Since 1989, a variety of measures and legal frameworks have gradually crystallized into something that could be called a European model for the protection of national minorities. International organizations like to take credit for this development. Different institutions have experimented with different ways of promoting international norms, and the sum of these attempts and achievements has often been regarded as exemplary. The Council of Europe, for instance, has managed to introduce a legally binding treaty (the Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has established a special diplomatic institution aimed at intervening in ethnic conflict at its earliest stage (the High Commissioner on National Minorities), and the EU and NATO have made the protection of minorities one of the preconditions for countries to be admitted as new members.

A superficial interpretation of this state of affairs would suggest that international institutions in Europe should pride themselves not only on having devised a complex system for the promotion of minority protection mechanisms but also on having in this way successfully avoided the spread of ethnic conflict, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, a region that was, in the beginning of the 1990s, widely regarded as particularly prone to such conflict.

Yet, however successful this recent history may seem, it should not make Europeans self-congratulatory. Not all problems that minority citizens are faced with are now resolved, and there are even a few new issues that need to be considered. This is one of the main messages in The Protection of Minorities in the Wider Europe, the excellent new volume in the Palgrave Series in European Union Politics. This book gives readers a sense of both the intricacies of the development of minority protection regimes in Europe and the complexity of the realities on the ground. It does so not by making a single argument and elaborating that argument in a systematic way, but by looking at the internationalization of minority rights from different angles. Individual chapters deal with the EU’s enlargement and conflict management strategies, the actions of the OSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities, and the Council of Europe’s attempts at legal codification. In addition, the volume reserves some space for exploring the political effects and implications of some of these legal developments through the examination of a number of specific cases in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans (Bulgaria, Slovakia, Romania, Kosovo, Macedonia) and in the Greece-Turkey-Cyprus triangle. By treating these cases separately it becomes clear that each one is, to a certain extent, driven by its own particular dynamics.

The volume comes closest to the formulation of an overall argument in the long and balanced opening chapter by Will Kymlicka. Kymlicka traces the recent history of the propagation of minority rights norms in Europe and shows that it has not been the smooth process that it is sometimes thought to be. While there might have been a consensus on the need for minority protection, there has also been a lot of disagreement between institutions and countries on what sort of protection is actually needed. Although there has been much talk about the importance of international legal norms, there has simultaneously been a reluctance to promote territorial autonomy rights or codify self-government rights for minorities. Much of that hesitance has been driven by a fear for cascading demands for secession. Instead, some institutions have opted for a more narrow focus on the promotion of cultural rights (such as minority media) and effective political participation.

Kymlicka has described this development elsewhere before, but in this volume he explores it in great detail. It is also reiterated in a more explicit formulation in the final chapter, written by one of the volume’s editors. While European institutions themselves may have argued that they have promoted minority protection because they believe in its intrinsic normative value (and thus in its potential as a standard that can be codified in law), their practice reveals that they have promoted it mainly (and merely) as a means to create stability and security. The final chapter explains why this is problematic: ‘the predominance of the security track may have the diametrically opposite effect of actually exacerbating state intransigence and incentivizing violence’ (p. 278). This claim sounds perhaps a bit too strong, but it is true that when supposedly universal legal norms are in fact used as political tools, they may cause frustration. For some groups or countries international legal provisions might appear to be more valid and more strict than for others. And some states may utilize a lack of fundamental agreement on far-reaching international standards as a way to justify their own reluctance to deal with demands that their national minorities put forward, even if these demands are reasonable and justifiable.

This book thus offers a broad view on how the internationalization of minority rights in Europe has come about and how it has led to a variety of political implications. Less attention, however, has been given to a number of sociological questions one can ask about minority governance in Europe today. Arguably, there is a potential disconnection between the current legal frameworks and the socio-political reality, and that too deserves an academic discussion. More in particular, how are minorities to be recognized as national minorities? The term national minority does not describe a pre-existing, pre-political reality so much as it is a label that creates such a reality. People can be grouped under a particular minority label, or they may choose to affiliate themselves with such a label. Yet they may also be grouped under other, competing categories at the same time. They may be seen, or see themselves, as members of a gender group, a nation, a family, a socio-economic class, a religious collective, a language group, a territorially defined unit and so on. People who, seen from one particular perspective, belong to the same minority group may in other important ways stand in opposition to each other. The existence of minority groups is thus not given. It is the result of the act of making one label more prominent and more relevant as a frame for identification, affiliation, and politicization. The making of a national minority is something that is actively pursued (through discrimination or through emancipation) not by the abstract collective of a national minority itself, but by particular actors, including organizations, individual ethno-political activists and policy-makers. This last aspect is important in the context of the increasing number of minority groups in Europe that may be in need of some sort of protection but are currently not regarded as the subject of any legal national minority protection measures.

In this book we do not get a thorough discussion of this last aspect. But we get plenty of other discussions instead. The chapters offer detailed analyses; they are written by experts and thus based on a thorough knowledge of all current legal mechanisms. In clear terms they explain and explore how these mechanisms work, how they have been interpreted in different domestic contexts, and how at certain times they have been the topic of intense politicization. Most of the authors have already widely published about these topics before. But it is worthwhile to have their work now together in one comprehensive volume.