The Minority Issue: Law and the Crisis of Representation

Abstract

The interdisciplinary essays gathered in this book reconstruct the history of democracy and democratic theories from the perspective of the minority issue. How do democracies deal with their minorities? Do minorities participate in the construction of political will? By what mechanisms does social discrimination against minorities turn violent? How does it happen that minorities are considered "enemies"? What are the normative foundations of the UN minority protection system and the establishment of an International Criminal Court for crimes committed mainly against "groups"? How can universal human rights be reconciled with minority rights? To discuss these questions, the common theoretical reference for the essays in this book is the work of the jurist Hans Kelsen. In 1925, Kelsen criticized democracy as based on a fiction: the "fiction of representation". Since political freedom means the faculty of a people to give themselves their own law, only the represented majority is free - but not the minority. Kant, Hegel, Tocqueville, Benjamin, Lemki, Foucault, Habermas, Honneth and Taylor are some of the authors who are addressed herein for further reflection on the minority issue.