Most countries in Europe these days sign most international
conventions relating to anything to do with human rights. So here’s a riddle – what Convention have the
following four countries (and only these) not signed up to – Andorra, Monaco,
France and Turkey?
Back in the late 1990s I was asked to act as joint
rapporteur for a Council of Europe delegation visiting Russia to consider what
that country was doing to guarantee equality of opportunity and civil rights
for members of the many non-Russian ethnic minorities present there. (My fellow rapporteur was a woman who was a
leading figure in pursuing the rights of Hungary’s Roma population.) Apart from presentations about policies we
also met representatives of communities such as the Bashkirs, Tatars and
Circassians, as well as the chief rabbi of Moscow. Russia had signed the convention on the
protection of national minorities a year
or two earlier, in 1996, and was preparing for its first official inspection.
France, Turkey and the two smaller states of Andorra and
Monaco will not have to make such preparations.
For they are the only European countries that have not signed the
‘Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities’, a measure
that was agreed by almost all Council of Europe states in 1995. (I will add here that a handful of other
European states have signed the Convention but not yet ratified it – I will
return to them later.)
So why have France and Turkey not signed the Convention, and
what are the consequences of them not having done so?
The Convention is actually rather vague on the definition of
‘national minorities’, leaving this up to individual governments. But a general definition would be of groups
of a distinctive and different ethnicity (religion, language, family or
political customs and so on) from that associated with the country as a whole
or with its state ideology and self-identity, with the added proviso that these
groups should not be primarily the product of recent migration flows. Roma gypsies are thus a national minority in
almost every European state, and Jewish communities could be regarded in a
similar light (certainly that was the case in my visit to Moscow in 1999). But almost every European country has one or
more national minorities within its borders:
Catalans, Galicians and Basques in Spain; Frisians in the Netherlands;
Welsh- and Scots Gaelic-speakers in the United Kingdom; French- and German-
speakers in Italy; Turks in Bulgaria; German-speakers in Romania;
Swedish-speakers in Finland; Russians in Estonia and Lithuania – the list goes
on.
The Framework Convention guarantees the right of such groups
to preserve their cultures, with a responsibility for signing governments (and
I quote from the web site relating to the Convention - http://www.coe.int/it/web/minorities/fcnm-factsheet
-“to promote full and effective equality of persons belonging to
minorities in all areas of economic, social, political, public and cultural
life together with conditions that will allow them to express, preserve and
develop their culture, religion, language and traditions. They have to ensure
their freedom of assembly, association, expression, thought, conscience,
religion and their access to and use of media. The Convention also provides
guidelines for their linguistic freedom and rights regarding education.”
Is it that France and Turkey have not
signed the Convention because they have no national minorities within their
boundaries? Of course not. France has significant and historic groups of
Bretons, French Basques, Alsatians, Catalans and Flemish within its borders,
not to speak of a substantial Roma presence; and Turkey has the Kurds. (We can leave Andorra and Monaco on one side
here – both under the geopolitical influence of France.)
Here we get to a wider issue, in some
ways, than that of attitudes to national minorities. This is about the self-image of states and
peoples. The 1st article of
the Constitution of the French 5th Republic says: “France is an
indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic.” La France est une République
indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale in the
original. The gloss on that word
‘indivisible’ talks about the uniform application of law across the whole of
national territory (see http://www.vie-publique.fr/decouverte-institutions/institutions/veme-republique/heritages/quels-sont-principes-fondamentaux-republique-francaise.html).
But ‘indivisibility’ also means that there is only one way to be French, with
no special provisions for any sub-group.
And that leads to a failure to make any special provision for those who
might be ‘other French’ – and no recognition of any specific rights for them,
or the promulgation of policies towards them.
Hence France does not recognize the concept of ‘National Minorities’,
since to do so would undermine the rhetoric and ideology of ‘indivisible France.’
But this goes further, to affect
France’s more recent diverse communities of migrant origin. Whilst British officialdom enumerates (for
example through the census) and monitors policy outcomes in terms of definitions
of ‘Black British’, ‘British Caribbean’, ‘British-born Chinese’ and other
groups, the whole idea of ethnic varieties of French-ness is anathema across
the Channel. So it is not only the
contrast between the recognition of the Basques in Spain (official with a
degree of local autonomy) and France (ignored and suffering cultural decline)
that is significant, but also the contrast between the treatment and discourse
around Islamic and other groups in, say France and the UK.
The lack of France’s signature to the
Framework Convention on National Minorities is indicative of something broader
– a normative and traditional view of what it is to be French. This goes along with a historically
assimilationist view of the aims for the integration of ‘new’ or ‘other’ groups
in the country: “only if they act like us French will we accept them as French”
would be a reasonable paraphrase of the tenor of much discussion of the issue. Turkey’s non-signature is for similar reasons
– just as there is only one way to be French, there is only one way to be
Turkish.
I need to touch briefly on four other
European countries who have signed the Convention but failed, as yet, to ratify
it and put it into practice. National
minorities are not an issue of any importance in Iceland, perhaps explaining
the non-ratification of the Convention for which the country was an initial
signatory back in 1995. Luxembourg was
also an original signatory – but there is now the paradox that native
Luxembourgers are almost a minority in their own country, where they are
outnumbered by various groups of migrant origin. Issues of identity are highly complex in Belgium
– a third non-ratification state – where there is no real national ideology but
instead a pairing of Flemish and Walloon identities (supplemented by a Brussels
capital identity and by the German minority community in Eupen and Malmedy in
the east). The final country to sign the Convention but not yet to ratify it is
Greece. Greece recognizes the Islamic
Turkish minority in Thrace but has been criticized by the Council of Europe for
not according this minority full rights, and for not recognizing other Slavic-speaking
national minorities, particularly those claiming Macedonian identity. Greece, like France and Turkey, seems to
depend on a view that there is only one way to be a full member of the national
society.
Does all this matter? Clearly it does for the minority communities
themselves. But I would argue that
France’s continuing adherence to the ideology of ‘indivisibility’ permeates
discussion much more widely than just about the Bretons or the Basques. Indivisibility, coupled with secularism,
prevents France from recognizing, promoting policies for, or monitoring the
life conditions of various of its minority communities – most especially its
Islamic minorities of North African or Middle Eastern origin. In a world of globalization, mass migration
and the dissemination of varieties of cultures, states and societies need to be
more flexible about recognizing the legitimacy of ‘other’ ways of being and
operating – whether that is Welsh-speakers in the UK, Catalans in Spain, or
both the Breton and the Islamic population of France. In a world of increased diversity, arguing
the necessity and desirability of homogeneity is outdated and potentially
repressive.
