Authors Iain Begg | Gabriel Glöckler | Anke Hassel ... - The Europaeum

instruments have been criticised for their lack of a definition of “minorities”,
which allows signatory countries to selectively identify their own
minorities.
Internally, the EU normative attitude to cultural diversity has focused
essentially on non-discrimination. The instrument most relevant to
minorities is the 2000 Race Directive. 16 While it fails to bring any clarity
to the definition of “racial and ethnic origin”, the Race Directive uses a
comprehensive notion of discrimination, prohibiting both direct
(difference in treatment) and indirect discrimination (neutral treatment
creating disadvantage). Yet, non-discrimination is insufficient in itself to
address the spectrum of minority rights, as treating everyone under the
same conditions is not enough to guarantee a total equality in practice.
Minorities and the enlargement process
The potential for ethnic conflict in the CEE region formed the rationale for
a greater international attention to the minority issues of candidate
countries in the 1990s. The EU faced difficulties in defining and
transmitting standards of minority protection for various reasons: first,
there was no provision for minority rights in EU law and, second, the
existing international regime of minority rights amounts more to
guidelines than concrete legal measures. 17
Minority protection was included in the 1993 Copenhagen criteria for
accession to the EU. Given the absence of an EU minority policy, in order
to operationalise the Copenhagen criteria, the Commission based its
approach on a series of non-EU documents and the international body of
minority rights developed by the CoE, the OSCE and the UN.
The EU conditionality on minority protection was rather effective in
influencing public discourse on minority issues and in motivating formal
policy changes in candidate states. However, the role of the EU itself in
monitoring the efforts made by candidate countries - through the
publication of annual Reports - has been criticised by many. EU reports
came out as being inconsistent and lacking emphasis on the actual
implementation of the provisions adopted by candidate countries.
Although eight of the ten accession countries had significant minority
populations, only two minority groups were consistently addressed in the
EU Reports: the Russophone minority in Estonia and Latvia, and the
Roma minorities of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and
Slovakia. Two other sizeable minority groups (the Hungarians of Romania
and Slovakia, and the Turks of Bulgaria) have been mentioned in the
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After the crisis: A new socio-economic settlement for the EU