No Lessons Learned

Abstract

As the third millennium dawns what are the prospects for regional cultural minorities? The omens are less favourable than one might suppose.

In western Europe the minorities have seen the process of western European integration as a liberating factor as the Member States of the Union, the traditional oppressors, decline, and they hand ever more power over to Brussels. But these minorities would do well to heed the old saying ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t’. The last three decades of the millennium showed that most states were increasingly willing to be generous to their minorities in their homelands, whether as a result of armed conflict or not; that dialogue between minorities and their host states, or between host states, weremore likely to bring about improved conditions for minorities than regimes imposed by international organisations. Indeed it can be argued that it was the relative success of arrangements at state level that paved the way for instruments adopted at international level.