Literature Review

Abstract

Minority protection in the EU has increasingly become a topic for scholarly research since the early 1990s; this correlates to the period when the EU first got involved in minority protection after the downfall of Communism and the devastating effects of the Balkan Wars, and made it an accession requirement in its Copenhagen Criteria. Europeanization research became more widespread around the same time, as the Maastricht Treaty and subsequent legislation made a significant impact on domestic rules (Featherstone and Radaelli 2003: 5 show a considerable rise in academic articles regarding Europeanization in the late 1990s). Comparative research on minority protection standards was carried out mainly in the post-communist context, and focused on EU influence on the installment and implementation of minority protection standards.