Joanne McEvoy

European organizations and minority rights in Europe: On transforming the securitization dynamic:

Minority rights conditionality has been seen by scholars as a key part of the EU enlargement process. While the focus on minority rights has largely been discussed in terms of democracy and even human rights, this article argues that conditionality was a result of the securitization of minorities rather than part of an agenda to protect or empower. In this article, we look at the methods of desecuritization as factors of ‘narratives, norms and nannies’. In response to Paul Roe’s conclusions about the impossibility of desecuritizing societal security, we examine whether the EU, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the Council of Europe have the ability to change the societal dynamics among ethnic groups in such a way as to make the desecuritization of societal security more likely. Overall, we illustrate how a focus on ‘deconstructivist’ and ‘constructivist’ approaches to societal security has failed to make European organizations important transformative actors in interethnic relations.

How Epistemic Communities Drive International Regimes: The Case of Minority Rights in Europe

Abstract Enjoying control over knowledge production, epistemic communities are central to international politics in guiding decision-maker learning. Yet, we do not understand fully the extent of epistemic community influence on diverse issue areas and the ways in which they drive international regimes. To illustrate an epistemic communitys impact, we investigate the role of experts in the EU, the OSCE and the Council of Europe within the European minority rights regime. Conceptually, we argue that a hierarchy among experts matters for the epistemic communitys influence via policy innovation, diffusion and persistence. Empirically, we track the operation of these mechanisms in the context of EU enlargement as experts on minority rights influence standard-setting, monitoring and standard expansion.

European Integration and the Geopolitics of National Minorities

The issue of national minorities in post-Cold War Europe has warranted considerable scholarly attention with regard to security, democratization and regional integration. The literature has focused on how European integration compelled host states to comply with obligations to protect a national minority within their borders. Missing from this debate, however, is a more comprehensive analysis of whether European integration has had an effect on the wider geopolitical relationship between the host state and the kin state over national minorities. Has European integration served to dampen or to intensify the salience of nationalist politics between host and kin states? To address this gap the range of host state–kin state relations in Central and Eastern Europe is explored corresponding to whether both states are EU members (at least one may be a candidate country) compared with when one state remains external to the EU for the foreseeable future. It is argued that, despite much of the Europeanization literature, European integration can have an amplifying effect on nationalism regardless of whether kin states are existing members, acceding states or outside the process altogether.

Explaining Regime Effectiveness

Having presented the relevant theoretical discussions relating to international regimes in the previous chapter, we now set out more explicitly our dependent and independent variables. The central objective of the book is to explain the effectiveness of the European minority rights regime. Based on the promotion of minority rights protection in the context of EU enlargement, we seek to uncover how successful the regime has been in solving problems relating to national minorities in post-communist CEE. First, we discuss the scholarly debates relating to regime effectiveness as the dependent variable in research on international regimes. Ultimately, an effective regime is one which governs actor behaviour and resolves the political problem at hand. Thus, our book seeks to determine whether issues relating to minority rights have been resolved, and to identify the factors that have helped or hindered the realization of an effective regime. Second, we address four potential explanatory variables for regime effectiveness, identified as 1) the impact of international norms, 2) the effect of IO mechanisms, 3) the nature of interorganizational overlap and 4) state preferences for policy implementation. We then discuss our selection of cases to illustrate regime effectiveness and our methodology as a process-tracing approach.

Female Party Attachment in a Power-Sharing Polity: The Erosion of Protestant Support in Northern Ireland

Power-sharing hinges on cooperation between communal parties who are expected to mobilize citizens in support of the new political system. Women are often ill-served, however, and their political differences exacerbated by such arrangements. Mindful of this finding and using data from the 2015 Northern Ireland Election Survey, we examine differences in party attachment between Catholic and Protestant women. The results suggest that Catholic women are more likely to claim a party attachment than Protestant women. The key factors accounting for this phenomenon are the differences in their levels of endorsement and the perceived effectiveness of the two main political parties.

‘Bumps in the Road Ahead’: How External Actors Defuse Power-Sharing Crises

ABSTRACT Power-sharing is a governance approach favoured by external actors for building state capacity and legitimacy in post-conflict societies. Yet it can be unstable and crisis-prone, compelling external actors to guide cross-community cooperation. Why and how do external actors seek to maintain power-sharing and prevent its collapse when operational difficulties emerge? We explore the distinction between ‘light touch’ and ‘heavy hand’ techniques and the motivations of external actors in defusing power-sharing crises. We find a trade-off between the short-term value of crisis management (‘putting out fires’) and the long-term objectives of sustainable local arrangements and external exit (local actors ‘going it alone’).

Letting “the people(s)” decide: peace referendums and power-sharing settlements

ABSTRACT Referendums have been used to legitimate power-sharing settlements in deeply divided societies transitioning from conflict. This article assesses the capacity of referendum rules to facilitate the “voice” of multiple groups or “peoples” in the decision to share power as a “constitutional moment.” Drawing on the constitutional referendums in Northern Ireland in 1998 and Iraq in 2005, the author demonstrates that referendum rules matter in highlighting the variable degrees of support for the elite-negotiated deal on the part of the contending groups. The institutional design process prior to the referendum is crucial for incentivising groups to support the settlement, particularly the previously dominant group. When faced with a choice between a simple majority threshold and countermajoritarian procedures, majoritarianism is appropriate only in so far as the main groups see their constitutional preferences satisfied and concurrent majorities can be secured. A qualified majority referendum threshold to protect a minority group is appropriate for divided states where the groups are regionally concentrated and when the groups agree to such rules. Important for the legitimation of power-sharing, referendums highlight the likely variable extent of approval on the part of the main groups, necessitating ongoing efforts to foster public support for the deal.

The international mediation of power-sharing settlements:

Power sharing is largely accepted among scholars and policy-makers as a potentially effective mechanism for building peace in the aftermath of violent ethnic conflicts and self-determination disputes. Although the operation of power sharing may be prone to ongoing challenges and even political crises arising from the legacy of the conflict, international actors continue to promote power-sharing arrangements to manage self-determination and other ethnopolitical conflicts. This article investigates the normative and instrumental reasons why third-party mediators (on behalf of international organizations and/or states) turn to power-sharing strategies during peace negotiations. It considers the reasons why third-party mediators promote power sharing when its maintenance is likely to depend on their ongoing commitment and governance involvement. We argue that mediators draw from four different perspectives in their support of power-sharing settlements: international law, regional and internal security, democracy and minority rights, and a technical approach where mediators focus on the mechanics of power-sharing designs. The article draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with officials from the United Nations and the European Union working for the organizations’ respective mediation units as well as documentary analysis of official mediation documents.

Inter-Organizational Coordination in Peacebuilding

This chapter explores inter-organizational relations in peacebuilding. It draws from wider organizational theory to apply the concept of action-set to the groups of international organizations engaged in peace operations. A review of the general peacebuilding literature is provided to identify the principal obstacles to effective coordination in this challenging policy area, discussing mainly organizations’ different approaches to peacebuilding, their efforts to preserve autonomy, and divergent organizational cultures. The chapter then proceeds to analyse the empirical literature on two cases—Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo—to investigate the presence of these obstacles on the ground. Finally, the chapter calls for more robust, theoretically informed and comparative research on inter-organizational coordination in peacebuilding.

The European Minority Rights Regime

With the integration of Central and Eastern Europe into the political, economic and security organizations of the ‘West’, we have seen the level of coordination increase as part of the enlargement processes of the Council of Europe and the EU, whereas the OSCE has focused on ‘persons belonging to’ national minorities retrospective of membership. Importantly, we can see that in the EU enlargement process, these organizations worked together in order to encourage the implementation of policies that protected the rights of national minorities. It is this complex coordination between organizations that makes the European minority rights regime an interesting case study.