Joseph Marko

Ethnopolitics. The Challenge for Human and Minority Rights Protection

In philosophical human rights discourses the relationship between “equality” and “difference” is very often discussed in highly abstract terms. The first part of this chapter is thus dedicated to the question how it is possible to reconcile political unity with legal equality and cultural diversity within the framework of the history of state-formation and nation-building in Europe. The philosophical and empirical reconstruction of these processes reveals that there is not a uniform development of national states in the nineteenth century, but that two, even opposing normative concepts of the French state-nation and the German ethnic nation-state dominate the “constitutionalization” not only of human rights, but also of minority rights protection until the very day. Thereby it becomes obvious from a de-constructivist approach that all “primordial” theories of ethnicity are part of the problem through their “naturalization of (cultural) difference” so that only a constructivist approach can – against the ideologies of ethno-nationalism, but also liberal nationalism – provide for a political theory for the normative justification of the legal instruments of minority protection and cultural diversity management. The second part of the chapter gives a comprehensive overview on the developments in legal standard setting with regard to minority rights. This is discussed in light of the problem of a definition of the concept “minority” and the right to self-determination of peoples as well as the swing of the pendulum in terms of the interrelationship between individual rights and group-oriented rights and identities. The third part of the chapter deals with the violation respectively implementation of human and minority rights in the life-cycles of ethnic conflict. In light of the wars in the ex-Yugoslav republics as empirical case study it can be demonstrated how “ethnic entrepreneurs” are able to steer a political process of ethno-mobilization in the pre-conflict phase so that “cultural diversity” is certainly not the root-cause of ethnic conflict. Finally, with regard to the conflict and the post-conflict phase this part discusses lessons to be learned from the implementation of conflict settlement agreements and their implementation again giving evidence against the “accommodationist” versus “integrationist” approaches in power-sharing discourses that reconstruction of war-torn states and democracies cannot be achieved without simultaneous reconciliation efforts.

Reconciliation After a Protracted Violent Conflict: Do Believing Processes Play a Role, and Which One? A Research Agenda

Twenty years after the conclusion of the Dayton Peace Agreement, the conflict between Bosnia and Herzegovina is still a prime example of the difficulties and challenges of reconstructing and reconciling deeply divided societies after protracted violent conflict, especially with ongoing ethnic mobilization of the population in the educational and political system. At the same time, there are ongoing theoretical battles between proponents and adversaries of the ethnic power-sharing system established by the Dayton constitution, as well as between methodologically individualist and neo-institutionalist approaches in the social sciences on how to understand and explain the phenomenon of “ethnicity.” This chapter, therefore, tries to make use of credition theory in order to focus on the functions which “processes of believing” can play in the political mobilization of “ethnicity” and thereby to contribute to a better conceptualization for further research with regard to “ethnic” conflict and reconciliation.

Constitutional Design for Divided Societies. Integration or Accommodation

Constitutional Design for Divided Societies: Integration or Accommodation? raises important conceptual questions of consociational theory and powersharing mechanisms and tests them against a wide range of regional case studies from Europe, Africa and Asia. The axiomatic, underlying interest for analysis is the question: how can and should culturally divided societies be politically managed, not the least through constitutional arrangements? All of the articles are based on the conceptual distinction of “integration” versus “accomodation” as a follow-up to the Lijphart-Horowitz debate. However, the main achievement of the book is the insight into the necessity to de-construct this conceptual dichotomy and to develop better refinements by bridging the gap between comparative politics and comparative constitutional law. In the end the book thus provides fresh food for thought on how to reconcile consociational theory and powersharing mechanisms with the problems of self-determination disputes usually overlooked by the former concepts.