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Introduction: Unequal Accommodation, Ethnic Parallelism, and Increasing Marginality

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Book cover Unequal Accommodation of Minority Rights

Part of the book series: Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series ((CAL))

Abstract

The introduction outlines the conceptual framework, the levels of analysis, and the main arguments of the volume. The core concept of the book is minority political agency, which has two complementary dimensions: political claim-making and community organizing. While interethnic bargaining is central to the former, for the latter the idea of ethnic parallelism is of key importance at both the discursive and institutional level. The chapters of the volume are grouped into three broad parts, according to their level of analysis. The first three chapters discuss macro-level phenomena, the next five focus on the meso-level (the institutional network providing the backbone of a Hungarian societal pillar), and the last three deal with the consequences of the interplay of the macro- and meso-level on micro-level phenomena.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Medianu (2002) and Horváth (2002) are obviously such examples.

  2. 2.

    On the significance of informal institutions in historical institutionalism, see Tsai (2014). Stroschein (2012) also emphasized the role of informality in ethnic politics in Romania.

  3. 3.

    Chapter 9 authored by Zsombor Csata is the most systematic in this respect.

  4. 4.

    In case of violent ethnic conflicts, institutional actors often propose consociational arrangements and segmental autonomies. See Kymlicka (2007, 2011).

  5. 5.

    Bíró and Pallai (2011) constitute an exception. They argue that “political accommodation” (with Romania as its paradigmatic case) constitutes a distinct paradigm of minority policies and define it similarly to what we call unequal accommodation.

  6. 6.

    For instance, the Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life (OSCE-HCNM 1999) explicitly call for the inclusion of minority representatives into executive power (but without urging institutionalized power-sharing).

  7. 7.

    In Hungarian: Romániai Magyar Demokrata Szövetség; in Romanian: Uniunea Democrată Maghiară din România (UDMR), in English Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR). In the case of Hungarian organizations, we will use the Hungarian acronyms throughout the book.

  8. 8.

    For studies about his topic, see Kiss et al. (2017) and Kiss (2017).

  9. 9.

    For a typology of minority voting in Eastern Europe, see Csergő and Regelmann (2017).

  10. 10.

    The institutional pillar underpinning the separate social organization of the Hungarian community also includes the Hungarian cultural institutions, the Hungarian-dominated local governments, and the habitus of political participation though ethnic parties. However, except for the organization of politics along ethnic lines, which is discussed in Chapter 3, these institutional elements are only touched upon briefly in various chapters of the book.

  11. 11.

    We should also note that Székely Land has no legally codified borders and, as a consequence, different actors use different spatial definitions of it.

  12. 12.

    The Magyar Autonomous Region was restructured in 1962. The territories of the present-day Covasna county were attached to Brașov/Brassó Region, while some Romanian majority territories West of Târgu Mureș/Marosvásárhely were attached to the region, which was also renamed Mureș-Magyar Autonomous Region.

  13. 13.

    Brubaker et al. (2006) have argued that ethnic tensions did not characterize everyday interethnic relations in the town.

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  1. Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Tamás Kiss

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Tamás Kiss

  2. Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    István Gergő Székely

  3. International Relations and European Studies Department, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Tibor Toró

  4. Institute for Minority Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Nándor Bárdi

  5. Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    István Horváth

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Kiss, T. (2018). Introduction: Unequal Accommodation, Ethnic Parallelism, and Increasing Marginality. In: Kiss, T., Székely, I., Toró , T., Bárdi, N., Horváth, I. (eds) Unequal Accommodation of Minority Rights. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78893-7_1

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