Minority Rights in the Face of Changing Geopolitics

Abstract

In this paper, authors attempt to extend their previous study, in which they monitored the impact of geopolitical processes on the development of international minority protection from the Second World War to the adoption of the EU Treaty of Lisbon, into the very recent past, the present, and “somewhat into the future.” This current paper raises the question of how the attitudes of Western political elites towards minority protection may have been influenced by factors such as the rise of Islamic terrorism, Russia's violent territorial acquisitions after the turn of the millennium, the uneven implementation of ethnopolitical solutions developed for Balkan states such as Kosovo after the Yugoslav war, and the strengthening of China's global power positions. The impact of the growing rejection of the nation-state and, thereby, the concept of the nation by mainstream liberal intellectuals is also raised. According to the authors’ observation, all these phenomena together led to a kind of “cooling off” in international minority protection after the rapid legal development of the 1990s. In the recent period – with the exception of the above-mentioned UN declaration on indigenous peoples – there has been no breakthrough: no new international minority protection conventions have been adopted and no practical structures of national autonomy have been set up as in the 1990s and before. It is rare that a violation of the conventions on the protection of minorities would have any substantive consequences.However, all of this continues to occur within the international legal framework of the post-1945 world order. The authors raise the question of whether such elemental challenges as Russia's current war aggression against Ukraine could overthrow the current world order and, with it, the existing international legal framework? They recommend that representatives of national and ethnic minorities, as well as people committed to minority rights, closely monitor the development of the world order and do everything they can to preserve and strengthen minority rights amidst global changes.