Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the policies of the Council of Europe, the EU and the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities targeting the Hungarian minority policies of the Slovak and Romanian governments. It will look into relations of symbolic power as well as the use of contested concepts.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the attempts of the Council of Europe, the EU and the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) to influence the Hungarian minority policies of the Slovak and Romanian governments in the period 1989-2004. The paper aims at providing an understanding of how contested issues and concepts within the European national minority regime have been framed by the three organisations in their communications to the governments of the two states. These concepts include national minorities, their rights and the best ways of avoiding conflict as well as creating a just solution for both minority and majority. Many of these concepts have been loosely defined in international documents on national minorities, such as the OSCE Copenhagen Declaration and the Council of Europe Framework Convention on National Minorities, but have only been clearly conceptualised in the practice of the organisations. I will argue that the treatment of the Hungarian minority issue by the organisations provides an instructive insight into this practice and the views held by the organisations which have shaped this practice.

Differences between the frames used will be discussed, as will developments over time, in order to arrive at the conclusion that there has been a significant convergence between the organisations during the period. In this regard, especially the degree to which the organisations have framed the Hungarian minority issue as an issue concerning justice or concerning security and conflict prevention will be discussed. This is important, as it affected the interpretation of themes in national minority rights such as collective and individual rights, autonomy and minority participation. One of my arguments will be that the organisations differed in terms of authority and symbolic power to define contested concepts, so that the HCNM had the moral authority and expertise to declare how the Hungarian minority issue should be framed, which the EU did not have, which meant that they would have to draw on the declarations of the HCNM. These declarations, on the other hand, would have little impact on the states if the EU had not used them in its policy.