ABSTRACT:
The topic of the book is kin minority, kin-state and home-state in the process of European integration, focusing on East and Central Europe, and specifically on the Hungarian Status Law (more precisely, Act on Hungarians Living in Neighbouring Countries). The set of the three notions – kin minority, kin-state, and home-state – is a recent creation of the Venice Commission (European Commission for Democracy through Law of the Council of Europe), in its official report on Preferential Treatment of National Minorities by their Kin-State released on 22 October 2001.
The topic per se has evoked fierce debates between the states of the region, which have been especially sensitive to the issue of national and ethnic minorities since the collapse of the communist regimes; needless to mention here, for example, the details of the breakdown of the former Yugoslavia into ‘nation states’. The scope of the debates, however, extended much more widely, involving the Council of Europe, the European Union, the OSCE and so forth, and these West European concerns were prompted not only by the conflicts between Hungary and her neighbours, but also by aspects of the Status Law which those agencies saw as inherently problematic. Thus, the topic was a hot political issue in the countries directly affected and in Europe-wide diplomacy as well, and it still may hold the banked coal for another fire. Moreover, this could be a long-term prospect according to the report of the Venice Commission, which suggested that the Hungarian case was the tip of an iceberg. For East and Central European countries have established status laws one after another since the second half of the 1990s.
We can speak of a ‘status law syndrome’ in the region.
The topic provoked not only political debates, but also academic controversies over the norms and the reality of nation states, nation building, citizenship, and/or minority protection in the context of post-communist regional integration and EU enlargement. In other words, the status law syndrome was sufficiently rich in challenging innovations to inspire scholars and specialists to reconsider the conventional interpretations of those notions and to rework them in terms of their specific disciplines. This is why the present volume contains the original documents produced in the course of the political debates alongside wide-ranging academic essays by authors from various parts of the globe including not only East and Central Europe but also Western Europe, North America and East Asia. Their specialisations are very varied, including sociology, political science, law, history, and more, and they come
from positions in academia, government and social organisations.
