South Tyrol, an autonomous and predominantly German-speaking province in northern Italy, is regarded as one of the most successful cases of ‘consociational’ democracy – a political system in which people deeply divided along ethnic, linguistic, or other lines share power. One of the rights that speakers of German, Italian and Ladin living in the province enjoy is proportional representation in the Provincial and municipal executives. Stephen J. Larin and Marc Röggla argue that it is now time to include ‘Others’, who do not wish to formally identify with any or just one of these language groups, in that proportionality rule. Taking this step would help shift the province from corporate consociationalism towards a more liberal model

Larin, Stephen J.

Röggla, Marc

LSE Research Online

By Democratic Audit UK 02/11/2016Time to invite the ‘Others’ to the table: a proposal to make SouthTyrol more inclusivedemocraticaudit.com/2016/11/02/time-to-invite-the-others-to-the-table-a-proposal-to-make-south-tyrol-more-inclusive/South Tyrol, an autonomous and predominantly German-speaking province in northern Italy, is regarded as one ofthe most successful cases of ‘consociational’ democracy – a political system in which people deeply divided alongethnic, linguistic, or other lines share power. One of the rights that speakers of German, Italian and Ladin living inthe province enjoy is proportional representation in the Provincial and municipal executives. Stephen J.Larin and Marc Röggla argue that it is now time to include ‘Others’, who do not wish to formally identify with any orjust one of these language groups, in that proportionality rule. Taking this step would help shift the provincefrom corporate consociationalism towards a more liberal model.The Dolomites, South Tyrol. Photo: Stephen LarinSouth Tyrol (known as Südtirol in German and Alto Adige in Italian) was part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire until itwas annexed by Italy at the end of the First World War. After a long and varying conflict between German- andItalian-speakers that included Fascist oppression, the flawed implementation of an autonomy agreement betweenAustria and Italy, and violent unrest, the 1972 Autonomy Statute successfully instituted territorial autonomy for theprovince and power-sharing between its three official language groups (German, Italian, and Ladin).In an earlier post, we explained that South Tyrol recently began what has been billed as a participatory democraticprocess with the aim of amending the Autonomy Statute. We argued that the ‘South Tyrol Autonomy Convention’does not represent a new type of consociational negotiation but its occurrence and even its problems may beevidence that power-sharing can transform conflicts.Now we propose to build on that success and genuinely bolster South Tyrol’s liberal–democratic legitimacy byamending the Autonomy Statue to include ‘Others’ – the Province’s official designation for people who do not want todeclare membership of one of its three official language groups – in the executive proportionality rule, and adjust thereservation of the Provincial Council’s two Vice President positions so that an ‘Other’ could hold one of them.1/6These changes would shift South Tyrol from ‘corporate’ towards ‘liberal’ consociationalism – making it more liberaland democratic without jeopardising the necessary protections that have made progress possible – and it would onlyhave an effect if that is what the people of South Tyrol want.Corporate and liberal consociationalism‘Consociationalism’ is a set of institutions and measures that formalise power-sharing between two or more socialsegments of a divided territory. It can be either ‘corporate’ or ‘liberal’. A corporate consociation names the segmentsthat will share power in the peace agreement or constitution that institutes it: in Belgium, for example, the federalexecutive must be composed of an equal number of Dutch- and French-speakers.A liberal consociation, on the other hand, institutes a power-sharing framework but determines who will share powerwithin that framework democratically. Northern Ireland, for example, uses the mathematical ‘D’Hondt method’ todetermine the proportional distribution of executive positions based on the number of seats each party wins in theelection, regardless of group affiliation.A recent study by Allison McCulloch found that of the twelve contemporary consociations, five are corporate, threeare liberal (only one by design), and four are mixed systems. Corporate and mixed consociational agreements aremore common, she explains, because such“settlements are negotiated at the very point at which group identities are the most politically salientand polarised. Under conditions of insecurity, groups and their representatives are unlikely to settlefor anything other than a strong guarantee of their share of power, regardless of electoral prospects.”Nevertheless, most advocates of consociationalism strongly prefer the liberal version. As John McGarry andBrendan O’Leary persuasively put it, liberal consociational arrangements are preferable because“national identities in pluri-national places are not permanently fixed, and not everyone adheres tothem—or with equal intensity if they do. A liberal consociation should treat as equally as possiblethose individuals who subscribe to rival national identities, to no national identity, to nested nationalidentities, or have other salient public identities which cross-cut national lines.”In short, liberal consociationalism tries to balance the pragmatism of formal power-sharing in a divided territory withthe principles of liberal–democratic freedom and equality.A proposal for South TyrolSouth Tyrol’s consociational measures are corporate: power is shared by the three official language groups(German, Italian, and Ladin) through a mix of reserved and proportionally distributed positions. This makes sensegiven the power imbalance and antipathy between German- and Italian speakers in the late 1960s and early 1970s,when the current Autonomy Statue was negotiated.Things have changed since then. As we argued in our previous post, South Tyrol is still divided, but the mistrust thatcharacterised the relationship between the German and Italian speakers is in the past for most people. This stabilityprovides an opportunity to shift South Tyrol from a corporate to a mixed consociation by introducing some liberalmeasures. We think that the best way to do that at this juncture is to make ‘Other’, a category that was added to thelanguage declaration 25 years ago, politically meaningful.2/6The Autonomy Statute requires proportional representation of South Tyrol’s three official language groups in itsProvincial executive, municipal executives, and for public service employees.At the Provincial level, the executive is composed of one President, two Vice Presidents, and a varying number ofMinisters (currently five), elected by the Provincial Council through majority vote. The President can be affiliated withany group, but one Vice President must be a German speaker and the other an Italian speaker. The executive as awhole must reflect the proportion of official language groups represented in the Council, with the one exception thata Ladin-speaker may be included even if this derogates from proportional representation.Municipal executives must also be proportionate to the linguistic composition of their Municipal Councils. Instead of aPresident and Vice Presidents, however, there is a Mayor and a Deputy Mayor. In municipalities with more than13,000 inhabitants (currently six), the Deputy Mayor must be affiliated with the second-most represented officiallanguage group in the Council.Executive proportionality was first implemented in the 1973 Provincial election, with candidates simply stating theirgroup membership. Proportionality among public service employees was implemented in 1976, along with therequirement that all Italian citizens in South Tyrol declare themselves members of one of the three official languagegroups in the decennial census, starting in 1981.An association of ‘mixed-language’ families (which included both migrants and families that speak at least two of theofficial languages) challenged the legality of the declaration requirement on the grounds that it discriminates againstpeople who do not identify with one or only one of those groups.In 1984, Italy’s Council of State ruled that while citizens in South Tyrol can be required to declare membership in anofficial language group in order to facilitate the implementation of the Autonomy Statute, they cannot be required tomake a false declaration, so persons who do not belong to one of the three official groups must have another option.In response, the Province added ‘Other’ as a declaration option, starting with the 1991 census, which requires thosewho choose it to also declare their ‘affiliation’ with one of the three official language groups in order to maintain theinstitutional function of the declaration. As a result, declaring oneself ‘Other’ is only symbolic and has no practicaleffect, which may be why so few people have chosen this option and the number has decreased over time: 2.39 percent  (10,095) in 1991, 2.24 per cent (9,587) in 2001, and 1.68 per cent (7,625) in 2011.Notably, however, 3.6 per cent of those surveyed in 2014 identified as ‘Other’ (double the number in the census justthree years earlier), and identifications not directly associated with the three official language groups figuredprominently: 17.2 per cent European and 11.3 per cent  ‘citizen of the world’ (it is important to note, however, thatrespondents could choose more than one answer). Furthermore, migration to South Tyrol has increased significantlyover the past 20 years, and now 8.9 per cent of the population is foreign-born.With these things in mind, we propose to amend the executive proportionality rule to include ‘Others’, and adjust thereservation of the Provincial Council’s two Vice-President positions from specific groups (one German and oneItalian speaker) to members of the first and the second most-represented official categories in the Council, followingthe municipal Deputy Mayor model.This means that the Provincial and municipal executives would be required to include ‘Others’ in proportion to theirrepresentation in their respective Councils, and it would be possible for a member of any of the four categories(German, Italian, Ladin speakers, and ‘Others’) to be one of the Provincial Vice Presidents. These amendments areintended to make political representation in South Tyrol more liberal democratic.Consociational democracy is a pragmatic response to circumstances where majoritarian democracy wouldeffectively institutionalise the dominance of one group over others. In many cases, this means that power-sharingbetween specific segments of a divided territory must be guaranteed in order to achieve stability. This kind of pre-determination constrains liberal democracy, however, and should be avoided when possible.3/6Making ‘Other’ a politically meaningful category is a way to empower people who do not identify with any or only oneof the official language groups without jeopardising the stability won through consociation. And the fact that anyonecan be an ‘Other’ would significantly improve the system’s liberal democratic legitimacy.How would this proposal affect South Tyrol’s autonomy arrangement?It is important to emphasise that these amendments leave almost all of the autonomy arrangement’s groupprotections intact, and only affect the composition of the Provincial and municipal executives. We cannot explainthese institutions  in detail here, but mention them briefly in order to ensure that our intentions are clear (for anoverview, see the Autonomy Arrangements in the World  website).The Joint Commission of Six, an inter-governmental and inter-group institution that is charged with implementing theAutonomy Statute, will keep its equal seat reservations because the autonomy arrangement is still fundamentally anagreement between a national minority (German speakers in South Tyrol) and the national majority (Italianspeakers throughout Italy). Public service employment will remain proportionate to language affiliation. And thepublic culture of each of the three language groups will remain protected through mandatory multilingualism in publicservices, and cultural autonomy supported with funding proportionate to language affiliation.‘Others’ will also still be required to anonymously declare affiliation with one of the official linguistic groups in thecensus, and to make a personal declaration to be considered for positions allocated by linguistic affiliation, such aspeople working in public services. They will not be required to declare a language affiliation in order to run forelected office, but must do so to invoke the ‘group right to challenge’.The South Tyrol Provincial Council. Photo: Stephen LarinThis right allows each of the three official language groups to challenge a bill, budget item, or administrative act thatit deems prejudicial to its rights as a group. ‘Others’ will still be able to initiate a challenge if they have declared anaffiliation, but the threshold for a challenge to move forward – a majority vote among the group’s ProvincialCouncillors – will only apply to Councillors who have declared themselves members rather than affiliates. In otherwords, ‘Others’ will be able to initiate but not block challenges within their affiliated group.The reasons for this are more straightforward than the details: ‘Others’ of whatever political identity may still have aninterest in protecting a particular public culture, but at the same time the right to challenge should favour those whoidentify as members of the three official groups that the system is designed to protect.4/6None of this means that we think that the amendments we have proposed are the only things that should change.We are, however, convinced that this is the extent of what is politically possible at this juncture, and we want tomake the system more liberal-democratic with the knowledge that this could lead to further and better-legitimatedchanges in future if people desire them.It is difficult to say what the results of the 2013 Provincial election would have been if the amendments that we areproposing had been in place. We do not know how many Provincial Councillors are ‘Others’, because only thedeclaration of affiliation is made public. Both politicians and voters may make different choices if ‘Other’ reallymeans something, and you do not have to be an ‘Other’ yourself to vote for a party or candidate that is.In Northern Ireland, where ‘Other’ has been a meaningful alternative to ‘Nationalist’ and ‘Unionist’ since the GoodFriday Agreement of 1998, the electorate still mostly votes along ethno-national lines. ‘Others’ have never receivedmore than 10 per cent of the vote, and have never held more than two of the ten executive positions at any giventime. This is expected in divided territories, but building ‘Others’ into the system allows it to respond to political andsocial changes over time.Even if it has no practical effect, however, there are good principled reasons to adopt this proposal.First, a more liberal approach to consociationalism in South Tyrol would help address one of the most commoncriticisms of consociational democracy in general, which is that it seems to entrench the divisions that it is intendedto address.Second, making ‘Other’ a meaningful category may allow for a wider range of political perspectives to berepresented in both Provincial and municipal governance.And finally, it would bring South Tyrol closer to international human rights standards. This is also a practicalconsideration, given recent European Court of Human Rights rulings that some of Bosnia and Herzegovina’scorporate measures are illegitimately discriminatory (Sejdić and Finci v. BiH  and Pilav v. BiH; for the problematicimplications of this type of ruling for power-sharing agreements, see McCrudden and O’Leary 2013).ConclusionThis proposal is a good fit for contemporary South Tyrol. The province has changed significantly since 1972, and wehave a real opportunity to build on that progress by making it more democratic. It is far less divided than bothNorthern Ireland, where ‘Others’ already have access to the executive, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where theexclusion of ‘Others’ has received significant international criticism.It would also be straightforward to implement. Executive coalitions in South Tyrol are between language groups, notparties, meaning that one party could form the Provincial government on its own, so long as the declarations of itsmembers on the executive are proportionate to the distribution of categories in the Council. But its greatest virtue isthat it will only have an effect if ‘Others’ achieve electoral success because that is what people want.This post represents the views of the authors and not those of Democratic Audit or EURAC.Stephen J. Larin (@sjlarin) (left) is a political scientist and Senior Researcher with the Institutefor Minority Rights at the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC), Italy. His researchfocuses on the relationship between majority nationalism and minorities such as migrants andsub-state nations.Marc Röggla (@MRggla) is a trained lawyer and Researcher with the Institute for MinorityRights at the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC), Italy. His research focuses onminority autonomy, protection, and media. He is one of two coordinators of EURAC’sadministrative and advisory role in South Tyrol’s Autonomy Convention , and a EURAC representative in the5/6European Association of Newspapers in Minority and Regional Languages  (MIDAS).6/6

Time to invite the ‘others’ to the table: a proposal to make South Tyrol more inclusive

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