Minorities, citizenship and Europe

György Schöpflin

At the heart of the problem of minorities is the failure of democratic theory and forms of citizenship to develop an adequate response to collectivities which have a different ethnic identity to that of the ethnic majority. Nominally, in a democratic polity each individual citizen enjoys exactly the same rights of citizenship as any other, regardless ethnicity. In reality, because citizenship is automatically, implicitly structured by the ethno-cultural norms of the majority - there are a few exceptions - minorities are left in an unequal position. Furthermore, because some minorities are tacitly thought to have "undesirable" ethnicity, as opposed to others who have "desirable" forms of it (more below), attempts to validate the rights of ethnic minorities run repeatedly into this wall of silent disapproval.

European democracy begins from powerful universalist assumptions that are seldom, if ever, deconstructed. Universalism proceeds from assumptions at what might be called the machine code level that one form of identity is morally superior to all others and that the entire world is inexorably moving towards that identity. Europe has inherited these tacit assumptions from the Enlightenment and ever since the 18th century has sought steadily to spread them in the form of a superior, rationally cogent proposition. The original Enlightenment postulate was that humanity was moving (and should be moved) towards a single overarching ideal of emancipation or freedom; that there existed a speculative unity of all knowledge; and that the unification of all into a single, transcendental, universal identity of reason was the meaning of history.

These assumptions have not disappeared, but have merely assumed a different form. In our day, the central universalist assumption is the superiority of democracy and human rights as defined by Europe and/or the United States. The possibility that other, non-sanctioned forms of democracy and human rights may exist in non-Europe is dismissed as silly or irrelevant or reactionary or as just incomprehensible. It is worth adding that as Europe's power has begun to wane, we had better start reassessing these assumptions, but that's another story. Note here that both liberalism and Marxism were both legatees of Enlightenment universalism and that their protagonists believe in their own moral superiority. And it should be stressed that neither shrank from imposing their universalism - their supposed universalism - on weaker parties.

It is effectively impossible to make sense of the extraordinary obstinacy with which the devotees of a universalist concept citizenship reject anything that, to them, smacks of particularism without first recognising their tacit universalist assumptions. All sorts of strategies are employed to delegitimate the challenges to universalism that particularism raises, from charges of irrationality to sabotage of the unity of the state; in even fairly decentralised states, ethnically based differentiation is taboo.

There is an ambiguity in what exactly ethnicity is. It can mean the socio-cultural identity of a group that is a minority in a state population, in which case it is defined as ethnic in contrast to the majority which is not so defined – this is generally a negative reference. Or ethnic can refer to a minority immigrant population, but conventionally only if they have migrated from a former colonial territory, so that Gujeratis in Britain or Arabs in France are ethnic; Poles or Lithuanians in Britain are not. In this case, it would appear that their status is defined by their inherited colonial origins and, hence, the positive assessment of their ethnic identity is to do with colonial guilt. In US usage, any immigrant group counts as ethnic as long as it can hyphenate itself (e.g. Polish-American, African-American), but the original settlers – British or Dutch – are not. Thus here ethnic refers to late settlement. A distinct group that is perceived as suffering social exclusion may also be termed ethnic, like the Roma. The elephant in the room, however, is the identity of collectivities deemed to be state-constitutive state majorities. These groups are not regarded as ethnic, even although their identity construction differs in no way from those of ethnic minorities.

All systems of power have a propensity to homogenise those affected by the exercise of power, the ruled, to make them "legible" by the state and to allow the state to regulate their affairs. This homogenisation is particularly difficult to attain when a group speaks another language and demands rights that go with that language, like recognition of cultural difference as having if not equality, certainly equivalence with regard to the majority. States deeply dislike such demands and the system of power on which the state rests seldom makes the allowances needed for ethnic minorities. Institutions function much better when they are monolingual, as well as being cheaper, and a territorial arrangement is simpler when only one language is used there. Ethnic and linguistic minorities find this monistic dynamic of power particularly difficult to deal with, as in the eyes of the linguistic majority monoculturalism is the naturalised norm.

What the current concept of citizenship demonstrates, therefore, is a conscious determination to ignore the sociological reality that a section of the population of the state may reproduce an identity that differs from that of the majority, thereby making the group's access to the real and symbolic goods of the state unequal. This denial of full civic status to minorities is partly explained by the proposition that the existence of a culturally and/or linguistically different group within the boundaries of the state shows up the ethnic quality of the majority, something that is regarded as unacceptable when the ethnic majority portrays itself as the guarantor of civic norms as a post-national collectivity. This process is firmly ideological, of course, can be traced back to a universalist axiology, meaning that the covert ethnic quality of majorities cannot be acknowledged in the current climate of opinion in Europe.

There are, for what it is worth, explanations for this state of denial. After 1945, when the process of European integration was launched, it was vital to downplay the role of nationhood. National states had been seen, accurately, as the source of conflict in Europe and for many, nationalism led automatically to fascism and Nazism, although this claim fails to explain why these phenomena were to be found only in  some states and not all.

In order to ensure the success of the European project, a tacit distinction was made between "good" and "bad" national identities, with the states of Western Europe falling into the first category, while ethnic minorities and the national identities of the Central and South-East Europeans fell into the latter. The West Europeans were in the first category by reason of their readiness to cooperate at the international level. The collapse of communism brought the states of Central and South-East Europe into the wider European orbit and it emerged that communism, having destroyed what civic organisation and values had existed, was being replaced by a nationalism that could be defined as ethnically-driven and, worse, it was reacting back on the supposedly post-national states of the West.

The collapse of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars of Yugoslav succession raised the spectre of state collapse under ethnic pressure, which led ethnic majorities in Western Europe to deny their own ethnic quality even more determinedly than before. This produced the added advantage that the site of persisting ethnicity could be safely displaced to the remote outer European periphery, thereby securing the denial of it in the West.

At more or less the same time, as unease with the extension of European integration began to manifest itself, there was a slow revival of the legitimacy of the nation-state concept, which was supposedly a civic nation-state, thus making the invisibility of the majority ethnicity more important than ever. The overall process, therefore, made the prospect of enjoying full citizenship rights for historic minorities ever more difficult to attain.

In these circumstances, it is understandable why the European Union has been slow and, indeed, inexperienced in the protection of minorities, although some standards were established by the Council of Europe; however, these were voluntary and could not be enforced. There is some discussion of a "European standard" of minority protection, but at most this is an ideal that majorities can ignore. Nevertheless, as the need for identifying a European demos gains force, it becomes evident that ethnic minorities, as equal citizens of Europe, are part of that demos, but are in a worse position with respect to EU rights than ethnic majorities. This is a problem that the EU will have to confront seeing that around ten percent of EU citizens speak a minority language.

Basically, by virtue of their minority status, minorities suffer a series of disabilities in terms of language rights, the capacity to secure cultural reproduction and access to both the goods of the state and the power that is vested in the state and in the EU. It is worth noting that almost without exception minorities are losing ground as far as their overall numbers are concerned; in other words, majority policies leave them subject to erosion and assimilation. The cultural prestige of the majority's language and culture reduce their life chances as members of minorities and some of those members conclude that they would be better off by assimilating to the majority, which is necessarily also an ethnic community. This cannot be called civic equality.

There is a further disability in the case of ethnic minorities - they are in competition with what might be called "universalist" or "pseudo-universalist" minorities, for whom the nation-state, in its current configuration, is ready to make space. These include minorities structured around gender-orientation, race, immigrant groups, those suffering physical disability and various other groups claiming recognition. Although the way in which these groups organise and identify themselves is structurally the same as ethnic minorities, they do not challenge the machine-code assumptions of the state, that its civic norms are universal, even when the actual evidence is wholly at variance with this proposition. Thus Anglo-Saxon feminists are completely different from their French counterparts, but this troubles no one, it is simply ignored, together with the entire package which results in the ethnic colouring of civic norms in supposedly post-national states.

In the foregoing, references to ethnic minorities have been to those defined by their language, culture, history, religion, above all their own individual discursive capital. These groups are further defined by being generally territorial, by their having been in existence since before the coming of modernity - 1789 is the symbolic date - and by the involuntary change of state frontiers. But this is only one of the various categories of minorities in Europe today.

Rather more numerous are the Third World immigrants and their descendants, who may be differentiated by skin colour and/or religion and, though this is seldom identified as a factor, by their inherited and transplanted sociological status, being mostly ex-peasants; further, they will generally come with a different family structure - the extended family or the matrifocal family. For these groups, strategies of integration are based on the project of multi-culturalism, which basically says that they may retain - sometimes, must retain - their original cultures or those features of their original cultures that are compatible with majority regulation. But there is no question of their being permitted to reproduce their language or ethnic discourses.

In the case of France, this ban on the reproduction of language is quite explicit - as it is for historic minorities in France - while elsewhere it implicit. Certainly, demands from immigrant minority groups for state recognition of and support for their languages are dismissed as "divisive"; in other words, there are clear limits to multi-culturalism and these are set by the majority, without the minority being given a real voice in the matter. Furthermore, minority groups are largely assumed to be identical among themselves, so that all Muslims, say, are alike, ditto all South Asians, Africans, Chinese etc. Conflict among them, which is real, is ignored. To all these problems should be added the tacit issue of race and racial differentiation, which is firmly assumed to be a white majority practice, although reverse racism and exclusion are not unknown, together with friction between different immigrant and ex-immigrant groups.

The third category of minorities need not detain us for long - this is that of indigenous people, a UN defined status, which affects only the Sami as far as Europe is concerned. Fourth, a special category of its own, are the Roma, who are differentiated in part by physiognomical difference, by their social organisation on the basis of the extended family, by their non-territoriality, by their seeming reluctance to integrate into majority norms and their frequent low status. The fifth category is a hybrid, the Russian-speakers of the Baltic states, who are partly a historic minority, having lived in the region since well before 1914, but partly - the greater part - an immigrant minority, having arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, i.e. at the same time as the Turks in Germany and the South Asians in Britain; partly they are different by reason of having been colonial settlers during the period of the illegal Soviet occupation of the Baltic region. The Russophones, who are internally differentiated because they include a large variety of former Soviet peoples, from Tatars to Ukrainians, enjoy the privilege of schooling in their mother tongue and state support for their cultural institutions, something which is not accorded to the Arabs in France.

The last category is relatively new, meaning that its implications are only now being explored. These are the intra-European migrants, both high and low status. In the past, it was assumed that these migrants would remain permanently in their new country of settlement and that over time they would assimilate to the majority - an example being that of the Poles who migrated to Germany before 1914 or France in the interwar period. Given levels of mobility and accessibility of communication currently available, their permanence of settlement can no longer be taken for granted; indeed, their intentions may only be to work abroad for a few years and then return home. Thus the nearly one million Poles in the UK count as fully legal migrants from 2004 - there was large number of semi-legal migrants after 1990 - and some have begun to return home to Poland. Some will stay, however, and it is open question whether the rules of multi-culturalism apply to them or not. There is a little state sector provision, like interpreters at police stations, and the private sector has also begun to use Polish in a few cases. In Dublin, where there is a similarly large number of Poles, the evening paper publishes a weekly 16-page section in Polish.

There are several hundred thousand French settlers in the UK, as well as British and German retirees in France and Spain. There are also an estimated 300,000 Russians in the London area. Some of them are in high status employment, like financial services and medicine. It is unclear whether they should enjoy state-supported cultural reproduction. An analogous problem is arising in the areas of Hungary within easy reach of Bratislava, where well-to-do Slovaks are buying up property, living there on a permanent basis to commute to Bratislava, and may be demanding Slovak-language nurseries for their children.

In conclusion, the argument in this paper is that historic minorities, by virtue of their temporal and spatial qualities and historically defined status, demand special consideration. They are equal citizens in formal, but seldom in real terms, in that they are subject to various disabilities politically, sometimes economically, certainly culturally, e.g. their access to tertiary education is often well below that of the majority. Perhaps more than anything else, with respect to their moral equality, as equal members of the moral community of citizens, they suffer discrimination in that they lack the same capacity for voice, for input into the discursive capital of the majority or even full access to the goods of the state. Their aspirations are brushed aside as "ethnic" and thus as falling outside the civic consensus that Europe and the nation-states of Europe are supposedly constructing. This is an inequality that demands correction both at the state and at the European level.