbakov, Igor. 2006. Kremlin Calls on Compatriots to Come Back to Mother Russia. Eurasia Daily Monitor 3 (29). http://www.jamestown.org /programs/edm/single /?tx _ttnews %5Btt _news %5D=31371 & tx _ttnews %5BbackPid %5D=177 & no _cache=1.

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CHAPTER 4

European Integration and the Basque Country in France and Spain Zoe Bray and Michael Keating

Nation and State European history has included the emergence of states and nations, some of which coincide almost perfectly while others do not: both are constructions, circumstantial, rarely complete and often contested. In this chapter we deconstruct what is understood as the Basque nation in order to reflect on the Basque Country’s situation as a territory divided between France and Spain and across different regional entities, in the context of European integration. The Basque Country has never been a single political unit but has been subject to three general nation-building projects: the Spanish, the French, and the Basque. While these represent three distinct national discourses, they are all intricately interlinked, with inhabitants identifying with them to varying degrees according to different and at times changing criteria and contexts. Thus, despite its small size, the Basque Country is one of the most complex societies in Europe and has attracted widespread attention from social scientists seeking to understand its identities, construction, and meaning.

The Basque Country: Territory and Identity

Spanning two states, France and Spain, the Basque Country can be defined in multiple ways. The various names, including Basque Country in English, Euskal Herria and Euskadi in Basque, País Vasco in Spanish, and Pays Basque

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in French, have different political and cultural connotations. Historically the Basque Country covers seven provinces, whose names in Basque are as follows: Araba (Álava in Spanish), Bizkaia (Vizcaya), Gipuzkoa (Guipúzcoa), and Nafarroa (Navarra, or Navarre in English) on the Spanish side of the frontier; and Lapurdi (Labourd in French), Behe Nafarroa (Basse Navarre), and Xiberoa (Soule) on the French side. “Euskal Herria” refers to the Basque Country as a linguistic and cultural territory made up of these seven provinces, which in Basque translates as both the Basque Country and the Basque people. The term “Euzkadi” was coined by Sabino Arana, the founder of the first Basque nationalist party, PNV, in the late nineteenth century to refer to the wider area as a potential political unit, but nowadays “Euskadi” refers to the autonomous community of the Basque Country, made up only of Gipuzkoa, Araba, and Bizkaia. The Pays Basque refers to the grouping of the Basque provinces on the French side.

AQUITAINE PYRÉNÉES-ATLANTIQUES LAPURDI

BIZKAIA

PAYS BASQUE

EUSKADI

XI

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B-N

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Map 4.1. The Basque country.

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The fact that many place names across broader surrounding areas of France and Spain show semantic links with the Basque language indicates that it was spoken over a wide part of the Franco-Cantabrian region. Basquespeaking tribes, including the Vascones and the Aquitani, were mentioned in Roman times (Braudel 1986). The territory between the rivers Ebro in Spain and Garonne in France was known then as Vasconia. After the collapse of Roman power in northern Spain, the Franks, Arabs, and Visigoths repeatedly attempted to invade the area. A famous battle took place in 778 when the Frankish army of Charlemagne was ambushed, allegedly by local Basques, at the Pyrenean pass of Roncesvalles. Around 820 the tiny kingdom of Pamplona was founded; later it evolved into the kingdom of Navarre, which briefly included Araba, Bizkaia, and Gipuzkoa. By 1200 Navarre had largely passed into the hands of Castilian monarchs, while in Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa fueros, or charters of self-rule, were negotiated. Basque culture flourished in these territories, representative institutions evolved, and the adventurous seamanship of coastal inhabitants took them as far as Iceland, Newfoundland, and Patagonia. Much of Navarre is Spanishspeaking, with only around 11.1 percent of the population mainly in the mountainous region close to the frontier with France, speaking Basque (Basque Autonomous Community 2006). In Bizkaia and Araba, Basquespeakers account for 23 percent and 14.2 percent of the population respectively. The percentage of Basque speakers is highest in Gipuzkoa, at 49.1 percent. On the French side approximately 22.5 percent of the population is estimated to speak Basque, but this proportion is expected to decline due to a lack of institutional efforts to promote the language (Basque Autonomous Community 2006). Prior to the emergence of Basque nationalism, the people residing across Vasconia, while sharing some biological traits and linguistic characteristics, were far from having an overriding sense of community beyond the locality. Since the early modern period, a stereotype of a Basque people with a fiery and independent character, strange language, and distinctive physical features has persisted, sustained by the international media that often draws on this myth-ridden traditionalism as an explanation for the persistent political confl ict; but this does not meet the standards of social science. Biological explanations of Basque distinctiveness have also ceased to feature in serious analysis. While more than half the population has nonlocal ancestry, barely 9 percent deny a Basque identity

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(see below). It does not follow, however, that the failure of primordial explanations or the recurrent reinvention and fragmentation of what it  means to be Basque somehow de-legitimate it as a subject of inquiry, or that Basque demands are thereby not to be taken seriously. It just means that Basque, like other social identities, is created and reshaped over time. The area is equally difficult to define institutionally, as the geopolitical status of the seven provinces varies. Navarre, reflecting its historically different relation with the Spanish crown, maintains its territorial identity as an autonomous region in its own right. Araba, Bizkaia, and Gipuzkoa are provinces in the Spanish administrative sense and together make up the Basque Autonomous Community, or Euskadi. Since 1997, the 158 communes and 21 cantons of the provinces of Lapurdi, Xiberoa, and Behe Nafarroa have been recognized by French law as a politicoadministrative unit known as a pays, under the name of Pays Basque. As an area recognized by the central state on the grounds of common cultural or economic characteristics, it can enter into communal planning contracts under a directive concerning territorial development. A council assembles local elected councilors and economic, social, and cultural actors into a deliberative forum to discuss local development policies. However, while the council gives advice, submits proposals, and monitors development projects, decisions can be made only with the agreement of representatives of the central state, the region of Aquitaine, and the département des Pyrénées Atlantiques, of which the Pays Basque forms part. Linked to these various conceptualizations of the Basque space are diverse understandings of what it means to be Basque, based on a range of political, cultural, and primordial factors such as the ability to speak the Basque language, family lineage, the adoption of certain customs, and affi liation with notions of a Basque homeland. In the twenty-first century, those people who identify themselves as Basques are influenced by a century of Basque nationalist rhetoric and as such tend to view the Basque homeland as the conjunction of the seven provinces. A corollary of this is a rejection of the state frontier as a barrier to communications and commonality. Among themselves, however, they reveal different degrees of commitment to these ideals. The level of priority attached to the unification of Euskal Herria varies according to different political ideologies, with many concentrating more on seeking enhanced political autonomy at the level of small geographical

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subsets, such as Euskadi or the Pays Basque, than on independence for the whole of the Basque Country.

State-Building and Nationalism in Spain and France

On the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, the Basque provinces retained the distinct institutions and privileges of the fueros long into the modern era. These historic rights included a special tax status, exemption from military ser vice, and a tariff regime that gave them free trade with the world but customs barriers with the rest of Spain. Navarre was incorporated into Spain in 1512 but remained a separate kingdom alongside Castile and Aragon. Successive efforts by the reigning sovereign to absorb the provinces were only partially successful, as defense of the fueros was a rallying point of the Carlists, a movement in favor of a rival branch of the royal family named after Don Carlos, a pretender to the throne. Fuerolism is not to be confused with Basque nationalism, and the Carlists were later divided between those who moved into the nationalist orbit and those who retained a strongly antinationalist element. The fueros were finally removed in 1870, but even then the four provinces enjoyed special fiscal status, the concierto económico, which they still have today. Despite this particularity, elites from these provinces occupied prominent positions in the Spanish political, bureaucratic, and military apparatus (Suárez-Zuloaga 2007). Later they dominated much of the banking sector. In France, the privileges were less extensive and were swept away by the revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. In the mountainous inland areas of the Pyrenees, however, the border between Spain and France was blurred. Inhabitants on either side formed their own autonomous communities, paying little heed to government laws and regulations. During the Carlist wars, local inhabitants often rejected military ser vice and helped each other across the border. When the French and Spanish authorities eventually interfered with the local trade rules in the nineteenth century, the valley dwellers turned to smuggling (Douglass 1998). In the late nineteenth century, both states sought the modernization and linguistic unification of their territories. The attractiveness of the republican and secular model of the French state made it the more successful of the two (Weber 1979), although the French Basque provinces, an industrially

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underdeveloped, rural, and poor part of the state, preserved traditional values, the Basque language, and ties to Catholicism (Itçaina 2002). Local elites were largely marginal actors in French centralized politics. On the Spanish side, the province of Bizkaia saw a massive industrial development as from the late nineteenth century, drawing in masses of workers from elsewhere in Spain. What marked the experience of the two parts most dramatically was the eruption of Basque nationalism in the late nineteenth century, starting in Bizkaia. This occurred in a context of rapid economic and social change combined with a crisis for the Spanish political class following the defeat by the United States in 1898. This displaced the old political class, and in the first third of the twentieth century Basque nationalism dominated the representation of the region. Although it never became hegemonic, the region built a powerful subculture embracing politics, leisure, culture, social life, trade unions, and sectors of the business community. Initially, the PNV predicated a national identity based on biological traits to distinguish the local Basque population from the immigrant outsiders; party members had to prove that all four grandparents had Basque names. It was conservative, traditionalist, and Catholic. Arana designed the Basque national flag, which we know as the ikurriña. The PNV’s exclusive and antimodern ideas were then attenuated with the adherence of a section of the Basque industrial bourgeoisie, and the emphasis on racial criteria was largely dropped. Yet archaeological and anthropological interest in the Basques’ supposedly unique origins has continued to frame the debate, and occasionally prominent nationalists will cause a stir by musing about biological origins. By the 1920s, a strongly Catholic Basque nationalism had replaced Carlism as a barrier against leftist anticlericalism. In 1936, however, the majority of the PNV sided with the Second Spanish Republic, as the promise of autonomy was given precedence over ideological differences. Only a few months after autonomy was achieved, the Spanish civil war broke out, and the Basque Country was once again divided. While leaders in the province of Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa sided with the republic, upholding their claim for autonomy, Araba and Carlist Navarre sided with the fascists. With resistance finally crushed and the establishment of the dictatorship under General Franco, all displays of regional identity, including the speaking of Basque, were prohibited. It was in this context that, from the mid-1950s, an alternative Basque nationalist movement emerged, predominantly in the province of Gipuzkoa, as a resistance to fascist authority. Influenced by anti-

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colonialist and revolutionary movements abroad, these Basque nationalists were inspired by the class struggle and revolutionary socialist ideas rather than by the traditionalist and Catholic-based aspirations of the PNV. In their struggle for the recognition of Basque specificity, this left-wing Basque nationalist movement sought to include immigrants from other parts of Spain, putting less emphasis on lineage and more on political identification (Bray 2011, chapter 3; Conversi 2002; Reinares, 2004). Calling themselves esker abertzales (to distinguish themselves from PNV nationalists who refer to themselves as jeltzales but also claim the title abertzale), they combined Basque nationalism and socialism to define a Basque person as anyone active in the political struggle for an independent Basque nation on Marxist lines. It was within this context that the violent movement ETA (Basque Freedom and Homeland) was born and developed, sustaining a strategy of tension with the Spanish state and using active or passive support for violence to force a polarization of Basque sentiment. Following the death of Franco, democratic elections were held in 1977. Despite opposition on the part of Basque nationalists to the referendum on the 1978 constitution, on the grounds of its lack of recognition of the Basque right to self-determination, Euskadi and Navarre became autonomous communities with their own regional governments and substantive powers. In Euskadi, the PNV governed in various coalition combinations continuously from 1980 to 2009, building a new identity around the institutions of the Basque Autonomous Community. There were various attempts by the anti-nationalist parties to unseat it, including a pact envisaging a government led by the center-right Popular Party (PP) that would have taken a hard pro-Spanish line. In 2009, a minority Socialist government was formed with external support from the PP. In Navarre, a different historical tradition, the legacy of Carlism and later pro-Francoism, has limited the influence of Basque nationalism, which is concentrated in the northern Basque-speaking part of the region close to the frontier with France. The Unión del Pueblo Navarro, a right-wing provincialist, foralist, and anti-Basque party allied to the PP, has dominated politics, although in 2007 a coalition of Basque nationalist parties, Nafarroa Bai, made a significant breakthrough. There remains a provision in the Spanish constitution for Navarre eventually to unite with Euskadi on the basis of electoral consent, but this is something that the current government refuses to consider. In both Euskadi and the Basque-speaking areas of Navarre, the development of an urban context provided a breeding ground that ensured

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generational renewal of esker abertzalism. ETA’s political wing, long known as Herri Batasuna (HB), together with a general social and cultural movement around esker abertzalism are a major force in social and political life in the Basque Country. They have had a strong impact notably among the younger generations and have been effective in spreading their message, adorning streets with eye-catching banners and using new media communications in charismatic fashion. In recent years, HB has gone through a series of name changes as its successive forms have been banned. Since 2002, it reappeared as Batasuna, but this party was in turn made illegal a year later. It thus continues to be active on the margins of the law. A new party, EHAK, which claims to have no links with Batasuna but represents its program, won 12.5 percent of the votes in Basque parliamentary elections in 2005. For the 2007 municipal elections the label Acción nacionalista vasca (ANV) was used. The party was legally prevented from taking part in the Basque elections of 2009, again on allegations of ETA association. Political conflict in Euskadi entered a new phase after ETA announced a ceasefire in January 2011. This followed internal reflection within the Basque left-wing nationalist circle with the assistance of a so-called International Contact Group (ICG) led by Brian Currin, a South African lawyer and conflict resolution expert. While support for ETA has shrunk dramatically since the late 1990s, when it was estimated at around 7 percent of the Spanish Basque Country’s population, support for Basque nationalism has grown, notably for left-wing elements seeking to distance themselves from ETA that are committed to political dialogue. This support materialized when an alliance of various strands of left-wing Basque nationalists, under the name of Bildu, were allowed to run in the local and regional elections of May 2011: it won 26 percent of the vote. It marked a popular affirmation of left-wing Basque nationalism as an alternative to the PNV. Bildu took control of the provincial government of Gipuzkoa, previously led by the PNV, and of key cities including San Sebastian and Renteria, previously under Socialist administration. Basque nationalism has thus succeeded in penetrating civil society across the whole of the Basque Country. There has also been a secularization of Basque identity, so that those who feel Basque are presently less religious and more liberal on social issues (Suárez-Zuloaga 2007). In Euskadi, the largest trade union is Eusko Langileen Alkartasuna (ELA), linked to the PNV, while its rival Langile Abertzaleen Batzordeak (LAB) is close to the left-wing nationalists. There are sporting and cultural organizations with a nationalist tinge, while bars and community centers in the towns and villages provide

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communal places for Basque nationalists and are visibly divided between those that harbor conservative or social democrat nationalism and those that favor more left-wing nationalism, each with its distinct dress code (Bray 2011). The political foundation of Basque nationalism is its institutions and its claims to historic fueros, that is, premodern legal rights (especially rights of local autonomy). The PNV criticized the Spanish constitution because it identified the fueros as privileges conferred by the constitution, rather than as original, preconstitutional rights. Yet an insistence on the fueros can also be interpreted as a moderation of the separatist demand in favor of partial or shared sovereignty, historic rights, and negotiation, a stance that is compatible with transnational and European integration (discussed below). The PNV leaders have often recognized the practical impossibility of independence, given the division of Basque society between nationalist and non-nationalist poles, but they have to sustain a certain ambivalent pro-independence rhetoric because of competition from other nationalist parties, including both the radicals and Eusko Alkartasuna (EA), a social democratic break-away rival created in 1987, which talks about Basque independence in the long term as part of a Europe of the peoples. The role of the Basque language during this time also changed. Traditionally the defining characteristic of a Basque person—euskaldun in Basque—was the fact of speaking Basque. This could thus serve as a mechanism for clear differentiation. Suppression of the language under Franco made it a rallying point and a symbol of resistance, and it was seized upon as a tool for creating a new Basque identity from the 1960s onward. By learning Basque, even only superficially, one could become a member of the Basque community, regardless of whether or not one was of Basque descent. This made the language, at least in the opinion of some people, particularly in the esker abertzale milieu, a mechanism for including people of non-Basque origin while still maintaining a social boundary. The number of native speakers rose again following the end of the Franco regime. Thanks to the decision of the government of Euskadi to make Basque an official language and to the efforts of defenders of the language to revitalize it, a substantial number of young people now grow up speaking Basque as their first language, or as their second language, becoming thus euskaldun berriak, new Basques. Basque is taught under various modules in schools, and employees of the public service are obliged to pass Basque language tests. The language nevertheless remains under heavy pressure from Spanish and French. While it has equal official status with Spanish in Bizkaia,

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Gipuzkoa, and Araba, in Navarre it enjoys this status only in the northern part, where a majority of Basque-speakers are situated; in the Pays Basque it has no official status. The practice of Basque remains limited also because, despite the knowledge of the language, there is often a lack of emotional identification, particularly among people who have grown up or interact in non-Basque circles. Th is is accentuated with the presence of immigrant populations especially from across Spain and Latin American countries that have a preference for Spanish. Th is tendency is in contrast with recent findings in Catalonia, where immigrants rapidly learn and speak Catalan (Aspachs-Bracons, Clots-Figueras, and Masella 2007). The difference may be explained by the fact that Basque, as a non-Latin language, is far more difficult to learn, and there continues to be a general residual popu lar tendency to associate Basque with primordialist ethnicity (see also Conversi 2002). In the Pays Basque, Basque nationalism has remained a minority movement. This has much to do with the fact that industrialization and modernization bypassed the area for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As late as the 1970s, a larger percentage of the population there than on the Spanish side spoke Basque (de Pablo 2002), but the population decreased rapidly as young people emigrated for education and work. Indeed the idea of an eighth province, made up of the so-called Basque diaspora, is strong in the Basque geopolitical imagination. Basques abroad often retain the language and traditions more strongly than inhabitants do back in the homeland (Totoricaguena 2004). Basque communities abroad often have their own Basque cultural center, known as a Euskal etxea, with which the Basque government has been active in maintaining relations. French Basque nationalism was only slowly ignited in the wake of the Spanish civil war, when numerous Spanish Basques took refuge across the border. Following World War II, neo-Marxist ideas of internal colonialism encouraged younger nationalists there to fight against French centralist authorities whom, they believed, were keeping the Pays Basque in a state of underdevelopment (Jacob 1994). This later briefly led to the launching of a so-called northern version of ETA, under the name of Iparretarrak. Since the 1980s, both the PNV and EA have branches in the Pays Basque, where they are active in local political life and have some municipal councilors (Izquierdo 2006). The secessionist left-wing party Batasuna remains legal in France and also counts a handful of elected councilors. The only homegrown political party is Abertzaleen Batasuna, a moderate left-wing group-

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ing, which has won an average of 10 percent of votes in local elections in the Pays Basque in alliance with the Green Party. Nationalism on the French side too has been contained by political strategy. Until the 1980s mobilization in the Pays Basque was absorbed in the localistic form of politics known in France as notabiliare, based on the local implantation of political brokers and clientelistic networks. Basque themes could be exploited as folklore but deprived of political meaning. As in other regions, these traditional networks were taken over by the triumphant Gaullists after 1958 and posed no contradiction between being Basque and being French. The task of the notables, as elsewhere in France, was to mediate between center and locality and to bring back their share of central resources. Regionalization in France has also deliberately cut across historic and cultural boundaries. The Pays Basque forms part of a culturally diverse département, Pyrénées Atlantiques, which in turn is part of a larger and yet more culturally arbitrary region, Aquitaine. An electoral promise by François Mitterrand to create a Basque département was abandoned under pressure from Spain. By the 1990s, however, “new regionalist” themes stressing economic development, institutional reform, more autonomy, and a linking with culture had made some progress (Keating 1998). This has created some common ground between Basque nationalists, traditionalists, developmentalists, and regionalists on a limited agenda for change. The French response to these new demands was the setting up in 2000 of the Convention Spécifique Pays Basque. While conferring no institutional powers, this convention recognizes the Pays Basque as entitled to financial support to promote its economic, cultural, and technological development. The convention is made up of representatives of the state, the region of Aquitaine, the département of the Pyrénées Atlantiques, and municipal councilors and was renewed in 2007 for a further five years with a budget of €213 million. It includes a special budget for an Office de la langue Basque. Along lines of “new governance,” theoretically understood as involving close dialogue and collaboration between institutions and civil society (Urteaga and Ahedo 2004; Mansvelt Beck 2005), it has channeled the demands of local Basque activists into two councils, one comprising local associations (the Conseil de développement du Pays Basque) and the other, local elected politicians (the Conseil des élus). These, however, have only consultative powers, in a decision-making process ultimately dominated by the state. Regional and departmental authorities and Basque militants criticize the convention as a device for blocking their demands.

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Non-nationalist politicians, business elites, and cultural activists also criticized it and together with Basque nationalists promoted a revived regionalism centered on the historic demand for the creation of a Basque département (Ahedo 2006). Since 2002 these actors have come together in the campaign Batera, which demands institutional autonomy for the Pays Basque, a chamber of agriculture and a university, and the co-officialization of the Basque language (Bray 2006). In 2009 Batera succeeded in collecting thirty-six thousand signatures, with the aim of reaching the minimum forty-six thousand signatures necessary for the state to recognize the right for residents of the Pays Basque to decide in a referendum on their institutional future. In 2005 a group of farmers fed up with waiting for the creation of a chamber of agriculture that could finally cater to their specific needs, notably in exploring less intensive and more sustainable methods of farming, set up their own chamber, Euskal Herriko Laborantxa Ganbara (translated as Chamber of Agriculture of the Basque Country; Laborantxa Ganbara for short), gaining support from numerous associations and businesses, the Confédération Paysanne, and a majority of local municipal councils, as well as from the government of Euskadi. It was taken to court in 2008 by the French state on the grounds of its illegal status, rivaling the official chamber of agriculture of the département des Pyrénées Atlantiques, but was acquitted in 2009. Despite differing perceptions of the Basque Country and its history, political parties operating in the Pays Basque all seize on elements of Basque identification to support their campaigns. In line with the modernization of tradition elsewhere (Keating, Loughlin, and Deschouwer 2003), cultural elements formerly considered old-fashioned, primitive, and backward-looking are now viewed as potential sources of political and social capital. Even the local branches of the national French parties have in recent years employed Basque terms once used only by Basque nationalists. In their speeches and manifestos they routinely mention Basque identity, Basque culture, and the importance of preserving the Basque language, appropriating them to suit their aims (see also Pierre 2005).

Identities in the Basque Country

These different historical and institutional contexts mean that there is no single way in which Basque identity is culturally and politically articulated. A survey produced by the Basque Cultural Institute (2007) shows how

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Basqueness is variously constructed across the territory. Thirty percent of respondents across the whole area defined the Basque Country (Euskal Herria) as the seven provinces, while the same number identified it in institutional terms, as the Basque Autonomous Community. This restricted definition was strongest in Navarre and Euskadi, while the broadest defi nition was most widely supported on the French side. When asked the standard Linz/ Moreno question about competing identities, 40 percent of respondents in the Basque Autonomous Community considered themselves only Basque and 15 percent thought of themselves as more Basque than Spanish. Only 6 percent were more Spanish than Basque, and 3 percent were only Spanish. These latter figures were considerably lower than the percentage of people born out of the Basque Country and well below those with non-Basque parentage, suggesting that incomers can feel at least partly Basque, in contrast to the ethnic exclusiveness of Sabino Arana. On the French side, however, 53 percent of respondents considered themselves only French. In Navarre too there was a widespread rejection of Basque identity, with the largest group (38 percent) considering themselves predominantly Navarrese. Respondents on the Spanish side cited several criteria for being Basque, including wanting to be Basque (42 percent), living and working in the Basque Country (41 percent), and being born there (39 percent). As these criteria can be taken on their own or mixed and matched, there is considerable room for negotiating what it means to be Basque. In the Pays Basque, however, Basque identity continues to be predominantly defined in primordial terms by biological kinship and having Basque as a mother tongue (Basque Cultural Institute 2007, 51). This is consistent with the fact that Basque nationalism has made relatively little progress there, in contrast to the Spanish side, where it has been possible for a territorial and institutionalized identity to embrace different ways of being Basque and to create one’s own Basque identity (Bray 2004). Institutional development allows Basque national identity to be transmitted by institutional means without the need for recourse to subversive or minority symbols as in the Pays Basque, where the mere existence of a Basque nation remains a subject of discussion. Recently a debate was even organized by various Basque cultural and political associations and trade unions in Bayonne on the question of the extent to which a Basque nation really exists. With few opportunities to give political expression to Basque sentiment, a majority remains incapable of seeing Basque identity as fluid and potentially innovating. According to the same survey, it is the inhabitants of the Pays Basque who tend

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to define the Basque Country in more ideal national terms, following the romantic idea of the zazpiak bat, a Basque motto for “the seven provinces make one.” This is the paradox that is often apparent in contexts where identification is torn between primordial and subjective definitions due to a sense of insecurity. In the Pays Basque, a sense of insecurity is based on the dwindling survival of the Basque language and Basque identification in the face of increased urbanization and Frenchification. For these various reasons it is difficult to talk of Basques simply as a minority. Self-conscious Basques are certainly a minority in France and in Navarre as concerns culture, language, identity, and political representation, but not in Euskadi, where the Basque language is co-official with Spanish and the government manages its own language, education, and culture policies. Basque regional politicians are a minority within the central Spanish state; yet in their own institutions they are not (Filibi Lopez and Ibarra 2006), although this may now be challenged with the Socialist party in power. It is revealing to note that, preoccupied by the risk of being dismissed as exclusivist, Basque militants in the Pays Basque have often been uneasy about calling themselves nationalists, while in Spain this has been less of a problem. In the Pays Basque the Basque word for “patriot,” abertzale, has come to replace the term “nationalist,” even when speaking in French. For Basque nationalists, to be recognized as a nation is a crucial step in the consolidation of their national identity, in the Spanish context enabling them to cooperate as equals with the Spanish state. In the Pays Basque, however, the possibility of being recognized as a separate nation by the French state has remained a much more far-off dream. As a result Basque militants in the Pays Basque have concentrated on small and more urgent projects, such as initiatives in support of Basque cultural initiatives or the environment. As one militant put it in an interview, “what is the point of fighting for a Basque nation if, in the meantime we are losing our language and destroying our country?!” Another militant explained that “sure, unification with Euskadi would help us survive, but that dream is just too far off. And we don’t want to depend on them anyway.” While grateful for the financial assistance provided by the government of Euskadi, French Basque militants have insisted on preserving their autonomy, emphasizing that the Pays Basque is a very different reality from Euskadi. There is no question of unification with Navarre because of the regional government’s lack of sympathy with Basque culture and language, even though Navarre has been presented by archaeologists and biological anthropologists as the cradle of Basque culture. As has hap-

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pened in many other cases, Basques are thus cross-pressured, producing responses that may appear inconsistent to a foreign eye thinking in purely mono-nationalistic fashion when actually they have their own logic.

The European Context

European integration has provided new opportunities for stateless nations and national minorities (Keating 2001, 2006; McGarry and Keating 2006). It has created a new discursive space in which ideas of identity can be linked to a transnational order, allowing Basque and other nationalists to portray themselves as one of the “peoples” of Eu rope alongside the state-nations. Dividing sovereignty between two levels opens up the prospect of new forms of political authority beyond the state, within it, and across states. While some nationalist movements have argued that the costs of independence have been lowered and they have argued for independence in Europe, rather more have moved to new forms of post-sovereignty (Keating 2001; MacCormick 1999; Tierney 2004). From the late 1980s there was much debate on the idea of a “Europe of the Regions,” a vaguely specified concept that involved the emergence of a third level in a multilevel federalism. There has also been a proliferation of cross-border initiatives, many promoted by the European Commission under its Structural Fund programs. The Basque Country has witnessed all these tendencies, but with varying results. The Basque Nationalist Party was an early convert to the European project, inspired partly by its participation in Christian Democratic movements from the 1930s and as a founder member of the Christian Democratic International (de Pablo and Mees 2005). Since Spain’s transition to democracy, it has supported European integration as a means of challenging the current Spanish state framework and gaining more autonomy. It has sought to adapt its insistence on historic rights to the new context. So while Sabino Arana argued (misleadingly and anachronistically) that the medieval Basque provinces were independent states in personal association with the monarch of Castile, modern nationalists argue more convincingly that they represented diff used and divided authority. Thus historic rights arguments blend with post-sovereignty doctrines. Yet unlike its counterparts in Catalonia, the PNV has not carried the whole of its electorate into its European strategy. There is a continuing isolationist strand among some of the population, and opinion is less enthusiastically pro-European than the Spanish average and

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much less so than Catalan opinion (Sangrador García 1996). Polls show big majorities thinking that European integration has been good for Spain but lower numbers thinking that it has benefited the Basque Country (Euskobarometro 2003). The boldest recent attempt to map out a new Basque role in the emerging state and European architecture was the Ibarretxe Plan (Keating and Bray 2006). Th is proposed that the existing Basque Autonomous Community be constituted as a self-governing state “freely associated” with Spain. Navarre and the French Basque provinces would be able to join in due course, of their own will and by peaceful negotiation. In the early stages of the debate, much emphasis was put on the new European context, and reference was made to the proposal of the French Basque (but not nationalist) politician Alain Lamassoure for regions to become “partners of the Union.” In fact Lamassoure’s proposal was a modest idea for implementing EU policies within regions rather than a prescription for constitutional reform and was further watered down in practice. The debate on the Ibarretxe Plan coincided with the work on the Convention on the Future of Europe and the draft constitutional treaty. Eusko Alkartasuna was a member of the European Free Alliance (EFA) of stateless nation parties, and the PNV was an associate; both subscribed to the EFA proposal for “internal enlargement” whereby stateless nations could become full member states of the EU. This proposal went nowhere, however, and even modest proposals from the associations of regions with legislative powers (RegLeg) for an enhanced regional input made little progress (Jeffery et al. 2004). In the Spanish referendum on the draft constitutional treaty, the democratic nationalist parties were in a conundrum, wanting to support more European integration but disappointed with the practical aspects of the treaty. The PNV reluctantly called for a “yes” vote, while EA called for “no.” The referendum passed in the Basque Country with less support than elsewhere in the country. With the European option fading, the debate on the Ibarretxe Plan fell into the old Spanish-Basque dyadic mode, which has provided little middle ground. References to Europe as a possible framework largely disappeared, and protagonists on both sides relapsed to rather traditional conceptions of sovereignty. The Basque parliament voted to send the plan to Madrid with the support of the ruling party and three votes from the left-wing nationalists but opposed by the Socialists and the Popular Party. In the Spanish parliament it was duly rejected.

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Meanwhile on the French side, interpretations of the European project have been rather different. During the period leading up to France’s 1992 referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, debate generally in the Pays Basque focused on the risks posed for its inhabitants by disappearing frontiers with Spain. If the direst predictions were to be believed, the Pays Basque risked succumbing both to the economic domination of ambitious entrepreneurs from Spain and to imported Basque “nationalist extremism” (de Castro 1994, 260). Basque nationalists in the Pays Basque were also divided on the Maastricht Treaty. While supporters of the PNV saw in it at last a chance to free the Basque Country from French and Spanish strongholds, esker abertzales and EA were skeptical, seeing in the EU yet another potential form of capitalist and imperialist control. There were also localist concerns. While 53.4 percent of voters in the département des Pyrénées Atlantiques voted in favor of the Maastricht Treaty, support was lower in the municipalities close to the frontier (Palard 2006), reflecting the vulnerability felt by border inhabitants. In the small village of Biriatu, only a few meters from the frontier at the point where it is crossed by the motorway linking France with Spain, 55.9 percent of voters opposed the treaty. In nearby Hendaye, by contrast, then-mayor Raphael Lassallette saw the treaty in a more positive light, in spite of recognizing the great economic shock it would have on the local economy, which largely depended on the activity generated by frontier controls; he urged voters to say “yes”, with the result that the “no” vote was lower, at 49.2 percent (Palard 2006). Basque nationalism in France was also divided on the referendum on the European constitution. The only homegrown Basque nationalist party, Abertzaleen Batasuna, hesitated about rejecting it but ended up doing so on the basis that the EU remained largely state-centered and simply represented yet another potential form of capitalist and imperialist control. They therefore threw in their lot with the French left ist “no” camp.

Cross-Border Cooperation

The Franco-Spanish border is one of the oldest in Europe, settled by the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. It has not seen cross-border warfare since Napoleonic times, and the two states developed in their separate ways in the modern era. Under the Franco regime, cooperation between the states was limited and France provided a refuge for Basque and other political

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dissidents. ETA militants used France as a base from the 1960s and continued to gain refuge there after the transition. French Left ists acted in solidarity with them as part of the general anti-Fascist struggle, producing a sympathy that lingered even after ETA continued its campaign under democracy in Spain (Ahedo 2006). A meeting between fellow socialists François Mitterrand and Felipe González in 1983 improved cooperation, but it was only after the victory of the Right in the French elections of 1986 that French police started to crack down on ETA. Meanwhile relations were soured by the activities of the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (GAL), anti-ETA death squads operating on both sides of the border with the covert support of the Spanish and French governments. Security considerations have played a big role in border politics into the twenty-first century and have in many ways prevented the emergence of a relaxed cross-border atmosphere. One visible result of European integration in the Basque Country is the growth in numbers of people residing on one side of the Franco-Spanish frontier and working or studying on the other. Since 1993, when frontier controls were lifted as a result of the Schengen treaty and the European single market, people have grown accustomed to using the locations on either side of the frontier as if they were part of a single, unified space (Bray 2006, 2007a). Since the introduction of the euro, they no longer need to carry pesetas and francs, and shopping and social life take place wherever the best deal is to be had. However, each side of the frontier serves a distinct function; for instance, people living on the Spanish side prefer to take their leisurely walks in the greener areas of the French side without necessarily mingling with local inhabitants, while residents of the French side prefer the nightlife and relatively cheaper drinks and tobacco of the Spanish side. Local media too have become increasingly cross-frontier in nature. The regional television and radio services of Euskadi are now broadcast in the Pays Basque. Some news services from Euskadi also have offices on the French side of the frontier. This exchange may be contributing to the creation of a trans-frontier Basque public sphere, but the media exchange remains rather unidirectional, with most of the broadcasting done from Euskadi centrally based agencies (Bray, Harguindéguy, and Argul 2005). There has been a series of cross-border initiatives, often inspired by European projects, although the European Commission has consistently stressed economic and functional considerations and downplayed the cultural and political elements (Cornago 2006). These operate at a series of

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spatial scales, state-to-state, region-to-region, and local. State-level cooperation largely concerns big infrastructure projects such as the high-speed train forming part of the Trans-European Networks program. This has involved arguments about how it links into the “Basque Y,” a regional project to bring greater spatial coherence to the Basque Autonomous Community by linking its three provincial capitals (Bilbao, San Sebastian, and Vitoria). One of the big projects between Aquitaine and Euskadi is a logistics platform designed to develop cross-frontier trucking activities through the two regions. Regional-level cooperation presents a number of political and institutional problems. There is no French counterpart to the Basque Autonomous Community. The region of Aquitaine is much larger than the Pays Basque, and its capital is in Bordeaux. Even where there is a will to cooperate, the different powers and financial resources of Euskadi and Navarre and of Aquitaine make it difficult to make commitments. Locally elected politicians and Basque associations pursuing cultural and social initiatives are often held back by French institutional authorities who hold the ultimate financial power and impose their own bureaucratic framework. Cross-frontier cooperation in France is ultimately managed by the centralized French state agency DATAR. So the idea that European subsidiarity provides minorities in control of their own regions with new opportunities to explore constituting crossborder political communities with their co-nationals needs to be qualified, since power relations are conditioned by state controls to varying extents. In the case of the Basque Country in Spain and France, this has consequences on the freedom of action in cross-frontier cooperation. For Basque nationalists, the most revealing fact is that we still talk in terms of cross-frontier cooperation. Efforts nevertheless started in 1983 with the Working Committee of the Pyrenees, inspired by the Alpine precedent (de Castro 1994). In 1989 a cooperation agreement was signed between Aquitaine and the Basque Autonomous Community, which was expanded in 1992 to include Navarre, although the latter dropped out in 2000 because of political tensions between the Basque and Navarrese governments (de Castro and Ugalde 2006). There followed three INTERREG programs under the European Commission’s cross-border programs. INTERREG I (1990–93) was controlled by the French and Spanish states, with little regional input. INTERREG II (1994– 99) was more devolved on the Spanish but not on the French side. Only

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with INTERREG III (2000–2006) were the regional authorities fully involved. Harguindéguy (2005) has shown how INTERREG was played out differently in the three parts of the Pyrenees, being used by Basque and Catalan nationalists in the western and eastern sides as a symbolic way to promote pan-Basque and pan-Catalan ideas, while in the central section, between Aragon and the region of Midi-Pyrénées, there is an absence of historical and cultural common ground. Aquitaine and Euskadi are, however, diverse internally and on the Basque side rather fragmented politically, and a program based on a super-region covering the whole space would make little functional sense. In 2007 for the first time the French state representative participated only in a consultative role in the cross-frontier conference between the region of Aquitaine, the département des Pyrénées Atlantiques, and the region of Euskadi. Th is was lauded as the fi rst time that institutions of either side of the frontier in that part of the Basque Country were gathered together as equals around the same table, without the interference of the French state. While regional deputies of the extremely right-wing National Front Party condemned this initiative as legitimizing the creation of a “Basque Euroregion,” the socialist president of Aquitaine insisted that his aspiration was a Euro-region that could then expand further to include the regions of Aragon and Navarre. A first major step in this direction came in December 2007 with the creation of a legal status for the Basque Euro-regional conference, preparatory to incorporation as a GECT (Eu ropean Grouping of CrossFrontier Cooperation), a recently created legal category within the European Union. The Batasuna member and ex-Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Koldo Gorostiaga argued that the Pays Basque, as an institutionally recognized “collectivité locale,” could seek cooperation with “collectivités locales” in other states, as permitted by the GECT. Thus, according to him, the Pays Basque could join forces with the Basque institutional units across the frontier, but this nationalistic dimension would certainly not be acceptable to the main partners. At the local level, the French Basque town of Bayonne and the Spanish Basque city of San Sebastian launched an agreement on cooperation with much pomp in the late 1990s under the banner of the “Basque Eurocity.” The official objective was to work on common projects that would more effectively reflect the reality of the increasingly cross-frontier lifestyle of much of its population, but it has so far gone little further than the initial symbolic act. The institutional differences on either side of the frontier are part of the explanation for this, but at the root of the problem lies a lack of political will.

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Politicians on the Spanish side tend to have enough ambitious projects to deal with at home and thus tend not to be so interested in working with their French neighbors, whom they see as “small fry” lacking political and financial power and with little room to maneuver. Political figures in the Pays Basque for their part are aware of their limited power in comparison to that of their neighbors, but they also have different priorities for local development. Meanwhile the president of Navarre’s regional government, Unión del Pueblo Navarro (UPN) member Miguel Sanz, invested energy in forging relations with the president of the département des Pyrénées Atlantiques, JeanJacques Lasserre of the center-right political party UDF (Union pour la démocratie française). This relationship is far from any Basque nationalist aspiration, both parties being of statist and right-wing inclinations, but rather meets their own regional needs, particularly in the construction of a highway across the Pyrenees and through the Pays Basque to gain access to the rest of Europe. The project has so far failed to win support from the Socialist leadership of Aquitaine, but it is strongly supported by Lasserre, to the consternation of local actors in the Pays Basque who argue that it would be counter to the interests of local inhabitants and the environment. So once again local interests have prevailed against broader conceptions of the region. Practical work at the very local level on specific projects also follows the logic of localism, of personal and partisan networks, and of micro politics rather than grand visions of nation-building. This is because on this level actors can manage to achieve concrete results. Local cross-border cooperation is best represented by the case of the Consorcio agreed by the municipal councils of three towns around the bay of Txingudi on the Atlantic coast (Bray 2011). Various projects of social, cultural, environmental, and economic interest have been launched successfully over recent years. Yet despite the openness of the frontier and increasing exposure to the values of communities on the other side, many people continue to feel attachment to their own state national contexts and occasionally express mistrust of “the others” across the frontier. Since the 1980s, the government of Euskadi has provided financial assistance to projects of a Basque character in the Pays Basque, initially causing numerous tensions with French authorities. On one hand, references to the “normalization” of the Basque language are still seen as threatening, and so French authorities prefer to talk of aménagement, or “organization” of the Basque language. The Office Public de la Langue Basque was duly created

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for this purpose in 2005. On the other hand, there has been some cooperation, with the Basque government participating as a “qualified person” in the work of the Institut Culturel Basque and the Conseil de développement du Pays Basque, along with representatives of the French state and local authorities (de Castro and Ugalde 2005). Perhaps the most politically significant move adopted by the Basque nationalists to promote pan-Basque cooperation was Udalbiltza, or Association of Elected Members of the Basque Country. This was a product of the 1998 Pact of Lizarra between the moderate and extreme nationalist parties, which immediately preceded the ETA cease-fire of that year. Udalbiltza was an effort to build cooperation from the bottom up while remaining within the bounds of legality and took the form of an inter-municipal association. Its first meeting assembled 1,178 delegates from 355 municipalities, all of them nationalists, with only 24 delegates from 14 municipalities coming from the French side (Etxeberria 2006). It received almost €1.5 million in its first four years of operation, from municipalities, the foral deputations, and the Basque government, to be used mainly for cultural activities (Etxeberria 2006). The end of the ETA cease-fire in December 1999, however, led to the exclusion of Batasuna, the leading left-wing nationalist party, and the formation by the moderates in 2000 of a new association called Udalbide with all the executive powers of Udalbiltza. Udalbide in turn suffered from restrictions on funding by the non-nationalist parties in the Basque parliament and questions about its tax status. Nonetheless, as an association strongly linked to the Basque government under the PNV, Udalbide remained prominent until 2009. Its funds remained substantial, and numerous associations in Navarre and the Pays Basque have benefited, including the grassroots Basque-language radio stations and Laborantxa Ganbara. Udalbiltza meanwhile, reconvened by left-wing Basque nationalists and claiming to be the legitimate heir of the body founded in 1999, has led a fitful existence, including being judicially banned for its alleged association with ETA. Cross-border cooperation has, then, been successful in some ways but not in others. The verdict depends on what we are talking about: the romantic unification of people without frontiers, the unification of “the Basques,” institutional unification, or the pragmatic solving of social and health services, transport infrastructure, or taxation. However, it can well be argued that one cannot be effectively carried out without the other. On one hand,

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the arrival in power in 2009 of a Socialist government in Euskadi, with the parliamentary backing of the Popular Party, did not lead to dramatic changes of policy on language or affect the more functional or pragmatic forms of cross-border cooperation, but it did end the conscious strategy of nationbuilding. Indeed the detachment of these initiatives from Basque nationalist or irredentist notions might even allow more cooperation to develop at multiple levels. On the other hand, political polarization within Euskadi continued as ETA attacks increased with the arrival of the new government in Euskadi while there was severe pressure on expressions of support for radical nationalism. Notwithstanding continuing confrontations between opposing political factions, many Basques have seen their lives improve considerably since ETA’s announcement of a permanent cease-fire in October 2011. Extortion has effectively ceased and individuals previously threatened by ETA can now live without bodyguards. Inhabitants of the Basque Country can now more easily reflect and define for themselves what it means to be Basque without having to consider violence as part of the equation. Meanwhile, both the Spanish and the French governments have continued to crack down on Basque nationalist activities perceived as having links with ETA. On the French side of the border, more than one hundred people allegedly linked to ETA are in jail. Other members of the left-wing Basque nationalist movement face the threat of possible arrest. French officials have continued to dismiss “the Basque problem” as a Spanish domestic one, while sanctioning French security forces to work closely with their Spanish counterparts in tracking down ETA members. The Spanish government, headed by the Popular Party since November 2011, is under pressure to open political dialogue and reach a peace settlement. Some initial steps have been taken, but it is not yet clear where they will lead. There are still major questions about the feasibility of dialogue. In particular, there is controversy over whether ETA must disband as a condition of government concessions. While senior PP officials say this is essential, others suggest that a reformed ETA could play a part in rehabilitating those convicted of violence. The International Contact Group plays an important role in the continuing attempt to facilitate dialogue in the Basque Country. It insists that all political parties engage in discussions and stresses the need to legalize the left-wing Basque separatist party Sortu, which was banned in March 2011 by the Spanish Supreme Court for its alleged links with ETA. To achieve

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effective political dialogue, the ICG insists, all parties be allowed to run in parliamentary elections in Euskadi in 2013.

Conclusion The Basque nation or people is a work under construction, not as a single project but as a theme in distinct and competing projects. Different criteria are applied to define the people and the territory, and there are big differences in the aims of the projects. On the Spanish side there is a nationbuilding project that dates back a little over a hundred years and which has succeeded in institutionalizing a certain conception of what it means to be Basque, linked to a constitutional program focused on three historic territories but with some opening to the wider Basque community. On the French side there is a rather traditional cultural identity and, more recently, a regionalism tied to a development project but not solely to nationalist themes. While the French political class has historically avoided recognition of national difference, it has been able to accommodate regional folklore as part of the variety of France and since the 1950s has had a strong tradition of regional development policy. These are not merely different from Basque nationalism but provide a barrier to it. Neither project is hegemonic. On the Spanish side there is an anti-nationalist and even anti-Basque movement with supporters on both right and left. Some of these are Spanish nationalists who cannot recognize divisions within the state, while others are traditional regionalists or localists who are attached to the historic territories (especially in Alava and Navarre) and refuse to recognize pan-Basque themes. On the French side, there is a Basque nationalist movement, but it has been relatively weak. Within Basque nationalism, there is a division between moderate and radical elements. These various asymmetries are an obstacle to the formation of a clearly territorially and culturally defined Euro-region (Mansvelt Beck 2006; Markusse 2004) as well as a common Basque territorial, cultural, and political community. The idea of a trans-state Basque national community is only relative. Basque nationalism is strongest and most embedded in Euskadi, but for its adherents the nation can only be Euskal Herria. Practical realities make this little more than a dream. The border has not disappeared under the impact of European integration, but it has been transformed and has become a new factor in local politics. Europe has permitted new ways of

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constructing Basque identity, but these are always negotiated by actors in multiple ways, and Europe itself has not gained consensual meaning. Crossborder cooperation themes have proliferated, but it would be a mistake to group these under a heading of “uniting” the Basque Country just as it was a mistake in the 1990s to imagine that the European Commission had a plan to subvert the state and transform the continent into a “Europe of the Regions.” Cross-border cooperation has been an instrument for a number of distinct policies, to do with security, with economic development, with addressing common problems and externalities on environmental matters. It has operated at a number of levels, from the state to the local community. The Basque nationalist project is linked to Europe but not in a clear or determinate way. The Ibarretxe Plan, which was intended to do this, failed, and Europe features less in the debate than it did in the past. As the peace process evolves, the projection of the Basque community across the border could be one element that will reconcile the conflicting French/Spanish and  Basque nationalist conceptions of political community. The Basque community, however, will remain a work in progress, interpreted differently by various actors on either side of the border. Notes The Carnegie Corporation and the EU Sixth Framework research program supported the research on which this chapter is based. 1. In Spanish, Partido nacionalista vasco. In Basque it is EAJ, Eusko alderdi jeltzalea. 2. Figures are from the 4th Sociolinguistic Survey produced in 2006, http://www .euskara .euskadi .net /r59 -738 /en /contenidos /informacion /inkesta _soziolinguistikoa2006/en _survey/adjuntos/IV_incuesta _en.pdf, accessed May 30, 2012. Results of the 5th survey are yet to be revealed. It is estimated that these figures have changed only minimally. For more, see the blog of the sociolinguist Erramun Bachoc, http:// www.eke.org /partaideak /blogak /sociolinguistique, accessed May 29, 2012. 3. The world’s highest occurrence of the Rh-blood type has been found in members of families based in the Basque Country over various generations. More recently these data have been backed by DNA studies. The biological evidence also harmonizes well with linguistic data (Cavalli-Sforza and Bertranpetit, 1991). 4. Meaning in Basque, “left-wing Basque patriots.” 5. The word comes from the name of the Basque nationalist party in Basque, Eusko Alderdi Jeltzalea, and is used to refer to someone who is a member of or associated with this party. 6. Which originally means “Basque patriot” but has come to mean “Basque nationalist.”

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7. In Spanish, Partido Popu lar. 8. Under pressure from party headquarters in Madrid, the Navarre socialists supported the renewal of the UPN government rather than put the nationalists into office. 9. Euskal Herrietako Alderdi Komunista, or Communist Party of the Basque Peoples. 10. The French constitution’s article 2 states that French is the only language of the French Republic. France is the only country in the EU, along with Greece, not to have ratified the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. 11. Meaning in Basque “Those of the North.” 12. Its Web page states its two main objectives as being to “ensure the integration of the Pays Basque as a strategic part of the Euro-regional space” and to “maintain and consolidate its internal coherence.” See http://www.lurraldea.net/. Accessed July 16, 2012. 13. In the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, when the French territory was being reorganized in the form of regions and départements, Dominique Garat, an elected member of the council of Lapurdi, argued at the National Assembly for the creation of an institutional and legal status grouping Lapurdi, Xiberoa, and Basse Navarre. This was eventually rejected. In his successful 1981 presidential election campaign, François Mitterrand promised a Basque département but in government dropped the idea under pressure from Spain. 14. See http://www.batera.info/ and http://www.batera.over-blog.com/article -5617940.html. 15. This question, first used by Juan Linz for Spain and then extended by Luis Moreno to Scotland, asks whether the respondent is (a) uniquely Basque; (b) more Basque than Spanish; (c) equally Basque and Spanish; (d) more Spanish than Basque; or (e) only Spanish. Other substate and state identities can be substituted for these according to the case. 16. These figures are consistent with those regularly reported by the Observatorio Político Autonómico in its annual Sondeo de opinión, published in Barcelona by Institut de Ciènces Polítiques i Socials. 17. Le Pays Basque: Une nation à part entière? Presentation given by Michel Cahen at the Manu Robles Arangiz Foundation, Bayonne, France, February 13, 2006. 18. Different ways of understanding what abertzale means over time have also been noted in Bray 2004. 19. Interview conducted by Zoe Bray on July 30, 2008, in Bayonne, France. 20. Interview conducted by Zoe Bray on August 1, 2008, in Bayonne, France. 21. The idea bears a close resemblance to the concept of “sovereignty association” and “sovereignty with partnership” offered at the referendums of 1980 and 1995 in Quebec. It also recalls the special status of Puerto Rico. 22. Allied with the Greens in the European Parliament. 23. They gave three of their votes to the plan to ensure its adoption and three against it to show their dissatisfaction with its limits, thus remaining faithful to their demand for outright independence.

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24. It was negotiated on the Island of Pheasants in the estuary of the Bidasoa River in France. Such is the importance of the island in the history of Franco-Spanish relations that since 1856 it has rotated between French and Spanish jurisdiction every six months. 25. Délégation à l’Aménagement du Térritoire et à l’Action Régionale. See also La montagne accouche d’une souris, Le Journal du Pays Basque, December 15, 2006: 3. 26. La conférence eurorégionale franchit un nouveau pas, Le Journal du Pays Basque, December 14, 2007: 1. 27. Autonomie, un terme tendance, Le Journal du Pays Basque, December 1, 2007: 2. 28. These are the councils of the three provinces and Navarre. Under Spanish law they are provinces, but Basque nationalists insist on calling them “historic territories.” They are directly elected, unlike other Spanish provincial councils, and it is they who have the historic tax-raising powers. References Ahedo, Igor. 2006. El viaje de la identidad y el nacionalismo vasco en Iparralde (1789– 2005). Vol. 11. Vitoria, Spain: Servicio Central de Publicaciones del Gobierno Vasco. Aspachs-Bracons, Oriol, Irma Clots-Figueras, and Paolo Masella. 2008. The Effect of Language at School on Identity and Political Outlooks. EUI Working Paper 36. Florence: European University Institute. Basque Autonomous Community. 2006. Fourth Sociolinguistic Survey. Vitoria, Spain: Servicio Central de Publicaciones del Gobierno Vasco. Basque Cultural Institute. 2007. Pratiques culturelles et identités collectives au Pays Basque: Présentation des résultats de l’enquête quantitative et qualitative menée en 2004–2005. Ustaritz, Spain: Basque Cultural Institute. Braudel, Fernand. 1986. L’identité de la France. Paris: Arthaud. Bray, Zoe. 2005. Going beyond Boundaries: Cooperation and Inclusion on the FrancoSpanish Frontier in the Basque Country. In Culture and Power at the Edges of the State: National Support and Subversion in European Border Regions, ed. Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan, 321– 48. Berlin: Lit Verlag. ———. 2006. Basque Militant Youths in France: New Experiences of Ethnonational Identity in the Eu ropean Context. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 12 (3– 4): 533–53. ———. 2007a. Boundaries in a “Borderless” Europe: European Integration and CrossFrontier Cooperation in the Basque Country. In De/ceiving (Dis)Appearances: Analyzing Current Developments in Europe and North America’s Border Regions, ed. Harlan Koff, 119–36. Brussels: PIE Peter Lang. ———. 2007b. Europe as Living Boundaries: The Case of the Basque Country. In Reflections on Europe: Defining a Political Order in Time and Space, ed. Bo Strath and Hans-Ake Persson, 305–24. Brussels: PIE Peter Lang. ———. 2011. Living Boundaries: Frontiers and Identity in the Basque Country. Reno: Center for Basque Studies Press.

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Bray, Zoe, Jean-Baptiste Harguindeguy, and Sergio Argul. 2005. Espace public médiatisé et coopération transfrontalière: Le cas de la baie de Txingudi au Pays Basque. In Communication et Organisation: La communication des nouvelles éthiques de l’entreprise, ed. Elizabeth Gardère and Gino Grammacia, 227–37. Bordeaux: ISIC Université Michel de Montaigne. Cahen, M. 2006. Abertzalisme en temps de mondialisation. Bayonne: Fondation Manu Robles Arangiz. Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., and J. Bertranpetit 1991. A Genetic Reconstruction of the History of the Population of the Iberian Peninsula. Annals of Human Genetics 55: 51– 67. Conversi, Daniele. 2002. Immigration and Statelessness: Political Participation of Immigrants and Their Descendants in Catalan and Basque Mobilizations (1959– 1978). Paper presented at the Joint Session of the European Consortium for Political Research, Turin, Italy. Cornago, Noé. 2006. Un acercamiento al concepto de Euroregión: Dimensiones funcionales y economía simbólica. In Acción colectiva Hegoalde-Iparralde, ed. Francisco Letemendia, 33–52. Madrid: Fundamentos. de Castro, José Luis. 1994. La cooperación transfronteriza en el marco de la Unión Europea. In Cooperación Transfronteriza Euskadi-Aquitania, ed. Francisco Letamendia, José Luis de Castro, and Antón Borja, 24–38. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco. de Castro, José Luis, and Alexander Ugalde. 2005. Anuario sobre la acción exterior de Euskadi, 2004. Oñati: Instituto Vasco de Administración Pública. ———. 2006. Anuario sobre la acción exterior de Euskadi, 2005. Oñati: Instituto Vasco de Administración Pública. de Pablo, Santiago. 2002. Vasconial Continental: Entre la III y la V República Francesa. In De Túbal a Aitor: Historia de Vasconia, ed. Iñaki Bazán, 816–34. Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros. de Pablo, Santiago, and Ludger Mees. 2005. El Péndulo Patriótico: Historia del Partido Nacionalista Vasco (1895–2005). Barcelona: Crítica. Diez Medrano, J. 2003. Framing Europe: Attitudes to European Integration in Germany, Spain and the UK. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Douglass, W. A. 1998. A Western Perspective on an Eastern Interpretation of Where North Meets South: Pyrenean Borderland Cultures. In Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, ed. T. M. Wilson and H. Donnan, 62–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Etxeberria, Noemí. 2006. Las redes municipales de cooperación intervasca. In Acción colectiva Hegoalde-Iparralde, ed. Francisco Letemendia, 83–128. Madrid: Fundamentos. Euskobarometro. 2003. Los Resultados del Observatorio Vasco de la Integración Europea y la Sociedad Internacional (OVEI) en esta segunda oleada del mes de Noviembre de 2003. Bilbao: Euskobarometro.

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Filibi Lopez, Igor, and Pedro Ibarra. 2006. Regions, Minorities and European Integration: A Case Study on the Basque Nation in Spain. EUROREG case study report. Bilbao: University of the Basque Country. Harguindéguy, Jean-Baptiste. 2005. L’Europe par les frontières? La mise en oeuvre de l’initiative communautaire INTERREG 111 en faveur de la coopération francoespagnole. PhD thesis, European University Institute. Imig, Doug, and Sydney Tarrow. 2002. La contestation politique dans l’Europe en formation. In L’action collective en Europe, ed. Richard Balme and Didier Chabanet, 195–226. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Itçaina, Xabier. 2002. Les affi liations croisées: La circulation des interprétations autour des identités Basques. In Identité(s), Actes du colloque “Identité(s). Poitier, France: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Izquierdo, Jean Marie. 2006. Desde el punto de vista de los partidos políticos ¿Existe todavía la frontera? In Acción colectiva Hegoalde-Iparralde, ed. Francisco Letamendia, 179–200. Madrid: Fundamentos. Jacob, J. E. 1994. Hills of Conflict: Basque Nationalism in France. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Jauristi, Jon. 1997. El bucle melancólic: Historias de nacionalistas vascas. Madrid: Espasa. ———. 1998. El Linaje de Aitor: La invención de la tradición vasca. 2nd ed. Madrid: Taurus. Jeffery, Charlie, Michael Keating, Jacques Ziller, Claude du Grandut, and Claudio Martini. 2004. The Local and Regional Dimension in the European Constitutional Process. Brussels: Committee of the Regions. Keating, Michael. 1998. The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. ———. 2001. Plurinational Democracy: Stateless Nations in a Post-Sovereignty Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004a. European Integration and the Nationalities Question. Politics and Society 31 (1): 1–22. ———. 2004b. Exploring Europeanization. International Studies Review 6 (3): 481–82. Keating, Michael, and Zoe Bray. 2006. Basque Nationalism, European Integration and the Ibarretxe Plan. Ethnopolitics 5 (4): 347– 64. Keating, Michael, John Loughlin, and Kris Deschouwer. 2003. Culture, Institutions and Economic Development: A Study of Eight European Regions. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. MacCormick, Neil. 1999. Questioning Sovereignty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mansvelt Beck, Jan. 2005. Territory and Terror: Conflicting Nationalisms in the Basque Country. London: Routledge. ———. 2006. Geopolitical Imaginations of the Basque Homeland. Geopolitics 11 (3): 507–28.

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Markusse, J. 2004. Transborder Regional Alliances in Europe: Changes for Ethnic Euroregions? Geopolitics 9 (3): 649–73. McGarry, John, and Michael Keating, eds. 2006. European Integration and the Nationalities Question. London: Routledge. Palard, Jacques, ed. 1996. L’Europe aux frontiers: La coopération transfrontalière entre régions d’Espagne et de France. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Pierre, Thomas. 2005. Usage et dénonciation de la notion d’ethnie Basque par l’antidépartementalisme en Pays Basque nord. Lapurdum 10: 233– 46. Reinares, Fernando. 2004. Who Are the Terrorists? Analyzing Changes in Sociological Profile among Members of ETA. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27 (6): 465–88. Sangrador García, José Luis. 1996. Identidades, actitudes y estereotipos en la España de las autonomías. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas. Suárez-Zuloaga, Ignacio. 2007. Vascos contra Vascos. Barcelona: Planeta. Tierney, Stephen. 2004. Constitutional Law and National Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Totoricaguena, Gloria. 2004. Identity, Culture, and Politics: Comparing the Basque Diaspora. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Urteaga, Eguzki. 2006. La langue Basque dans tous ses états: Sociolinguistique du Pays Basque. Paris: L’Harmattan. Urteaga, Eguzki, and Igor Ahedo. 2004. La Nouvelle Gouvernance en Pays Basque. Paris: L’Harmattan. Weber, Eugen. 1979. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. London: Chatto and Windus.

CHAPTER 5

Albanians Divided by Borders: Loyal to State or Nation? Alexandra Channer

Introduction “If you look down there [pointing into the valley], you can see the border. It cuts straight across the valley and up the other side into those mountains. That’s Albania. I remember standing here every evening when I was 11 years old with my father and just gazing at Albania. We couldn’t point then because it was too dangerous. We just looked. I came to this spot every day just to look.” The longing expressed by this Albanian above the MacedonianAlbanian border in July 2007 illustrates the fascination that the state of Albania holds for Albanians left outside its border in 1913. This persevering commitment to “Albania” is this chapter’s subject. The objective is to describe how border changes dividing Albanians over time and the process of EU integration have shaped and are shaping Pan-Albanianism’s historical development. The declaration of independent “Albania” in 1912, which was followed by its partition in 1913 by the Great Powers, remains the persistent grievance shaping Pan-Albanianism and its often conflicting goals: uniting nation and state or consolidating independent Albania (Austin 2004, 235–36; Kola 2003, 392). Th is partition—imposed from London (1912–13), reaffi rmed at Versailles (1919), and reinforced after World War II (1945)—hardened the commitment to unification among Albanians outside independent Albania and manifested illegal movements from 1912 onward. Meanwhile their common

SERBIA

Pristina

MONTENEGRO Vermosh

•

KOSOVO

Vuthaj

• •

Podgorica

Breznca • Karaceva

•

Morina

Konculj

•• •Bujanovac BULGARIA

Tropoja

• Plave •Globoqica

• Shkoder • Ulqin

• Jazhince • Kryenik • Tetova Skopje

• Mat • Durres

MACEDONIA

• Debar

Tirana

ALBANIA

. Yugoslavia and Albania after 1945.

• Krushev

GREECE

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experience of discrimination nourished belief that security and progress would be possible only if they were reunited politically. Independent Albania’s survival was threatened in the same negotiations by neighbors seeking territory, and by occupation in 1939. Constant insecurity restrained its official policy on unification, leading at times to abandonment. However, the 1948 sealing of Albania’s border with Yugoslavia, dividing nation, village, and family, cloaked independent Albania in an enduring mystical appeal. It anchored partition in a deep popular emotional trauma, reinforcing a shared sense of being Albanian that was rooted in overcoming separation. Pan-Albanianism adapted to Albanians’ internal partition between three Yugoslav Republics after 1945 and five states from 1989 to 2008. Initially Albanians defined their collective status in Yugoslavia as the first step toward unification. In the 1990s, however, Kosovo, which was central to this objective, became an international question in a diplomatic context demanding no border changes, making the excluded goal of independence the priority. By 1992 independent Albania, struggling with transition and putting first security in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), had disavowed unification. Albanians began to pursue seemingly distinct goals through passive resistance and participation and eventually through armed resistance in separate wars in Kosovo, Presheva (Serbia), and Macedonia. With Albania’s categorical reaffirmation of opposition to unification in 2001, Pan-Albanianism appeared fragmented, and unification became taboo in political discourse. Analysts argued that aspirations might be satisfied by Kosovo’s independence, while the promise of EU accession could provide an alternative semi-unification based on informal borders, guaranteeing minority rights and constraining Kosovo and Albania. This study suggests that the EU alternative has not yet overcome the enduring nature of the partition grievance and its centrality to Albanian national identity. While the promise of freedom of movement is extremely important for Albanians, it is not perceived as a sufficient replacement for unification. The limited implementation of minority reforms has not reduced the resilience of alienation, exacerbated by the asymmetry of rights granted through international negotiations to Kosovo’s Serb minority. Continuing uncertainty over Kosovo’s supervised and conditioned independence has stimulated Pan-Albanian mobilization. Civil society has begun stressing the regenerative power of national unification and its achievability, peacefully. Political elites remain cautious; however, no longer so fearful of damaging

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Kosovo’s prospects and secure in NATO membership, Albania’s prime minister talks of spiritual, though not political, unity while pursuing economic and cultural integration as required by the EU. Rather than providing an alternative, the process of EU accession has created a new space for an adapted Pan-Albanianism.

Research This analysis draws on twenty-six interviews conducted in villages at five sites on borders dividing Albanians in 2007. Interviews were conducted by the author in Albanian; a few required translation assistance where regional dialects were strong. Subjects were found through “snowballing,” and all but one were male heads of households. The goal was to understand the border’s impact on communities and to augment existing analyses focusing mostly on political elites. Each interviewee was asked these questions: (1) when was his/her village divided by the border; (2) how this affected his/her family and village; (3) how the border still affects his/her life; (4) whether joining the EU might improve this situation; (5) what would the best political solution to his/her problems be? In addition the author conducted a random survey of 994 people in Prishtina, Kosovo, regarding attitudes toward independence, unification, and European integration. The results of this 2007 poll are discussed below. This study is about Albanians living in five different states in a divided nation. Regarding place names, conventional Anglicized forms of the original Albanian are applied, and in their absence local Albanian forms are used. Kosovo has the largest, and Macedonia the second largest, Albanian population outside independent Albania. Indeed, Kosovo’s population of 1.6 million Albanians (2011) is over half of Albania’s, which in 2011 had 2.8 million (see Table 5.1). Albanians in Montenegro and the Presheva Valley in Serbia constitute smaller minorities. Although fewer in number, Albanians account for 5 percent of Montenegro’s population. Albanians constitute just 0.8 percent of Serbia’s population but 60 percent of the Presheva Valley: of the valley’s three municipalities, Presheva is almost entirely Albanian (89.1 percent); Bujanoc has an Albanian majority (54 percent); and in Medvegja, Albanians are a minority (26.2 percent). New censuses exclude people living outside the state for more than one year, raising fears of de-

Map 5.2. Albanian populations

1. Ethnic Albanian Populations Outside Albania Kosovo

Total Albanians 1,616,869

Macedonia

 Total population

Total Albanians

 Total population

509,083

25.2

93.0

Montenegro

Serbia

Total Albanians

 Total population

30,439

5.0

Total Albanians

 po

61,647

estimate by Kosovo Statistical Office (the 2011 census was boycotted by Kosovo’s Serbs; the only figure released is for the total re on, estimated at 1,739,825). es excluding all residents living outside the state for over one year.

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population in Montenegro and Presheva, where it is estimated that half of Albanians are abroad.

“Albania” at Partition The border dividing Albanians was drawn by the London Conference of Ambassadors in 1913. The Great Powers defined independent Albania’s territory following the Ottoman Empire’s defeat and occupation of its territories by the Balkan States in 1912. The priority at the conference was to pacify the demands of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia while maintaining the balance of power between Austro-Hungary and Russia. The border drawn left approximately 850,000 Albanians inside the state of Albania and up to one million outside, marooned in Greece and the future Yugoslavia (Banac 1984, 298; Carnegie Endowment 1993 [1914], 413). At the moment of partition, Albanians were constructing a shared national identity. Partition occurred after fifty years of nationalist mobilization, months after the Ottomans granted Albanians autonomous rights, and after Albanians declared independence on November 28, 1912. Defining territorial “Albania” had occurred through territorial defense against the Great Powers and Balkan States by the League of Prizren, the fi rst Pan-Albanian movement between 1878 and 1881. It was also defined through flight: Serbia’s army expelled Moslems from newly conquered territories in 1877, including sixty thousand to one hundred thousand Albanians, many of whom settled in Kosovo (Malcolm 1998, 228; Prifti et al. 1993, 118). The League of Prizren and later nationalists built on local resistance to Ottoman centralization, harmonizing this with demands for an autonomous united Albanian Vilayet in the empire and, after its collapse, independence, shaping political “Albania.” Before the 1913 partition, Albanians were Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim, including the Bektashi, Kosovo’s historic Sufi community, and influential in the national movement. After partition, the few remaining Orthodox Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia were mostly assimilated. Syncretism was and is strong due to a history of collective conversion to Islam, often leaving families committed to two faiths (Duijzings 2000, 2). Albanians were orga nized in local kinship networks, or fis (extended family or tribal grouping), around a subsistence agricultural economy linked to traditional territories, placing them in Gellner’s (1983) “agrarian” category. As will be seen throughout the chapter, the sense of “Albania” is inextricably tied to family,

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village, and land. Local affiliations existed within “Gheg” and “Tosk” identities deriving from dialect and geography, with an approximate dividing line being the River Shkumbin. These identities’ political salience is often overemphasized; they were and still are subdivided by more significant economic, social, and geographical cleavages. Distinct religious and social identities were united by a shared culture and unique language. With few exceptions the Ottomans restricted Albanian language schools and publications, and the struggle to teach and print this language became central to the national movement. Sami Frashëri (1899, chapter 5), a leading nationalist, counseled, “There can be no Albania without Albanians; there can be no Albanians without the Albanian language; and there can be no Albanian language without a writing system for it and schools in which to teach it. Therefore the language is the first thing.” Nationalists used language to sever links with the Ottomans, establishing in 1908 a Latin, not Arabic, thirty-six-letter alphabet. A standard language based on the Tosk dialect was adopted after World War II. Albanians outside independent Albania speak Gheg, and while a minority advocates elevating Gheg to a separate language, the majority defends the standard language as critical to national unity.

Impact of External Partition on Pan-Albanianism Partition linked resistance to the sense of nation. On June 6, 2007, Jusuf, a student who grew up in Morina, Kosovo, said in an interview, “Often my father or grandfather would tell me, there we have our [in Albania], and I listened and looked with so much curiosity. I was told we fought not to allow the border; that my father had two uncles who were killed in the war at Shkoder in 1912, resisting the Ambassadors’ Conference. I was told about their lives and how they never returned. We never found their graves.” The border shaped goals, confronting Pan-Albanianism with two objectives: consolidating independent Albania; and uniting nation and state. Between 1918 and 1925 these goals were pursued by the National Committee for the Defense of Kosovo, which mobilized inside Albania for independence and with peasant guerrilla bands, Kaçaks, fought an armed uprising across Albanian areas in Yugoslavia for self-determination. Although gradually eliminated by Serbia’s army, the movement was destroyed through internal

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competition for power in Albania following the 1921 reaffirmation of Albania’s borders and independence. Ahmet Zogu, leader of Mat in Albania, closed the Kaçak neutral border zone in return for Serbia’s support for his power bid, eradicating rivals among the National Committee. Zogu titled himself “King of Albanians,” but his rule marks Albania’s first formal abandonment of unification. The latter became rooted in illegal movements in states that were, for most of this period, Albania’s adversaries. Partition is tied to national and familial catastrophe. According to a 1913 investigation by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the goal of the invading Serb army in 1912 was “the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians” (Carnegie Endowment 1993 [1914], 151). Similar policies were implemented in 1918, and Kaçak resistance to the returning Serb army was repressed through martial law, arbitrary violence, and harsh collective punishment. A small number of Albanian landowners participated politically until their party, Xhemjeti, was suspended in 1925. Internal administrative borders were drawn to disorga nize Albanians. Serb and Montenegrin officials dominated local administration, and the language of governance, schooling, and place names became Serbian. In a state-led colonization program between 1918 and 1940, at least 60,000 Serb and Montenegrin farmers and administrators were settled on expropriated farmlands and sensitive border areas in Kosovo (Obradović 2005 [1981], 264). Albanians were encouraged to identify themselves as “Turks,” and in 1938 the kingdom signed an agreement for a population transfer with Turkey, which was suspended due to the war (Prift i et al. 1993, 188– 90). Most importantly Albanians were excluded from public education, with the exception of religious schools, so illiteracy predominated. The few who went to Albania or King Alexander Medresa in Skopje produced Kosovo’s World War II revolutionaries. The dominant strategy was emigration, estimated at 90,000 to 150,000 between 1918 and 1940 (Malcolm 1998, 286). In Chameria similar state policies of assimilation and colonization forced approximately half of the Albanian Muslim Cham population to flee; many were included as “Turks” in the 1923 Lausanne population exchange (Repishti 2002, 30; Vickers 2002, 4–5). The 1930s, “the time of the King,” is one of the  few periods when orga nized resistance was silenced; nevertheless it reinforced alienation from Yugoslavia, shaping Albanians’ response to occupation in 1941.

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The occupation of Yugoslavia (1941) and the state of Albania (1939) led to a temporary border change. In 1941 the Axis Powers united Albania with some Albanians in Montenegro and Kosovo, as part of the Italian Kingdom, in what became known as “Greater Albania.” It excluded Albanians under Bulgarian occupation in northeastern Macedonia, eastern Kosovo, and the Presheva Valley. Part of northern Kosovo was within occupied Serbia. For Albanians in Yugoslavia, occupation by Germans and Italians was, in practice, liberation: schools in Albanian were opened; they could participate in local and central governance and use their language; and their teachers came from Albania. The Axis Powers thus used the national question to quell resistance and encourage cooperation. They tolerated the expulsion between 1941 and 1944 of at least forty-thousand Serbs and Montenegrins, roughly two-thirds of the settlers brought to Kosovo before 1940 (Fischer 1999, 238; Malcolm 1998, 305). This helped the Axis Powers fight the Yugoslav Communist Party (YCP), as many settlers were Communists, undermining interethnic cooperation. Albanians were reluctant to join the YCP because it was dominated by Serbs and Montenegrins. Nationalist and Communist recruitment to the Anti-Fascist Liberation Front increased massively only after the December 1943 Bujan meeting guaranteed Albanians in Yugoslavia the right to self-determination (Institute of History 1998, 127). That same autumn some nationalists in Kosovo formed the Second League of Prizren, cooperating with the Germans to consolidate and extend occupied Albania’s borders. In contrast, the state of Albania lost sovereignty and independence. Resistance started earlier here; however, the national question divided nationalists and communists. For the Albanian Communist Party (ACP), which did not recognize the Axis-sponsored Albania, liberation of the 1913 state was the primary goal. They committed, as did Yugoslavia’s communists, to self-determination after the war. In 1943 this brought them into conflict with nationalist and monarchist groups that sought to retain Albania’s wartime borders by collaborating with the Germans. The struggle was instrumental in shaping Pan-Albanianism during the war. In 1945 Albanians outside Albania were forcibly incorporated into a new federal and socialist Yugoslavia. After six months of military rule and with over fifty thousand troops still present, Kosovo was annexed to federal Serbia by a resolution approved by an appointed YCP assembly in Kosovo (Malcolm 1998, 315). This occurred after widespread atrocities perpetrated by Yugoslav partisans against Albanian “reactionary” elements between 1944 and 1945,

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triggering armed revolt in the west of Kosovo. Longer-term resistance was organized by the democratic and westward-oriented Albanian National Democratic Movement. Uniting communists and nationalists, the movement operated illegally throughout Albanian areas in Yugoslavia until destroyed by the end of the 1940s. Abrogating Bujan’s commitment to self-determination is still spoken of as betrayal. Arif from Vuthaj, Plavë, said on June 2, 2007, “The Serbs and Montenegrins betrayed us. They said come and fight together against fascism, but then they divided us, they divided us into three or four states, and they divided us here in Vuthaj. They divided our family, our land, everything.” The sense of betrayal is directed at Albania and its communist regime, led by Enver Hoxha (1944–85), which did not risk its 1945–48 alliance with the Yugoslavs to insist on self-determination. Hoxha’s critics suggest that he willingly abandoned unification out of his own self-interest, his commitment to socialism, and his subservience to Yugoslavia, even though the consequence was brutal internal repression (Kola 2003, 61, 389; Malcolm 1998, 302; Sulstarova 2003, 83). Despite the alliance, however, Albania remained extremely vulnerable during the postwar period: surrounded by hostile states, sovereign security remained, as ever, the primary concern. In 1946 Hoxha could do little when Tito said he could not honor Albanian self-determination because of Serbia’s opposition (Minxhozi 2002, 25). During a brief window of Soviet support in 1948, Hoxha’s regime attempted to incite armed insurgency among Albanians in Yugoslavia and denounced repression through newspaper polemics and radio broadcasts. Decades later, exploiting the limited Yugoslav reforms of the 1970s, Albania cultivated a shared identity through books, teachers, professors, cultural ensembles, and mass media. In addition clandestine support and advice were given to illegal movements. Hoxha was therefore admired by Albanians in Yugoslavia as a symbol of Albanian nationalism, especially in 1981 when he supported demands for republic status and condemned repression. At no point, however, was Albania’s sovereignty risked for the cause of unification. Occupation was fatal for Albanians in Chameria. Here it was also a form of liberation, leading some to cooperate with the regime and reclaim expropriated lands by expelling Greek settlers, while others joined anti-Fascist resistance and nationalist groups. Between 1944 and 1945 Greek nationalists attacked Cham communities, labeling them as collaborators, which led to the flight of most of the remaining population, estimated at thirty-five thousand (Meta 2007, 81–82). A law that remains in force expropriated their

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property, and the few remaining Orthodox Muslim Chams were slowly assimilated. Since 1945 the Cham question has become a refugee question, focused on restoration of property rights. The third repetition of partition occurred in 1948 when Albania and Yugoslavia severed diplomatic relations, after Tito broke with Stalin. Albania’s border was sealed for over forty years. The 1948 border closure transformed the 1913 grievance into a collective trauma. In Tuz, near the MontenegroAlbania border, on June 29, 2009, Nikollë explained that his grandmother had gone to visit relatives on the other side, leaving her only daughter, his mother, behind. They did not see each other again until the border reopened. The border separated communities that traditionally intermarried, isolating them from a generation of births, engagements, marriages, and deaths. In Bllatë, Albania, on July 6, 2007, Ismail explained, “All our marriages and engagements were with families in Dibër e Madhe [in Macedonia].” Indeed after we drank coffee, he had to leave to go to a wedding between his village and Dibër. Crossing the pass between Kosovo and Albania, on June 6, 2007, Jusuf said, “One of my father’s uncles was killed on the border because he went to collect his fiancée.” The years of separation magnified links between family and nation, contributing to a mystical longing for Albania. When I asked Gani, from Krushev, Plavë, on June 2, 2007, whether he had lost family, he responded, “Albania is my mother.” On the same day Arif from Vuthaj explained, “For 50 years we lived without any contact except by letter with our people. We couldn’t meet at the border, because there were soldiers, so many types of soldiers.” A few kilometers away in Vermosh, Albania, Vesel described how his uncle and cousin fled to Plavë from the regime. He did not see them again until 1990. In Dibër, on the Albania-Macedonia border, on July 6, 2007, Rasim said, “My brother and sister remained on the other side of the border, in the motherland. . . . My wife is from the motherland, from Bllatë and she didn’t see her family for over 40 years. We could write letters but they had to be very simple so no one was suspicious. It was terrible in the Ranković time. We couldn’t even look at the border.” The 1948 border closure preceded another period of severe repression for Albanians in Yugoslavia, known as “the Ranković time” after the Yugoslav minister of the interior, who persecuted Stalinist elements and Albanians in particular until his removal in 1966 (Ramet 2006, 294–95). A regime of fear was maintained by an extensive secret police system. Albanian schools

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were temporarily closed in Montenegro and Macedonia, displaying Albanian national symbols or celebrating November 28 was prohibited, and the newly opened Albanological Institute in Prishtina was closed for “hostile” activity. Tito initially banned the return of expelled Serb and Montenegrin colonists to Kosovo; however, a commission later reviewed 11,168 cases and allowed all but 595 to return (Malcolm 1998, 318). State propaganda encouraged Albanians to define themselves as “Turk,” and an agreement was signed with Turkey for a population transfer in 1958. Brutal weapons searches during winter 1955–56 were justified as a control for armed groups, although between 1948 and 1958 only a few small saboteur units existed, fostered by the competing security ser vices of Albania or Yugoslavia. The dominant response was flight: In four years between 1953 and 1957, about 195,000 Albanians left (Biberaj 1982, 29). In total in the period from 1945 to 1966, approximately 246,000 are estimated to have gone, of which half were from Macedonia and at least 100,000 were from Kosovo (Malcolm 1998, 323; Shtylla 1993, 235–39). Two reforms had long-term consequences, distinguishing this from the  interwar period. First, primary schools were opened in the Albanian language, including secondary schools in Kosovo, attracting Albanians from other parts of Yugoslavia and reducing illiteracy. Change was initially slow: 74 percent of Albanians in Yugoslavia were illiterate in 1948; and 63 percent were in 1953. But in 1971, just after the first major Albanian demonstrations, illiteracy for this group had dropped to 35 percent, and by the second major demonstrations in 1981, just 21 percent fell into this category (Islami 2005, 178–81). Second, a small number of Albanian communists were appointed to senior positions within Yugoslav party structures. This opened an institutional path for Albanians within the communist system; however, the regime’s nature restricted their ability to represent Albanian demands fully and undermined their legitimacy. At the end of the 1950s, two new movements for self-determination were founded by men educated in the Italians’ war-time schools. Although not ideological communists, these activists saw Hoxha as the symbol of nationalism, and their methods were strongly shaped by the partisan war. Within a year or so arrests decimated these movements. They were followed in the 1960s by an increasingly literate and urban generation organized around the Revolutionary Movement for Unity of Albanians, led by Adem Demaçi, who would spend twenty-eight years in Serbian prisons for advocating unification.

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In 1964, in a dramatic symbolic action that led to mass arrests, activists raised the prohibited Albanian flag in towns across Kosovo. These movements shared the goal of uniting Albanians in Yugoslavia, with an independent Albania. Their work laid the foundations for 1968 mass protests.

Impact of Internal Partition on Pan-Albanianism When Albanians were incorporated into Yugoslavia in 1945, they were divided between three of the six republics: Montenegro, Serbia, and Macedonia. The boundary dividing Kosovo and Presheva, so important after 1999, was drawn almost unnoticed after the war. Republics were constitutionally guaranteed rights to secession, but internal borders were hardly physically discernible. Pan-Albanian mobilization gradually adapted to this political structure. In 1968 popular demonstrations for self-determination included the call for an “Albanian Republic” in Yugoslavia as a first step to unification. The fall of Ranković in 1966 and demonstrations in 1968 heralded a decade of reform relevant for arguments that EU integration can satisfy unification. Many interviewees said they were presently struggling for rights that they had enjoyed in the 1970s. Between 1969 and 1974 reforms allowed Albanians to fly their national flag; they were actively recruited into local administration and were allowed to read previously prohibited Albanian books, perform plays, and sing songs about their history. Kosovo was granted representation in the Yugoslav presidency and rights to a legislative assembly, a supreme court, and a national bank. Most important was the opening of the University of Prishtina in the Albanian language, transforming Prishtina into an intellectual center of gravity for Albanians throughout Yugoslavia. Taking advantage of the reforms, forty-five thousand Albanians came to work and study in Kosovo in the 1970s (Islami 2005, 312). Disaffected by the changed political and economic circumstances, Serbs and Montenegrins joined a wave of urban migration to Belgrade: in the 1970s about fift y-two thousand are estimated to have left, and they were joined by another twenty thousand in the 1980s (Islami 2005, 315; Malcolm 1998, 331). Reforms aimed to redress inequitable representation of Albanians in party structures, state enterprises, and administration. In 1961 and 1971, Serbs and Montenegrins constituted 27.5 and 21 percent of Kosovo’s population respectively but held over 50 percent of official and professional jobs (Lampe 2000, 303). Albanian representation improved, reinforcing the in-

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stitutional path opened up in 1945, but Kosovo remained economically backward in comparison to other parts of Yugoslavia. Federal funds were invested in the 1960s in raw materials extraction or electricity production, all sold at low fi xed prices to other more quickly developing republics. This produced few jobs in Kosovo, which had the highest unemployment in Yugoslavia (Islami 2005, 210; Lampe 2000, 303). Limited reform increased Albanian aspirations. In practice Kosovo’s new competences added up to those of an independent republic, but by law it was an autonomous province within Serbia and was denied the constitutional right to secession. In the mid-1970s illegal organizations, mostly subcribing to Marxism, a choice largely driven by allegiance with Albania, mobilized in support of unification. Their work and Albania’s engagement politicized the new student population, which in 1981 engaged in mass protests for a “Kosovo Republic” as a first step toward unification. Their demand was denounced by Yugoslav officials, including Albanians in Kosovo’s institutions, as threatening the stability of Yugoslavia and violating the multiethnic ideology of “brotherhood and unity.” In contrast with 1968, these demonstrations triggered a decade of indiscriminate repression of Albanians across Yugoslavia: Between 1981 and 1988 nearly half of the Albanian population in Kosovo passed through police hands (Islami 2005, 321). In Macedonia and Montenegro, Albanian teachers were expelled from schools, and in Macedonia, Albanian classes were closed. The decade ended with Serbia’s March 1989 revocation of Kosovo’s autonomous status, initiating Yugoslavia’s breakdown and restoring Kosovo to direct rule by Serbia. As Yugoslavia imploded, internal borders transformed: Albanians were not only divided by international frontiers but also subjected to varying pluralist yet discriminatory systems. This new separation reinforced the shared sense of a divided nation, sharpened by the bitter joy of reunion as Albania’s border reopened officially and despair as Albanians realized that their national state was wracked by poverty. Macedonia’s borders became those of a state between 1991 and 1992. Demir, a schoolteacher living in Kryenik, on the Kosovo side of the border, explained on June 8, 2007, “[Y]ou had to pay a fee to cross the border. You could pay only in the post office and if you missed the day, then you would lose the deposit.” Musli, a retired teacher from Globoqica, Kosovo, said, “The students from Jazhinca came here for 5–8th grade lessons. When the border was imposed they were stopped from coming to school.” Pointing at Jazhinca, two kilometers away in Macedonia, a shopkeeper named Musafer

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explained, “My sister married there and I had to walk through the mountains illegally to visit her, or now go with a passport just to see her.” In his classroom in Kosovo, Demir explained, “I took my mother to hospital in Skopje in 1993, illegally by mule. She died there on 21st December, and I had to bring her body back home. They kept me waiting for six hours on the Serbian side, so I waited in the neutral zone until it was dark. Then I got the attention of a man selling cigarettes, and when the guard changed, I put my mother on my back and walked across. She was very heavy because she was quite fat. I stopped at the nearest house, and they helped me with a tractor and I buried her secretly just with the lights from the tractor. The problem was on the Serbian side. They said I had to go to Belgrade to get permission to enter Serbia with a dead body.” In contrast, as border controls relaxed in 1990 families were being reunited in Albania. Ismail, from Bllatë, Albania, on the border with Macedonia, recounted with excitement how a crowd of young people tore down the border fence. In Montenegro, Arif from Vuthaj, Plavë, explained, “It’s a difficult thing for a brother to say to his brother, who are you, or to say to your own father, I don’t know you, or to your nephew, who are you? This is something only the Albanian nation has experienced.” In the nearby village of Krushev, Plavë, Gani remembered he had to ask, “Who are you, where is he or is she . . . are they alive?” Zeqir, from Hot, said wistfully when he visited Albania that “everything seemed beautiful.” For political prisoners who had struggled for unification, images of people clinging to ships to leave Albania by the thousands were a profound shock. Kosovo’s border with Albania became militarized in the 1990s. Jusuf recalled that “exactly then, the Serbian government reinforced the border with additional soldiers and paramilitaries. We moved to Gjakova because of continual pressure on our home.” On the other side of the border, Ali, from Tropoja, Albania, explained, “In 1989 a man died in a village near here, just one kilometer from this café. His sister was in Morina, [Kosovo] and we didn’t know how to tell her her brother had died, and take her to the funeral. One of us decided to go to the checkpoint to explain. He was arrested by the Serbs at the checkpoint and held in prison for three months.” It was as fighters or refugees that many families were reunited. An elderly man, Mehmet, from Morina, Kosovo, told me on June 6, 2007, that he lost his betrothed when the border closed in 1948. They met again by chance when he was expelled over the border by Serbian forces in 1999. Although they had both since married, his face lit up as he described how he trembled when they met.

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The border between Presheva and Kosovo was the site of mass refugee flows during the wars and remains militarized. After 1999 it became in practice an international border managed by NATO’s peace-keeping deployment Kosovo Force (KFOR) and the Serbian gendarmerie. Selver, Karaçeva’s border representative, said on May 26, 2007, that the border dividing his village from Breznicë in Serbia had been adjusted closer to Karaçeva mistakenly in 1999. He said that people were disturbed, as now “[t]he gendarmerie travel along this road and pass through our village almost every day.” On the same day Xhevat, head of the village of Breznicë, said villagers were reluctant to let their children play in the fields below the gendarmerie posts on the hill. He argued, “They hold us in a chain under constant pressure because they want to make life difficult for us so we will leave.” Although the 1990s was the decade of transition and democratization, Albanians in the former Yugoslavia remained subject to institutional discrimination and indiscriminate violence. They were rarely employed in state or local institutions; those in Kosovo’s institutions were expelled by law in 1991. Albanians were virtually unrepresented in justice systems, police forces, and the army, except as conscripts. They were unable to display their flag publicly; they could not use their language in administration or to register their children’s births. Albanian language education once again became repressed. Diplomas from universities in Tirana were not recognized; the Albanian University of Tetova was declared illegal by Macedonia; Serbia expelled Albanians from Prishtina University. In Kosovo thousands of school pupils were obliged to study in a parallel education system; in Macedonia, Albanian classes had been effectively closed after 1981. Kosovo was stripped of its limited industrial resources as the Milosevic regime transferred ownership to Serbian corporations. Thousands fled, especially young men facing conscription. Pan-Albanianism adapted, and each minority addressed different sources of power to resolve its problems. In 1990 Kosovo’s expelled assembly deputies declared it an independent Yugoslav Republic; in the October 1991 illegal referendum 99.87 percent voted for independence; in Presheva in 1992 the overwhelming majority voted to unite with Kosovo. Montenegro’s Albanians focused on escaping from Serbia: they formed a strategic alliance with Djukanovic, the Montenegrin prime minister, when he moved against Milosevic in 1997 and were later the deciding factor in Montenegro’s 2006 independence referendum. Albanians in Macedonia boycotted the 1991 independence referendum because it failed to recognize them as a constituent nation. After independence in 1992 they voted for autonomy in an illegal referendum.

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These separate initiatives still took place in a Pan-Albanian framework, coordinated by the new Albanian political parties established in all areas. In 1991 they formed a committee united around a common platform that should Yugoslavia survive without internal border changes, Kosovo would demand republic status and the status of “nation” for Albanians; should internal borders alter, then Kosovo would demand a republic for all Albanians in Yugoslavia; and if Yugoslavia disintegrated, then Albanians would seek national unification. Independent Albania supported Kosovo’s demand to be a republic and on October 21, 1991, recognized its independence. It provided hesitant leadership on unification. Before the first democratic elections in 1991, The Independent newspaper (London) reported (August 9, 1991) that Albania’s Democratic Party argued, “If the process of the disintegration of Yugoslavia proves to be completely irreversible, the creation of a new Albanian state in its own borders will be the only alternative for stability and peace in the region.” However, open support for unification faltered as it became clear that Kosovo’s independence, unlike Slovenia’s or Croatia’s, would not be recognized. In December 1992 the Edinburgh Eu ropean Council supported only the autonomy of Kosovo in Serbia; at the same time the state news service Albanian Telegraphic Agency (ATA) said that Prime Minister Berisha (while at a visit to NATO in Brussels) had promised that his country did not seek to change its borders. Initially Albanians in the former Yugoslavia engaged in participation and passive resistance, utilizing the introduction of pluralism. In Kosovo mass demonstrations against the removal of autonomy led to the recruitment of over half a million people into the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). LDK advocated passive resistance to the Milosevic regime, channeling the tremendous solidarity of this period into the establishment of a parallel “republic.” Initially it united former institutional participants and illegal movement activists; however, as LDK’s strategy failed to attract international support or end arbitrary violence, popular support shifted to armed groups, merging in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The decade ended with separate wars in Kosovo (1998–99), Presheva (2000–2001), and after a similar failure of participation, in Macedonia (2001). Montenegro remained the exception, where the tiny minority enjoyed leverage as a coalition partner. When armed resistance began in Kosovo, Albania had already collapsed under the pressure of an economic crash and mass protests in 1997. Albania’s security became paramount: the government pursued dialogue with Milos-

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evic and supported, in February 1999, the “temporary solution” of the internationally mediated Rambouillet Accords, in which Kosovo remained part of Serbia. However, Albania reserved the right to unification. The 1998 constitution referred to the “centuries-old aspiration of the Albanian people for national identity and unity.” Similarly the Academy of Sciences of Albania proposal regarding the “national question” began by reaffirming the right to unification (1998, 51). Most importantly, Albania acted as a secure zone during the war, allowing KLA soldiers and arms to cross the border and sheltering hundreds of thousands of refugees. By mid-1999 Albania came under increasing external pressure to renounce unification entirely. Standard measures of economic and social integration, such as plans to build a road between Durrës and Prishtina, exchanges between Prishtina and Tirana universities, and publication of standard elementary school textbooks, were reported by international media (Associated Press, June 7, 2000) as steps toward “Greater Albania” or “Greater Kosovo.” Pressure to renounce unification intensified during the wars in Presheva and Macedonia, and then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright warned Albania against encouraging plans for a Greater Albania (Deutsche Presse, February 19, 2000). In 2001 Albania’s Foreign Ministry responded by publishing Greater Albania—between Fiction and Reality, which stated that Greater Albania was “counterproductive and contrary to the objectives of Albania to be integrated into a United Europe” (cited in Austin 2004, 250). The ATA reported (April 4, 2001) that Prime Minister Ilir Meta argued, “The future of Albanians in the region is not a ‘Greater Albania’ but their integration into places where they live and integration of these places into the European Union.” It appeared that Albania was abandoning unification to secure EU and NATO membership and Kosovo’s independence. Regional experts writing after 2001 suggested that Pan-Albanianism had fragmented. They argued that Albanians had developed separate identities, that Albania was more interested in EU and NATO integration, and that unification was perceived as outdated, equated with Milosevic’s Greater Serbia. The International Crisis Group (ICG) argued, “The KLA and NLA started to gain popular support in Kosovo and Macedonia respectively at precisely the time when they moved away from their initial pan-Albanian nationalist goals and concentrated on more rights for their own people” (2004b). Writing about the wars in Presheva and Macedonia, the analyst Tim Judah (2001) doubted that there was any current popular desire for a

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“Greater Albania.” Two historical works analyzing Albania’s official position went further, concluding that there had never been nor was there any official or popu lar support for a “Greater Albania” (Austin 2004, 235–36; Kola 2003, 394). The EU’s Institute for Security Studies (Batt 2008, 6) argued that the contemporary Albanian question was about “economic underdevelopment, poverty, corruption and crime,” rather than nationalism. These conclusions emphasized politicians’ public indifference but deemphasized the activity of illegal movements and popu lar support for unification, presuming that the contemporary adaptation of goals equaled abandonment. Viewed in the historical context of Pan-Albanian development, reticence about unification was a tactical response to internationalizing the question. LDK advocated independence but qualified this as a compromise on unification; although KLA representatives publicly talked of independence, each KLA soldier swore an oath to “liberation of all occupied Albanian territory and their unification.” The Liberation Army of Presheva, Medvegja, and Bujanoc (UCPMB) and the National Liberation Army (NLA) in Macedonia fought for rights, but unification was the unspoken alternative. Moreover, all were rooted in Pan-Albanian support. The LDK had branches in Presheva, Macedonia and Montenegro, and the Diaspora. The KLA was founded by and recruited members, weapons, and funding from Albanians in the Balkans and the Diaspora; and KLA soldiers fought in Macedonia and Presheva. During this period there was solidarity expressed in sponsorship of Albanian families in Kosovo, voluntary taxes for the parallel state or weapons, and the sheltering of war refugees. Serious fragmentation did, however, weaken Pan-Albanianism after the wars of 1998 to 2001 as Albanian society reeled from the physical costs of war and sought implementation of differing minority rights reforms through participation, hampered by factionalism and corruption. Even the issue of Kosovo initially limited mobilization, as the freezing of its status in the UN Security Council’s hands led to fears that Pan-Albanianism might damage its uncertain prospects. Between 1999 and 2008 the policy of unification became taboo, supported only by “extreme Albanian nationalists.” The term “Greater Albania” was used pejoratively, associated with fascism, implying that Albania’s natural borders were those of partition: extension implied “expansion.” Unification was publicly espoused only by shadowy armed groups, such as the Albanian National Army (ANA), categorized as terrorist by the UN in 2003; small peripheral parties in Kosovo; or in speeches at commemo-

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ration ceremonies for war heroes. The term disappeared, for a while, from mainstream politics.

Impact of EU Accession on Pan-Albanianism There was great confidence in the EU’s transformative power after the November 2000 launch of the regional integration initiative, the “Stabilization and Accession Process” (SAP), and, at the June 2003 Thessaloniki EU–Western Balkans Summit, the EU’s declaration of “unequivocal support to the European perspective of the Western Balkan countries.” The International Crisis Group (ICG) hoped that Pan-Albanianism could be “tamed” by implementing minority rights agreements and conditioning Kosovo’s independence by excluding unification (2004b, 6). The Institute for Security Studies (Batt 2008, 6–7) assumed that EU integration was well placed to deal with institutional and economic reforms, which were Albanians’ primary concern. However, progress toward accession was slow. Macedonia’s candidacy (2005) was blocked due to the dispute over its name (vis-à-vis the Greek claim that “Macedonia” is an exclusively Greek toponym); Montenegro was granted candidate status (2010); Serbia and Albania are still potential candidates. Kosovo remains suspended in the SAP, unable to progress toward integration into the European Union as it is not recognized by five EU members. Albanians and their host states were subject to more direct intervention through civilian and military missions and internationally mediated peace agreements, but it was the promise of EU membership that was predicted to wield change. The Economist concluded on February 23, 2008, “It is the hope of one day becoming EU members that has gradually lured the countries of the Western Balkans to adopt democracy, ditch violence and start the long haul of building free-market economies.” The war in Macedonia concluded in August 2001 with the internationally mediated Ohrid Framework Agreement guaranteeing Albanians decentralization and ethnically redrawn municipal boundaries, language rights, education, proportional representation in institutions, a multiethnic state identity, and amnesty. Serbia, on the other hand, did not sign the internationally mediated Konculj Demilitarization Statement ending the war in Presheva, which guaranteed demobilization and disarmament in exchange for amnesty and ending discrimination. Konculj concluded by calling on

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Serbia to keep commitments made in its unilateral Program for the Solution of the Crisis in Southern Serbia, or Covic Plan. The latter promised a multiethnic and multiconfessional society, economic development, security, freedom of movement, and the right to return, conditional on disarmament and disbanding of “terrorists.” There was no mechanism obliging Serbia to implement the Covic Plan, whereas Ohrid was tied to Macedonia’s EU candidacy and supported by NATO, and later EU, military and policing missions. In Montenegro minority rights were designed through legislation required for EU accession. The absence of armed conflict created a sense that discrimination was not an issue. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) did not produce “Early Warning Report” surveys, as it did in Kosovo and Macedonia; US State Department Human Rights Reports from 1999 to 2006 commented only that Albanians were participating; the EU’s Progress Report on Montenegro observed that “inter-ethnic relations are smooth” (2008, 17). Nik Gjeloshaj from the Albanian Alternative Party echoed a complaint common among interviewees when he said on October 22, 2007, in Tuz, “Having political parties means people think we have all our rights.” Indeed just a year before the EU report’s optimism, Montenegro’s Center for Democracy and Human Rights (CEDEM) reported increasing ethnic distance between Montenegrins or Serbs toward Albanians; and in December 2008 Montenegro’s ombudsperson issued a critical report on minority representation in state institutions. As of 2012, Albanians are employed and represented in local institutions in all three states, although only Macedonia has decentralized significant powers to municipalities. Municipal borders were drawn along ethnic lines, giving Albanians greater participatory powers in selecting police chiefs and language rights. Although significantly improved, Albanian employment in state institutions is still not equitable in Macedonia and varies substantially by sector (UNDP 2010, 58). The municipalities of Presheva Valley report that Albanians constitute just 24 percent of state employees in the area; Montenegro’s ombudsperson reported in 2008 that no Albanians were employed in the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Information or that of Education and Science and that they constituted up to 2 percent of employees in other ministries, excepting minority rights. Albanians are still underrepresented in justice systems and defense institutions. While almost equitably represented in Macedonia’s multiethnic police force, in Montenegro the MP Mehmet Bardhi stated on June 29, 2009, that Albanian presence is low. The Presheva municipalities report that just one-third of their multiethnic

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police are Albanian. Policing competences remain with Serbia’s gendarmerie. Albanians state that both Serbia and Macedonia have violated amnesty agreements regarding fighters in the 2000–2001 wars. All states prohibit Albanians from displaying their flag because it is identical to Albania’s. According to interviewees in Montenegro, in practice they could display their flag alongside the state flag on public holidays, although not Albanian Flag Day. In Macedonia in 2007 the constitutional court annulled measures allowing the use of the flag beyond municipalities. In Presheva the Albanian flag can be displayed only at private events. Albanian is a municipal language in parts of Montenegro, Serbia (the Presheva Valley), and Macedonia (where Albanians make up over 20 percent of the population). Implementation is not satisfactory: in Ulqin, which is 72 percent Albanian, local MP Genc Nimanbegu commented on June 29, 2009, that most assembly business is still conducted in Montenegrin. In Bujanoc signage is in Serbian only, as is all data inside identity cards issued in Presheva in 2007 (ICG 2007b, 14). Macedonia and Montenegro have recognized Albanian as an official state language. However, MP Amir Hollaj stated on June 28, 2009, that it is logistically difficult to use Albanian in the Montenegrin parliament; in Macedonia controversy over the law has disrupted implementation. Language is contentious in Macedonia because it is associated with Albanians’ claim to be recognized as a constituent people, interpreted by most Macedonians as a threat to territorial integrity. Albanians have access to instruction in their own language, although there are still problems with poorly translated books. Albanians in Presheva and Montenegro attend universities in Kosovo, Albania, or Macedonia. Macedonia has legalized the Albanian University of Tetova, but Serbia refuses to recognize diplomas from the University of Prishtina, where the majority of Preshevar students study. In Montenegro and Presheva teacher training faculties have been established, although not as requested in Ulqin and Presheva. Albanian quality of life has dramatically improved since 2001. However, despite slow but promising legislation, discrimination continues due to inadequate implementation, causing frustration. Hence Sadri, from Martinaj, Plavë, said on June 2, 2007, “I don’t want to be begging all of my life to be treated as an equal and the same goes for my children.” Macedonia has achieved the greatest progress since 2001, no doubt partly due to EU leverage; however, this has been achieved despite bitter official and public opposition, in addition to the backdrop of a state-led Macedonian identity campaign, focusing on the capital of Skopje. The EU’s transformative power appears to

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have been overestimated in securing deeper change, in circumstances where Albanian demands are viewed in a security context and where Albanians view failure to reform as motivated by state hostility. For instance, Zeqir, from Hot, said, “[A]lthough Montenegro pretends to be a European state, nothing has improved as it touches Albanians in our municipality or my village.” Recognition of Kosovo’s independence by Macedonia and Montenegro is perceived by Albanians as reluctantly conceded. Limited reforms have not weakened the resilience of Albanian alienation. In June 1999 the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) was mandated to provide “substantial autonomy” for Kosovo until settlement of its “future status” (UNSCR 1244). Negotiations over Kosovo’s future status would not begin until after riots against UNMIK and the Serb minority led to the death of eight Serbs and eleven Albanians, as well as the forced displacement of approximately forty-five hundred people, mostly Serbs and Roma (ICG 2004b, 155, i). In his 2004 report, the UN envoy Ambassador Eide recommended that the EU take on the leading role in Kosovo. In 2007 the Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement, also known as the “Ahtisaari Plan” (after the UN special envoy and former prime minister of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari), provided a form of independence supervised by the EU and international actors and conditional upon an extensive package of minority rights for Kosovo’s 5 percent Serb minority. This was accepted by Kosovo’s institutions as a compromise for recognition, rejected by Serbia, and not authorized by the UN Security Council due to Russian opposition. Following another round of fruitless talks, Kosovo’s provisional institutions declared independence on February 17, 2008, in accordance with Ahtisaari’s Plan, which was inserted into and above the constitution. This process inspired mobilization by a new nonviolent Movement for Self-Determination (Lëvizja Vetëvendosje!), which refused to recognize UNMIK’s authority and demanded a referendum on self-determination, not negotiations. This movement opposed Ahtisaari’s Plan in popular demonstrations arguing that it would divide Kosovo ethnically and render the state dysfunctional. The European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX), equipped with executive powers, led the supervision. There are four other international missions with executive and supervisory powers: KFOR; an International Civilian Office (ICO), supervising Ahtisaari’s Plan (closed in 2012); an EU Special Representative (EUSR); and a UN office. Only the ICO recognizes Kosovo’s independence; the rest, including EULEX, operate according to UNSCR 1244 and are “status-neutral.” This ambiguity, deriving from Secu-

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rity Council and EU division, has made international actors hesitate to restrain Serbia from using its illegal parallel structures to control, and destabilize, parts of northern and eastern Kosovo. Instead negotiations have continued in various forms. The UN secretary-general offered concessions in November 2008, proposing a temporary segregation of Kosovo’s police, justice system, and customs on ethnic lines, known locally as the Six Points—a deal opposed in two mass demonstrations. In 2011 Serbia and Kosovo entered an EU-facilitated “technical dialogue” addressing issues deriving from Serbia’s nonrecognition of Kosovo and framed in EU accession. The EU views Serbia’s accession as vital to regional stability but is divided over Kosovo’s status and therefore does not require Serbia to recognize Kosovo. Instead Kosovo has been asked to make concessions. So far EU accession has become a framework facilitating Serbia’s potential candidacy but promising no equal prospects for Kosovo. This continuing process in circumstances of persistent insecurity has ensured that Kosovo’s future remains the focus of Pan-Albanianism. Ahtisaari conditioned independence on extensive rights for the Serb minority, including autonomous powers relating to policing, courts, health, and education; redrawing municipal boundaries according to ethnicity through decentralization; and Serbia’s right to finance these municipalities. This was far greater than rights offered to Albanians in the Ohrid Agreement. Asymmetry increased Albanian awareness of the discrepancies in rights they had been guaranteed and led to demands for reciprocity. In Montenegro, Albanians demanded decentralization and full municipality status for Tuz, an urban municipality; in Macedonia, a new Ohrid Agreement and federalization were demanded; in Presheva, Albanians demanded unification in return for partition, or autonomy, if Serbs were granted the same. Unification was also ruled out as an option in negotiations. In 2005 the  UN’s Contact Group for Kosovo (including the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia) established “The Guiding Principles for a Settlement of Kosovo’s Status.” The Sixth Principle stated, “There will be no changes in the current territory of Kosovo, i.e. no partition of Kosovo and no union of Kosovo with any country or part of any country.” This position was enshrined in the Ahtisaari Plan and Kosovo’s new constitution (Article 1.3), which stated, “The Republic of Kosovo shall have no territorial claims against, and shall seek no union with, any State or part of any State.” Article 10 required that constitutional amendments be approved by a two-thirds majority of Assembly deputies, including two-thirds of minority

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deputies. The exclusion of unification—permitted in international law peacefully and by agreement—returned it to the public sphere. Last, Ahtisaari’s Plan conditioned independence on adopting a multiethnic “Kosovar,” rather than Albanian identity, seen as an antidote to nationalism (ICG 2007a, 9– 10). The Ahtisaari Plan’s first article stated, “Kosovo shall be a multi-ethnic society,” while the declaration of independence defined Kosovo as “a democratic, secular and multi-ethnic republic.” New multiethnic state symbols were adopted: the state flag was given EU colors and six stars, categorizing Albanians as one of Kosovo’s six communities; a new anthem was composed, called “Europe” but with no lyrics; Albanian National Flag Day was categorized as a community memorial day, rather than an official holiday. While multiethnicity is now a common political refrain and has some adherents in Kosovo’s intellectual elite, the idea of a Kosovar identity remains controversial. Moreover erasing Albanian elements from public symbols has stimulated popular countermobilization to affirm Kosovo’s Albanian identity.

Perseverance of Unification UNDP surveys forcing respondents in Kosovo to choose either independence or unification implied decreasing support for unification, which dropped from 9 percent in September 2005 to just 3 percent in March 2007 as negotiations over independence began. Altering the question, however, produces very different results. The author conducted a survey in Kosovo regarding attitudes toward unification and EU integration. This poll of 994 randomly selected people was administered by Index Kosova, a private company affiliated with Gallup International, on June 9–10, 2007. According to this data, 73 percent of Albanians in Kosovo (of whom 51 percent strongly agreed) believe that in an “ideal world” all Albanians should live united in one state. Over 75 percent agreed that unification would be a positive solution to the Albanian question by improving security, economic, cultural, and national development. Gallup Balkans Monitor surveyed Albanians in Kosovo after its declaration of independence in 2008: support for unification dipped to 54 percent. One year later, in 2009, support for unification had risen to 77 percent. The same year a survey in Albania showed that 68 percent were in favor of unification. In Macedonia support has been significant, though relatively lower: in 2008 Gallup recorded 39 percent in favor of unification; this figure rose

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to 45 percent in 2009. Results here should be considered in the context of the Albanian claim in Macedonia, which is as an autochthonous community seeking constituent status. Hence in a June 2005 UNDP survey, 34.5 percent of ethnic Albanians said they strongly identified with another country, and yet in another question 72 percent said they loved Macedonia. From 2005 to 2006 the Ohrid reforms and Macedonia’s EU candidacy are thought to explain the increasing number of Albanians who stated they felt like citizens of Macedonia, from 52 percent to 79 percent. Yet those supporting unification also increased during this period, from 24 percent in 2003 (UNDP) to 45 percent in 2009 (Gallup). These rather puzzling results might be affected by insecurity in openly answering questions about unification (Gallup 2008, 24); Macedonia was the most difficult area for finding interview subjects. Nevertheless a proper analysis requires further investigation. Interviewees responded with sympathetic incredulity that I could believe there was any solution other than unification. “It’s natural for us to be united,” said Fatmir on the Morina pass on June 6, 2007. “It’s for our prosperity and wealth. We have the same traditions and customs and language. We are the same blood. Bread is called the same, water is called the same.” The language of the family was used consistently. On the Albania-Macedonia border Rasim shivered with fear when the subject was broached. He said, “To be one is better. Then we will be together as brothers.” Ismail, in Albania, immediately replied, “Everyone wants to be with his brothers. Albanians want to be with Albanians. No one wants to have borders between brothers.” Xhevat, on the Serbian side of Kosovo’s border, said, “Breznicë and Karaçeva are like brothers, and a [kin] who have been divided. All our friends and family are in Kosovo.” In Kosovo, Demir wagged a finger at the Macedonian border and asked, “What is the purpose of this border? Will I attack my own family on the other side? Removing the border is the only solution.” In Jazhinca, Macedonia, a former fighter said on June 8, 2007, “I think the border should be removed completely. It’s a state border, but I call it a family border because we’re the same family on either side of it. Of course we should be a united family—and I mean all Albanians together.” Far to the north, in Vermosh, Albania, Dod called the border an AlbanianAlbanian border (June 2, 2007): “We don’t want to attack another state or take something not ours, but we want the land our grandfathers and fathers fought for.” All interviewees were hopeful that EU integration might make crossing borders easier. Ismail’s wife, Shyhrete, said (July 6, 2007), “I want the border

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removed. I want to be close to my family. Now I have a passport, but it has expired and so I have to go and renew it again and it’s difficult.” Musafer from Globoqica, Kosovo, said, “Why unite? It’s very simple, just a small thing. If I want to visit my sister I need a passport. If she dies, I can’t visit her without a passport.” Crossing borders has become easier; however, in the author’s survey a total of 63 percent (of whom 39 percent strongly agreed) still thought unification necessary if Kosovo joined the EU, together with neighboring states. Interviewees were skeptical of EU integration as a replacement. The retired teacher Musli, also from Globoqica, worried, “If we enter Europe piece by piece it will be more difficult to unite in the end.” Agron from Plavë was distrustful, saying (June 2, 2007), “Europe left us here before without our agreement. Europe made this unfair division, she divided us.” Salih, from Plavë, asked, “How can I integrate with another people [in Europe], if I am not integrated first with my own people?” At the Morina pass, Fatmir asked me, “Who imposed this border? Did we, in order to obstruct ourselves, or did others, to obstruct us? It is all because of this unjust border. You can see this with your own eyes—it was put between brothers. In 2007, everyone else is talking about integration, but we are still talking about borders.” The elderly Adem from Karaçeva on the Serbian border (May 26, 2007) was concerned what would happen after the EU, saying, “We need to have a border with Serbia because whenever something changes, they’ll claim something different. We need a border, so if the EU collapses, Serbia cannot claim us again.” The perseverance of the partition grievance should not be unexpected; every major Albanian resistance movement from 1913 to 1999 sought unification. EU accession, the conditioning of Kosovo’s independence with Ahtisaari’s Plan, and persisting negotiations with Serbia reactivated PanAlbanianism, while unresolved discrimination against Albanians maintained the resilience of alienation. Contrary to predictions, the question of unification adapted to new circumstances and is no longer taboo. By 2009 it was the topic of TV debates, starting with Klan TV (January) and Top Channel (February) in Albania and KTV in Kosovo (April). In addition unusually strong Cham mobilization in Albania elected two deputies in 2009 elections. The resurgence of Pan-Albanianism in the public sphere emerged from civil society. In August 2008 approximately twenty organizations representing Albanians in five states met in Tirana as the Network of Albanian Organizations (RrOSh) under the motto “We are one.” RrOSh staged public debates in universities, initiated a “Buy Albanian” campaign, raised awareness about discrimination, and coordinated celebrations of National Flag Day in Tirana,

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Prishtina, and Skopje. Their goal was to generate solidarity and Pan-Albanian social activism by discussing shared problems and working together to resolve them—a first and necessary stage, making political unification possible. Enis Sulstarova (2008), sociology lecturer at the University of Durrës and a member of the National Club within RrOSh, argued, “National unification should not be understood only as territorial unity in one national state, but first as spiritual unity, the shared will of Albanians.” Rather than reducing the idea of unification to the impossibility of changing borders or confi ning it to sports events or political rhetoric, Sulstarova argued that it had to become part of the “everyday lives of Albanians.” Albin Kurti, leader of the Movement for Self-Determination, argued that the partition of Albanians and the denial of self-determination were largely responsible for their poverty, insecurity, and loss of territory and resources. He feared that the conditioning of Kosovo’s independence and the fostering of a Kosovar identity were intended to make partition permanent, ending the long-term strategy of consolidation as the first step to unification. Kurti (2008) criticized contemporary Albanian politicians for failing to exploit opportunities available to them, observing, “The national renaissance politicians formed the nation and built the state. Today’s politicians are neither advancing state nor nation.” The conditioning of Kosovo’s independence shaped other groups. The Movement for Unification, founded in late 2007 in Kosovo, responded to Ahtisaari’s Plan by demanding reciprocity between Albanians in Presheva and Serbs in Kosovo, as a first step toward territorial exchange and unification. Koço Danaj, an analyst from Albania, argued in Platforma e Shqipsërsë Natyrale (2009) for an international conference to “reformat” rather than “patch” the region and to take political steps toward a confederal state of Kosovo, Albania, and Albanian areas of Macedonia. After Kosovo’s declaration of independence in February 2008 and Albania’s acceptance into NATO in April 2009, unification returned to the discourse of Albania’s politicians, keen to exploit its electoral popularity and open up new economic markets. Describing the new highway joining Prishtina and Tirana, Albania’s Prime Minister Berisha stated on May 31, 2009, “This tunnel above all is a tunnel uniting the nation. Today we decided there is no mountain, no obstacle, nothing that can spiritually or physically divide this nation.” Commitment to political unification was avoided, however, as Albania remains constrained by the lingering threat of Kosovo’s partition and nonrecognition as well as EU accession. Instead Albania’s leaders promise that Albanian unification will be achieved in the European

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Union. On March 18, 2011, prior to the start of EU-led dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo, Albania’s Foreign Minister Edmond Haxhinosto called ideas of territorial unification or exchange “damaging”; he stated, “Albanian integration will be achieved through integration in the European Union, when our entire region and all states where Albanians live are members of the EU.” Kosovo’s leaders echo this kind of rhetoric. Meanwhile EU accession criteria have provided a new space for Albania and Kosovo to cooperate practically in trade, customs, border policing, local administration, and education. But interviewees in Montenegro, Macedonia, and Presheva complained, a little guiltily, that Albania is not active on their behalf. Albania’s breaking of the taboo on unification has thus been strongly shaped by the long process of EU accession and Kosovo’s continuing insecurity, remaining secondary to the consolidation of both states.

Conclusion Neither the promise of an alternative form of unification within the EU nor the conditionality of its accession process has yet managed to weaken the resilience of Albanians’ commitment to uniting divided nation and state. On the one hand, this should not be surprising considering the partition grievance’s centrality to identity and the way it has been historically reinforced by repetitive external and internal border divisions, Albanians’ isolation from independent Albania for over forty years, and their experience of varying levels of state-administered violence and discrimination. Nor should it be unexpected, considering the remarkable adaptability of Pan-Albanianism to changing political structures, all of which excluded it as a legal option. Its continuing relevance has made it an electoral issue under conditions of democracy. On the other hand, long separation and Albania’s aversion to unification when it threatened its security suggest it was not unreasonable to imagine that Albanians might adapt to living in different states, if borders were inconsequential and their existence secure, with equal economic and political prospects. However, although the leverage of EU accession may have ensured legislation for minority rights reforms in Macedonia and Montenegro, implementation has been slow, and minimal in Serbia. Many Albanians remain dissatisfied with the slow pace of change, as well as the asymmetry of minority rights granted to them compared to the Ahtisaari Plan. At the same

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time, conditioning Kosovo’s independence and the continuing challenge to its sovereignty and territorial integrity, enhanced by EU division over recognition, have perpetuated the insecurity at the heart of Albanians’ need to unite. Kosovo’s prospects of EU accession also remain distant, thus undermining elite promises of semi-unification within the European Union. Unexpectedly the EU accession process has simultaneously helped to remove the taboo on public discussion of democratic and peaceful unification by requiring integration. Actors in civil society, socioeconomic elites, and political movements that advocate different means and ends of unification have exploited this opportunity. Instead of extinguishing unification, the EU has facilitated its political rehabilitation in an adapted form, making it possible for the two goals of Albanian nationalism—the protection of independent Albania and the unification of nation and state—to become, for the moment, complementary rather than competitive. References Academy of Sciences of Albania. 1998. Platform for the Resolution of the Albanian National Question. Tirana: Shkenca. Austin, Robert C. 2004. Greater Albania: The Albanian State and the Question of Kosovo, 1912–2001. In Ideologies and National Identities: The Case of 20th Century Southeastern Europe, ed. J. Lampe and M. Mazower, 235–53. Budapest: Central European Press. Banac, I. 1984. The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Batt, J., ed. 2008. Is There an Albanian Question? Chaillot Paper 107. Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies. Biberaj, Elez. 1982. Kosovë: The Struggle for Recognition. Conflict Studies 137. London: Institute for the Study of Confl ict. Carnegie Endowment. 1993 [1914]. The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment. Center for Democracy and Human Rights (CEDEM). 2007. Ethnical Distance in Montenegro April–May 2007. Podgorica: Department for Empirical Research. Duijzings, Ger. 2000. Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo. New York: Columbia University Press. EU Progress Report Montenegro. 2008. SEC (2008) 2696: November 5. Brussels: European Commission. Fischer, Bernd J. 1999. Albania at War, 1939–1945. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

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Frashëri, S. 1899. Albania: Its Past, Its Present and Its Future. Trans. Robert Elsie. Bucharest. http://www.albanianhistory.net/texts19/AH1899_1.html. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Gallup Balkan Monitor. 2008. Insights and Perceptions: Voices of the Balkans. Gallup, Inc. http://www.balkan-monitor.eu/index.php/reports. ———. 2010. GBM Survey. http://www.balkan-monitor.eu/index.php/reports. Hoxha, Enver. 1981 [1949]. Memoirs from My Meetings with Stalin: 3rd Meeting. http:// www.marxists.org /reference/archive/hoxha/works/stalin/meet3.htm. Institute of History. 1998. Bujan Conference. Prishtina: Institute of History. International Crisis Group (ICG). 2004a. Collapse in Kosovo. Report 155. April 22. ———. 2004b. Pan-Albanianism: How Big a Threat to Balkan Stability? Report 153. March 25. ———. 2007a. Kosovo: No Good Alternatives to the Ahtisaari Plan. Report 182. May 14. ———. 2007b. Serbia: Maintaining Peace in the Presevo Valley. Report 186. October 16. Islami, H. 2005. Demographic Studies: 100 Years of Demographic Development in Kosovo. Prishtina: Academy of Arts and Sciences of Kosovo. Judah, T. 2001. Greater Albania? New York Review of Books 48 (8): 35–37. Kola, P. 2003. The Search for Greater Albania. London: C. Hurst & Co. Kurti, A. 2008. Politics of the Renaissance. Prishtina, November 27. http://www.vete vendosje.org /?cid=1,31,762&author=1. Lampe, John R. 2000. Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malcolm, N. 1998. Kosovo: A Short History. New York: New York University Press. Meta, B. 2007. The Cham Tragedy. Tirana: Institute for Cham Studies. Minxhozi, Y. 2002. The Unknown Letter of Enver Hoxha: Documents of the Russian Archive. Prishtina: Botimplex. Municipality of Bujanoc, Presheva and Medvegia. 2009. Statistics Showing Employment by Ethnicity in State and Local Institutions. Bujanoc: Municipality of Bujanoc. Obradović, M. 2005 [1981]. Agrarian Reform and Colonization in Kosovo, 1918–1941. Prishtina: Institute of History. Ombudsperson Montenegro. 2008. State Institutions, Local Government Institutions and Public Ser vices. Podgorica: Ombudsperson. Prift i, K., L. Nasi, L. Omari, P. Xhufi, S. Pulaha, S. Pollo, and Z. Shtylla, eds. 1993. The Truth on Kosovo. Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Albania, Institute of History. Tirana: Encyclopedia Publishing House. Radio Free Europe. 1971. Yugoslavia’s Population after Recent Census. November 8. Open Society Archives: Central European University Press. http://www.osaarchi vum.org /fi les/holdings/300/8/3/text/79-3-119.shml. Ramet. S. 2006. The Three Yugoslavias: State Building and Legitimation 1918–2005. Bloomington: Indiana State University Press.

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Repishti, S., ed. 2002. Articles from the First Cultural Seminar on Chameria. Shkodra: Biblioteka e së Përkohëshmes Kulturore Phoenix. Rushiti, L. 1981. Koçak Movement in Kosovo 1918–1928. Prishtina: Institute of History. Shtylla, Z. 1993. The Deportation of Albanians in Yugoslavia after the Second World War (1950–1966). In Truth on Kosovo, ed. Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Albania, Institute of History, 233– 41. Tirana: Encyclopedia Publishing House. Sulstarova, E. 2003. Nationalist Discourse in Albania. Tirana: Aferdita. ———. 2008. The National Struggle in Civil Society. Vetëvendosje! 163 (November 3): 4. UN Security Council. 2008. Report of the Secretary General on the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK). Document S/2008/692. November 24. United Nations Development Program (UNDP) the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. 2003. Early Warning Report FYR Macedonia. Skopje: UNDP. ———. 2005. Early Warning Report FYR Macedonia. Skopje: UNDP. ———. 2006. Early Warning Report FYR Macedonia. Skopje: UNDP. United Nations Development Program (UNDP) the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and the South East European University (SEEU). 2010. People Centered Analyses Report: Quality of Social Ser vices. Skopje: UNDP and SSEU. http:// www.undp.org.mk /content /Publications/People-centered%20Analyses%20ENG %20web.pdf. United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Kosovo. 2005. Early Warning Report Kosovo. Report 11. http://www.ks.undp.org. ———. 2007. Early Warning Report Kosovo. Report 17. http://www.ks.undp.org. U.S. State Department. 1999–2008. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. http://www.state.gov/g /drl/rls /hrrpt/. Vickers, M. 2002. The Cham Issue: Albanian National and Property Claims in Greece. Shrivenham, UK: Conflict Studies Research Centre (CSRS). ———. 2007. The Cham Issue—Where to Now? Shrivenham, UK: Conflict Studies Research Centre (CSRS).

CHAPTER 6

The Kurds and EU Enlargement: In Search of Restraints on State Power David Romano

Introduction Turkey’s Kurdish minority numbers around fifteen million, or around 20 percent of the country’s total population of seventy-two million. Kurds in Turkey hold a wide variety of political opinions, and some do not even selfidentify as Kurds. However, it appears that most Kurds in Turkey look upon the possibility of Turkish accession to the Eu ropean Union (EU) with a great deal of enthusiasm. They hope that EU protections for individual minority rights, particularly cultural and linguistic rights, will force Ankara to grant its Kurdish minority a level of freedom denied since the creation of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s. Even though Turkey’s prospects of actually joining the European Union remain uncertain at best, the ongoing reforms aimed at making Turkey conform to the EU’s Copenhagen criteria have already been credited for some liberalizations, particularly limited Kurdish radio and television broadcasting as well as the legalization of private courses to teach Kurdish. At the time of this writing, the latest government Kurdish initiative (announced by Turkish prime minister Erdogan in August 2009) promises to liberalize further the Turkish state’s policies toward the Kurdish minority. The success of such initiatives remains difficult to predict, of course, as several past efforts stalled and achieved only modest changes. While the Kurdish regions of neighboring Iraq, Iran, and Syria have no possibility of entering the EU, the Kurds of these countries also have reasons

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to support Turkish accession. First would come the economic benefit of formally bordering Europe. Turkey’s attempts to satisfy the EU of its worthiness for admission have also helped constrain Turkish intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkish membership in the EU would also entail consequences inimical to Pan-Kurdish aspirations, however, because the process would exacerbate differences between the Kurdish communities of Turkey and neighboring countries, including socioeconomic and cultural differences that have expanded since the post–World War I division of the Kurds into the Turkish, Iraqi, Iranian, and Syrian states. This chapter begins with an examination of the historical forces that led to the current Kurdish predicament in Turkey and elsewhere. Following this is a look at Turkey’s efforts to join the EU and these efforts’ effects, for better or worse, on the distinct populations that comprise a divided Kurdish nation. I argue that the process of coming into compliance with EU entry requirements, especially the criteria for respecting human rights, has clearly benefited and may continue to benefit Kurds on either side of the Turkish border. The reigning Turkish establishment may not, however, prove willing or able to reconsider modern Turkey’s national narrative. Recognizing another significant founding nation besides the Turkish one remains anathema to Kemalist ideology, particularly as this would imply the need for a certain amount of self-determination for majority Kurdish parts of the country. An inability to recast Turkey’s national narrative in turn endangers both relative Kurdish gains of the past few years and Turkey’s aspirations to join the EU.

A Periphery People “Kurdistan” generally refers to the Zagros Mountains and adjacent valleys and plains predominantly populated by people who speak Kurdish, including the Kurmanji, Sorani, Gurani, and Zaza varieties. Of course the question of whether these are dialects of a single Kurdish language was politicized with the advent of European-style nationalism in the region. A shared language serves as one of the most common traits in defining nationhood and often leads to recognition as a bona fide nation, perhaps with the right to a state: that is, national self-determination. Although a collective identification with the Kurdish nation, including its culture, history, and the notion of a common ancestry, is fairly widespread

Map 6.1. Kurds and the region.

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in Kurdish regions today, other identities have consistently competed for the loyalty of people who may identify as Kurds. While today’s Kurdistan is divided at the intersection of the borders of modern Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria (more on this shortly), the geographic region was never a unified political entity before World War I either. Prior to the twentieth century, most Kurdish areas were under Ottoman control, with the remainder under the Persian empires (the Safavids and the Qajars). Kurdistan served as the buffer region between competing Ottoman and Persian empires, and most of the warfare between these two dynasties occurred in Kurdistan, often fought by  Kurdish proxies. The centers of dominant Turkish and Persian “high cultures,” including scholarship, science, and literature, were in faraway Istanbul and Esfahan (and later Teheran). The Kurdish hinterlands of these empires saw relatively little economic development or industrialization, and Kurds (whether feudal landowners, nomads, or peasants) generally considered themselves fortunate if they never saw authorities of the central governments. Indeed an emperor’s writ was often limited in Kurdish regions right up until the twentieth century. Kurdish identities prior to the twentieth century remained largely religious (most Kurds are Sunni Muslim, with large numbers of Sufi mystic orders and smaller heterodox religious communities, including Alevis, Yezidis, Ahel il-Haq, and some Shiites as well) and tribal, given the historically important role of nomadic pastoralism in Kurdish society. The high mountains and undeveloped transportation networks of the Kurdish hinterland also played a role in hindering Pan-Kurdish identification and a sense of Kurdish nationhood, as Kurdish communities remained largely isolated from each other and developed their own oral traditions, dialects, and perspectives. Geography may thus explain the aforementioned range of Kurdish dialects, different Kurdish Sufi orders (the main two being the Naqshibendi and Qadiri), and varying Kurdish religious communities and political movements. Prior to the advent of modernity, tribal warfare and raiding may also have been as common as commerce between many distinct Kurdish groups. Kurdish nationalism therefore lagged behind competing nascent Arab, Turkish, and Persian nationalisms. Furthermore Kurds suffered from a much less developed literary tradition. Combined with the economic underdevelopment of Kurdish regions and the emerging, strongly centralizing Turkish, Arab, and Persian state bureaucracies in Istanbul (later Ankara), Esfahan (later Teheran), Baghdad, and Damascus, Kurdish nationalism remained

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peripheral. Kurds were derisively viewed as a “low-culture” people to be suppressed and with regions to be assimilated into more powerful nation-states. While many Kurdish elites became important administrators and officials in the various governments of the Middle East, they did so as assimilated members of Turkish, Persian, and Arab empires and states, speaking “high languages” of those bodies.

Lausanne’s Orphans

Events of the early twentieth century forced the Kurds to confront increasingly emergent Turkish, Arab, and Persian nationalisms. They were left with the choice of either assimilating into national projects based on these Turkish, Arab, and Persian ethnicities or pursuing their own separate Kurdish nationalism. During the years immediately following World War I there was a dramatic redrawing of political boundaries across southeast Europe, Anatolia, and the Middle East. Largely due to a poorly developed sense of Kurdish nationalism and the disunity of disparate Kurdish groups, Kurds failed to seize the opportunity that this redrawing of political boundaries presented. While European powers such as Britain and France initially fl irted with the idea of supporting a Kurdish state, they abandoned the notion in the face of Turkish, Arab, and Persian opposition, as well as Kurdish disunity. Article 64 of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres promised the Kurds the possibility of having their own state (along with the Armenians): If within one year from the coming into force of the present Treaty the Kurdish peoples within the areas defined in Article 62 shall address themselves to the Council of the League of Nations in such a manner as to show that a majority of the population of these areas desires independence from Turkey, and if the Council then considers that these peoples are capable of such independence and recommends that it should be granted to them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation, and to renounce all rights and title over these areas. . . . If and when such renunciation takes place, no objection will be raised by the Principal Allied Powers to the voluntary adhesion to such an independent Kurdish State of the Kurds inhabiting that part of Kurdistan which has been hitherto included in the Mosul Vilayet. (cited in McDowall 1996, 459–60)

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However, armed opposition led by Ottoman general Mustafa Kemal Ataturk effectively nullified the Sèvres agreement and forced the Allied Powers to relinquish their claims on what became Turkey. Ataturk successfully rallied Kurdish tribes to his cause by framing the issue as one of protecting the Muslim caliphate against infidel invaders, and most Kurds accepted this objective in favor of Kurdish nationalist objectives. In 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne was drafted to replace the Treaty of Sèvres, it made no mention of the Kurds (or the Armenians). Ataturk promptly abolished the caliphate and founded the modern Republic of Turkey on the basis of a single nationalism—that of Turks. The only minorities in Turkey recognized by the Treaty of Lausanne were non-Muslims, which Ankara continues to interpret as applying only to Jews, Armenians, and Greek Orthodox Christians. Kurds (along with other groups such as Alevis, Arabs, and Laz) were deemed part of the Turkish nation if they resided within the new Turkish borders; if they fell outside those borders (in towns such as Kirkuk or Qamichly), they became outsiders from the point of view of the state. The new Turkish state project became one of assimilating non-Turkic Muslims or, in the view of some extreme nationalists such as Foreign Minister Tawfiq Rushdi, eliminating them: “in their [Kurdish] case, their cultural level is so low, their mentality so backward, that they cannot be simply in the general Turkish body politic . . . they will die out, economical ly unfitted for the struggle for life in competition with the more advanced and cultured Turks . . . as many as can will emigrate into Persia and Iraq, while the rest will simply undergo the elimination of the unfit.” The project of making the new Turkish state and nation fully coterminous thus necessitated outlawing use of the Kurdish language, Kurdish media, Kurdish names, Kurdish social or political organizations, and Kurdish education; even the acknowledgment of a Kurdish existence was criminal. After 1915 Armenians no longer formed a significant minority in Turkey, and Kurds stood as the only important minority threat left to the Turkish state project. Kurds could thus move forward in Turkey only if they publicly identified themselves as Turks, in which case they were generally free to try and advance to the highest echelons of society. The era of Ottoman delegation of authority to local Kurdish elites and feudal Kurdish autonomy in Kurdistan was largely over. This remained the situation in Turkey until 1991, when some cracks began to emerge in the state’s view of the Kurds. After the Treaty of Lausanne, those Kurds who found themselves in Iran or the new colonial creations of Syria and Iraq also became subjects of

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centralizing Persian and Arab nationalist states, respectively. Reza Shah of Iran attempted to emulate the Turkish strategy of assimilation and repression. In Iraq and Syria assimilationist programs were not as robust, but authoritarian governments likewise excluded and repressed Kurdish identity. From a Kurdish nationalist perspective, a once-contiguous Kurdish homeland had been divided into four impoverished regions by non-Kurdish rulers. “Kurdistan” now existed only in the imaginations of nonassimilated Kurds. The Kurdish regions of each of the new states remained economic and political backwaters, little changed since the days of empire, whether Ottoman or Persian.

Rebellion and the Elusive Quest for Minority Rights During the course of the twentieth century, dozens of Kurdish revolts broke out in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Increasingly the Kurds were turning to ethnic nationalism, perhaps in reaction to competing Turkish, Arab, and Persian nationalisms. Notable revolts in Turkey included the Kuchgiri uprising (1919), the Sheikh Said uprising (1925), the Mount Ararat rebellion (1927–30), the Dersim revolt (1938), and the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) insurgency (1984–present). Iran witnessed among others the Simko revolt (1920–24), the Mahabad Republic (a Soviet-aided, short-lived Kurdish state in 1945), and revolts against the new Islamic Republic (1979 and 1982–83). Before World War II Iraq experienced various revolts led by Sheikh Barzinji (1919–32); from the 1940s ongoing revolts were led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani (until 1975) and later by his son Masoud Barzani and former associate Jalal Talibani, now the president of Iraq. After the first Gulf War, and with American encouragement, the Iraqi Kurdish revolts culminated in the uprising of 1991. Following a crackdown by Baghdad, a U.S.-British–protected Kurdish autonomous zone emerged in northern Iraq. This autonomy was officially recognized in the 2005 post-Saddam Iraqi constitution and presents a first for Kurdish attempts at protected status, minority rights, and self-government. Some observers, particularly those with an interest in denying the existence of a Kurdish nation, characterize many of the early revolts as either religious uprisings (a reaction against Ataturk’s abolishment of the sultanate and caliphate), feudal attempts to resist central government encroachment, banditry, or, in the PKK case, “foreign sponsored terrorism.” All the revolts mentioned here, however, were undertaken under an explicit banner of Kurd-

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ish nationalism, and Kurds themselves unfailingly describe them as such. The results of these uprisings were extreme levels of repression, massacres, forced displacement, military rule, and general state coercion. In the Iraqi case, this culminated in the 1987–88 genocidal Anfal campaigns and chemical weapons attacks on Halabja and other Kurdish civilian centers. In the Turkish case, huge swaths of territory in the Kurdish southeast were cleared of population and declared “forbidden security zones,” and around three million Kurds were directly or indirectly displaced by counterinsurgency campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s (KHRP/BHRC/EUTCC 2005a, 2005b). These forced migrations led to a large Kurdish diaspora in the regional metropolises of Istanbul, Teheran, Baghdad, and Damascus as well as abroad (mainly in Europe, with a majority in Germany). These diaspora populations quickly acquired educations and exploited the opportunity to develop and promote Kurdish culture, including tasks such as standardizing the Kurdish language. The states’ repression probably also played a major role in causing larger numbers of Kurds to self-identify as Kurds and to attach increasing value to their Kurdish identity (Romano 2006, chapter 4). If people come to feel that they suffer repression due to ethnic or religious discrimination, they often come to identify more strongly with their ascribed ethnicities or religions, using such identities as tools of resistance and community mobilization. Remarkably the official positions of all modern (post-1945) Kurdish political parties insist that their objectives remain limited to autonomy and democratic and minority rights, rather than separation of the various Kurdish regions from Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. This position may stem from a grim appraisal of the balance of power in the region and the Kurds’ vulnerable strategic position. It may also be a tactical strategy, aiming to use a platform of autonomy and minority rights to push for full independence later on (which is the view of opponents to Kurdish nationalism). Nonetheless it seems difficult to ignore the consistency and legitimacy of such limited claims for autonomy, democratic rights, and minority rights.

The EU and Domestic Political Constituencies in Need of Allies Turkey became a member of the Council of Europe in 1950 and has had an Association Agreement with Europe since 1963. On December 31, 1995,

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Turkey and the EU also signed a customs union agreement. Hence Turkey and Europe have been integrating their economies for more than a decade, and the economic requirements for Turkey’s accession are not insurmountable. It was after Ankara formally applied to join the European Union in 1987 that the issue of political, social, legal, and cultural reforms in Turkey came to the forefront. In 1999 Turkey officially became a candidate country for accession; in December 2002 the EU specified a series of benchmarks (known as the Copenhagen criteria) that would “require that Turkey have a functioning market economy and stable institutions that guarantee democracy, the rule of law, and human rights” (Phillips 2004). In the fall of 2005 the EU formally began membership talks with Turkey, although Brussels felt that such talks would require at least ten to fifteen years before Turkey could finally accede to the EU (Anderson 2005). Turkey’s efforts to conform to European Union membership criteria influenced a number of changes in the Turkish state’s treatment of the Kurds. In 1991 Ankara stopped denying that there were Kurds in Turkey (the PKK insurgency that had been going on since 1984 may have also played a role here). Turkish prime minister Turgut Ozal even began discussing the need for a political change in Turkey that would address Kurdish grievances. It was under his leadership that Law 2932 (which completely banned the use of the Kurdish language) was repealed in 1991, although Kurdish media, broadcasts, publications, and education remained forbidden for another ten years. Of the four categories of the Copenhagen criteria that Turkey must ascribe to, the most relevant for this discussion remain the political criteria: “Membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities” (cited in Hochleitner 2005, 1). Since 2002 Turkey has adopted almost a dozen legislative packages and two constitutional reform packages aiming to fulfi ll the Copenhagen criteria. Perhaps the most significant of these are Turkish constitutional amendments in 2004 that established the supremacy of international human rights law over Turkish regulations when the two conflict (Hochleitner 2005). For Kurds in Turkey, these amendments allow them to bring various issues to Europe for adjudication and represent a huge stride forward. Other important benefits from Turkey’s quest for accession come from Ankara’s adhesion to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Article Six of the ECHR, in particular, states that courts must be independent and impartial; this article is now being used to

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challenge military tribunals and court cases where even only one military judge was present. Oftentimes Turkey’s democratic steps forward were accompanied by several steps back as well, however: for example, at the same time that Ankara began recognizing limited Kurdish rights in the early 1990s, Kurdish parliamentary deputies (the most famous of whom is Leila Zana) were stripped of their parliamentary immunity and imprisoned for allegedly supporting the PKK; in addition human rights violations under military rule remained rampant in the southeast of Turkey. Michael Gunter (2005) has commented on the apparent contradictions of Turkish openings vis-à-vis the Kurdish issue: In December 1991, Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel declared that “Turkey has recognized the Kurdish reality.” Two years later, the new Prime Minister Tansu Ciller broached the “Basque model” as a potential formula for solving Turkey’s Kurdish problem after a meeting with the Spanish prime minister. Then in December 1999, the former Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz declared that “the road to the EU passes through Diyarbakir.” None of these proposals led to any concrete results. It remains to be seen, therefore, what will happen to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s declaration in August 2005 that Turkey had a “Kurdish problem,” had made “grave mistakes” in the past, and now needed “more democracy to solve the problem.” True, Turkey has made progress, but some of it is not real, and more is needed. After the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999, Turkey publicized a renewed push for democratic and legal reforms. Limited Kurdish television and radio broadcasts became legal, if constrained to a few hours a month and with content controlled by the state. Playing the wrong Kurdish song on the radio could still land producers in court on charges of treason. Private classes to teach Kurdish, in line with Eu ropean binding principles on minority rights, became legal but rarely succeed in opening; they are harassed, forced to charge fees that an impoverished local population has trouble paying, censored in their curriculum, denied facilities on technical grounds, and even forbidden from calling themselves “Kurdish schools.” Kurdish mayors are still charged with separatism for mailing out bilingual Turkish-Kurdish holiday greeting cards, and parents are still prevented by local state authorities from giving Kurdish names to their children.

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In August 2009 Prime Minister Erdogan announced the latest of Turkey’s “Kurdish initiatives,” a “roadmap” to “solving the Kurdish question” via “a democratization project” (Today’s Zaman, August 12, 2009). Although the details of the reforms remain unspecified at the time of this writing, the prime minister’s initiative may be more significant than prior ones, given the media attention it has received, the backing of the Turkish military and Foreign Ministry, and Erdogan’s new willingness to meet with Kurdish opposition MPs. While there is no question of altering Turkey’s political borders, of course, or even changing its political system from a unitary French model to a federal one, the latest reforms will likely involve further improvements on minority cultural and linguistic rights: “the government’s plan may include a series of moves on the cultural rights front, including the establishment of private Kurdish-language television stations and Kurdish language faculties in universities, as well allowing towns and villages to once again use their original Kurdish names” (Schleifer 2009). Barring the unlikely event that Prime Minister Erdogan’s latest reforms reflect a new minority rights consensus in Turkey’s political and bureaucratic establishment, however, the problem of effective EU monitoring of Turkish compliance to the Copenhagen criteria will remain central. Reforms adopted in rhetoric still need to be internalized by Turkish society, particularly civil servants and security personnel on the ground. Such changes may take a good deal of time. Although Kurds in Turkey place a great deal of hope in the EU accession process, segments of the Turkish state, particularly state prosecutors, seem to be finding creative ways to conduct “business as usual” when it comes to containing and restricting manifestations of Kurdishness. According to Austrian ambassador Eric Hochleitner (2005), the benefits of and political pressure for Turkish accession must not be allowed to weaken the criteria for such accession (Hochleitner 2005). Freedom House (2008) currently ranks Turkey as “partly free” with a score of three on a seven-point scale where one is the most free (Freedom House 2008). If Turkey is allowed to join the EU before practical implementation (rather than just rhetorical implementation) of the Copenhagen and ECHR criteria is complete, reforms may stall and the entire binding principle of the European Union may suffer a fatal blow. Once a full member of the EU, Turkey may also find it easier to revert back to traditional approaches toward its Kurdish minority. Pressure to admit Turkey sooner rather than later has increased, however, for two principal reasons. First, the “War on Terror” makes many Western leaders anxious to demonstrate that the EU is not a “Christian club” and

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that Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” model misses the mark. A secular, moderate, and free Muslim member of Europe may bolster Arab reformers in their discursive struggle with Islamic extremists. Second, Turkish enthusiasm for (and patience with) the EU accession process appears to be waning. Many secular and nationalist Turks now argue that EU reforms allow too much of an opening to both Islamist and Kurdish nationalist forces in the country. Suspicious that states such as France and Germany will never deem Turkish reforms sufficient in any case (given their hostility to Turkish accession under any circumstances), increasing numbers of Turks wonder if the whole process does more harm than good to Turkey. A perceived Iraqi Kurdish threat may also take priority over an EU candidacy if Turkish policymakers decide they need to invade northern Iraq. Kurdish actors are not the only ones to have turned to the EU for help against their domestic opponents. Islamists such as the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi and hereafter AK Party or simply AKP) have also used EU accession criteria, particularly those requiring the military to stay out of politics, to strengthen their uncertain status in the country. It is not even clear whether Islamists, including moderate Islamists such as Tayip Recep Erdogan of the AK Party, truly want to join the EU, but the accession process has certainly proved useful to them in the meantime. The European Union will probably never outright refuse Turkey’s candidacy, but it may continue dragging the process out indefinitely. Under such circumstances Turks would lose patience and withdraw their candidacy long before the EU closes any final doors to accession. Nor does a “privileged partnership” emerge as a viable alternative option for Turkey: as a point of pride, this would be completely unacceptable to Turks. To many Turks the symbolism of being accepted as an equal member of Europe holds as much, or more, importance than the material benefits that EU membership could provide. Moreover “privileged partnership” would force Turkey to abide by EU directives without being able to influence EU policy. Should Turkey gradually end more than eight decades of orientation toward Europe and the West, however, the international ramifications would be staggering. Increasing Turkish alignment with Russia, China, or just neighboring regional states would drastically change the political dimensions of the region. Considering that anti-American sentiment reached an all-time high in Turkey due to the Iraq War, impatience with Europe is bubbling over, and pro-Islam parties are winning increasing numbers of

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votes, such a shift is not unimaginable. In such a scenario democratic reforms might well roll back drastically, and those parts of the Turkish state that advocate the most repressive measures against Kurdish exceptionalism could again take the lead. Since at least the 1980s Kurds and some progressive Turks have argued that Turkey’s approach to its Kurdish minority forms one of the main stumbling blocks to further democratization in Turkey. A Turkish state unwilling to surrender authoritarian means to combat a Kurdish challenge cannot fully democratize. Conforming to EU criteria for membership could, however, help Turkey democratize to a point that would allow most Kurds to fully buy into their Turkish citizenship. In a kind of catch-22, unfortunately, many Turks seem to have lost interest in Eu ropean accession precisely because this would require a drastic change in the Turkish state’s approach to its Kurdish minority. It is unclear whether Turkey is ready to reevaluate the mono-national principle upon which the Turkish Republic was founded. It is clear that Turkish enthusiasm for the EU is waning, and that in more nationalist Turkish circles the declining interest comes from resentment of EU requirements for minority rights. Following elections in July 2007, three parties were able to enter parliament: the moderate Islamist AKP; the center-left secular CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi)); and the far-right nationalist MHP (Milliyetci Hareket Partisi). On one hand, only the AK Party’s platform came out solidly in favor of continuing the accession process, which should be of no surprise given the Copenhagen criteria’s usefulness in protecting the AK Party from military intervention. On the other hand, Recai Birgün, the CHP’s candidate for Izmir (Turkey’s third-largest city), made a preelection statement in the Turkish daily newspaper Today’s Zaman (July 14, 2007) that underscored Turkish suspicion of Western demands on minority rights: I believe that Western countries try hard to instigate hatred in connection with Turkey’s ethnic problems. They once dreamed of a clash between Alevis and Sunnis. They achieved partial success in this. In consideration that they would not be able to go further, they plotted another plan to provoke a clash between the Turks and the Kurds. We sacrificed 30,000 people [the death toll from the PKK insurgency, 90 percent of whom were ethnic Kurds]. They now dream of a secularist vs. anti-secularist clash. External powers are heavily involved in

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this plot. Big countries such as the US, Britain, Germany and France enjoy instigating these problems. Similar views were expressed to the author by a CHP official in Canakale and in many informal conversations held in Istanbul and Ankara in July 2007. Meanwhile the submission of MHP Ankara candidate (and former ambassador) Deniz Bolukbasi to the same issue of Today’s Zaman (July 14, 2007) embodies the essence of Turkish nationalist resistance to the EU and opposition to any Kurdish demands: Hailing from a different ethnic background cannot be used as a pretext for initiating a process of separation between the people who founded this state together. Among the founding principles of the state are a single nation, a single homeland, a single flag and a single language. If you attempt to change any one of them, you trigger a process where all of them will be opened to question. Receiving education in one’s mother tongue is one of the impositions of the European Union. Different ethnic identities demanding to learn their own languages in private courses (a demand that the AK Party accepted) is not an innocent demand. It will be followed by the demand to teach their languages in private schools. And the next step will be the integration of those languages into the Turkish national education system, and then eventually the process of those languages becoming official languages of Turkey will begin. All these are the first set of demands included in the outlawed Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) political action plan. The most important means of debilitating the consciousness of being a member of the Turkish nation and installing instead the consciousness of being a member of another nation is language. In this regard, one of the most important subjects that shape the Nationalist Movement Party’s (MHP) stance against the impositions of the EU is that the EU imposed the PKK’s demands in the disguise of the Copenhagen criteria. From this perspective, eighty-three years of draconian assimilation policies were not enough to make the Turkish state and nation coincide, and the project is still so fragile that granting minority language rights will destroy the country. Hence the EU-inspired reforms must be stopped. The MHP has

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also advocated Turkish military intervention into northern Iraq, the main motive of which is to prevent Iraqi Kurdish autonomy and/or control of Kirkuk. On the other side of the political spectrum, Kurdish politicians (running as independents in the 2007 election in order to circumvent a 10 percent national threshold for parties to enter parliament) insist that they do not advocate separatism and that they are loyal citizens. In my July 18, 2007, interview with a Democratic Society Party (DTP) official in Tunceli province, this position is quite clear: “We don’t want to separate. We live together. We don’t want this war to continue either. Which is more sad, when a Turkish soldier is brought home dead, or when a PKK guerrilla is brought home dead? They’re both sad. We just want respect and our rights as Kurds. Getting our people into parliament this election will give us a voice. The European Union also helps us—it’s very good. But Turkey won’t get into the European Union.” Although nothing in the EU accession process obliges Turkey to offer community or regional rights to Kurds (such as Spanish Basque-style autonomy or at least greater degrees of self-government in the southeast), promised individual legal protections to members of the Kurdish minority remain a very important goal. For example, Ankara’s mono-nationalist ideology and politics can be more openly questioned, and Kurdish community rights more easily negotiated, when intellectuals and journalists enjoy greater freedom of expression in Turkey.

Divided Nations and Divergent Prospects: Whither Iraqi, Syrian, and Iranian Kurdistan? Kurds in neighboring Iraq, Iran, and Syria look forward to sharing a de jure border with Europe. Such a development would have economic advantages, with the possibility of trading more easily with the European Union. Iraqi Kurdistan already does most of its trade and business with Turkey, and Turkish companies have built two airports there, many roads, and several other major projects. The economic boost Turkey would get from EU full membership would undoubtedly have positive spin-off effects for its neighboring trading partners. For Turkey to enter the European Union, it would also have to relax its policies toward the Kurdish ethnie in general. This would be a particularly welcome development for Iraqi Kurds, who currently worry about Turkish intervention (armed or otherwise) in their

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affairs—something that could continue in spite of their robust trade relationship. In the long term, however, Turkish accession to the European Union would push an already distant Pan-Kurdish project of unity even further. It would make the practically impossible dream of an independent Kurdistan that includes all four Kurdish territories (in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran) undesirable to most Kurds in Turkey, who would now be in the EU. Strangely enough, however, the notion that belonging to the EU might be the best strategy to combat Kurdish secessionist tendencies never seems to enter Turkish nationalist political discourse. Inclusion in Europe would lead the Kurds of Turkey to grow even further apart from their brethren in neighboring Iraq, Iran, and Syria. As things stand, age-old Kurdish divisions from competing identities (religious, tribal, dialectical, and political), geography (the tall mountains and deep valleys that have always separated Kurdish communities), and Ottoman-Persian rivalries have worsened. More than eighty years of division into four separate states with very different societies and education systems (including various alphabets and writing systems) have created four different Kurdistans. The borders intersecting Kurdistan became very rigid after World War I; if Turkey were to accede to the European Union, they would solidify even further as the borders of both states and Europe and Asia.

Conclusion Even if Turkey were to one day enter the EU, mechanisms for effectively monitoring its continued compliance with EU norms vis-à-vis the Kurds would need to be robust. In many cases Turkey’s rhetorical shifts and legal reforms have not been matched with equal changes in practice. Some changes take time, and whether accession talks require a decade or longer, just the rhetoric of respecting minority rights, the rule of law, democratic principles, and human rights in general promotes positive developments in Turkey. Although the Turkish Republic achieved a great deal on its own, such as a parliamentary system and a capable, functioning, forward-looking state, we can also credit the EU accession process for some of the more recent moves to liberalize the country further and encourage the state to reevaluate the status of minorities such as the Kurds. The most pressing question, however, remains whether or not Turkish society has the fortitude to continue with

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an uncertain accession process for ten or more years, especially if attacks by impatient PKK rebels stall the integrationist project. A slide back into authoritarianism and military rule would devastate everyone in Turkey, no matter what their ethnic or religious identity. For the Kurdish communities of neighboring Iraq, Iran, and Syria, Turkish accession to the European Union would lead to all the advantages of living on the doorstep of the EU. Even failing Turkish accession, however, reforms that significantly move Turkish society, culture, and politics still further toward European norms would also increase the distance between Turkish Kurds and their kin in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Kurdish society and political movements have already developed a style and form particular to each state in which they developed during the past eighty years, and changes that affect the Turkish state and society will likewise include its Kurdish minority. Notes 1. Due to the lack of census data on the issue, it remains difficult to establish the number of Kurds in Turkey reliably. The CIA World Fact Book estimates that Kurds make up 18 percent of Turkey’s seventy-eight million people, or about fourteen million. The total worldwide Kurdish population is probably somewhere between thirty and thirty-five million people: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world -factbook /geos/tu.html. 2. In the July 2007 elections, for instance, the two parties to receive the overwhelming majority of votes in the Kurdish regions of Turkey were the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Democratic Society Party (DTP). These two parties are the most ardent supporters of liberalizing reforms needed to bring Turkey in line with EU norms. The author’s own conversations with Kurds living in Turkey, between 1994 and 2008, also inform this statement. 3. Language alone, however, may not serve as a sufficient component of nationhood. As Benedict Anderson (1983) notes, the “imagined community” of a nation must include other things, such as a collective sense of and belief in the nation. 4. Although the Ottoman Empire controlled much more of Kurdish-populated territory than did the Persian Empires, Kurds are ethnolinguistic cousins of Persians rather than Turks. 5. Article 62 defined these areas as “the predominantly Kurdish areas lying east of the Euphrates, south of the boundary of Armenia as it may be hereafter determined, and north of the frontier of Turkey with Syria and Mesopotamia” (quoted in McDowall 1996, 459). 6. For more on Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s wooing of the Kurdish tribes and his subsequent (after the Allied Powers had been repulsed from Turkey) decision to betray his promises to them, see Romano 2006, ch. 2.

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7. The remarks are detailed in a British Foreign Office Communiqué, “from clerk to Chamberlain,” FO 271/12255, January 4, 1927 (cited in McDowall 1996, 200). 8. For more on this, see Kreyenbroek and Sperl 1992, 75; and McDowall 1996, ch. 9. 9. Rather than major revolts, Syria experienced only occasional riots and unrest in its Kurdish northeast. This may result from the fact that the Kurdish areas within Syria are not mountainous (the mountains lie just north and east, in Turkey and Iraq), leaving potential rebels with few places to hide from state security forces. 10. See, for example, Criss and Cetiner 2000 as well as Michael Rubin’s review of Romano 2006, available at http://www.meforum.org /article/1733. 11. This statement is based on numerous interviews conducted by the author in  the Kurdish regions of Turkey (1994, 1997–98, 1999, 2003–4, 2007), Iraq (1994, 2000, 2003– 4), Iran (1999, 2000), and Syria (1998, 2003). 12. For more on the Anfal campaigns and Halabja, see Makiya 1992. Estimates of the number of Kurdish civilians killed in these campaigns vary between eighty thousand and two hundred thousand. 13. For more information on forced displacement of Kurdish populations, human rights abuses, and the Anti-Terror Law, including eyewitness accounts, also refer to Amnesty International 1992; Helsinki Watch 1993; Human Rights Watch 1991, 1994; and U.S. Department of State 1997, among others. 14. The European Court of Human Rights did not consider the trials of Leila Zana and the other Kurdish parliamentarians fair, and no evidence of their affi liation with the PKK was made public. On June 26, 2001, the European Court of Human Rights officially ruled that Leila Zana and the other Kurdish deputies arrested with her had not enjoyed a fair trial. 15. For more on this, including extensive detail on the hurdles that state authorities imposed in an effort to block Kurdish language education, see Recognition of Linguistic Rights? The Impact of Pro-EU Reforms in Turkey, Fact-Finding Commission of the Kurdish Human Rights Project, Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales, EU-Turkey Civic Commission, September 2005. 16. France, for instance, refused to sign EU treaties obliging it to protect and foster minority languages (such as Breton, Occitan, and Basque, in France’s case). The failure of EU institutions to protect or expand the linguistic rights of minority populations is detailed in this volume by Tristan James Mabry (Chapter 2). 17. Although President Obama’s inauguration and policies may be changing the situation, recent Pew surveys (Grim and Wike 2007) found that only 9 percent of Turks had a favorable view of the United States, compared to 52 percent who had a favorable view of the United States in 2000. 18. The irony here lies in the fact that Turkish war cemeteries from World War I and the subsequent Turkish War of Independence include plenty of Kurds from Kirkuk and other cities that now lie outside Turkey. They fought for the Ottoman Empire, but unlike Kurds from towns such as Diyarbakir, they fell outside the territory that Turkey controlled by 1923. Hence they are now a foreign threat whose autonomy

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in Iraq must be prevented, while the Kurds in Diyarbakir are part of the Turkish nation and must speak Turkish as their mother tongue. 19. Turkey being part of the EU would also provide neighboring Kurds with significant black market and illegal immigration opportunities: Turkey is already one of the main transit points for underground migrants headed for Europe, and the Turkish-Iranian-Iraqi borders are much more porous than the Turkish-Greek border. References Amnesty International. 1992. Turkey: Walls of Glass. Document EUR 44/075/1992. London: Amnesty International. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Anderson, John Ward. 2005. E.U. Opens Historic Talks on Membership for Turkey. Washington Post, October 4. Criss, Nur Bilge, and Yavuz Tura Cetiner. 2000. Terrorism and the Issue of International Cooperation. Journal of Conflict Studies 20 (1): 127–39. Freedom House. 2008. Freedom in the World Country Report: Turkey. http://www .freedomhouse.org /template.cfm?page=22& year=2008&country=7508. Accessed July 11, 2012. Grim, Brian J., and Richard Wike. 2007. Turkey and Its (Many) Discontents. Pew Global Attitudes Project. http://pewresearch.org /pubs/623/turkey. Accessed July 11, 2012. Gunter, Michael. 2005. The Implications of Turkey’s EU Candidacy. EU Turkey Civic Commission. http://www.eutcc.org /articles/8/20/document219.ehtml. Accessed July 11, 2012. Helsinki Watch. 1993. The Kurds of Turkey: Killings, Disappearances and Torture. New York: Human Rights Watch. Hochleitner, Erich. 2005. The Political Criteria of Copenhagen and Their Application to Turkey. Working paper. Austrian Institute for European Security Policy. Human Rights Watch. 1991. Turkey: New Restrictive Anti-Terror Law. Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch. ———. 1994. Turkey: Forced Displacement of Ethnic Kurds from Southeastern Turkey. Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch. KHRP/BHRC/EUTCC. 2005a. Fact-Finding Mission Report: Recognition of Linguistic Rights? The Impact of Pro-EU Reforms in Turkey. London: Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP), Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales (BHRC), EU-Turkey Civic Commission (EUTCC). ———. 2005b. Fact-Finding Mission Report: The Status of Internally Displaced Kurds in Turkey and Compensation Rights. London: Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP), Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales (BHRC), EUTurkey Civic Commission (EUTCC). Kreyenbroek, Philip G., and Stefan Sperl, eds. 1992. The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview. London: Routledge.

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Makiya, Kanan. 1992. The Anfal: Uncovering an Iraqi Campaign to Exterminate the Kurds. Harper’s Magazine (May): 53– 61. McDowall, David. 1996. A Modern History of the Kurds. London: I. B. Taurus. Phillips, David L. 2004. Turkey’s Dream of Accession. Foreign Affairs 83 (5): 86–97. Romano, David. 2006. The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Opportunity, Mobilization and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schleifer, Yigal. 2009. Turkey: Ankara Wrestles with the Kurdish Issue. August 2. http://www.eurasianet.org /departments/insightb/articles/eav080309.shtml. U.S. Department of State. 1997. Turkey Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1996. http://www.state.gov/www/global/human _rights/1996 _hrp_report/turkey .html. Accessed July 11, 2012.

CHAPTER 7

European Integration and Postwar Political Relations between Croatia and the Bosnian Croats and Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs Marsaili Fraser

Introduction In Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia) sizable populations of Serbs and Croats maintain active ties with their neighboring titular nation-states. These relationships are markedly different from other examples of crossborder “kin” relations in Europe, where “external minorities” separated from “kin-states” are typically subject to the nationalizing policies of their “hoststates.” No single ethnic group forms a majority in Bosnia: Bosniaks (or Bosnian Muslims) are estimated to compose around 48 percent of the population, Serbs 37 percent, and Croats 14 percent. Bosnia declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992, marking the start of a devastating three-year war; by the time the war ended, largely homogeneous ethnic Serb and Croat territories had been ripped out of the country’s multiethnic patchwork, primarily as a result of ethnic cleansing. These war-time para-states enjoyed de facto independence from the Bosnian government and were intimately linked to neighboring states, the newly independent Republic of Croatia (hereafter Croatia) and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (hereafter FRY), a shrunken entity consisting of Serbia and Montenegro.

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In 1994 and 1995 the US-sponsored Washington and Dayton Peace Agreements belatedly secured Bosnia’s external borders but also conferred high degrees of autonomy to the Serb and Croat territories established violently during the war. The state’s power-sharing structures, loosely configured through consociation and a quasi-confederation, formally recognized no titular nation but rather a governing triumvirate of three equal constituent peoples: Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. In practice, Bosnian Serb and Croat politicians used ethnic and territorial veto powers to disable power sharing after the war. Instead international civilian and military missions endowed with extraordinary executive powers guaranteed Bosnia’s borders against the separatist ambitions of the country’s Serb and Croat leaderships, as well as the irredentist inclinations of neighboring Serbia and Croatia. These ad hoc international organs also carved out a number of multiethnic federallevel institutions in Bosnia. However, despite this flurry of international activity, Bosnia’s central state has significantly fewer responsibilities, resources, and enforcement mechanisms than other federations in Europe and beyond (Venice Commission 2005). Stymied by internal disagreements, Bosnia has been incapable of reaching consensus on minimal tenets of statehood, let alone of enforcing a “nationalizing” policy over its citizens. Cross-border kin relations have had mixed effects on Bosnia’s postwar stability. The nationalist regimes in Croatia and Serbia were instrumental in  creating and sustaining Bosnia’s Croat and Serb war-time para-states: ethnically cleansed swaths of Bosnia were to be incorporated into “Greater Croatia” and “Greater Serbia” when international circumstances permitted. When war was no longer in the interests of the Serbian and Croatian regimes, they forced their Bosnian progenies to accept a peace deal. But neither wartime nor postwar relations have been dominated consistently by the more powerful kin-states. Far from being puppets of neighboring Croatia and Serbia, the leaders of Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs are autonomous actors in control of strong substate governing structures. They have also influenced politics in Zagreb and Belgrade in a number of ways since the war. Nevertheless for much of the postwar period the Serb and Croat regimes in Bosnia remained more integrated with Yugoslavia/Serbia and Croatia respectively than with other parts of Bosnia. Opaque cross-border relations forged during the war persisted, maintaining links between political regimes, security networks, and organized crime. After the war a common cultural, economic, and security space opened between Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia’s Croat- and Serb-controlled areas, thereby undermining the few functional

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incentives that Bosnia’s Croat and Serb political elites may have had to participate in Bosnia’s feeble power-sharing institutions. After the nationalist regimes in Croatia and Serbia lost power in 2000, many of the murkier aspects of kin relations were reformed. Secure in its own borders (and making significant headway toward EU membership), Croatia highlighted its support for the territorial integrity of neighboring Bosnia, renouncing earlier irredentist claims and reforming relations with the Bosnian Croat leadership. This change of tack by Croatia encouraged Bosnian Croat leaders to participate more constructively in Bosnia’s central power-sharing structures. Serbia’s relationship with Republika Srpska (hereafter Srpska), the highly autonomous Bosnian Serb entity declared in 1992 (initially as the Republic of the Serb People of Bosnia and Herzegovina), remains more problematic. Though bilateral relations in the region have vastly improved, new regimes in Serbia and the Bosnian Serb entity have strategically reinforced their pan-Serb relationship for mutual gain. Closer political and institutional links could be taken as evidence of increasingly benign and transparent “postterritorial” kin links. However, they have been accompanied by a sharp rise in separatist rhetoric from the Bosnian Serb leadership, a phenomenon enabled by the drawdown and impending closure of the international civilian and military peace-keeping missions in Bosnia. Politicians in Serbia have done little to moderate the divisive rhetoric and obstructionist politics of Srpska politicians. Rather, they have sometimes encouraged it, using the status of Srpska as a bargaining chip in negotiations with international officials, and asserting its right to self-determination as a rhetorical device to cushion the collective blow to citizens as Yugoslavia’s borders continue to contract, with the secession of Montenegro (2006) and Kosovo (2008). Given international constraints, it is doubtful whether mainstream politicians in Serbia and Srpska harbor serious separatist or irredentist ambitions; kin relations are used strategically on both sides of the border to achieve other ends. Bosnia’s acute governance problems are not primarily the result of policy in neighboring kin-states but the product of a peace agreement that cemented the country’s wartime territorial division and put in place a weak power-sharing system that provides few incentives for political cooperation. But as international governance in Bosnia comes to an end and homegrown incentives to promote cooperation among the country’s fractious political elites remain rare, kin-state politics will likely take on a greater role in shaping Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb policies toward the contested and weak Bosnian state. The issue of external kin in Bosnia may appear of

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marginal importance in Croatia and Serbia. Yet the future of Bosnia may require neighboring states to pressure Bosnian Croat and Serb elites to cooperate within, rather than defect from, the Bosnian state.

European Integration Among the countries of the former Yugoslavia, European integration yielded mixed effects on cross-border kin relations. The remnants of Yugoslavia were not welcome when the European Union (EU) fi rst expanded into Central and Eastern Europe, and institutional war wounds continue to complicate the region’s prospects for membership. The EU’s successful contribution to the stabilization and integration of former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe (not to mention its lofty rhetoric of unity) stood in sharp contrast to the individual and collective failures of European states to prevent or mitigate conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. It was chiefly the belated efforts of the United States that brought an uneasy peace to Bosnia, and the United States retained a key role in international decision-making after the war. As “hard” international power in the volatile region declines, it is often assumed that the “soft” pull of EU integration can supplant force as the incentive of EU membership stabilizes weak borders and bolsters fragile states. Since 2000 EU membership has become an increasingly credible prospect for countries of the Western Balkans, encouraging greater respect for new frontiers, the normalization of bilateral relations, and regional cooperation. (The Western Balkans region includes the successor states of the former Yugoslavia and Albania but does not include Slovenia.) By the end of 2011 Croatia, Montenegro, and Macedonia had achieved the status of actual candidates; Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, and Albania remain potential candidates. But the pull of Europe is felt more strongly in some Balkan states than in others, and this partly accounts for variation in each country’s willingness to improve the status of their internal minorities and to reform their relations with external kin. Secure in its own borders and motivated by an increasingly credible prospect of EU membership, successive Croatian governments renounced irredentist claims. In Serbia, where the country’s own borders are unsettled and nationalism continues to be a potent political catalyst, the gravitational force of EU integration is weaker, and the relationship with external kin in Bosnia continues to be exploited for political gain. Within Bosnia EU influence has been partly successful in encouraging more integration

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and improving relations with neighboring states. However, Europe’s transformative power has stalled as the threat of international sanctions wanes and Bosnian Serb politicians once again openly question the legitimacy of central power-sharing institutions. EU membership continues to be the best long-term palliative to competing territorial claims in the region. It requires the recognition of extant frontiers, while enabling the development of benign cross-border kin relations through open borders, regional cooperation, and the internationalization of human rights and minority protections (Csergő and Goldgeier 2001). However, in the Western Balkans it is not yet clear whether modernist accounts of nation-state creation have been displaced in favor of virtual kin relationships. Bosnia’s fragile postwar settlement was brokered by the international community and kin-states. As hard international power gives way to the soft pull of the EU, the constructive engagement of kin-states may be a necessary condition for a fully functional Bosnian state.

The Cross-Border Communities

Two national communities straddle Bosnia’s border: ethnic Serbs extend across Serbia into the Bosnian territory of Srpska; and Croats extend across Croatia’s frontier through Bosnia’s regions of Herzegovina, Posavina, and central Bosnia. For centuries before the birth and death of Yugoslavia, most areas of Bosnia, including the border areas adjoining neighboring Croatia and Serbia, were ethnically mixed. The undoing of this heterogeneity and the creation of essentially homogenous territories are results of the 1992–95 war. The Bosnian region of Srpska is not the “ancestral homeland” of the Serb nation in Bosnia but rather a territory carved out through ethnic cleansing. The majority of Bosnia’s Croat and Serb populations are now territorially concentrated, express their identity primarily in ethnic terms, and favor current or greater levels of autonomy. Integrative and disintegrative forces have waxed and waned through Bosnia’s history. The interventions of external actors, from imperial powers to nationalizing neighbor states, have had key influences on shaping events and identities within this multiethnic territory. The medieval Bosnian kingdom was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. A large proportion of the Bosnian population converted to Islam and enjoyed preferential treatment. However, Bosnia’s Christian (Orthodox and Catho-

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Map 7.1. Ethnic distribution of Bosnia, 1991.

lic) and Jewish populations were protected under the Ottoman millet system, which afforded them freedom of religion and gave the Serb Orthodox Church feudal status and various privileges. The Orthodox and Catholic populations in Bosnia shared a religion with populations in what is now neighboring Serbia and Croatia, respectively, and this would form the basis of their later identification as Serbs and Croats. Nineteenth-century nationbuilding projects ensured that this process was largely complete by the beginning of the twentieth century (Malcolm 1996). But a distinctly Bosnian identity also coexisted and interacted with these ethnonational identities. As one historian of Yugoslavia concludes: “nationhood is not an all-ornothing affair; the identity of a Bosnian Serb, for example, is very different from that of a Serb from Serbia, and is in many respects closer to that of a neighboring Bosnian Croat or Muslim. Furthermore, among the Bosnian Serbs themselves, there are and have always been different ways of interpreting the Bosnian Serb sense of nationhood. These interpretations differ according

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Map 7.2. Ethnic distribution of Bosnia, 1998.

to historical period, geographic location, social settings and political circumstances” (Hoare 2007, 25). Interethnic conflicts have flared up periodically in Bosnian history, with a particularly bloody crescendo during World War II. But the “ancient hatreds” thesis, popularized during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, is a misrepresentation: for most of Bosnian history, its various ethnonational/confessional groups remained distinct and in some respects separate, but they coexisted peacefully. In rural settings this often extended to friendship and celebration of each other’s customs and festivals (Bringa), while in urban contexts intermarriage during the communist period was common and ethnic differences were of decreasing social relevance. However, the rich multiethnic (confessional/national) mix that characterized Bosnia and other parts of the Balkans posed a challenge to nineteenthcentury nation-state builders. Bosnia’s patchwork of interethnic settlements precluded the possibility of merging Bosnia’s Serb and Croat populations

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into ethnically pure states without large-scale population displacement. Yugoslavia’s various incarnations in the twentieth century provided different solutions to this demographic “challenge.” From 1945 Bosnia became a federal unit of Yugoslavia, a solution that united Serbs and Croats in one greater Yugoslav state while maintaining Bosnia’s borders. The Bosnian Republic was not defined as a state of any one of its nations, making it an anomaly in the Yugoslav Federation, in which all other republics were dominated by a titular nation. Muslims were recognized as a “nation” in 1968, and from the 1970s the communist regime in Bosnia sought to balance public positions between members of its three constituent nations (Bieber and Keil 2009). In parallel with these developments, Yugoslavia became a looser federation, and Belgrade’s tight central control was replaced by increasing autonomy at the level of the republics, setting the scene for Yugoslavia’s eventual disintegration (Ramet 1992). The first multiparty elections in 1990 returned ethnonationally defined political parties to power in Bosnia, mirroring developments in other Yugoslav republics. Constitutional rules ensured that all three constituent ethnic groups were represented in the government. All Bosnian parties initially favored the maintenance of the Yugoslav Federation, recognizing that the dissolution of Yugoslavia would have grave consequences in the multiethnic republic. The Bosnian leadership, together with Macedonia, attempted to broker a last-minute deal in which Slovenia and Croatia would remain part of a more flexible Yugoslav confederation. These attempts failed in the face of Serbia’s larger political objective, which sought to create a Greater Serbia from the remnants of the former Yugoslavia, and the independence bids of Slovenia and Croatia. When the mainly Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat leadership announced their intention to hold a referendum on independence, ethnic Serb delegates withdrew from the Bosnian parliament in October 1991 and then three months later announced the creation of Republika Srpska. Bosnia, with the support of its Bosniaks and Croats, declared independence in March 1992. A brutal Serb-driven ethnic cleansing campaign began in Eastern Bosnia in spring 1992 with the aim of establishing an ethnically “pure” Serb territory that would eventually join a Greater Serbia. The Bosnian Croats lent their support to an independence bid. However, the pro-Bosnian Sarajevo-based Croat leadership had been replaced in autumn 1991 by Herzegovina-based hard-liners loyal to Franjo Tudjman’s nationalist regime in neighboring Croatia. Unlike the Sarajevo-based Croat leadership, who represented a Bosnian Croat tradition of preserving and promoting

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Bosnian statehood, the Herzegovina leadership felt little affinity with Sarajevo or the maintenance of a multiethnic Bosnia (Hoare 1997). Mirroring the Bosnian Serb leadership’s agenda, they intended to consolidate an ethnically pure Croat territory centering on Herzegovina that could be annexed by Croatia proper when circumstances permitted. The Croatian Community of Herzeg-Bosnia (Hrvatska Zajednica Herceg-Bosna) was established in November 1991 and was succeeded by the Croatian Republic of HerzegBosnia (Hrvatska Republika Herceg-Bosna, hereafter Herceg Bosna) in August 1993. Having initially cooperated with Bosnian government forces against a Bosnian Serb onslaught, Bosnian Croat forces turned against their former allies in Mostar in May 1993. The conflict between Croat forces and the Bosniak-dominated Bosnian army was to last for more than a year. Bosnia’s Serb and Croat populations were not territorially consolidated before the war; hence viable portions of Bosnia could not be hived off via the ballot box. Instead the Bosnian Serb and Croat leaderships set about creating ethnic majorities by suppressing opposition and expelling, humiliating, or exterminating people of other ethnic groups; they also encouraged (and sometimes forced) Serbs and Croats from parts of Bosnia to relocate to territory under their control. The projects relied on propaganda campaigns that disseminated interethnic hatred, often drawing on and manipulating historical instances of interethnic violence (Thompson 1999). The Serb and Croat para-states in Bosnia were respectively sponsored, armed, and protected by Milosevic’s regime in Belgrade (1987–2000) and Tudjman’s regime in Zagreb (1990–99). Milosevic and Tudjman met in 1991 to agree on a division of Bosnia along ethnic lines, even as ethnic Serb statelets were being formed in Croatia with Belgrade’s support. There is a vigorous debate about the legality and normative consequences of the international community’s decision to recognize the internal borders of Yugoslavia’s republics as the basis for organizing new states (Caplan 2005). In the context of a crumbling federation, the claims of “orphans of secession” (McGarry 1998), cut off from ethnic kin with whom they had shared the same state, may have a legitimate basis. Indeed, Bosniak leaders were initially as keen as the Serbs to maintain the Yugoslav Federation. But as a panel of international and regional historians and social scientists has concluded: “in politics, however justifiable the cause, once one crosses a certain threshold in the means employed, the method itself becomes the central issue. The Serbs themselves ruined their cause by being the first to raise the standard of a disruptive and repressive nationalism, and finally by treating

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their real or perceived enemies in ways all too often reminiscent of certain practices of totalitarian movements before 1945” (Klemencic 2009, 61). In Bosnia ethnic cleansing was not a by-product of the war but the purpose of the war itself. Greater Serbia, a nationalist project formulated in the nineteenth century, could not be created without eliminating other ethnic groups who lived in the target territories. So “the committing of war crimes was the essence of Serbian strategy in the war” (Gow 2003, 2). Squeezed between the Serb and Croat national projects, the Bosniaks became Bosnia’s principal protectors. From the outset there was a tension between their leaders’ promulgation of a Bosniak identity and their defense of Bosnia as a multiethnic entity. Before the war the Bosniak leadership engaged in its own form of exclusive (ethno–)nation-building and considered the organization of political parties along ethnic lines a natural and desirable state of affairs. However, contrary to Serb and Croat propaganda, Bosniak leaders did not promote Islamic fundamentalism or hegemonic control of Bosnia. In fact Bosniaks did not even aspire to an independent Bosnia. But after Slovenia and Croatia left the federation, the Bosniak leadership calculated that independence was a lesser risk than remaining a minority in Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. In the face of the Serb and Croat onslaught and international indifference, the Bosnian government succumbed to the war’s nationalist logic. Whereas it had begun the war as a multiethnic entity with ambitions to preserve Bosnia’s multiethnic character, the Bosnian government and its territory became increasingly dominated by Bosniaks, many of whom had been expelled from other parts of Bosnia, and a defensive Bosniak nationalism took hold. The design of successive but unsuccessful international peace plans succumbed to the logic and “inevitability” of ethnic division, and even indirectly encouraged ethnic cleansing (Campbell 1998). The Bosnian conflict lasted for more than three years, cost the lives of over one hundred thousand people, displaced more than two million citizens, and brutalized countless communities. The rich patchwork of interethnic settlement that typified Bosnian life for centuries was torn apart. Bosnia became a symbol of Europe’s impotence as a foreign policy actor.

Postwar Para-State-Building and Kin-State Support

The Washington and Dayton Peace Agreements (1994 and 1995, respectively) finally brought an end to hostilities in Bosnia, the latter only after international

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military force was finally brought to bear on the Bosnian Serbs. Both agreements were the result of US diplomacy, which leveraged Croatia and Serbia to force Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb leaders to lower their weapons. The transformation of kin-states from sponsors of war to sponsors of peace was pragmatic and self-interested: in return for moderating belligerent kin in Bosnia, both states expected to receive various international favors. In lieu of formal independence or unification with neighboring states, Bosnia’s Croats and Serbs were forced to accept different degrees of autonomy under the terms of the peace agreements. The 1994 Washington Agreement united areas controlled by the Bosnian government with territory claimed by Herceg Bosna. This ethnic Croat regime, based in Mostar, joined Sarajevo in a formal federation (the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, hereafter the Federation) with most competencies shared with or devolved to ten cantons defined largely along ethnic lines. The following year the Federation and Srpska were brought together in a single de jure state at Dayton. Srpska retained most traditional “statelike” competencies, including exclusive control over revenue raising and separate security and armed forces. Central powersharing arrangements between Bosnia’s three ethnic groups (and two territorial entities) were enshrined in the peace agreement, but they were hobbled as decision-making was dependent on quorum and voting rules that required the presence and consent of all territorial and ethnic groups. Strong-armed against their will into accepting the terms of the peace agreements, the Bosnian Croat and Serb leaderships set about consolidating territories under their control after the war, at the expense of internal minorities, common power-sharing structures, and liberal democratic institutions more generally. The leaders of Bosnia’s three war-time ethnic parties (see below) were legitimized by nominally democratic elections, but they continued to wield many of the authoritarian tools on which they had relied during the war to control public institutions and suppress opposition (European Stability Initiative 1999). Questions of national self-determination and ethnonational rights were also used instrumentally to cement their own power after the war (Bose 2002, 6–7). In this context formal democratic institutions were routinely undermined. Two conditions rendered the Bosnian state an irrelevant arena for the Serb and Croat political elites. First, each group enjoyed extensive de jure and de facto territorial autonomy. Srpska functioned almost as an independent state in the immediate postwar period. The Bosnian Croats were denied formal territorial autonomy, but their war-time party retained control of all Croat majority areas, and many of the war-time insti-

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tutions of the Croats’ Herceg Bosna continued to function. These included public companies, which served as vital sources of income for the Croat regime; a separate welfare state; and even separate armed forces. Second, each group received materiel and symbolic support from neighboring kin-states. Much as they denied their direct involvement in Bosnia’s breakup during the war, Croatia and FRY formally accepted Bosnia’s postwar territorial integrity, but in practice they continued to support the autonomist projects of the Bosnian Serb and Croat elites. As signatories of the Dayton Agreement, Serbia and Croatia are required to uphold its provisions. The agreement also enables both entities to establish “special parallel relationships” with neighboring states (Article 2[a], Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina). International pressure prevented the realization of special relations between Srpska and FRY before 2001. By contrast, in 1998 the international community encouraged Croatia to sign an agreement with the Federation in an unsuccessful attempt to undermine the powerful and largely opaque relationship that persisted between Croatia and the Bosnian Croats. In practice, these agreements were of much less significance compared to the extensive (and often covert) cross-border kin relations that were forged during the war and maintained for some time thereafter. While Srpska and the remnants of Herceg Bosna continued to provide most public ser vices to their populations after the war, neighboring states (not the Bosnian state) provided the rest, including: 1. a common security space, in which Belgrade and Zagreb participated in the financing and management of the Srpska army and Bosnian Croat armed forces, while intelligence and security regimes on each side of the border remained intimately linked; 2. a shared economic space, enabled by porous borders and closely bound to cross-border crime; and 3. a range of common cultural institutions promoting a common identity, from the provision of Serbian and Croatian textbooks in schools to cross-border public broadcasting. In the case of Croatia, kin-state benefits also extended to citizenship, which was available to all persons of Croat ethnic origin, regardless of residence, under the 1991 citizenship law. Croatia also transferred significant amounts of cash to maintain the Bosnian Croat (para-) institutions of Herceg

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Bosna, some of which had no formal constitutional status in postwar Bosnia but continued to function nonetheless. The parallel Bosnian Croat regime was heavily reliant on political and economic support from Croatia, and this would render their project vulnerable to regime change in Zagreb. The political relationship between the regime in Croatia and Bosnian Croat leaders was stronger than that between FRY/Serbia and Srpska. Prior to the outbreak of the Bosnian war, Croatia’s ruling party, the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica, hereafter HDZ), took control of its sister party in Bosnia, the Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica Bosne i Hercegovine, hereafter HDZBiH). The separate HDZ leaderships on either side of the border remained intimately linked both during and after the war. The relationship between the parties was not simply one-sided in favor of Zagreb. Herzegovina Croats held prominent positions within Croatia during the war, helping to shape Tudjman’s policy toward Bosnia while maintaining close links with Herceg Bosna. After the war they continued to influence policy in Zagreb and to dominate lucrative cross-border criminal networks. From 1995, Bosnian Croats became part of Croatia’s electorate, sending representatives to the Croatian parliament from a “diaspora list” by way of their “expat” Croatian citizenship. Thus, the Herzegovina lobby maintained an important role in postwar Croatian politics. Political ties between the regimes in Belgrade and Srpska, however, became strained during the war as Milosevic eventually sought to pressure the increasingly independent and intransigent Bosnian Serb leadership into accepting a peace deal. Although postwar political relations between Srpska and Belgrade were tested, their security and intelligence regimes remained intimately linked. The movement of people—including criminals, war criminals, and security officials (frequently persons qualifying as all three)—goods, and ser vices also continued unabated between FRY and Srpska postwar, while the international community struggled to guarantee minimal communication and freedom of movement between Bosnia’s constituent parts. However, FRY’s international isolation and economic collapse meant it was of little fi nancial help to Srpska. With the exception of the FRY military, which continued to provide various forms of overt and covert support to the Srpska army, there seems to have been little direct budgetary support to Srpska from Belgrade postwar. In fact, Srpska may have assisted Belgrade more, laundering money and facilitating cash flows to Serbia that enabled the regime to circumvent sanctions (International

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Crisis Group 2003, 14). Unlike the Bosnian Croats, whose leaders lacked a consolidated territorial unit, Srpska’s highly autonomous status within Bosnia in the early years of de facto statehood meant that neither its leadership nor the authorities in Belgrade particularly needed to strengthen their relationship.

International Policy The international civilian and military peace missions deployed in Bosnia after the war monitored a frozen conflict of sorts. The country’s three ethnonational groups became ever more homogenized as they were sorted into distinct, highly autonomous territorial units. In some ways the separation of Bosnia’s three communities produced at least a superficially stable settlement. International peace-keeping forces suffered no casualties. There was no outbreak of renewed conflict, and surprisingly low levels of intercommunal violence resulted. A glaring exception was the frequent and orchestrated violence committed against refugees who attempted to return to their prewar homes, thus challenging the ethnic division of Bosnia and the nationalist logic of ethnic cleansing. Central power-sharing structures were also casualties of the postwar settlement, convening only under massive international pressure and producing few tangible results. Alarmed at the slow rate of peace implementation, Bosnia’s top international official, the High Representative, assumed extraordinary executive powers in 1997, two years after the peace agreement was signed. These have been used to impose regulations and to remove officials who obstructed the peace process. However, the international community was initially unprepared to challenge the shadowy political and criminal networks that sustained the nationalist regimes and divided the country into three spheres of political, economic, and social influence (International Crisis Group 1999). Crossborder violations of the Dayton Peace Agreement and of Bosnia’s territorial integrity were also tolerated during this period, including Zagreb and Belgrade’s management and financing of parts of the Bosnian Croat and Serb armies. The international community continued to view Belgrade and Zagreb as potential moderators of unruly kin in Bosnia. But just as during the war, international attempts to pressure Zagreb and Belgrade into moderating the Serb and Croat regimes in Bosnia had little effect as long as the interests of neighboring regimes were closely tied up in joint cross-border enterprises.

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In the immediate postwar period, the effects of “Europeanization” on cross-border relations in the Western Balkans were marginal. The EU’s greatest external influence depends on a credible prospect of membership. This remained a distant and rather implausible prospect in Bosnia, FRY, and even Croatia prior to 2000. International policy and rhetoric played a part in discrediting and isolating the nationalist regimes in Croatia and Serbia, boosting the electoral chances of the opposition in 2000. But it was not until the war-time regimes were defeated that the EU would have a meaningful impact on politics in the region. European diplomatic resolve and military muscle were eclipsed again by the United States in 1999, when NATO launched a campaign against Serbia over the regime’s mistreatment of Kosovo Albanians. In Bosnia the EU provided large amounts of aid to reconstruct damaged infrastructure and housing stock but continued to play a marginal political role. When tasked with direct peace implementation, the EU proved to be singularly ineffective. Between 1994 and 1997 the EU administered the divided city of Mostar under the terms of the Washington Agreement but was consistently undermined by Croat nationalists who opposed integration, ruling their half of Mostar as the de facto capital of a Bosnian Croat para-state.

After Tudjman and Milosevic, 2000–Present Croatia and Serbia, even more attracted by the prospect of EU integration, have as a consequence ceased their attempts to subvert the domestic constitutional order [in Bosnia and Herzegovina] over this period. —“The Balkans in Europe’s Future,” Report of the International Commission on the Balkans, April 2005

The turn of the millennium brought regime change to FRY, Croatia, and parts of Bosnia. War-time parties in all three countries lost power to more moderate forces, leading to a marked improvement in regional relations and prospects for European integration. The EU sought both to encourage and to consolidate regime change by launching an association process for countries of the region in 1999 (the first stage in an EU membership operation, named the Stabilization and Association Process, or SAP, for the Western Balkans) and in 2000 by pledging a commitment to the potential inclusion

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of the five Western Balkans countries in the European Union. For the first time since the war, the EU could wield a credible tool to promote reform and smooth relations. Emboldened partly by the improved regional environment, the international community in Bosnia began to promote various “statebuilding” measures to strengthen the weak structures of the Dayton Agreement. This involved wrestling competencies from the substate entities and coercing the autonomist Bosnian Croat and Serb elites to participate in power-sharing institutions. Some of the problematic connections that persisted between Zagreb, Belgrade, and the Croat and Serb regimes in Bosnia after the end of the war were also reformed. For much of the period, the conditions of EU integration generally complemented and reinforced state-building efforts in Bosnia, helping to break down borders within the divided country and to strengthen external borders that had been undermined during the war. Although the state remains weak, EU integration requirements were used, in conjunction with international force and sanctions, to construct the essential institutions of statehood and to encourage neighboring states to respect Bosnia’s sovereignty. However, despite its expanded power and influence in the region, the EU’s pull has not been as strong or as consistent as many had hoped. Nor has the prospect of EU integration had a uniform impact on the path of cross-border kin relations in the region.

Croatia Redefines Its Interests in Bosnia

In terms of economic development, democratic consolidation, and EU integration, Croatia has made the most progress in the region by far. Partly as a result, the most dramatic changes in cross-border kin relations since 2000 have been between Croatia and the Bosnian Croats. Following Tudjman’s death in December 1999, the Croatian HDZ lost elections to a coalition of opposition parties led by the Social Democratic Party (Socijaldemokratska partija Hrvatske). Regime change set off a chain of events that would radically reshape the relationship between Zagreb and the HDZBiH regime. The close political, military, and criminal cross-border ties that were established during the war were reformed, drawing post-Tudjman Croatia significantly closer to the European norm. In the process the Croatian government redefined Croatian national interests vis-à-vis external kin, emphasizing that a functional Bosnian state is in the interests of both Croatia and the Bosnian

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Croats. Stjepan Mesic, Tudjman’s successor as Croatian president, forcefully articulated the change in policy, stating early in his mandate that those who seek “to prevent Croatia’s European integration have their shelter in the area of former Herceg Bosna.” The sea change in Croatian policy under the Social Democrat–led government also set the scene for a major reform of the Croatian HDZ itself. While the party was in opposition, Tudjman supporters lost power to a more pragmatic EU-leaning leadership that sought to rid the party of its uncomfortable image, including its Herzegovinian connection. Ivo Sanader took over the leadership of the party in Croatia in April 2000 and made reforming the relationship with the HDZBiH and its sympathizers a key pillar of his overhaul of the HDZ and its transformation into a pro-EU right-of-center party. The reformed HDZ won general elections in Croatia in 2003 and remained in power until the end of 2011. HDZ governments were more willing to give symbolic support to some of the grievances of the Bosnian Croat leadership, primarily in a self-interested attempt to win diaspora votes in Croatian elections, given that diaspora seats can make or break an HDZ majority in the Croatian parliament. But the Croatian government was at pains to avoid the impression that Zagreb was interfering in the neighboring country’s affairs so as not to derail Croatia’s increasingly credible prospect of NATO and EU membership. Representing a clear departure from the Tudjman era, HDZ Croatia distanced itself from the leadership of its sister party in Bosnia. In 2006, Croatian prime minister Sanader supported the formation of an HDZBiH splinter party with more moderate credentials (named HDZ1990). Sanader later downplayed his opposition to HDZBiH and began pushing for the unification of HDZBiH and HDZ1990, ostensibly to improve the Croat negotiating position within Bosnia but mainly in a self-interested attempt to win the diaspora votes of HDZBiH supporters in Croatian general elections. However, the Croatian government’s relationship with the HDZBiH leadership remained strained, and Zagreb showed little interest in events in Bosnia. Croatia continues to have a more intimate institutional relationship with external kin than perhaps any other kin-state in Europe, providing benefits to Bosnian Croats both on Croatian territory (by dint of their Croatian citizenship) and in Bosnia, where the Croatian government funds various cultural and educational institutions and programs and continues to pay social benefits to Bosnian Croat war veterans and their families. Many Croats in Bosnia use their Croatian citizenship to work, gain education, and receive

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other state benefits and ser vices in Croatia, sometimes fraudulently through the registration of fictive addresses in Croatia. Most controversially, Bosnian Croats vote in Croatian elections by way of their dual Croatian citizenship, posing incentives for Croatian HDZ politicians to interfere in Bosnian politics. Nonetheless, relations differ significantly from those of the Tudjman era, when a flow of cash from Croatia was used to prop up the Bosnian Croats’ para-state, and Croatian officials routinely treated Herzegovina as an extension of Croatian territory. Annual budget transfers from Croatia to Bosnian Croat beneficiaries are now transparent and regulated mainly through bilateral agreements with Bosnia. With the exception of war veterans’ benefits, financial support from Croatia is now exclusively earmarked for cultural, educational, and social programs in the mainly Croat areas of Bosnia. In 2010, a reduction in the number of diaspora seats in the Croatian parliament further reduced the influence of Bosnian Croat voters and their representatives in Croatian politics. Initially withdrawal of political and financial support from neighboring Croatia contributed to a radicalization of Bosnian Croat policy. Isolated by the new regime in Zagreb, and ousted from power in Bosnia at national and entity levels by a coalition of moderate parties, HDZBiH and a handful of other smaller Bosnian Croat parties unilaterally declared Croat “self-rule” in Bosnia in March 2001. Encouraged by the election of reformists in Croatia and in parts of Bosnia, the international community reacted decisively. Senior HDZBiH officials were removed from their positions. Hercegovacka Banka— the bank that kept the coffers of Croat self-rule, sustained the HDZBiH’s parallel institutions, and provided evidence of abuse of funds that would lead to the conviction of some HDZBiH leaders—was seized and placed under international administration. The international community also supported the efforts of the moderate Federation government (the so-called Alliance for Change [2000–2002]) to eliminate parallel Croat institutions and integrate them into joint Federation-level institutions. Although parts of the governing coalition in Zagreb were critical of international force and sanctions, the Croatian government provided practical and rhetorical support for international actions against the Bosnian Croats’ “third entity” project. Deprived of financial and symbolic support in Zagreb and penalized by international sanctions, the HDZBiH retained electoral support but reemerged in 2002 under a more pragmatic leadership with a reformed strategy to support Bosnia’s central state institutions. HDZBiH officials continued to undermine power-sharing institutions and integration projects at the mid-level

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Federation, where they resented being outnumbered and sometimes outvoted by Bosniaks. But explicit calls for the establishment of an autonomous Croat territory in Bosnia were suppressed. In its place, the leading Bosnian Croat party adopted a two-pronged strategy, calling for the redistribution of governing powers away from the mid-level and shift ing them up to the Bosnian state or down to the cantons, repackaging the third entity project as a quest for a more functional federalism. Lacking Srpska’s consolidated territorial autonomy, and unable to turn to Zagreb for support, the Croat leadership pragmatically calculated that Bosnian state institutions, where they are overrepresented and wield veto power, would provide them with a better platform than the hated mid-level Federation. Croat elites therefore came to champion consociational power sharing in Bosnia, a system that is begrudged by Bosniak and Serb elites alike (the former because of its ethnoterritorial division of the country, and the latter because of the requirement to share power at the center). It remains open to question whether this repositioning is simply a pragmatic front for the old third entity project. Since 2006, as the threat of international sanctions dramatically declined, HDZBiH (and its splinter party HDZ1990) has begun to advocate refederating Bosnia along ethnic lines, though both parties continue to emphasize their support for empowering Bosnia’s central institutions. Following elections in 2010, the same parties explicitly called for the establishment of a third Croat territorial entity as the only way to protect Croats from unfair constitutional and electoral rules that allowed Croat candidates from parties that represent a minority of Croat voters to take positions in the state presidency and government (and in the Federation). Though the HDZBiH leadership uses these grievances for its own political ends, there is legitimacy to some of their grievances. The Bosnian Croat shift from state strengthening back to substate-building was also influenced by the Bosnian Serb leadership’s successful attempts to stop statebuilding in its tracks. The message from the Serb leadership to Croat leaders was clear: division and obstruction pays. Whatever their ultimate aim, it is clear that the direction of Bosnian Croat policy will continue to be influenced by policy in neighboring Croatia, particularly as the international community withdraws from its governing role in Bosnia. When the Croatian government cut off the lifeblood of the HDZBiH para-state in Bosnia and explicitly ruled out future border changes, the Bosnian Croats were unable to fall back on substate-building as their only strategy. Subsequent HDZ governments took a relatively hands-off approach

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to political events in Bosnia, engaging with kin usually only when their own electoral interests were at stake. By contrast, the exclusion of the majority Bosnian Croat parties from government following general elections in 2010 prompted Zagreb’s active involvement in the debate on government formation in Bosnia and the constitutional status of Bosnian Croats more generally. The joint involvement of the HDZ prime minister, Jadranka Kosor, and the newly elected and definitively moderate Social Democrat president, Ivo Josipovic, reduced the impression that the Croatian government was becoming involved in the debate for political gain. Despite protests from some circles in Sarajevo and Zagreb, Croatian officials differentiated their position from the HDZ parties in Bosnia, explicitly ruling out support for the establishment of a third federal Croat unit in Bosnia. Instead, Croatian officials emphasized that the majority Croat parties should be represented in government and mechanisms found to ensure their right to participate in government in the future.

Pan-Serb Links Strengthened

Since Milosevic was deposed, Yugoslavia-cum-Serbia has been generally less responsive to the pull of European integration and less keen (or able) to draw a line under issues related to territory. Nevertheless, the post-Milosevic regimes have improved bilateral relations with Bosnia, boosted regional cooperation, and liberalized the free movement of people and goods between Serbia and all parts of Bosnia. The relationships between the military and intelligence structures of Serbia and Srpska were also reformed, albeit mainly on the initiative of the international community in Bosnia. EU conditionality finally prompted Serbia to hand over the Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic to international prosecutors, and Serbia began to acknowledge some moral, if not legal, responsibility for wartime atrocities. In many quarters, the previously destabilizing relationship between Serbia and Srpska has been declared resolved. Instead, international attention has focused on Serbia’s handling of Kosovo’s secession and the Bosnian state’s dysfunction. Efforts to improve regional cooperation and reform of some of the illiberal aspects of cross-border connections were accompanied by the forging of closer political and institutional ties between Serbia and Srpska. Fresh regimes in Belgrade and Banja Luka are largely free from the stigma associated

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with the era of Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic. This has enabled them to reinforce their relationship for mutual gain. These links could be taken as evidence of increasingly benign and transparent “post-territorial” kin links. Serbian politicians routinely express their commitment to the Dayton Agreement and Bosnia’s territorial autonomy. However, Serbian engagement has often encouraged Srpska’s political leadership, whose radical rhetoric and increasing detachment from the already weak Bosnian state is widely perceived to be the main obstacle to the country’s cohesion and prospects for European integration. Politicians in Srpska celebrate the importance of panSerb ties, while routinely undermining the legitimacy and functioning of Bosnia’s flailing power-sharing bodies. Accompanied by calls for selfdetermination for Srpska on both sides of the border, instances of pan-Serb cooperation have been perceived in the rest of Bosnia as evidence that the Greater Serbian project is alive and well. While these claims may be exaggerated, the relationship has an important impact on the (non)functioning of Bosnia’s fragile power-sharing agreement. Milosevic pursued a violent policy of uniting all Serbs in one state but showed little interest in coethnics in Bosnia and Croatia once his project was defeated. By contrast, his successors have strengthened formal links with ethnic kin in the diaspora. Ethnic Serbs outside Serbia’s borders now qualify for Serbian citizenship, emulating the Croatian example. A Ministry for the Diaspora was established, and legislation defines relations between Serbia and Serbs outside its borders, including the collective rights of “Serbs in the Region” to cultural and economic cooperation with Serbia (Rava 2010, 21). Two special agreements on parallel relations between Srpska and the post-Milosevic governments in Belgrade were signed in 2001 and 2006. The agreements established a Joint Council for Cooperation, chaired by the prime ministers of Serbia and Srpska, and include annexes defining cooperation on a range of issues, including economic cooperation, privatization, culture, education, and other social issues. There have been some high-profile instances of Serbian investment in Srpska, and authorities on each side emphasize the significance of strengthened cross-border ties. However, Serbian government assistance to Srpska still amounts to “marginal financial, political, and social ser vice benefits” (International Crisis Group 2011, 11). It is not the existence of cross-border institutions that is problematic in Bosnia. In cases of conflict where self-determination claims cross-state borders, cross-border kin institutions may be a necessary and fair part of a sustainable peace settlement (McGarry and O’Leary 2004). By preserving

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borders, these institutions may be an “antidote to irredentism” (King and Melvin 2000, 136) rather than an indication of predatory intent. However, in successful cases of conflict resolution, functioning cross-border institutions are accompanied by the promotion of compromise and power sharing. In the case of Serbia and Srpska, kin relations must be analyzed within the context of Srpska’s highly autonomous position within the fragile postconflict Bosnian state. Despite a marked improvement in regional relations since 2000, Serbia has generally taken advantage of cross-border institutional links with Srpska while doing little to promote more functional governance in Bosnia as a whole. Politicians on both sides of the border marginalize Bosnia’s weak state institutions. High-profile meetings of Serbian and Srpska officials convene routinely, often without the participation or prior knowledge of Bosnia’s officials. Politicians in Srpska underline the importance of these pan-Serb ties, while routinely questioning the legitimacy of Bosnia’s central power-sharing institutions. Serbian officials also neglect bilateral cooperation with the state of Bosnia as a whole, though several disputes between the two countries remain unresolved. Most problematically, Serbia has failed to moderate Srpska’s radicalized leadership, contributing instead at times to an escalation in tensions in the neighboring state. Throughout the postwar period, Bosnian Serb politicians have selectively interpreted the Dayton Agreement as validating a radical form of self-rule at the expense of any meaningful element of shared rule. But international pressure ensured that the Srpska leadership participated in (and from 2002 to 2006 even strengthened) Bosnia’s state institutions. As the mandate of the international civilian and military peace missions in Bosnia declines, Srpska’s obstruction of state business and separatist rhetoric rises. Since 2006, there has been a sharp reduction in the use, and therefore credibility, of the High Representative’s executive powers of imposition and removal. During the same period, international peacekeeping forces in Bosnia have been reduced to a mainly symbolic presence. Cognizant of dwindling interest and international resources available to Bosnia, the Srpska leadership routinely questions the legitimacy of the international mission and the central power-sharing structures forced on them by international pressure. Nationalist rhetoric increases in advance of elections and in response to corruption allegations against Srpska’s governing elite. In 2009, when Srpska’s prime minister was accused of corruption by the internationally supported state prosecutor, he countered that Bosnia was a “pointless” country and that Srpska should secede from Bosnia and “meet up in the Eu ropean

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Union,” emulating the divorce of Czechoslovak ia. Politicians in Srpska are not solely responsible for Bosnia’s current impasse. Bosniak politicians have also encouraged separatist rhetoric by questioning the legitimacy of Srpska and by playing on their community’s fears in order to win votes. The international community too is complicit: its extraordinary executive powers and years of state-building plastered over significant cracks in Bosnian society and its political system, obfuscating the need for more substantial structural change. Although the relationship between Serbia and Srpska is often ignored outside Bosnia (even in Serbia), governments in Belgrade also bear some responsibility for the current impasse. Rather than encouraging moderation in Bosnia, Belgrade protects radicalized politicians in Srpska. At worst, Serbian officials have encouraged separatist rhetoric there, using external kin as (willing) pawns in the rhetorical battle with the international community as Yugoslavia’s contours continued to contract, following Montenegro’s secession in 2006 and Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in 2008. Even the pragmatic Europhile Zoran Djindjic questioned the status of Srpska within Bosnia if Kosovo were granted independence, concluding in January 2003 that “borders in the region would have to be completely redefined” (International Crisis Group 2003, 14). In June 2005, Serbia and Montenegro foreign minister Vuk Draskovic stated that should citizens of Kosovo be granted the right to self-determination and independence, Srpska would enjoy the same right (International Crisis Group 2007, 3). Prime Minister Kostunica continued to link their fate after Kosovo’s declaration of independence, leading to an international démarche criticizing Kostunica’s attempt to draw a parallel between the Dayton Peace Agreement and UN Security Council Resolution 1244 on Kosovo, therefore likening Bosnia’s internal relations to relations between Serbia and Kosovo. Serbian statements closely coordinate with authorities in Srpska, who express mutual support in return for various symbolic and practical favors from Belgrade. In 2007, at the height of international negotiations with Serbia regarding the fate of Kosovo, the prime minister of Srpska called for a referendum on independence. This was followed by the sale of Srpska’s mobile phone provider, a key concern in the entity’s privatization plans, to the Serbian Telecom operator for an inflated 650 million euros. In 2008, following Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia, members of the Srpska National Assembly explicitly linked their entity’s fate with Kosovo, describing the circumstances under which they would be entitled to secede from Bosnia.

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Political relations between Srpska and Serbia are, indeed, stronger than at any point since the war. From 2000, successive Serbian leaders established strong relationships with leaders in Srpska. Under the presidency of conservative nationalist Vojislav Kostunica, these links were motivated by ideological as well as political considerations (see below). Kostunica’s successor, Boris Tadic, who represents the most pro-European section of the government and has been at the forefront of Serbia’s often difficult reform agenda, has also closely associated himself with Dodik, seeking and gaining Dodik’s highprofile backing in two election campaigns. Tadic has returned the favor: in 2009, when Dodik came under investigation for corruption, Tadic condemned attempts to undermine Dodik’s “personal and professional integrity”; in 2010, he backed Dodik’s election as president of Srpska. It is often assumed that external kin need protectors in neighboring kin-states more than the larger kin-state needs them. The Serbian president’s close association with Dodik is of mutual benefit. Forced to compromise on Kosovo’s independence and to ensure Serbia’s cooperation with the Hague tribunal, Tadic uses his close relationship with Dodik to boost his populist appeal. Dodik, in turn, gains nationalist points at home from his close association with the Serbian regime as well as the protection of the larger kin-state in his ongoing battles with the international community. It is open to debate whether mainstream politicians in Serbia and Srpska harbor serious separatist/irredentist intentions. As long as the international community continues to rule out further border changes in the region, politicians on both sides of the border may be content to play on the kin relationship for other ends. Politicians in Srpska will continue to press for maximum autonomy in Bosnia, exploiting the relationship with Serbia for political gain. International officials have played down the significance of ambiguous rhetoric in Serbia on the question of Srpska’s status, keen instead to support reformist elements in Belgrade and to reward the regime for living with Kosovo’s independence. The election of a broadly pro-EU coalition government in Serbia in July 2008 calmed fears that the regime might embark on an anti-EU course. Serbian president Boris Tadic stated that his government has no long-term strategic interest in absorbing Srpska into its territory, and there are signs that he may temper the excesses of Srpska’s prime minister. However, despite “the triumph of pro-European realism in Serbian politics” (Rupnik 2011, 23), there is speculation that Serbian officials will continue to use relations with Srpska to compensate for the loss of Kosovo. As the threat of international sanction declines, Srpska’s increasing resistance to common

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power-sharing institutions in Bosnia exposes the fragility of the Bosnian state-building process. The incentive of European integration was expected to replace international force and coercion as the driver of state-building in Bosnia, while guaranteeing a permissive regional environment in which borders are respected. In the short term at least, these expectations have not been met.

Accounting for Differences in Kin Politics

What accounts for the divergence of Croatian and Serbian policy toward external kin in Bosnia? Why has Croatia sought to reform ties and promote Bosnian Croat participation in the Bosnian state while Serbian officials continue to directly and indirectly question Bosnia’s territorial integrity? A combination of factors explains the divergence. The regime in Zagreb was able to make a relatively clean break with kin in Bosnia for several reasons. First, the claims of external kin received decreasing popular support in Croatia after the war. Even during the war, when rebel Serb forces occupied some areas of Croatia, many Croatians had little sympathy for Tudjman’s vision of an expanded state that incorporated swaths of Bosnia. The majority of the Serb population fled Croatia in 1995 after a military operation consolidated government control of the autonomous Serb enclaves; their return to Croatia was directly and indirectly discouraged. With its own borders settled, there is less sympathy in Croatia for the claims of external kin. Herzegovina Croats tend to be stereotyped in Croatia as a rural and less sophisticated population. This negative impression was reinforced by a series of cross-border corruption scandals in the late 1990s, as well as increasing media investigation of war-time atrocities committed by Croat forces in Bosnia. These events turned popular opinion against Croatia’s unreformed HDZ and its network of murky cross-border connections with its Bosnian analog, the HDZBiH. Second, when the HDZ lost power in 2000 to a pro-EU coalition led by the Social Democrats, the new regime had pragmatic reasons to reform relations with the Bosnian Croats. It was in their interests to cut the political and commercial supply lines from Bosnia that had bolstered HDZ power in Croatia. Hence financial transfers from Croatia to Bosnia became more transparent. There was also a strong current in the opposition that had opposed

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Croatian aggression in Bosnia during the war. Stjepan Mesic, a former Tudjman adviser who opposed Zagreb’s policy in Bosnia, became the first postTudjman president of Croatia and remained in office for a decade. He shifted Croatian discourse and policy on the issue of kin in Bosnia, arguing forcefully and consistently for the integration of Bosnian Croats within the Bosnian state and for the recognition of Croatia’s war-time role in the Bosnian conflict. Third, the 2000 defeat of the HDZ actually prompted reform of the ousted party; this dramatically altered the political scene in Zagreb, uniting all major parties on a pro-EU platform. In 2003, when the HDZ returned to power and Ivo Sanader was elected prime minister, his government was more willing than its predecessor to give symbolic support to Bosnian Croat grievances, in large part to win diaspora votes in Bosnia. Nonetheless, because it was keen to differentiate the reformed HDZ from the party of the 1990s (in large part for an international audience), his government did not break significantly with its predecessor. Indeed, in some respects it was easier for the HDZ government to make concessions on sensitive national issues as the party’s nationalist credentials make it less vulnerable to accusations of selling out the country. Finally, the increasingly credible prospect of EU membership complemented, promoted, and consolidated these reforms in Croatia. Much as the countries of Central and Eastern Europe enthusiastically sought EU membership in the 1990s, the prospect of EU membership unites political elites in Croatia, tapping into a strong popular impetus to “return” to Europe as a legitimate, normal, and prosperous state, detaching the country from an awkward “Balkan” history that Croatian politicians have long attempted to reject (Baksic-Hayden 1997). Having consolidated its own borders, Croatia’s turning away from kin in Bosnia and forgoing the Greater Croatia project was a relatively small price to pay for the larger goal of international legitimacy and European integration. Many of the factors that prompted Croatia to reform relations with the Bosnian Croats were absent in the case of Serbia. First, Serbia is a state in which territorial boundaries remain unsettled, as does the legacy of its devastating role in the conflicts of the 1990s. Serbia’s gradual loss of territory and the division of ethnic Serbs across several new states are widely considered unjust and feed into a historical discourse of Serb victimhood (Anzulovic 1999). Kosovo’s independence, supported by major Western powers, provided incentives to Serbia’s leadership to use external kin in Bosnia as

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(willing) pawns in international negotiations. External kin were used strategically and largely instrumentally. But the rhetoric taps into a popular feeling that Serbia and Serbs in general were the primary victims of Yugoslavia’s collapse, despite recent official acknowledgment of some of the worst excesses of Milosevic’s politics. Independent Kosovo remains an open sore that will complicate Serbia’s EU integration path and may continue to pose incentives for Serbia’s ruling elite to use, propose, or at least threaten to support redrawing borders in the region along ethnic lines. In Serbia, even politicians with a clear commitment to European integration benefit from appearing to defend Serb interests in Bosnia. Second, the country’s post-Milosevic leadership represents an uneasy coalition of parties whose reformist credentials and attitudes toward external kin vary widely. Members of the most liberal and pragmatic wing of the coalition, fostered under Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic and led since his death by Boris Tadic, strongly supported European integration. They have been more willing to cast off territorial claims—and to confront other national taboos—in return for international legitimacy, foreign aid, and the credible promise of European integration. But the reformists’ room for maneuver has been constrained by other forces. Vojislav Kostunica took the presidency from Milosevic in 2000, and his party was, until 2008, kingmaker in successive governments. Kostunica is a conservative nationalist who has long argued for the creation of a Greater Serbian political space (Budding 2004, 198). He faulted Milosevic not for trying to forge a Greater Serbia but for failing to achieve it (Batt 2006, 181). In government, Kostunica was instrumental in forging close links with Srpska and sponsoring parallel ethnic Serb institutions in Kosovo. Serbia’s reformists also failed initially to gain control of security forces and organized criminals still controlled by Milosevic-era appointees, as the assassination of Prime Minister Djindjic in 2003 dramatically demonstrated. The new regime in Serbia was therefore unable or unwilling to control many of the covert and destabilizing aspects of cross-border relations, including the free movement of fugitives. Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were both charged with crimes against humanity, including genocide: Karadzic was not arrested until 2008, and Mladic was at large until 2011. Third, not only have Serbian moderates been forced to share power with conservative nationalist forces, but in addition the post-Milosevic coalitions have been flanked to the right by the strongest opposition parties, including the Serbian Radical Party, whose leader, Vojislav Seselj, was indicted by the

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International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and continues to advocate Srpska’s inclusion in Serbia, and, until 2008, Milosevic’s largely unreformed Socialist Party. This is quite distinct from Croatia, where the war-time nationalist party reformed itself even as it faced an opposition that was definitively moderate and pro-European. There are signs of an emerging elite consensus on European integration in Serbia (Teokarevic 2011). The Serbian Radical Party split at the end of 2008, and a splinter party (the Serbian Progressive Party, SNS) formed under the leadership of Tomislav Nikolic on a pro-EU platform. The Socialist Party also entered government committed to Serbia’s EU integration. It remains to be seen what impact their conversion to the European cause will have on Serbia’s prospects for EU integration and attitude toward external kin. Finally, Europe’s gravitational pull has been much weaker in Serbia than in Croatia. Since the conflicts of the 1990s, the EU has been tainted with accusations of anti-Serbian bias, particularly following the 1999 NATO air strikes against Serbia, and international support for Kosovo’s independence. The resolution of Kosovo’s status stoked a popular feeling in Serbia that the EU is not an honest broker. Instead Russia emerges periodically as Serbia’s champion in the international arena, staging strategic investments in Serbia and offering at least the pretense of an alternative geopolitical pole to which Serbia could gravitate. Even Europhiles in Serbia are often wary of the EU’s intentions, fearing that the bloc is reluctant to absorb problematic countries such as Serbia in the near term. An independent Kosovo will continue to complicate Serbia’s EU integration. The EU is playing a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, it is keen to support moderates in Serbia who embrace European integration and are likely to come to accept Kosovo’s independence. On the other hand, the EU is obliged to ensure that Serbia faces up to some of its historical demons, by arresting fugitive war criminals, acknowledging its role in the confl icts of the 1990s, and, most problematically, accepting an independent Kosovo. Insisting that Serbia play a constructive rather than destructive role in neighboring Bosnia has been low on the list of EU priorities. As for Serbs and Croats in Bosnia, divergences in their relations with neighboring kin states and their approach to the Bosnian state can be explained by a combination of factors. The Bosnian Croats’ lack of formal postwar territorial autonomy meant that their autonomy-seeking project was reliant on political and economic support from Croatia. Following regime change in 2000, the incoming Croatian authorities severed most of the ties

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that had sustained parallel Croat structures in Bosnia. Bosnian Croat political elites were forced to reevaluate their interests and came to view participating in and strengthening the central Bosnian state pragmatically. International actions targeting parallel Bosnian Croat institutions, as well as their covert sources of financing, complemented changes in kin-state policy. The Bosnian Croat leadership may respect the state of Bosnia little more than the Bosnian Serb leadership does, but their room for maneuver has been constrained by kin-state politics, constitutional constraints, and the threat of international force. By contrast, years of international state-building and targeted sanctions against the political elite of Srpska have failed to promote more than superficial Bosnian Serb participation in Bosnia’s power-sharing institutions. Srpska’s retention of extensive territorial autonomy at Dayton entrenched the political and financial interests of Bosnian Serb politicians at the level of their para-state. International pressure continues to guarantee Srpska’s formal participation in the Bosnian state; without it the Bosnian state is more or less redundant in the eyes of Bosnian Serb leaders. Extensive territorial autonomy has made Srpska’s elite much less dependent on Serbia, both institutionally and financially, especially when compared to the Bosnian Croats’ elite vis-à-vis Croatia. Nevertheless the close cultural and political relationship with Serbia has been exploited (both ways) to entrench Srpska’s autonomy and to undermine Bosnian statehood.

Conclusions: The EU, Divided States, and the Dangers of Uneven Integration Enlargement is the European Union’s most successful foreign policy tool. Offering a credible prospect of membership to aspiring countries has enabled the EU to dictate wide-ranging membership conditions that have transformed the economies and governance of candidate countries (Grabbe 2003; Kelley 2005). Eventual incorporation into the European Union continues to offer the greatest chance that prosperity, stability, and good neighborly relations will replace economic stagnation, instability, and a perennial fi xation on territory in and among the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Much has been made of the “Europeanization” of conflict management in the region. In Kosovo, Macedonia, and Bosnia the EU has deployed peace-keeping forces,

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police, and civilian missions as part of its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), boasting of a new and unique capacity to address postconflict dynamics in the region. But these tools are useless without a reasonable prospect of EU membership. It is this promise that has promoted better regional relations, discouraged Croatia and Serbia from interfering in Bosnia’s affairs, and promoted a minimal sense of common direction among Bosnia’s fractious political elites. Evidence of a backlash against further enlargement within the European Union would destabilize the Western Balkans and dull the EU’s sharpest peace-building tool. A standard EU integration process will not, however, be sufficient to maintain the integrity of the shaky Bosnian state. Bosnia’s postwar powersharing system was imposed on two separatist political elites and has been held together since through coercive international intervention. The minimal competencies held by the Bosnia state institutions were acquired only after EU conditions were used, in combination with international force and sanctions, to compel the Bosnian Serb leadership to accept minimal tenets of statehood. Many commentators argue that international interference in Bosnia’s governance has had a perverse effect on domestic capacity and conflict resolution (Chandler 1999; Knaus and Martin 2003). Some of this criticism rings true. But the international community’s sudden withdrawal from state-building was premature. By 2006, a process of incremental state-building had grown the bones of a more functional common state that domestic constituencies had begun to invest in (Bieber 2006). But these institutions require ongoing international support and external incentives to ensure Srpska’s politicians, in particular, participate in them. EU policy indicates that Bosnia will be treated as just another potential EU candidate country. But without active support from the international community generally and the EU specifically, Bosnia will remain a dysfunctional, divided state that could, at worst, disintegrate for a second time on the EU’s watch.

Kin Relations Matter More than Ever

Bosnia’s “stateness” problem is routinely presented as an internal issue. But kin-states are also an important, though frequently forgotten, part of the Dayton formula. Croatia and Serbia forced the Bosnian Croats and Serbs to accept a peace deal that maintained Bosnia’s borders; the subsequent failure

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of neighboring states to promote implementation of integrative aspects of the peace agreement was compensated for (and to a degree covered up) by a heavy multilateral presence in postwar Bosnia. However, with the threat of international sanctions dissipating and in the absence of homegrown incentives to promote cooperation among Bosnia’s various ethnopolitical elites, kinstate politics will arguably take on a greater role in influencing the direction of Croat and Serb policy toward Bosnia’s weak power-sharing system. Kinstates can play a central role in promoting the resolution of disputes involving external kin, as recent experience in Northern Ireland and Cyprus demonstrates. This intervention may be crucial for the functioning of fragile powersharing agreements; conversely, a negative regional environment can scupper them (Kerr 2005). The Croatian example demonstrates that once titular nation-states stop supporting the separatist agenda of external kin, the leadership of said kin can be forced to accept their host state as a fact of life, at which point participation in central power-sharing structures becomes much more attractive. However, as international interest in Bosnia declines and nationalist rhetoric rises, some commentators in Bosnia have begun to criticize Croatia’s policy of noninterference, arguing that Croatia cannot simply distance itself from the Bosnian Croats but must become more active in promoting compromise and cooperation in Bosnia. The Bosnian Serb elite is less dependent on the direction of events in neighboring Serbia, given their extensive territorial autonomy within Bosnia. However, the Srpska leadership relies on Serbia for international protection, for rhetorical support, and ultimately as an alternative state. Withdrawal of Serbian support for Srpska’s separatist agenda would undermine the project in both practical and symbolic terms—perhaps fatally—and would force an isolated Srpska regime to participate more constructively in the Bosnian state. The promise of eventual EU membership helped transform Croatia’s territorial designs on Bosnia and Herzegovina; it may have a similar effect in Serbia. Following the Croatian trajectory, if reformists gain the upper hand in Belgrade, it is likely that a pragmatic acceptance of a smaller Serbia with realistic chances of EU membership will win over remaining proponents of a Greater Serbia project, assuming that EU insistence on Bosnia’s territorial integrity is firm. However, constructive kin-state politics cannot be taken for granted. As long as there are incentives for politicians in Serbia, and even in Croatia, to interfere in the politics of neighboring Bosnia for self-serving

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political ends, their constructive engagement will depend on international pressure and firm European conditionality. So far, there is little evidence that the European Union is taking this on board. Indeed, some aspects of the EU accession process may actually encourage neighboring states to interfere in Bosnian politics with divisive rather than integrative effects.

The Dangers of Uneven European Integration

The continued eastward expansion of the European Union creates a new regional border; as a result, divided nations can straddle the border of an EU member and a non-EU member (Grabbe 2000). The EU enlargement model is not necessarily geared to unite divided states where one party to the conflict is excluded from the integration process: “Integration can be conflict reproducing or intensifying if one conflict party is not included in the integration process, and if competing norms or interests reinforce conflictive identities or lead to a policy of hard borders” (Diez et al. 2006, 4). The so-called regatta principle, whereby each country of the Western Balkans progresses on its own merits and at its own pace toward EU membership, appears to be a fair process. However, uneven integration may be destabilizing in a region in which neighboring states share a recent history of brutal confl ict and relations are complicated by a host of unresolved disputes. Dual citizenship, porous borders, and weak attachment to multiethnic states add further complications if states accede to the EU at different times. In 2011, the European Union leadership signed an accession treaty with Croatia setting the stage for its incorporation into the EU in 2013. After Croatia’s accession, there is speculation that enlargement fatigue within the EU and fitful progress among the remaining countries of the Western Balkans will halt further enlargement for some time. Croatia’s earlier entry to the EU will result in a situation in which most of the members of one of Bosnia’s three ethnonational groups—the Bosnian Croats—hold EU citizenship, by dint of their dual citizenship, while the rest of the population does not. Apart from questions of fairness and social cohesion, this situation is likely to reinforce incentives for Bosnian Croats to relocate temporarily or permanently to Croatia and other EU countries. For all their fears of marginalization within Bosnia, it may be that the European Union’s uneven spread contributes to the most marked reduction in Bosnia’s Croatian population since the war.

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As an EU member, Croatia will have a veto on the entry of other countries of the region to the European Union. It is likely that Croatia’s postaccession involvement in Bosnia will remain, on the whole, constructive, seeking to reinforce Bosnian statehood as a requirement for the country’s EU entry while promoting the legitimate interests of the Croatian community in Bosnia. As it nears EU accession, the Croatian government is making moves to reform some of the potentially destabilizing aspects of dual citizenship. However, it is also conceivable that, as an EU member, Croatia could use its veto on Bosnia’s entry to block reforms that are perceived to threaten Croatia’s interests or the position of the Bosnian Croats, or even to insist on the adoption of measures that heighten the Bosnian Croat community’s autonomy. Croatia’s behavior depends ultimately on the political interests of the  regime and the strategic interests of the state. Politicians in Zagreb who influence Brussels may yet have a greater impact on Bosnia’s fate than politicians in Sarajevo. Extending this logic to an imagined EU that includes Serbia but excludes Bosnia presents a much more problematic set of possibilities. Aside from the thorny question of Kosovo, the country is likely to face fewer obstacles on its road to EU membership compared to the dysfunctional and contested Bosnian state. If Serbia obtains EU membership fi rst and wields a veto on Bosnia’s entry, the negative effects could be profound. This fact alone should inspire the EU to rethink its approach to EU integration in the region. Notes 1. See, for example, Brubaker 1996. 2. These figures are estimates (UK Department for International Development, Europe and Central Asia Department; Bosnia Factsheet November 2008). The last census in Bosnia was conducted in 1991, before the outbreak of war. At that time Bosnia’s population was 43 percent Muslim, 31 percent Serb, and 17 percent Croat. 3. NATO enforced the military aspects of the Dayton Agreement until 2005, when EU peacekeeping forces took over. 4. The ethno-territorial division of ethnic groups is not complete. Some urban centers in the Federation retain a flavor of their previous multiethnic character, particularly the cities of Sarajevo and Tuzla, where minorities of Croats and Serbs continue to live. Bosniaks and Croats live side-by-side in the ethnically mixed but divided city of Mostar, and in parts of Central Bosnia. There have been a number of “minority” (non-Serb) returns to some parts of Srpska.

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5. Polling results are mixed and vary according to the political environment. In 2004, at the height of state-building in Bosnia, only a minority of Serbs believed other Serbs wanted independence for Srpska (16 percent) or joining Srpska with Serbia (9 percent). Similarly, only a minority of Croats believed that fellow Croats desire the formation of a third Croat entity (20 percent), the return of the war-time Bosnian Croat entity, Herceg Bosna (9 percent), or some form of joint state with Croatia (5 percent) (Prism Research, Marketing, Media and Social Research Agency, Public Opinion Poll for Early Warning System of UNDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina, May 2004). A Gallup poll in 2011 found that 87 percent of respondents in Srpska believe the Bosnian Serb entity has the right to independence, should its citizens vote to split from the rest of Bosnia. A narrow majority of Croats—56 percent—opposed the creation of a third Croat entity. (Gallup Balkan Monitor, November 2010). 6. The Bosniak Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the Croat Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), and the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) gained the largest share of the vote, marginalizing the former Communists. 7. Milosevic and Tudjman met in Karadjordjevo, Serbia, in March 1991 to discuss the division of Bosnia. Th is was followed by a meeting between their Bosnian proxies, Radovan Karadzic and Mate Boban, in May 1992 in Graz, Austria. Milosevic used the Serb national question strategically to promote the expansion of Serbianheld territory as Yugoslavia collapsed. Tudjman’s territorial designs seem to have been rooted in a more deeply held nationalist conviction that Bosnia was, historically and geographically, a “natural” part of Croatian territory. According to the last US ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, Tudjman said he would be content with controlling less than 50 percent of Bosnian territory, leaving the rest to the Serbs, with a small strip of territory remaining for the Muslims around Sarajevo (Zimmerman 1996). 8. The most reliable estimate of war dead is 97,207 persons; of these, 65 percent were Bosniaks, 25 percent Serbs, and 8 percent Croats (Research and Documentation Center, Sarajevo, Human Losses in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1991–95). 9. Croatia was pressured into delivering the Bosnian Croat party leaders on the understanding that it would receive international support for resolving its own territorial dispute with the self-proclaimed Serb autonomous para-states established on Croatian territory in 1991 (see Galbraith 2002). The following year Milosevic was forced to deliver the beleaguered but uncompromising Bosnian Serbs at Dayton, in the expectation that international sanctions against Yugoslavia would be lifted and his regime would gain international legitimacy. The Bosnian Serbs were humiliatingly sidelined during the Dayton negotiations by the Serbian leader: Milosevic effectively substituted for the Bosnian Serbs, delivering their signature on the agreement sometime after the official signing ceremony (see Holbrooke 1998). 10. The fi rst Special Agreement between Republika Srpska and FRY was signed in February 1997 but did not enter into force largely because the international

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community concluded that it violated the Bosnian constitution. The agreement envisaged significantly greater cooperation between Srpska and FRY than between the constituent entities of Bosnia, including the formation of a single economic market and harmonized foreign policies. 11. Croatia was the first state in Central and Eastern Europe to grant citizenship rights to coethnic nonresidents (Law on Croatian Citizenship, Official Gazette of the Republic of Croatia 53/91, 28/92, 113/93). It is estimated that up to 800,000 acquired naturalized Croatian citizenship from 1991 to 2006 (Stiks 2010, 13), most of whom are also Bosnian citizens. 12. The diaspora list for general elections to the Croatian parliament was introduced in 1995 with a fi xed quota of twelve seats. In 2000, a nonfi xed quota determined the number of diaspora seats based on turnout: six members were elected in 2000, four in 2003, and five in 2007. As of 2010, there are a fi xed number of three diaspora seats. The vast majority of Croatian diaspora voters reside in Bosnia. Since 1995 all diaspora seats have been won by HDZ. 13. Until 2002 a large number of officers in the Srpska army (VRS) were on the payroll of the Yugoslav army (VJ) (Opinion and Judgment in the Case of Prosecutor v. Dusko Tadic, May 7, 1997, ICTY Case No. IT-94-1-T). It is estimated (by Zagreb’s daily Globus, March 16, 2000) that until 2000 around half of all Bosnian Croat officers were on the payroll of the Croatian army. It is also estimated that between 1990 and 2000 at least 20 billion Croatian kuna was transferred from Croatia to Bosnian Croat organs via the Croatian Ministry of Defense (from a report by Dada Zecic, April 18, 2003, in Zagreb’s Vjesnik: Susak’s documents are no longer classified and are going to the Hague. [Suskovi dokumenti vise nisu tajni i odlaze u Haag]). 14. From a report by Zoran Daskalovic, November 25, 2000, in Zagreb’s Feral Tribune: Interview with Stipe Mesic. 15. See reports in Zagreb’s National: Tomislav Klauški, Pomirenje u BiH HDZ-u donosi možda i šest mandata (Reconcilliation in BiH HDZ may deliver a sixth mandate), October 25, 2007, and Robert Bajruši, Squabbling Bosnia & Herzegovina HDZ fractions on Sanader’s Diaspora Slate, November 12, 2007. 16. Even high-ranking members of the HDZBiH admit to having fictive addresses (see Snjezana Krnetic, HDZ- ovac priznao da ima fi ktovno prebivaliste u RH, February 10, 2010, http://www.24sata .hr/politika /hdz-ovac-priznao -da-ima-fi ktivno -prebivaliste-u-rh-158307). Double residency also gives many Bosnian Croats double voting rights in Croatian elections. 17. The largest sum continues to be spent on war veterans’ benefits. See Agreement on Cooperation between Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Croatia regarding the Rights of Victims of War in Bosnia and Herzegovina relating to the previous members of the Croat Defense Council and their families, Official Gazette of the Republic of Croatia, International Agreements Edition, February 2006. The amount spent by Croatia on educational, cultural, and health programs in Bosnia is meager by comparison.

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18. As of 2010, there are three diaspora seats, and votes will be cast exclusively in Croatian diplomatic and consular premises, reducing the number of polling stations in Bosnia to four (compared to 124 in 2007). 19. At the height of tensions between HDZBiH and the international community, Croatian president Mesic met the High Representative and agreed that the “problem of extremists inside the Croat people in BiH actually also represents a problem of Croatia itself ” (BiH Media Round-up, Office of the High Representative, BiH Media Round-up, June 4, 2001, http://www.ohr.int/ohr-dept/presso/bh-media-rep/round-ups/default.asp ?content _id=513). The Croatian government complemented various initiatives that limited financial flows to HDZBiH and supported sensitive cross-border reforms, such as the decision to cut off the transmission of Croatian state public broadcaster HRT in Herzegovina. 20. From 2002 to 2006, HDZ supported state-building reforms that transferred powers from the entities to the state. The Croat elite also continued to push for the ethnically based division of some ser vices from the state level, for example advocating a public Croat channel. Their strategy partly concurred with the aims of international state builders, who seek to transfer competencies from the substate entities to the state, but clashes with international attempts to dilute the ethnic principle as a method for institutional organization. 21. At both the mid-level Federation and in the state institutions, Croats have lesser protections than Bosniaks and Serbs, whose dominance of each entity accords them electoral and other forms of dominance. See International Crisis Group 2010. The Croats’ population share in Bosnia has also declined most rapidly since the war, due in so small part to the ease with which Bosnian Croats could move to Croatia. 22. Zajednicka izjava Predsjednika RH Ive Josipovica i predsjednice Vlade RH Jadranke Kosor o potpori Republike Hrvatske euroatlantskom putu BiH, January 12, 2011, http://www.predsjednik.hr/12 _01_2011_1, accessed August 11, 2012. 23. Social Democrat Ivo Josipovic was elected Croatian president in 2010, replacing Stjepan Mesic, whose term had expired. There are signs that he will take a proactive approach toward the resolution of disputes in the region and in neighboring Bosnia. In 2010, he told the Bosnian Parliament: “as a co-signatory of the Dayton Agreement, Croatia needs to help the Croatian nation there in defi ning its interest and how to achieve it. I wish to emphasize that this means to help, and not to dictate” (Bajrusi 2010). 24. For example, in 2010, under significant pressure from the EU, the Serbian parliament adopted a resolution apologizing for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and stating that more could have been done to prevent it. 25. In 2007, the opening of a new Serbian consulate in Srpska’s capital was accompanied by an official call for Bosnian Serbs to apply for Serbian citizenship under new expedited procedures. Srpska prime minister Milorad Dodik used the occasion to present his application for Serbian citizenship to the Serbian foreign minister.

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26. See, for example, a report by Senad Pecanin in Sarajevo’s Dani, June 26 2009: “Boris Tadic—following in Miloševic’s footsteps.” 27. Descendants of emigrants from Serbia and ethnic Serbs residing abroad may acquire Serbian citizenship by making a written declaration (Article 23, Law on Citizenship of the Republic of Serbia, Official Gazette of Republic of Serbia, no. 15/04). The law was amended in 2007 following the break-up of Serbia and Montenegro (Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia, 90/2007). The new law also allows persons who belong to other national groups in Serbia to attain citizenship (Rava 2010). 28. Law on Diaspora and Serbs in the Region, Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia, no. 88/09). See Rava 2010, 21. 29. See the Agreement on Establishing Special Parallel Relations between the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Republika Srpska, signed on March 5, 2001 in Banja Luka; and the Agreement on Establishing Special Parallel Relations between the Republic of Serbia and Republika Srpska, signed on September 26, 2006, in Banja Luka. By the end of 2011, 27 agreements had been signed between Serbia and Srpska in the framework of the Agreement on Special Parallel Relations. 30. Branka Trivic, Srbija Treba Pozitivno da Utiče na Dodika (Serbia needs to have a positive effect on Dodik), Radio Free Europe, October 12, 2009. 31. The interventionist British High Representative Paddy Ashdown, on whose watch Bosnia’s central state institutions gained their own source of revenue from indirect taxation and military and intelligence structures in the country were unified, was replaced in January 2006 by Christian Schwartz-Schilling, who announced that he would use executive powers only in extraordinary circumstances. The withdrawal of the threat structure had profound consequences for the political environment and Bosnia’s weak state institutions, many of them established only months before Ashdown’s departure. 33. See Dan Bilefsky, Tensions Rise in Fragile Bosnia as Country’s Serbs Threaten to Seek Independence, New York Times, February 26, 2009. 34. For example, a Bosniak party (Stranka za Bosnu i Herzegovinu, The Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina) was instrumental in the defeat of a package of constitutional amendments in April 2006 that would have improved state governance. The party’s leader was the Bosniak member of the collective Bosnian presidency from 2006 to 2010, who encouraged Dodik’s separatist rhetoric by questioning the legitimacy and future existence of Srpska. 35. See Political Tensions Threaten Bosnia’s Fragile Peace, Deutsche Welle, March 1, 2009. 36. See Tadic, Boris, Nacionalni Interes Srbije je Cjelovita BiH (Bosnia’s territorial integrity is in Serbia’s national interest), Politika (Belgrade), October 29, 2009. 37. The fortunes of the HDZ, however, ultimately collapsed: in 2009 Sanader unexpectedly resigned from office and as the head of his party; in 2010 he was arrested on corruption charges; in 2011 the HDZ was defeated in parliamentary elections by another coalition led by Social Democrats.

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38. For example, in a Gallup survey conducted in 2008, 49 percent of Serbs in Serbia agreed that Radovan Karadzic, indicted for genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was a “good Serb”; 26 percent disagreed. In the same survey only 28 percent of Serbs in Serbia agreed that Karadzic’s arrest served justice; 52 percent disagreed. See Insights and Perceptions: Voices of the Balkans, Summary of Findings, Gallup Balkan Monitor, 2008. 40. Attempts by the Croatian government to crack down on “double residency” have met with a hysterical reaction from Bosnian Croat leaders, who conclude that if forced to choose between residence in Bosnia and retaining access to ser vices in Croatia, most Bosnian Croats would choose to move permanently to Croatia. 41. For a pessimistic view of Croatia’s potential position on the future accession of Bosnia and Serbia, see Jovic 2011. References Anzulovic, Branimir. 1999. Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide. London: Hurst and Company. Bajrusi, Robert. 2010. Hebrang Has Dropped His Complacent Election Campaign Mask. Nacional (Zagreb) 747, March 9. Bakic-Hayden, Milicia. 1997. Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of the Former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review 54 (4): 917–31. Banac, Ivo. 1984. The National Question in Yugoslavia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Batt, Judy. 2006. Cross-Border Minorities and European Integration in Southeastern Europe: The Hungarians and Serbs Compared. In European Integration and the Nationalities Question, ed. J. McGarry and M. Keating, 169–90. London and New York: Routledge. Baubock, Rainer. 2007. The Trade-off between Transnational Citizenship and Political Autonomy. In Dual Citizenship in Global Perspective: From Unitary to Multiple Citizenship, ed. T. Faist and P. Kivisto, 69–91. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bieber, Florian. 2006. After Dayton, Dayton? The Evolution of an Unpopu lar Peace. Ethnopolitics 5 (1): 15–31. Bieber, Florian, and Soren Keil. 2009. Power-Sharing Revisited: Lessons Learned in the Balkans? Review of Central and East European Law 34: 337–360. Bose, Sumantra. 2002. Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention. Oxford: Oxford University Press, New York. Bringa, Tone. 1995. Being Muslim the Bosnian Way—Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Budding, Audrey H. 2004. From Dissidents to Presidents: Dobrica Cosic and Vojislav Kostunica Compared. Contemporary European History 13: 185–201.

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Campbell, David. 1998. National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Caplan, Richard. 2005. Europe and the Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chandler, David. 1999. Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton. London: Pluto Press. Csergo, Zsuzsa, and James Goldgeier. 2001. Virtual Nationalism. Foreign Policy 125 (July/August): 76–77. Diez, Thomas, et al. 2006. Project Final Report (2003–2005). The European Union and Border Conflicts: The Impact of Integration and Association. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham. European Stability Initiative. 1999. Bosnian Power Structures: Reshaping International Priorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Berlin/Brussels/Sarajevo: European Stability Initiative. Galbraith, Peter W. 2002. Turning Points: Key Decisions in Making Peace in BosniaHerzegovina and Croatia. In Islam and Bosnia: Conflict Resolution and Foreign Policy in Multi-Ethnic States, ed. M. Shatzmiller, 136–47. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Gordon, Claire, Sofia Sebastian, and Gwendolyn Sasse. 2008. EU Policies in the Stabilization and Association Process. MIRICO Working Paper. Bolzano, Italy: EURAC. Gow, James. 2003. The Serbian Project and Its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes. London: Hurst and Company. Grabbe, Heather. 2000. The Sharp Edges of Europe: Extending Schengen Eastwards. International Affairs 76 (3): 519–36. ———. 2003. Europeanization Goes East: Power and Uncertainty in the EU Accession Process. In The Politics of Europeanization, ed. K. Featherstone and C. M. Radaelli, 303–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoare, Marko Atilla. 1997. The Croatian Project to Partition Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1990–1994. East European Quarterly 31 (1): 121–38. ———. 2007. The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day. London: Saqi Books. Holbrooke, Richard. 1998. To End a War. New York: Random House. Imamovic, Mustafa. 2006. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Evolution of Its Political and Legal Institutions. Sarajevo: Magistrat. International Crisis Group (ICG). 1986. Changing Course? Implications of the Divide in Bosnian Croat Politics. ICG Balkans Report 39. ———. 1999. Is Dayton Failing? Bosnia Four Years after the Peace Agreement. Europe Report 80. ———. 2003. Serbia after Djinjic. ICG Balkans Report 141. ———. 2007. Ensuring Bosnia’s Future: A New International Engagement Strategy. Europe Report 180.

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———. 2010. Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina—A Parallel Crisis. Europe Report 209. ———. 2011. Bosnia, What Does Republika Srpska Want? Europe Report 214. Jovic, Dejan. 2011. Turning Nationalists into EU Supporters: The Case of Croatia. In The Western Balkans and the EU: The Hour of Europe, ed. J. Rupnik, 33– 46. Chaillot Papers 126. Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies. Kelley, Judith. 2005. Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kerr, Michael. 2005. Imposing Power-Sharing: Conflict and Coexistence in Northern Ireland and Lebanon. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. King, Charles, and Neil J. Melvin. 2000. Diaspora Politics: Ethnic Linkages, Foreign Policy, and Security in Eurasia. International Security 24 (3): 108–38. Klemencic, Matjaz. 2009. The International Community and the FRY/Belligerents (1989–1997). In A Scholars’ Initiative: Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies. www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/history/facstaff/Ingrao/si/team5report.pdf. Knaus, Gerald, and Felix Martin. 2003. Travails of the European Raj. Journal of Democracy 14 (3): 60–74. Lovrenovic, Ivan. 2001. Bosnia: A Cultural History. London: Saqi Books. Malcolm, Noel. 1996. Bosnia: A Short History of Bosnia. London: Macmillan. McGarry, John. 1998. “Orphans of Secession”: National Pluralism in Secessionist Regions and Post-Secession States. In National Self-Determination and Secession, ed. M. Moore, 215–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGarry, John, and Brendan O’Leary. 2004. The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramet, Sabina. 1992. Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962–1991. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rava, Nenad. 2010. Country Report: Serbia. San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy: EUDO Citizenship Observatory. Rupnik, Jacques. 2011. The Balkans as a European Question. In The Western Balkans and the EU: The Hour of Europe, ed. J. Rupnik, 17–30. Chaillot Papers 126. Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies. Solana, Javier, and Olli Rehn. 2008. Summary Note on the Joint Report “EU’s Policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Way Ahead.” Document IP/08/1672. Brussels: EU High Representative for the CESP and EU Commissioner for Enlargement. Stiks, Igor. 2010. A Laboratory of Citizenship: Shift ing Conceptions of Citizenship in Yugoslavia and Its Successor States. CITSEE Working Paper Series 2010– 02. Edingburgh: CITSEE. Teokarevic, Jovan. 2011. Ten Years of Post-Milosevic Transition in Serbia: Problems and Prospects. In The Western Balkans and the EU: The Hour of Europe, ed. J. Rupnik, 59–78. Chaillot Papers 126. Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies.

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Thompson, Mark. 1999. Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina. London: University of Luton Press. Venice Commission. 2005. Opinion on the Constitutional Situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Powers of the High Representative, adopted by the Venice Commission at its 62nd plenary session. Venice: CDL-AD. Waterbury, Myra A. 2008. Uncertain Norms, Unintended Consequences: The Effects of European Union Integration on Kin-state Politics in Eastern Europe. Ethnopolitics 7 (2): 217–38. Zimmerman, Warren. 1996. Origins of a Catastrophe. New York: Times Books.

CHAPTER 8

The Divided Irish Etain Tannam

Northern Ireland is now an example of a successful resolution to the problem of divided nations, although disputes continue as to why it has had a successful peace process and a stable political settlement (for example, see Taylor 2009). In this chapter the contribution of European integration to conflict resolution in the region is examined, beginning with a discussion of the partition of Ireland and its consequences. Partition divided not just the Irish national community but also the British national community in Ireland, although the southern segment of the British community subsequently became integrated into Ireland. For this reason the focus here is on the issue of the “divided Irish,” which remains salient and which has been associated with Western Europe’s most violent conflict since World War II. The two segments of the Irish nation have diverged somewhat since partition, largely because of ninety years of living in different states. The subsequent focus here is on Europe’s part in Northern Ireland’s peace process, including its role in improving relations between the United Kingdom, the “host state” of Northern Ireland’s Irish nationalist minority, and the Republic of Ireland, the Irish minority’s “kin-state.” Cooperation between these states is widely seen as crucial to Northern Ireland’s transition from violence to peace, but there is much less consensus on Europe’s influence. Eu ropean integration in fact played a supportive and positive role, including in promoting minority rights protection in Northern Ireland and in providing institutional models that informed the Good Friday Agreement, but it is difficult to conclude that the European Union’s role was decisive.

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Cooperation between the British and Irish states preceded their entry into the European Union (EU) and was also driven by independent imperatives, including the desire to stop violence. The conclusion to be drawn is that the European Union has provided a forum for enhanced functional cooperation between unionist and nationalist political parties in Northern Ireland and between Northern Ireland and Ireland, but that it is difficult to isolate Eu rope’s independent influence from that of the two sovereign governments, which also backed cooperation. In spite of common arguments that the European single market would promote trade and tourism between the two parts of the island and that European integration would erode nationalist and unionist identities while promoting a European identity, there has to date been no significant change on any of these fronts.

From Partition to the Belfast Agreement Historically, political and violent division in Ireland has centered on antagonism between Irish nationalists, who wished to form part of a united and independent Irish state with thirty-two counties, and British nationalists, that is, unionists, whose allegiance was to the United Kingdom. There were two nations on the island as a whole: a majority Irish community descended mainly from the native, Irish-speaking, and Catholic population; and a minority British community descended mainly from the settler, Englishspeaking, and Protestant population. In Ernest Gellner’s (1983) terms, both communities developed as separate national communities during the modern industrial period, although Protestant Ireland was more industrialized than Catholic Ireland. The partition of Ireland by the Government of Ireland Act (1920) and its ratification in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 (which gave the newly created Northern Ireland the right to opt out of the Irish Free State and to stay within the United Kingdom) reflected an apparent attempt by the British state to relieve the tensions caused by these two irreconcilable nationalist sets of preferences. The unfolding story of the Irish border, according to one view, is largely about the assertion of northern unionist independence from Ireland (Coakley and O’Dowd 2007, 7); according to another, it is the story of Ireland’s increasing separation from the United Kingdom (Kennedy 1988). For unionists, partition was a bulwark against a feared nationalist threat. They sought a six-county Northern Ireland that would remain part of the United Kingdom,

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Map 8.1. Percentage change in number of Catholics, 1911–26.

rather than a nine-county Ulster, as the historic provincial borders of the island would have implied. If the border had been drawn to separate Ulster from the rest of Ireland, unionists would have had only a slim majority of around 55 percent, whereas the six-county option gave them 65 percent. Even this latter option, however, meant that Northern Ireland started with an uncomfortably large minority, which was to grow significantly from 1981 to reach 45 percent by the century’s end (Coakley and O’Dowd 2007, 7). Partition implied the existence of two nations, but it created one new state, Ireland, and shrank another state, the United Kingdom, and the new border

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did not neatly reflect any side’s nationalist preferences. In the new twentysix-county Irish state, the population was around 11 percent Protestant, though this was to decline thereafter to 5 percent. Both the first constitution of 1922 and the 1937 constitution provided for the protection of minorities and religious freedoms while outlawing religiously based discrimination. Arthur Griffith, president of the new Irish parliament (Dáil Éireann), met with unionists shortly after partition and assured them that a proportional representation system would be used for parliamentary elections (Lyons 1975, 473). The new senate consisted of sixteen Protestants out of a total of thirty members (ibid.). While Protestants sought, unsuccessfully, greater powers for the senate, they appeared to recognize that there had been a genuine effort to integrate them into the new state (ibid.). Protestants played a role in building the new Irish state, and those Protestant civil servants who did not want to remain in Ireland emigrated. Some civil servants relocated to the Northern Ireland Civil Ser vice (McColgan 1981, 159). The position of Protestants in Ireland was not perfect. While freedom of conscience was protected, the Irish prohibition of divorce and contraception and various cases of Catholic Church interference in state social policy reflected the Church’s dominant position. Demographically Protestants were under pressure to assimilate, in part because of the Catholic Church’s insistence from 1908 that the children of “mixed” marriages be brought up as Catholics. Overall, though, Ireland became “a parliamentary democracy of a classically simple kind, in which freedom of speech, of worship and of political association were in all essentials preserved intact” (Lyons 1975, 683). Ireland’s Protestants may have retained their religious identity, but they fully integrated into the Irish nation. The British (unionist) community in Northern Ireland did not seek to reclaim Protestants from Ireland or reestablish the pre-1921 arrangements, in which all of Ireland was under British rule. Rather than practicing irredentism, Northern Ireland’s Protestants opted for partitionism, with the primary goal of ensuring that Northern Ireland did not become part of an all-Ireland independent state. This partly reflected the fact that Protestants in Ireland had successfully integrated into the Irish nation. In explaining this “integration,” Ruane and Butler have examined how and why Irish Protestants in Ireland were less strongly unionist and held both Irish identity and British allegiance that later waned: “If Protestants are more self-confident now than in the past . . . it is a confidence born of having become ‘Irish

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nationals.’ . . . The effect has been their transformation from a British ethnic minority to an Irish religious one” (2007, 635). There were also different ideological strands among the British community throughout Ireland, with a liberal strand emphasizing tolerance dominating in the south, which was quite unlike the more ethnocentric and Calvinistic Protestant community in the north. Tensions between partitionism and irredentism in Ireland peaked again in the 1930s. Sean Lemass, a later taoiseach, declared that Fianna Fail, then the governing party, was only “a slightly constitutional party,” implying that it rejected the legitimacy of the Irish state and its current borders (Lyons 1975, 501). The Irish Republican Army (IRA) was committed to irredentism. It continued to drill, and incidents of violence against the government and intimidation of juries increased. There were also several murders, including deaths of informers or those alleged to be disloyal to the IRA cause (ibid.). In the midst of this violence, Fianna Fail and the IRA commemorated jointly at the grave of Wolfe Tone, the father of Irish republicanism, in 1931 (Lyons 1975, 503). However, contrary to unionist fears that “the heavens would fall” if Fianna Fail was elected (Lyons 1975, 503), once in government the party sought to allay such fears and emphasized a program of economic selfsufficiency for the Irish Free State. Indeed economic issues seemed to be the greatest attraction to voters in Fianna Fail’s victory of 1932, when its elected members infamously entered the Irish parliament with revolvers in pockets for fear of attack by treaty supporters (Lyons 1975, 504). While initially Éamon de Valera, Fianna Fail’s leader and taoiseach, was loath to clamp down on the IRA, by 1934 he asked for the surrender of IRA arms, or at least the cessation of military drilling. Both requests were rejected, and after a spate of brutal IRA murders, the IRA was declared illegal by Fianna Fail in 1936. Under the Emergency Powers Act, internment began at the Curragh camp in Kildare (Lyons 1975, 535). The fate of irredentism was greatly influenced by de Valera’s strategy. His aim was to “persuade ‘physical force’ republicans to forswear military and adopt constitutional methods” (Bowman 1989, 123); and the 1937 constitution, which he drafted, was intended to make it plain that the claim and goal of unification remained but had to be pursued by diplomatic and peaceful methods. By moving toward a de facto republic, albeit partitioned, and by dismantling many aspects of the treaty other than partition, he cut the ground

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from under the IRA’s feet (Lyons 1975, 535). By emphasizing a new economic policy, he appealed successfully to voters’ economic interests within a twentysix-county state. Similarly de Valera instructed Irish representatives to avoid the topic of partition on the international stage (Bowman 1989, 136). De Valera diluted Fianna Fail’s irredentism because he appeared more aware than his followers of how intractable partition was (Bowman 1989, 146). However, to placate his supporters, he espoused irredentist rhetoric revealing “his primary instinct to defend his party’s republican flank, irrespective of the consequences on Ulster opinion” (Bowman 1989, 129). Thus his onslaught on Commonwealth symbols further alienated unionists in Northern Ireland, as did his conception of “Gaelic” Ireland (Bowman 1989, 128–29). In 1937 de Valera adopted a new constitution that, while its first goal was to consolidate a sovereign Irish state, included an irredentist claim to Northern Ireland. Gradually, however, Northern Ireland and partition were not prioritized among Irish political elites, civil servants, or Irish citizens: “The historic ‘nation’ had to take a back seat” (Arthur 2001, 10). Communication and cooperation between nationalist politicians in both parts of Ireland waned gradually after 1921. By the 1950s, while a united Ireland was an aspiration in the Irish constitution and supported by many Irish citizens, support for reunifying the island by violence had waned, and the priority of Ireland’s policy-makers became the construction of a viable and secure Irish twentysix-county state built on economic development, a centerpiece of which was the Economic Plan of 1958. Taoiseach Sean Lemass attempted during the 1960s to stimulate greater economic cooperation with his Northern Ireland counterpart, Terence O’Neill, but this failed under political pressure from unionists (Lyne 1990). The largely manufacturing economy of Northern Ireland weakened throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, as it did in other regions of the United Kingdom, and unlike in Ireland, it proved unsuccessful at attracting sustained foreign direct investment (Bradley 2007, 70). It also became heavily subsidized by the British exchequer (Bradley 2007, 71–72). By the 1980s Northern Ireland was the poorest region in the UK and one of the poorest in the European Community. While Ireland was also classified as one of the poorest regions, by the 1990s its economic growth rate had risen exponentially, and according to some indices it had become one of the richest economies in the EU. The economic divergence between the two parts of Ireland may have further entrenched partitionism in the minds of some

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southern elites, some of whom came to view Northern Ireland as a competitor in seeking foreign direct investment. While after 1921 southern nationalists had their own state, northern nationalists were subordinated to Protestant rule in a devolved government in Belfast. A unionist regime (it was not a state) was built in isolation from Ireland and left alone by Great Britain. Irish nationalists suffered extensive discrimination during regime consolidation: through gerrymandering and exclusion from fair participation in key institutions, to which nationalists responded in various ways, including apathy and parliamentary abstention. By the 1960s, however, Northern Ireland’s nationalists had mobilized behind a campaign of civil disobedience, based on the tactics of the civil rights movement in the United States. When this movement was met with extreme opposition from a majority of unionists, it provided the space for the emergence of the Provisional IRA and the beginning of the “troubles,” the violence that was to scar Northern Ireland for some thirty years. The subordination of Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland was accompanied by human rights violations in various forms. Added to this, after the suspension of the Northern Ireland parliament and the imposition of direct rule by London in 1972, British policy emphasized strengthening security measures and the use of intelligence forces “to suppress dissent” (O’Duff y 2007, 91). This policy of securitization led to various allegations of human rights abuses—for example, a shoot-to-kill policy, use of plastic bullets, and the relaxing of the right to trial by jury. While aiming to prevent all paramilitary activity, both unionist and nationalist, these human rights abuses had a disproportionate impact on Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland and constituted an additional difference between their experience and that of the Irish in Ireland. Indeed for many observers, systematic discrimination by unionists against Catholics contributed to the strengthening of Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland (see, for example, O’Dowd, Rolston, and Tomlinson 1980). But while the treatment of Northern Ireland nationalists kept their antipartitionism alive or strengthened it, IRA violence, in part a reaction to this treatment, contributed to a violent conflict that undermined southerners’ enthusiasm for reunification. Overall by the 1990s the existence of the Irish border had magnified a deep economic and political divide between Northern Ireland and Ireland and had isolated Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland from Irish citizens in  Ireland. The border had insulated Northern Ireland from Ireland, and differences between both areas were marked. European integration poses a

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number of key questions in this case: How did it affect relations between the two states hosting the divided Irish nation (that is, Ireland and the United Kingdom)? How did it impact the making of Northern Ireland’s landmark Good Friday Agreement and minority rights protection? How did it impact relations on the island of Ireland (including between the partitioned Irish communities and between the British and Irish within Northern Ireland)?

European Integration, the British-Irish Intergovernmental Relationship, and Conflict Resolution in Northern Ireland British-Irish policy cooperation has been a key determinant of Northern Ireland’s peace process and of its multiparty negotiations. From the 1980s both governments pursued a strategy of “coercive consociationalism,” providing incentives for Northern Ireland’s communities to cooperate and penalties if they failed to cooperate (O’Leary 2004, 120–22). The 1994 paramilitary cease-fires, 1998 agreement, and 2007 multiparty settlement may be viewed as the successful result of this British-Irish strategy. The success of the BritishIrish relationship and its consensual style has led to suggestions that the consensual model provided by EU membership and its institutional framework influenced the conduct of British-Irish relations: “Without the embedding of both states in the wider system of European integration and without the models of politics offered by the EU, it is unlikely that both states and other political actors could have found the political capacity and the institutional models to craft the Good Friday Agreement” (Laffan 2003, 14; see also Meehan 2000). This claim is difficult to substantiate, given the various factors at play during this period. The crisis that erupted after 1969 was a key motivation for increased British-Irish cooperation. After 1969 well over three thousand people were killed in Northern Ireland because of paramilitary violence or actions by the British and local security forces. Initially there were grave concerns among Ireland’s political leaders that violence would spill across the border. There were also immediate security risks for Great Britain, known by unionists as the British “mainland.” In the early stages of the crisis, British policy-makers tended to develop policy for Northern Ireland on the basis of separate preferences from their Irish counterparts, but gradually shared British-Irish preferences and joint policy-making emerged. While the 1973

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Sunningdale Agreement, aimed at achieving power sharing in Northern Ireland, failed spectacularly, the subsequent Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) in 1985 marked a watershed in the history of the British-Irish relationship and led to a subsequently cooperative approach to the Northern Ireland conflict. The AIA was an intergovernmental treaty signed by British and Irish governments that established a framework for British-Irish cooperation with an Irish consultative role over areas of priority concern to Catholics in Northern Ireland. The AIA emerged precisely after a long period of unilateral British policy-making had strengthened support for the IRA among Northern nationalists, rather than reduced it. The making of the AIA showed that the United Kingdom felt obliged to turn to Ireland to help it manage the IRA; Ireland took the opportunity to influence policy-making over Northern Ireland without insisting on or raising unification demands. The AIA was a major turning point because it created an InterGovernmental Conference, ser viced by a joint secretariat in Belfast, in which Ireland had institutionalized input into all aspects of British government in the north. But it still reflected conflicting sets of British and Irish preferences.

Table 8.1. Key British-Irish Policy Shifts Agreement

Policy Shifts

Sunningdale (1973–74)

• Institutionalized “Irish Dimension”— Council of Ireland • UK recognition of Irish dimension • Irish recognition of Northern Irish status • Institutionalized Irish dimension by international treaty and standing intergovernmental conference • Institutionalized Anglo-Irish cooperation • East-west cooperation institutionalized by BIC and North-South Council • Amendment of Ireland’s Articles 2 and 3 • Adoption of less absolutist definitions of sovereignty

AIA (1985)

Good Friday Agreement (1998)

Source: Tannam 2001, 509.

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The Irish government “primarily sought to reform Northern Ireland by advancing minority interests in the administration of justice” (O’Leary and McGarry 1993, 246). The British government sought to improve security around the border and minimize the loss of British sovereignty (ibid.). While the AIA did not reflect a full consensus, it institutionalized British-Irish intergovernmental relations and was embedded as a formal international treaty deposited at the United Nations, implying that it could be broken only by the mutual consent of its signatories. The AIA institutional forum provided the main negotiating framework in subsequent years. By 1998 there was a British-Irish consensus on resolving the crisis through institution building, mutual constitutional reform, and incorporation of a Pan-Irish policy-making dimension (Tannam 2001, 511). The AIA arguably opened the path both to the 1994 cease-fires by loyalist and republican paramilitaries and to a successful bargaining framework that resulted in the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998. The content of the Good Friday Agreement has led several authors to highlight the EU’s significance (Laffan 2003; Meehan 2000). Several aspects of the agreement overlapped with EU policy domains. Cross-border economic cooperation within the EU is a component of Strand 2 of the agreement, which deals with relations between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Cross-border institutions with executive power were established over six designated areas of policy, the Special EU Programs Body (SEUPB) set up to manage all aspects of EU funding packages, trade and business development (Inter-Trade Ireland), food safety, language, and Irish lighthouses. Moreover, the GFA established a North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC), involving the governments of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, to develop “consultation, cooperation and action within the island of Ireland, including through implementation on an all-island and cross-border basis— on matters of mutual interest within the competence of Administrations, North and South.” The NSMC resembles the style of policy-making used in the European Council. The plenary meetings of the NSMC comprise the Irish prime minister (taoiseach) along with Northern Ireland’s first minister and deputy first minister. Like the EU, the NSMC has an emphasis on reaching decisions in designated areas by consensus (Coakley 2002, 8). Like the European Council, the NSMC gives ministers “considerable discretion to reach decisions,” but they remain “ultimately accountable to their respective legislatures” (O’Leary 1999, 162). Under Strand 1 of the agreement, which deals with Northern Ireland’s internal institutions, the d’Hondt electoral system

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used for the allocation of portfolios to assembly members was adapted in part from the European Parliament’s system of allocating political offices according to shares of seats (O’Leary 2003, 292). Thus the GFA contains some “borrowed” rules and ideas from European institutions. In addition the EU, the Council of Europe, and the OSCE had all played roles in condemning erosions of human rights in Northern Ireland and therefore aided the Irish government’s ambition to protect the Irish minority there. For example, the European Commission on Human Rights condemned the Conservative government’s management of the 1981 hunger strikes, where ten IRA prisoners died (O’Leary and McGarry 1993, 214). The European Parliament (EP) condemned the use of plastic bullets in 1982 (O’Leary and McGarry 1993, 214). Similarly in 1993 a delegation from the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) criticized conditions in police holding centers in Northern Ireland and revisited in 1999. In 1998 the United Kingdom incorporated the substantive human rights provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights into the 1998 Human Rights Act (Livingstone 1999, 1465). Under the GFA the Irish government committed to ratify the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on National Minorities (Livingstone 1999, 1481). The two Human Rights Commissions established in Northern Ireland and Ireland under the provisions of the GFA have a key role in ensuring that the domestic law does not conflict with international law, including European law (Livingstone 1999, 1465). Thus interventions from a range of international human rights bodies, including the European Court for Human Rights, have been cited as essential in improving human rights for all citizens in Northern Ireland (Committee on the Administration of Justice 2008, 8; Livingstone 1999, 1477). The EU, however, was not the only external factor influencing human rights and aiding the British-Irish intergovernmental relationship and the position of the Irish nationalist minority in Northern Ireland. The United States of America was perceived to be a more important critic by UK policymakers (O’Leary and McGarry 1993, 214), and US investment capacities were crucially important in both parts of Ireland. The Irish diaspora was much larger in the United States than in any European country, including the United Kingdom, and had voting powers and significant organizational resources. International law emanating from the UN and reports from international NGOs such as Amnesty International were also significant, not just European human rights bodies.

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Therefore it is important not to overstate the EU’s role in influencing British-Irish policy. While there are similarities between EU institutions and those in the GFA, the two states’ shared European experience was parallel to the more important security imperatives guiding their policy toward Northern Ireland. The fi rst extensive British-Irish negotiations occurred in 1972 as a direct response to violence in Northern Ireland and before EU membership began. Margaret Thatcher, a noted Euro-skeptic, signed the AIA after the IRA bombing of the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton in 1984, but not from a spirit of Euro-solidarity. The increased institutionalization of British-Irish policy can be traced to the foundation of the Anglo-Irish Division (AID) in the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs in 1973—a unit that became pivotal in British-Irish negotiations. The timing of key events in British-Irish history therefore implies coincidental rather than causal salience for the EU. Indeed the British-Irish bargaining process shares many similarities with bilateral bargaining processes outside the EU, in which the less powerful state achieves its key policy aims—for example, Canada toward the United States (Keohane and Nye 2001, 153–80). Such bargaining outcomes have been found to result from the intensity of preferences held by the less powerful state, the existence of issue linkage in bargaining, and the less crowded foreign policy agenda of less powerful states, which enables their policy-makers to focus on a small number of key priorities (ibid.). Moreover the formulation of policy preferences toward Northern Ireland within each government and the definition of acceptable bargaining solutions have domestic rather than European determinants. The election of a Labor government in the UK in 1997 “removed or diminished” (O’Duff y 2007, 172) ideological obstacles to specific bargaining outcomes. On Ireland’s side, Fianna Fail’s eventual modification of its formal irredentism heralded a nonpartisan approach to Northern Ireland among the key Irish parties. Modernization and urbanization may have paved the way for the acceptability of reforming Ireland’s constitutional claim to Northern Ireland, and Europhiles may argue that modernization and urbanization were caused by European integration, but both phenomena, whatever causal power they may have had in fact, were well under way before 1973. It is therefore not possible to claim convincingly that the EU was a prime cause of cooperation between Ireland and the United Kingdom over Northern Ireland. The EU provided a useful intergovernmental and human rights framework and an example of institutionalized cooperation, but it did not cause British-Irish cooperation over Northern Ireland; it did not block prog-

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ress, and it was often financially useful at the margin and rhetorically supportive of progress, but that is all that may be confidently maintained.

The Effects of European Integration on Relations within Ireland From the late 1980s the financial incentives for cross-border cooperation provided by the EU and the economic arguments that supported such cooperation made it easier for moderate nationalists and unionists to support cross-border cooperation and “sell” it to opponents and skeptics. The concept of multilevel governance appeared to some as relevant to the Irish/ Northern Irish case (Keating and Jones 1995). The territorial boundaries of each state were eroded in significance as regional and local actors became formally empowered to influence policy-making. For Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland, multilevel governance implied an opportunity for greater contact, if not integration, with the Irish in Ireland, eroding the practical significance of the border. From the 1990s the EU increasingly attempted to use its financial and political weight to make funding conditional on cross-community or crossborder cooperation (Laffan and Payne 2001). Conditionality implied that money would be received only if proof of genuine cooperation existed. Under Peace 1 (1995–99) approximately €500 million was made available to underpin the peace process, while €531 million and €333 million were delivered under Peace 2 (2000–2004 and extended until 2007) and Peace 3 (2007–13), respectively.

The EU’s Impact on Northern Ireland’s Political Parties

Party attitudes in Northern Ireland to the EU were constrained by attitudes to partition until the 1990s. For Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland, the traditional view was that cross-border cooperation by definition recognized the legitimacy of the Irish border so that even the moderate Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) in the early 1970s opposed the concept of the pooling of sovereignty associated with the EU. However, by the late 1970s the SDLP had come to support the EU and cross-border cooperation as a model of conflict resolution, and by the 1990s it had overcommitted itself to claims

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that all were living in the world of postnationalism. Sinn Féin also initially opposed the EU on the grounds that it weakened Ireland’s sovereignty, but by the late 1980s it began to embrace the EU’s cross-border dimension as a way of eroding the border’s status. On the unionist side, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) was opposed to the EU, viewing cross-border cooperation as a dangerous step toward Irish unity, and sometimes viewed the Treaty of Rome and Vatican Rome as linked. The historically dominant Ulster Unionist Party (the UUP) opposed the EU, much like many British Conservatives, because they thought that it eroded the sovereignty of the Westminster parliament, though it engaged in pragmatic lobbying and availed of its funds. Both the DUP and the UUP vehemently opposed the European Parliament’s 1984 Haagerup Report, which recommended the establishment of joint British-Irish responsibilities in specific political, legal, and other fields (Hayward 2004, 7–11); cross-border cooperation; an EU integrated plan for Northern Ireland and the border regions; and eventually devolution. The European Union did provide a forum for enhanced cooperation between Irish nationalist and unionist parties in Northern Ireland, particularly when representatives of each section met in Brussels or Strasbourg. Similarly, when it came to EU issues such as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) or regional policy, unionist and nationalist representatives lobbied jointly on behalf of their constituents. Ian Paisley, then DUP leader, for example, was often praised by nationalist constituents for representing Northern Ireland’s farming interests at the EU level. In the aftermath of the Single European Act (1987), pragmatic emphasis on the EU’s benefits for all of Northern Ireland’s people was highlighted by UUP Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Jim Nicholson: “It is possible to use the [European] Parliament to benefit the people of Northern Ireland” (cited in Tannam 1995, 812). Similarly the DUP emphasized the need to secure the maximum amount of EU Structural Funds money from the European Union. Following the 2007 agreement to restore the Northern Ireland Assembly, one DUP spokesman was quoted in the Belfast Telegraph (April 24, 2007) as stressing that his party was keen to discuss EU matters of mutual concern with Ireland and also to build up east-west institutions within the EU, encompassing Scotland, Wales, the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland. Moreover the DUP was not shy about declaring its aim of securing the Irish government’s help in accessing EU funds (ibid.). For the DUP, the feared connection between EU-funded cross-border cooperation and Irish unification

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has therefore weakened—if not disappeared. EU funding and cross-border cooperation are welcomed and are distinguished from attitudes to Irish unification. It is likely that increased east-west cooperation under an EU framework will also evolve, thereby increasing connections between the British living in the “Celtic fringes” and those living in Ireland. The change in the DUP’s approach to the EU is part of a wider change that occurred after 1985. “Regionalism” became fashionable in the late 1980s, and some of its rhetoric seeped into the manifesto pledges of all key parties. Delivering economic benefits from EU Structural Funds to Northern Ireland was increasingly prioritized by Ian Paisley and Jim Nicholson, MEPs at the time for the DUP and UUP, respectively. The large increase in EU money available under the Structural Funds made the concept of a “Europe of the Regions” more palatable to DUP and UUP politicians. But perhaps the underlying reason for the DUP’s change of approach to the EU was the British-Irish policy of coercive consociation pursued after 1985. As Arthur (1986) has observed, by excluding unionists from negotiations and agreements, unless they compromised, the AIA caused “attitudinal change.” Changes in attitudes to the EU are, however, best seen as part of a broader political change from 1985 onward.

The EU’s Impact on Cross-Border Cooperation: Trade and Travel

The European concepts of “multilevel governance” and “subsidiarity” combined with the view that borders should be less important all suggest support for multilevel cross-border cooperation in Ireland. For Northern Ireland, it was argued that as its border region shared many common interests and faced common economic threats, there was a basis for greater cooperation across it, so as to maximize economic gains. Similarly Northern Ireland and Ireland were seen as facing common threats and opportunities in a Single European Market (SEM). As small peripheral regions, they could be excluded from the benefits of the SEM. Cross-border cooperation to attract investment, maximize economies of scale, expand cross-border markets, and engage in joint ventures could help alleviate this threat. Key cross-border networks were set to gain from increased EU funding and appeared to play a key lobbying role in the late 1990s and the new millennium. These initiatives were also predicted to increase local regional cooperation across the Irish border.

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Indeed the European Commission was credited with playing a proactive role in encouraging local input in 2001: “The Commission official who sat on the monitoring committee . . . acting as a policy entrepreneur strongly encouraged the networks to adopt a program approach” (Laffan and Payne 2001, 98). The European Commission rejected the fi rst INTERREG III submission from Ireland partly because there was insufficient attention to providing indicators of the impact and concrete examples of cross-border cooperation (Laffan and Payne 2001, 116). In the submission of programs and projects to be funded and in the allocation of funding, NGOs, local authorities, and local businesses were all involved (ibid.). Th is local activity and the inclusion of local actors in the SEUPB’s management committee suggest that the EU has strengthened partnership and that multilevel governance was emerging along the Irish border. However, EU-inspired policy activism is not the whole story. Demands for local partnership and social inclusion were supported and indeed led by the governments of Ireland and the UK in the 1990s, partly to head off Sinn Féin’s desire to empower local community activists in nationalist workingclass areas (Tannam 1999). The two sovereign governments’ preferences altered in the multiparty negotiations that preceded the GFA, partly to satisfy unionist preferences to seek greater accountability through centralized Northern Ireland executive control of cross-border activities. The Peace 2 program was modified. Peace 2 extended EU funding under Peace 1 to 2004. The aims were to maximize advantages from the peace process by stimulating economic renewal, social integration, local regeneration, and cross-border cooperation. As it was unequivocally under the authority of the SEUPB, it was a more centralized program than its predecessor. The European Commission no longer had a decision-making role on the monitoring committee set up to monitor EU expenditure but was granted “observer status” (Tannam 2007, 351). In short, when the European Commission did appear to exert influence on the role of partnerships and local actors, it did so because it was allowed to do so by the sovereign governments. Multilevel governance as an empirical description is much more applicable to those states that were already federalized, for example Belgium. The EU’s federalizing influence on the internal policy-making processes and regions of centralized states is much less evident. The impact of European integration on local behavior has been symbolic and facilitative, rather than dominant. Again the evidence suggests that the peace process, the move toward power sharing within Northern Ireland, and the British-Irish inter-

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Table 8.2. Trade between Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland, 2003–7 ORIGDEST DIVISION

Northern Ireland (All) Exports

Imports

YEAR



Metric Tons



Metric Tons

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

1,785,886 1,864,296 1,610,718 1,408,331 1,484,205 1,576,820 1,658,804 1,761,272

1,693,757 2,111,816 2,115,501 2,281,758 2,394,728 2,416,869 2,391,255 2,689,345

1,205,037 1,231,260 1,036,313 1,042,326 1,149,298 1,275,640 1,303,425 1.343,005

2,706,624 2,668,286 2,622,845 2,584,419 2,789,384 3,340,897 3,339,029 3,454,405

Source: Central Statistics Office Ireland n.d.b.

governmental relationship have been far more powerful influences on local behavior. Table 8.2 shows that there has been some increase in cross-border trade since 2000 but not consistently and from a low base (Bradley and Birnie 2001, 31–32). This increase has coincided with the implementation of the GFA and the creation of Intertrade Ireland to foster closer cooperation. It is therefore not easy to argue that any increase in cross-border trade is a result of the EU or of its policy initiatives. Optimism about the EU’s impact on trade reached a peak in the 1980s with the decision to create a Single European Market (SEM) by 1992, removing barriers to trade. However, the SEM initiative did not produce a significant increase in cross-border trade. In late 2008 onward there were fears on the part of Irish policy-makers and business communities that the weakened value of Sterling was encouraging increased numbers from Ireland, a member of the Euro-zone, to shop in Northern Ireland, undermining Irish retailers’ interests, particularly along the border. Irish government and businesses reacted to this development by stressing the need to shop in Ireland, not Northern Ireland, highlighting how for the Irish state, national interest was defined as excluding Northern Ireland. Moreover in 2009 the head of Intertrade Ireland, one of the implementation bodies established under the GFA, stated that cross-border trade was 80 percent less than it should be when compared to forty cases sharing

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a land border. Intertrade Ireland blamed local information deficits about markets and difficulties in fostering local cross-border business relations, rather than currency and taxation differences. There is no compelling evidence that European integration has caused increased cross-border economic cooperation. An underlying obstacle to advancing cross-border economic cooperation is that the two economies are “out of alignment” (Bradley 2007, 78). In particular Northern Ireland has only limited policy-making autonomy in economic planning and is still heavily subsidized by the United Kingdom (ibid.). Its exports continue to go primarily to the UK, and it still suffers from the decline of traditional industries (ibid.). In Ireland there is greater trade diversification and inward investment and more emphasis on information technology through US multinationals (see above). The two economies therefore have very different structures and face different problems, though now both are deeply affected by governmental cutbacks triggered by the global financial crises. European integration has not, it seems, led to any significant harmonization of economic structures or activities. It is true that cross-border interactions have generally increased since 1994. In addition Irish and Northern Irish state agencies with responsibility for tourism now work together to market Northern Ireland and Ireland. However, this initiative emerged from British-Irish executive pressure, rather from the EU. There are no official statistics indicating the numbers of Irish citizens who travel to Northern Ireland and vice versa by car. Table 8.3 presents an estimate of cross-border

Table 8.3. Cross-Border Passenger Movement by Bus and Rail, 2000–2006 (000s)

Period 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Total Rail and Bus

Total Rail and Bus (overseas residence)

Estimate of Total Bus and Rail (Republic of Ireland residence)

1, 015 954 965 970 915 885 833

545 568 531 524 488 469 438

470 386 434 446 427 416 395

Source: Central Statistics Office Ireland n.d.a.

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travel by Irish citizens, excluding car travel. While an increase occurred after 2000, this increase tailed off in 2005 and 2006. This cursory view of cross-border trade and travel statistics suggests that neither the EU’s nor the GFA’s impact has been significant, but the absence of car travel data and of local regional cross-border data limits our ability fully to assess the EU and GFA’s respective impacts on behavior.

Europe’s Impact on Identity in Northern Ireland7

Various academic schools of thought have proposed the hypothesis that economic functional cooperation and the process of European integration would create a sense of “we-feeling” and community (Deutsch 1957) between different nationalities. More recently constructivists have examined whether the EU is building a European identity. The expected hypothesis from these bodies of argument is that British and Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland will increasingly feel a shared European identity and not regard their own national identities as so salient. There is, however, no evidence that the EU is altering identity in Northern Ireland. Most respondents define themselves as being Irish or British or both. In 1999 Protestants in Northern Ireland defined themselves as British (86 percent) and Catholics defined themselves as British-Irish (50 percent), with only 29 percent of Catholics defining themselves as Irish citizens solely (Fahey, Hayes, and Sinnott 2005, cited in Coakley 2007a, 6). Only 8 percent of Catholics defined themselves in the “other category” (not specified), and barely any Protestants defi ned themselves in this category (ibid.). From a Eurobarometer poll rating European identity, it did not appear to have high levels of support, as Table 8.4 shows. Similarly when asked to state their identities in a 2003 poll, few respondents answered that they felt European. Clearly for most people, their national identities do not coexist with a Eu ropean identity and are not subsumed by a Eu ropean identity, even though, as Table 8.6 suggests, a lot refuse to identify as either nationalist or unionist. While the findings in Table 8.6 do not have any direct implications for the results about European identity, they do raise the question of whether any softening of attitudes to the Irish border has occurred. The results from

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Chapter 8

Table 8.4. Levels of European Identity by Religion, Northern Ireland, 2002 Survey Response I always think of myself as European I sometimes think of myself as European I never think of myself as European Don’t know

% Catholic

% Protestant

% No Religion

Total

7

6

15

8

27

19

29

23

64

73

54

67

2

3

3

2

Source: ARK Northern Ireland 2003a.

Table 8.5. Religion and Identity as Percentage of Each Population, 2003 Identity British English European Irish Northern Irish Scottish Ulster Welsh None

Catholic

Protestant

No Religion

Total

12 2 4 65 30 1 1 0 1

78 1 3 5 34 1 19