Политическая география европейских меньшинств english
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national situation inside the two systems was, paradoxically, the most stable one. The world-wide confrontation displaced old ethnic tensions and secessionist intentions from the surface of European political geography.
The confrontation between two blocs may explain the initial success of autonomization, the Soviet-shaped response to the nationalist challenge, which designated certain groups as autonomous in their traditional geographical heartlands. Few sounds of cracking along the "sub-state" boundaries were heard. At the same time, the Eastern status-quo - once achieved - was then so well locked and guarded that it left no chance for purely "ethnic" Eastern European nations to become somewhat "political" (if the terms of Krejci and Velimsky are used). They could not establish any new official ethnic homelands. Moreover, some of the formerly arranged homelands were lost, as, for example, the Hungarian (Muresh) autonomous region which existed between 1952 and 1968 in Transylvania, part of Romania. The partition of Cyprus in the mid-1970s is an exception, but it remains distinct both politically and geographically. Even more telling is that this de-facto partition was (and still is, after so many recent precedents!) not recognized by the international community.
The Western situation of the time was not very different. Almost no single nation-state was brave enough to devolve its power. Only in the years since the 1970s, events like the creation of a canton for Jura in Switzerland (1970-75), the 1978 regional autonomy-minded Spanish Constitution, the 1979 Scottish and Welsh referenda (which maintained the UK integrity), and later Belgian federalist development (much less successful for the Belgian Kingdom), have marked a notable shift. A devolution of state power now seems to be possible under a much wider tendency toward regional and local self-government under such a reliable "supralock" as the increasingly powerful EU framework.
Forty years of such stability present many examples of the evolution of minorities mostly by their natural growth. The number of minorities did not change greatly between 1930 and 1970. Several new ethnic groups - exceeding our symbolic limits of absolute strength and thus added to the list of minorities - were balanced by a few cases of self-determination. Malta and Cyprus are two states that attained independence after 1950, making the total number the same as in 1910. Assimilation, official ignorance, and emigration were often important driving forces of ethnic structural shifts. For instance, Greek authorities and statistics do not recognize any ethnic minority, which makes our evaluation problematic. Hence, the diminishing proportion of Macedonians, Turks, Albanians and Aromuns in Greece could be an artifact of official policy, but it could also be the result of real assimilation or mimicry. The same process in Ireland and Finland was determined by lower national growth rates of English and Swedish minorities and partly by emigration, rather than assimilation. The latter was evidently the leading factor reducing the number of Hungarians and Germans in Romania, combined with the certain impact of their lower birth rates. By contrast, the three numerous Spanish minorities (Catalonians, Basques and Galicians) were naturally increasing to form over 25% of the total population in 1970.
The third geopolitical shift in 1989-95 is extremely important for Central and Eastern Europe: the reduction by one state due to the German re-unification, but a twofold increase in the number of states caused by Soviet, Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian disintegrations. This causes a sharp reduction of both the absolute and relative strength of the minorities for the whole of the continent and for the East in particular. It is true that the East has a lower percentage and average population of compact minorities than the West. The latters minorities have increased in average and in total, in comparison with 1910.
The "minority-free zone", that zone of states below 5% of national totals, now covers 15 states, instead of 6 in 1910, and form a compact core stretching from the Netherlands to Hungary and from Norway to Slovenia. The opposite pole is represented by Belgium, Switzerland and Bosnia; Bosnia is as far from a nation-state as was the whole of the Yugoslavian Federation before 1991. Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine and Moldova inherited the former all-Soviet category of minorities share. European Russia, though a unique federation here, finds itself in a lower category. It still has the greatest number of minorities, but Russias total minority population is now more comparable to that of Ukraine or Spain (over 10 million in each case).
A superficial view prompts a conclusion: the more numerous and the smaller the nation-states, the fewer "foreign bodies" and accompanying problems. This is, however, wrong, and not necessarily beyond formal statistics. One has to mention the number of minorities growing step by step in conformity with the progressing self-determination. The total, 150, is now almost 1.4 times as high as it was in 1910 and about 1.5 times higher in Central and Eastern Europe taken alone.
Thus, the process of self-determination had a very contradictory effect. It converted a minority (and often its major portion) into a majority inside its nation state. On the other hand, it cut the minority population dwelling outside the state into multiple segments. In other words, what happened to minorities is to be determined as a "multiplication by splitting", a biological term for reproduction of simple organisms. As an example, let us consider what happened to Ukrainian irredentism? Formerly, there was only one (Soviet) populous Ukranian minority in the USSR. After the collapse, nearly 37.5 million Ukrainians constituted the majority in Ukraine. At the same time, 6.7 million Ukrainians formed 14 separate minorities in other newly independent post-Soviet states (6 of them account for over 100,000 each). In addition, two million reside as they did before in neighboring European countries, Canada and USA. Naturally, a complete repatriation back to the "motherland" is unfeasible, although the ambition is typical of a young nation-state. Initially, independent Ukraine gained a notably positive migration exchange, particularly with Russia (+110, 000 in 1992), but the declining economic situation in Ukraine soon resulted in an opposite balance (-17 thousand in 1993).
In spite of the expansion of states that pretend to be "mono-ethnic"; there was no adequate growth of their share in total European population. The share of the first proportional category (up to 5%) was about 1/5 in 1910 when it included France and Italy and has become 1/4 of the total population by 1993. Together with the next group (up to 10%), the share has increased from almost 2/5 to 1/2. The dynamics are most likely a result of certain stability of such areas where the environment is favorable for assimilation and dissolution. A greater growth of other minorities whose masses, shares and mobilized position make for self-preservation is the opposite factor, that slows down the process and determines modest results.
Finally, it should be noted that all of the above developments happened to minorities which also include millions of Asian, African and other diasporas in Europe. When added together, they surely make the Western minorities more numerous. In general terms, an average minority also became more heterogeneous, "less native" (or less rooted) and less spatially determined (less compact and local). Hence it may claim nothing above some cultural autonomy.
Three conclusions follow from this discussion:
(1) The nation-state model still is attractive for major local minorities in Europe; however, it gradually becomes a less effective tool to solve ethnic problems - neither for the multiplying states nor for the multiplying minorities themselves. Each new split engenders new minorities, new historical resentments and new conflicts.
(2) The last act of the European geopolitical drama has yielded the greatest "advance" for the former minorities in Central and Eastern portions of the continent. The act is not yet over; nobody can argue that its actual "photo image" is the final one, at least in several Balkan cases (Bosnia and Moldova) and in Transcaucasia.
(3) If some form of a new stability is achieved eventually, one cannot exclude an east to West transfer of ethnic mobilization of some ethnic minorities who would become much more numerous and claim more rights.
POLITICAL TENSIONS AND GEOPOLITICAL RISKS I
N EUROPEAN ETHNIC AREAS
We now present an evaluation of various tensions and the risks of separatism in ethnic areas of Europe. These includes specially defined areas of compact settlement of national minorities, where their number is more than 50,000 people and where they can aspire to a certain territorial autonomy. Such an area forms another ethnic (spatial) unit, and thus, differs from a purely ethnic minority. We developed quantitative methods suggested earlier (Anderson, 1990; Rugg, 1985; Quantitative..., 1989) and estimated socio-political tensions in ethnic regions in Europe, using 16 variables which can be divided in 6 groups: 1) the number (the absolute and the relative number of a minority in the country as a whole and in its area);
2) the geopolitical situation (isolated or in the neighborhood with ethnically close areas or nation-states, in dispersed or concentrated settlement);
3) the cultural situation (the percentage of a minority speaking the native tongue, its status, the relationship between its confession and the religion of