Fahrmeir, Andreas

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Samuel Salzborn. Ethnisierung der Politik: Theorie und Geschichte des Volksgruppenrechts in Europa.Campus Forschung Series. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005. 356 pp. Bibliography. EUR 39.90 (paper),ISBN 3-593-37897-5.Reviewed by Andreas Fahrmeir,H istorisches Seminar,U niversität zu Köln.Published by H-German (February,2 006)Minority Protection and the Radical Right in EuropeSamuel Salzborn’sp rovocative book isconceiveda sam ixture between a scholarly studyand a political wake-up call. He starts with theobservation that the European nation-state, amodern "bourgeois" system of politicalorganization born of the French revolution, isunder threat. The threat that mainly concerns himemanates from the European project’se mbrace of a"Europe of the regions." Regional movementsinclude, of course, the violent groups in Corsica orthe Basque regions of France and Spain, which, inSalzborn’sr eading, are among those that strive forethnic purity.B ehind anyr hetoric of minorityrights, therefore, Salzborn suspects a hiddenagenda: to exclude those deemed alien and replacethe civic equality of citoyens with inequalities in anethnic state. Doing so, Salzborn argues, wouldallow völkisch ideas (which originated in right-wing political movements during the SecondGerman Empire and the Weimar Republic) totriumph and permit a subversion of the Europeanproject by the radical right. The Austrian minorityrights politics practiced by the FPÖ/ÖVP servea san example for Salzborn of what may lie in storefor Europe.Put brieﬂy,S alzborn seeks to showh owminority rights can servea sab asis for "animplementation of a völkisch and anti-egalitarian"blueprint for society,w hich represents "atheoretical and historical counter-project to theFrench Revolution, the bourgeois-republicaninterpretation of citizenship ... and the postulate ofequality" (p. 16): the triumph of ethnos over demosas the basis for a political society.Most of the book’sc hapters are systematic.The ﬁrst section provides an overviewo fdeﬁnitions of ethnicity.I ti sf ollowed by a bird’seyep erspective onc oncepts of minorities,ethnicities and nationalities in Germanys ince thePeace of Augsburg( 1555), with particularemphasis on the post-Versailles period. Its mainpoint is the systematic exposition of thefundamental contradiction between "democraticliberalism" and " völkisch antiliberalism" (p. 59).The section entitled "Theoretical Elementsof Modern Volksgruppenrecht "i st he core of thebook’ss ystematic argument. In a comprehensivereading of scientiﬁc papers, press articles, draftminority and minority language codes by variousauthors, Salzborn documents his case that evenadebate on ethnic groups couched in terms of grouprights is likely--and possibly bound--to culminatein mass exclusion. Take, for example, the demand,often formulated by advocates of ethnic grouprights, that in order to protect culturaldistinctiveness, areas of minority ethnic groupsettlement must be protected against mass"majority" immigration. Presumably,s uch callsseek to preclude policies liket he "Germanization"of Polish-speaking provinces in late nineteenth-century Prussia, "Italianization" in pre- and post-Second World War South Tyrol, or Chinese actionsin Tibet. But the demand also implies limiting orrescinding the individual rights of non-groupcitizens: if theya re more than a guarantee of staterestraint, theyl imit or denyf reedom of movement,freedom of expression and individual culturalautonomy to citizens classiﬁed as members of anethnic group not native tot hat particular region.Salzborn also highlights that most deﬁnitions of"ethnic groups" are written with stable, largelyimmobile, settlements of peasants in mind ratherthan, say,m igrant workers. Written into aEuropean minority code and taken to its logicalextreme, the protection of regional (say,B avarian)populations could thus justify,f or example,H-Net ReviewsGerman restrictions on "alien" immigration fromwithin the European Union.The book’sl ast chapter turns to history.Here, the sweeping analytical perspective oft hetheoretical analysis givesw ay to fairly minutedetail. Salzborn traces the development of threeinstitutions, which, to him, exemplify the gradualreemergence of völkisch regional ethnic policyconcepts. A brief attempt to coordinate "non-ethnic" regionalist movements throughout WesternEurope in the late 1940s foundered quickly.I tw asonly when more völkisch -oriented interests fromDenmark came to the fore that an organization wasformed. Renamed the Federal Union of EuropeanNationalities (FUEN) in 1954, this group attractedmore attention and some German governmentsupport. Its chief members and supporters wereorganizations representing (or claiming torepresent) Danes in Germany, Germans inDenmark and Italy,G erman Heimatvertriebene andsome residents of Brittany. Most other Europeanregionalist movements refused to join the FUEN,apparently causing the leadership to fear that itmight be perceiveds olely as a German movement.The FUEN was closely linked with anotherinitiative:ar esearch institute for self-determinationand nationality politics, founded at Lüneburgb ythe Bundesministerium für Gesamtdeutsche Fragenin 1956 and movedt oM arburgt en years later.T hethird villain in Salzborn’ss tory is the MunichInternational Institute for Ethnic Group Rights andRegionalism, funded by the Bavarian governmentand established in 1977 not least in order toprovide Munich with greater inﬂuence onEuropean legislative projects. From 1985, FUENand the Munich institutes were cooperating indrafting proposals for European legislation onregionalism and ethnicity.S alzborn claims that allproposals emerging from these organizationsshared a common purpose: to reduce nationalsovereignty and re-ethnicize European politics. InSalzborn’sv iew, their partial success resulted fromthe European transformation of 1989, whichbrought issues regarding the treatment of nationaland ethnic minorities back to the forefront of(Western) European political perceptions. Salzbornfails to mention, however, that after 1989 FUENbeneﬁted greatly through the addition of partner-organizations in Eastern Europe (althoughgovernment funding remains limited to SouthTyrol, Karinthia, and Schleswig-Holstein, wherethe society’sh eadquarters are located). Salzbornargues that the framework agreement on theprotection of national minorities signed in 1995and the 1992 European Charter of Regional andMinority Languages represent a ﬁrst breakthroughof the newp olitics of ethnicity.Salzborn is at pains to showt hat theseassociations were personally and institutionallylinked to the racial policies of the Third Reich andremain tied to Europe’s( or,m ore precisely,Germany’s, Austria’s, and Denmark’s) newr ight.Manyo ft he founding members of the FUEN andthe Marburgr esearch institute had a background ininterwar ethnic politics, and the Marburgb uildinghad housed an institute involved in the pre-war andwartime planning for a racially redesigned Europeunder German dominance. What emerges lessclearly in the account is the real extent of thiscontinuity of content, or indeed whether the aimsof the Bavarian government (which includedgreater European recognition of German Länder )were truly compatible with those of old-schoolrace politics, or those of federal German ministries.Little attempt is made to quantify or contextualizeright wing connections, which are often insinuatedrather than proved--for instance, Salzborn, quotesan activist’sN SDAP membership number(incidentally in the high millions) in order tocontend that this person must have held anti-democratic and racist beliefs in the FederalRepublic (p. 206).Because Salzborn’sa ccount is in part apolitical cri de coeur,j udgments on its validity arelikely to depend on readers’ personal politicalpreferences; the point of a reviewc annot be to passjudgment on this aspect of the book. Nevertheless,If ound Salzborn’st extd isappointing for a numberof different reasons. His uncritical acceptance ofthe "enlightened" European nation-state as acontinuous font of rights and liberties is soprofoundly ahistorical--and in completecontradiction to recent, more complexa ccounts ofthe rise of the modern nation-state--that it passesbeyond the boundaries of political persuasions intothe realm of the factually incorrect.[1] It is assimplistic as the message--displayed on the homepage of the Munich International Institute--that the"ethnic expulsions, ’cleansings’ and genocides ofthe 20th century are products of nation-stateideology of the 19th century."[2] What isparticularly surprising, givent he frequentreferences to Adorno, is the absence of anyreﬂection on the "dialectics of enlightenment"--letalone anyd iscussion of the empirical question of-2-H-Net Reviewswhat basis in historical experience exists forassuming a systematic and empirical contrastbetween a French, libertarian, and a German,ethnic, model of the nation-state.[3]However, the book’sm ain problem is that itfails to delivero ni ts promise of analyzing "theoryand history" of minority law" in Europe" (aspromised in the title). Its focus on German (andsome Austrian) groups ignores ethnic minorityexperiences particularly in Eastern Europe, but alsoFrance or Spain. As Salzborn points out, post-1945West Germanyl acked substantial ethnic minoritieslikely to face state discrimination; protection ofindividual rights not only appeared adequate, butalso met the concerns of the vast majority of thepopulation. Minority policyw as, therefore, largely,ap otential tool of foreign policy. Approaching thequestion through the eyes of Hungarians inRumania or Serbia, or the Corsicans or Basques inFrance or Spain, will lead to very different results.Such comparisons would have required, of course,am uch broader empirical analysis; but withoutsuch an analysis, a full explanation of the reasons,consequences and motivesf or the changes inEuropean Union minority policyc annot be given.Notes[1]. See, for example, Wolfgang Reinhard,Geschichte der Staatsgewalt (Munich: Beck,2001); Michael Mann, The Sources of SocialPower: Volume 2, The Rise of Classes and NationStates 1760-1914 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993). Salzborn’sa ccount couldnot incorporate Michael Mann’s Fascists(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) orThe Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining EthnicCleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2004).[2]. See http://www.intereg.org( consultedFebruary 7, 2006).[3]. A summary of the arguments thatencourage caution can be found in Patrick Weil,Qu’est-ce qu’un français? Histoired el anationalité française depuis la Révolution,2 nd ed.(Paris: Gallimard, 2005; [1st ed., 2002]), pp.281-315.-3-H-Net ReviewsCitation: Andreas Fahrmeir. "Reviewo fS amuel Salzborn, Ethnisierung der Politik: Theorie undGeschichte des Volksgruppenrechts in Europa, H-German, H-Net Reviews, .URL: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=17051147197659.Copyright © 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of thiswork for nonproﬁt, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author,w eb location, dateof publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For anyo ther proposeduse, contact the Reviews editorial staffa th books@mail.h-net.msu.edu .-4-

[Rezension zu:] Samuel Salzborn. Ethnisierung der Politik: Theorie und Geschichte des Volksgruppenrechts in Europa. Campus Forschung Series. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005. 356 pp. Bibliography. EUR 39.90 (paper), ISBN 3-593-37897-5

[Rezension zu:] Samuel Salzborn. Ethnisierung der Politik: Theorie und Geschichte des Volksgruppenrechts in Europa. Campus Forschung Series. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005. 356 pp. Bibliography. EUR 39.90 (paper), ISBN 3-593-37897-5

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