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‘Ethnicity’ in the International Law of Minority Protection: The Post-Cold War Context in Perspective*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2012

Abstract

As a concept, ‘ethnicity’ has been informing the notions of the ‘self’ as well as the ‘other’ since antiquity. While in ancient Greek it referred to the ‘other’ in a derogatory sense, in the Romantic literature of the nineteenth century, ethnicity came to depict the self-image of the nation. Although, in contrast, the liberal self-image refers to ethnicity only in the instrumental sense (as a tool for regulation without attributing any real value to the notion), ethnicity remains salient in both the liberal and conservative versions of nationalism to identify the backward ‘other’ – the minority – within the nation. Against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century discourse on ethnicity, this paper explores how the notion of ethnicity having the image of ‘otherness’ as well as ‘backwardness’ shapes the liberal perception of ‘minority’ and ‘minority protection’ in the post-Cold War context in three different ways. First, I argue that ethnicity informs the perception of the minority as the ethnic ‘other’. Second, the individualist response to minority protection paradoxically endeavours to remove ‘ethnicity’ from the concept of ‘minority’. And finally, in the post-Cold War European scenario, it is again the ethnic ‘otherness’ that rationalizes a differentiated minority protection mechanism for the West and the East within Europe.

Type
INTERNATIONAL LEGAL THEORY
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2012

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this article was presented in the 4th Biennial Conference of the European Society of International Law in 2010.

References

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2 N. Glazer and D. P. Moynihan (eds.), ‘Ethnicity’ (1975), at 1. Apparently, their claim relied on a number of facts that they referred to: the term ‘ethnicity’ understood as the character or quality of an ethnic group did not appear in the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary; it was only in the 1972 Supplement to this dictionary that this word appeared, where the first usage recorded was that of David Reisman in 1953. Although Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961) included the term, neither the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966) nor the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1969) included it. However, four years later in the 1973 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, the term ‘ethnicity’ was included.

3 R. H. Thompson, Theories of Ethnicity: A Critical Appraisal (1989), at 1.

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59 Monogenists conceived human races as emanating from a common origin; despite possessing different ranks in the civilizational process, they would ultimately survive as the superior whole through the evolutionary continuum. Polygenists perceived human races as fundamentally distinct species, whose hierarchical positions are fixed in the evolutionary process in that the superior must be preserved from any intermixing with the inferior.

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67 UN Doc. E/2573 (1954), at 48–9.

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83 Such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965), the UNESCO Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination in Education, the UNESCO Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice (1978), and the UN Declaration against Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion and Belief (1981).

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91 Ibid., at para. 15.

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93 Ibid., at 193.

94 See generally F. Fukuyama, ‘The End of History’, (1989) 16 National Interest 3, at 3–18.

95 Paras. 31 and 33 of the Document. See also, Henrard, supra note 66, at 206–7.

96 See, Preece, ‘National Minorities and International System’, (1998) 18 Politics 17, at 21.

97 Art. 11 of the Recommendation.

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101 Kymlicka, ‘Reply and Conclusion’, supra note 98, at 373.

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