Browsing by Author "Westö, Jan"

The ethos of this research lies in the idea that how the society treats its minorities reflects its cultural and moral values. The master’s thesis analyses the institutional process of the Council of Europe when it tried to solve the minority question between 1990 and 1995. The minority question means here the difficult status of national minorities within the nation-state system. The research answers two major questions: how the Council of Europe defined the minority question, and how the institutional process of solving the minority question was conducted. The end results for the process were the creation of the Framework Convention for the protection of National Minorities. It is the most extensive international document on the rights of minorities. The research aims to prove the hypothesis of the existence of European horizons that enabled the international and institutional efforts to protect minority rights in early 1990s. These horizons are examined in the context of decision-making and debates within the Council of Europe and its actors. The research analyses the actions of the Council of Europe as an institutional decision-making process with three distinctive phases: 1) ideological change that indicated the need for a solution to the minority question, 2) institutional adaptation that evaluated and decided the right balance between the promotion and level of protection of minority rights, and nation-states sovereignty; and 3) institutional answer, the solution to the initial problem: the end results. This study of the institutional policy process is an historical and detailed interrogation that aims to reveal and to identify the developments of the process, and all the elements related to it. Hence, the research places significant emphasis on the analysis of ideas and debates, objectives and perspectives on minority rights in the decision-making of the institutional actors. With the analysis of the institutional process the research indicates that the main reasons behind the European horizons for minority rights protection were: 1) to reduce the possibilities for minority-majority related conflicts, and 2) the ideological change in general attitude towards the status of minorities in nation-state societies. Will Kymlicka is the most notable academic who have arrived to same conclusions. Furthermore the analysis shows how the different institutional actors of the Council of Europe understood the concept of minority rights, and more importantly that a universal definition for minorities was unnecessary in the context of European institutions whose existence is based on the international cooperation of nation-states. The take on definition of minorities discusses with research by Patrick Thornberry, Maria Amor Martin Estébanez, Marc Weller, Hans-Joachim Heinze, Asbjörn Eide and Jennifer Jackson Preece. The research views the end result of the policy process, the Framework Convention, as an institutional solution that is a consensus emphasising the objectives of the nation-states. This is visible in the analysis of the institutional process both in political decision-making and in debates on social and juridical perspectives. The nation-state objectives stand out especially after the Vienna Summit in 1993 that increased the focus on turning the political commitment into legal obligations. In addition, the Vienna Summit commenced the narrowing of the European horizons that finally closed up in 1995 when the Framework Convention was created.