Discourse of Minority Rights in New EU Member States as a Determinant of the Norm's Success

The vigor with which EU's enlargement officials took up the question of minority rights prior to the 2004 expansion might lead us to believe that there was a widespread agreement about the most desirable means of handling this sensitive issue. However, the consensus did not reach too far beyond a vague wish not to repeat the tragedies caused by untamed ethnic tensions in the Balkans of the 1990s. Building on a broader theoretical framework, this paper introduces the minority rights norm as an example of a norm characterized by high levels of government support, but low societal internalization. I analyze this norm in detail, outlining its various versions and their interaction in the EU policy space. I draw heavily on fieldwork conducted in Slovakia and Lithuania to test the hypotheses that follow from the norm's location in the proposed typology. The two countries occupy opposite poles of the spectrum of performance on the minority rights issue from among all 2004 EU entrants and the variation between them represents the core puzzle tackled here. A combination of in-depth interviews and parallel q-methodology studies in both countries is used to examine societal responses to changing minority rights standards for clues about the varying success of the norm. The findings from Slovakia reveal a highly polarized discourse of minority rights that is in sharp contrast to an overarching consensus with regard to Lithuania's inclusive policy targeting ethnic minorities. The results are linked with broader developments on the minority rights front in Lithuania and Slovakia to support the main argument that the ease with which minority rights standards spread is primarily affected by societal attitudes on the subject