Human Rights and Minority Rights in the European Union by Kirsten Shoraka

Excerpt

Europe's political history is the history of minorities, whether they are ethnic, linguistic, religious, or otherwise. Even before the Great Awakening in the nineteenth century, the place of minorities within nation-building projects has been questioned. However, as Europe has evolved towards more liberal, democratic systems of government, there have been attempts to answer the “minority question” with an answer of everything from social integration to political empowerment. The role of minorities in Central and Eastern Europe was raised to the fore when the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union broke out at the end of the Cold War and in turn the European Union's (EU) inclusion of the “protection of national minorities” in the Copenhagen Criteria (1993). The distance to this point in Europe and the EU is the subject of Kirsten Shoraka's book. …