The Charter: an Overview

Abstract

The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages should be viewed in the context of the evolution of European legal and political thinking on the treatment of minorities in the second half of the twentieth century. Post Second World War Europe did not offer a friendly environment to minorities, their languages, their cultures or their political aspirations. The continent had been ravaged, millions were dead and unemployed and the polarisation between the liberal democratic world of Western Europe and that of communist Eastern Europe was becoming all too evident.

I am grateful to Dónall Ó Riagáin for the original version of this chapter.