Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Affairs in Light of National Case Law
Based on different concepts of nation-states, the article tries to demonstrate through the analysis of decisions of national courts that despite the same wording of the constitutional text, supreme and constitutional courts may come to totally differing conclusions in light of the constitutional history and doctrine of the respective country. The first part of the article gives an overview on case-law denying effective participation through non-recognition of ethnic diversity as a legal category, for instance through the ban of the formation of political parties along ethnic lines or through interpretative preemption of the legal status of minority groups. The second part of the article gives an overview of various legal mechanisms in order to enable, support, or even guarantee the representation and process-oriented effective participation of minorities in elected bodies, such as exemptions from threshold requirements in elections or reserved seats in parliament, and through cultural and territorial self-government regimes in those constitutional systems which legally recognize ethnic diversity. Nevertheless, the case-law demonstrates how difficult it remains to reconcile the notion of "effectiveness" with a positivistic and formal-reductionist understanding of terms such as equality, sovereignty, people or nation. The Lund Recommendations have served as an important guideline for a new, "communitarian" understanding of "effective" participation so that the author argues in conclusion that it requires more intra- and inter-disciplinary dialogue between law, politics and (legal) philosophy as well as between national and international minority protection mechanisms to "constitutionalize" this philosophy.