Suchergebnisse

Minority Rights, Jennifer Jackson Preece, Cambridge (UK) and
Malden MA: Polity Press, 2005, pp. ix, 213.This book is not, as its title might be thought to suggest, an
abstract conceptual analysis of a particular sub-set of rights. Although
it builds on, and acknowledges, the work of Kymlicka, Raz, Taylor and
Shklar (160), the narrative thread that gives it unity is historical. It
deepens our understanding of the nature of the discourse of minority
rights by contextualizing that discourse both temporally (through
historical examples) and spatially (through adroitly selected comparative
examples). With extraordinary succinctness and clarity the author guides
us through a succession of political epochs: the time of the Christian and
Islamic medieval universitae, the period of the dynastic re-organization
of Europe, the modern era of popular sovereignty with its attendant
notions of civic and ethnic nationalism, and especially the
contradiction-laden time of European imperialism and its post-imperial and
post-colonial reverberations. As this narrative unfolds we follow the
vicissitudes of religious, racial, linguistic and ethnic minorities and
observe the successive forms taken by the "problem of
minorities."

Failure of European nations to enforce provisions of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe condemning ethnic violence.

The "sexiest acronym in international diplomacy." Such was a Washington pandit's roguish, if appropriate, characterization of the CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) just a few of years ago in 1990 after it critically helped ignite the revolutions in Eastern Europe and torpedo the Berlin Wall. Other, more serious, foreign affairs analysts were equally enthusiastic about CSCE. A prominent commentator called it the "premier post-Cold War political forum."