State determination vs. Selbstverstimmung der Völker

In 1958, the year the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted Resolution A/RES/1314(XIII) on international respect for the right of peoples and nations to self-determination (UNGA 1958), Hans Kohn (Reference Kohn1958, 528) observed that this concept “is more easily and inspiringly stated as a guide and a goal than realized in the complexities and ambiguities of the world situation.” This gap between principle and reality can be partly explained by the sheer imprecision of the terms (self-determination, peoples, nations) at hand. Yet it also derives from the dominant (yet fictional) idea that the nation-state, the cornerstone of the modern international order, exercises sovereignty in the name of a single undifferentiated “people” (Bieber Reference Bieber2018). For the most part, the nation-states established in Europe during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, either through the top-down standardization of existing unitary realms or the break-up of imperial polities, delivered self-determination to national majority populations defined by citizenship but also — crucially — shared history, language, and culture. Following Cassese’s (Reference Cassese1995) definition, this self-determination was both external (freedom to define one’s international status) and internal (freedom to choose one’s own authentic form of government) in quality. These majoritarian states have remained home to subsets of their citizenry that claim the status of peoples in their own right. In all but exceptional cases, however, the latter have been denied the possibility of realising external self-determination, since international law has given clear primacy to maintaining the territorial integrity of existing states (Blanke and Abdelrehim Reference Blanke and Abdelrehim2014, 556–558).

While the idea of self-determination is easily grasped according to the maxim “let the people decide,” this immediately begs the question of how (and by whom) “the people” is to be defined (Jennings Reference Jennings1956). The answer has been provided by the modern ideology of nationalism, which delineates sovereign peoples by reference to a shared history, culture, and political destiny (Harris Reference Harris2009, 4). In a seminal work, Umut Őzkirimli (Reference Özkirimli2017) calls nationalism a discourse that: defines a population group as having a shared national identity,Footnote ¹ seeks to achieve or preserve distinctive boundaries and sovereignty for the group, and legitimises rule over (or the claim to rule over) a defined territorial homeland. Although (as discussed below), it is possible to envision forms of national sovereignty that do not require control over territory, the nationalist principle “that the political and the national unit should be congruent” (Gellner Reference Gellner1983, 1) has become inextricably linked with “the self-determining nation-state as the only legitimate political form throughout the globe” (Manela Reference Manela2007, 5).

During the 19^th and early-20^th centuries, prototypical modern states in Western Europe deployed their power top-down to forge an understanding of peoplehood which, while ostensibly founded on civic-territorial precepts, also implied linguistic and cultural uniformity of the citizen body. As would later become clear, their efforts to assimilate non-core ethnic groups remained uneven and incomplete. Nevertheless, as Emmanuel Dalle Mulle (this issue) observes, it was in this majoritarian context that the term “minority” — denoting a part of the population that was numerically inferior (and thus subordinate in political status) — first came into usage. In CEE, conversely, “nationality” became synonymous not with citizenship of an existing state, but rather with the linguistic-cultural understanding of “peoplehood” (Piirimäe Reference Piirimäe2022, 334) associated with the German word Volk. Having taken hold within an imperial framework characterized by pronounced ethnocultural diversity, this generated demands for Selbstverstimmung der Völker that challenged and reshaped the political and social order from below.

The “nationality question” — as it became known in English after the 1848 Revolutions in CEE — could not, however, be addressed by giving each ethnocultural group a territory of its own, so mixed were the patterns of settlement in the region. The German and Italian “national” states and the autonomous Kingdom of Hungary established after 1860 were all ethnically diverse and beset by internal tensions. In this regard, many local thinkers and activists questioned the applicability of the nation-state as a template for the region’s future. Rather than dissolving the existing empires, they advocated reconfiguring them along democratic, ethnofederalist lines within their existing borders. The Austrian Social Democrats Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, for instance, redefined nations not as territorially based entities but as communities of persons united by shared language and culture, irrespective of whether they lived compactly or were dispersed across the territory of an existing state. By proposing that individual citizens be allowed to determine their ethno-national affiliation and, on this basis, register to elect state-wide institutions of cultural self-government for the relevant community, Renner and Bauer propounded an alternative, functionally based modality of national self-determination and sovereignty and a very different vision of statehood (Bauer Reference Bauer and O’Donnell2000; Renner [1899] Reference Renner and Nimni2005).

Indeed, contrary to later nationalist claims, it was only in 1917 that political activists amongst many of the former subject peoples began to pursue the option of establishing a fully sovereign national state. Before this, nationality debates encompassed a range of proposals based on different configurations of territorial and non-territorial autonomy (NTA) within a multinational state structure (Smith and Hiden Reference Smith and Hiden2012; Trencsényi et al. Reference Trencsényi, Kopeček, Gabrijelčič, Falina, Baár and Janowski2018; Piirimäe Reference Piirimäe2022). The NTA model later informed early post-imperial state-building processes in several settings across the region (Germane, Kuzmany, and Smith Reference Germane, Kuzmany and Smith2025). The most notable were Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which became an important formative context for the international activism of the CEN (Smith and Hiden Reference Smith and Hiden2012).

In the western peripheries of the collapsing Russia, the shift to state-seeking nationalism gathered momentum following the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power. Though intent on keeping all the peoples of the former empire together within a single Soviet-led state, the Bolsheviks had recognized the need to address national self-determination (NSD) claims if they were to attain and consolidate power. Amidst the upheavals of 1917–1920, they used expressions of support for “free self-determination, up to secession and the formation of an independent state” as a “political tool” to undermine the power of their political rivals (Rowe Reference Rowe2024, 24 and 32). This approach is exemplified by the May 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Imperial Germany, which had itself weaponized NSD claims by Russia’s subject peoples to undermine the integrity of its wartime adversary on the Eastern Front. In relinquishing control over a swathe of Russia’s former western borderlands, Lenin’s government declared that the future status of these territories should be determined according to the will of their inhabitants. The separation, though, was intended to be only temporary; for, in Lenin’s (Reference Lenin1974, 72) view, “the freedom to leave one’s husband [was] not an invitation to all wives to do so.” When Imperial Germany collapsed in November 1918, the Bolsheviks moved to forcibly assert their authority over the ceded territories, engaging in armed struggle with national movements committed to achieving independent statehood.

The Bolsheviks’ instrumental espousal of NSD nevertheless carried important longer-term consequences, inspiring the subsequent ethnoterritorial structure of the USSR and the purportedly anti-colonial indigenization (korenizatsiya) policies of the Soviet regime during the 1920s. Following the dictum of “national in form, socialist in content,” this “voluntary federation of equal sovereign national republics” was initially understood as a transitional arrangement. In what was in fact a centrally controlled single-party dictatorship, korenizatsiya was supposed to lay the ground for the longer-term rapprochement (sblizhenie) and eventual merger (sliyanie) of the USSR’s constituent nationalities into a new “Soviet people” united by its shared commitment to an “internationalist” communist state and its use of Russian as a lingua franca. Ultimately, however, early Soviet policies had the unintended effect of institutionalizing both personal ethnicity and territorial nationhood to an unparalleled degree (Brubaker Reference Brubaker1996), creating an in-built tension between limited sub-state cultural autonomy and top-down, often coercive and increasingly Russocentric policies of Sovietization from the 1930s onwards. This “affirmative action empire” (Martin Reference Martin2001) that “nourished cultural uniqueness yet denied its expression” (Suny Reference Suny1991, 113) kept the “nationality question” alive, heralding a resurgence of NSD claims when hegemonic control by the Communist Party finally ceased in the late 1980s.

Outside the Bolshevik realm, it fell to the victorious Western Allies of Britain, France, and the USA to address the self-determination claims that had arisen so forcefully during World War I. In February 1918, US President Woodrow Wilson declared self-determination “an imperative principle of action” following a war rooted “in the disregard of the rights of small nations and of nationalities [lacking] the force … to determine their own allegiances and their own forms of political life” (Wilson Reference Wilson1918). Wilson’s statement had global resonance, raising expectations amongst all peoples hitherto subject to imperial rule. These, however, were quickly dispelled by the peace settlement of 1919–1923.

With Britain and France rejecting any application of NSD to their own domestic realms or overseas colonial possessions, its scope was to be limited to the post-imperial territories of CEE. Wilson, it seems, understood NSD only in general liberal terms as “consent of the governed.” He had no intrinsic commitment to the nationality principle and knew little about the complexities of CEE, where talk of self-determination raised as many questions as it answered (Núñez Seixas Reference Seixas, Manoel and Seixas2021a). His Secretary of State Robert Lansing thus rightly asked, “When the President talks of ‘self-determination’ what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race (sic), a territorial area or a community? … It will raise hopes which can never be realized” (Macmillan Reference Macmillan2003, 11).

In practice, ethnicity and language became the criteria for defining CEE’s “small nations and nationalities” (Núñez Seixas Reference Seixas and Xosé2021b). The Western-brokered peace settlements applied a territorial modality of self-determination whereby each such group would acquire a sovereign national state. This approach, however, was only applied selectively, as NSD was subordinated to the Western Powers’ geostrategic goal of creating a belt of viable states as a bulwark against a resurgence of Germany’s power and a further expansion of Bolshevik influence. In any case, as Renner, Bauer, and others had previously foreseen, a purely territorial approach would have been unrealizable in practice, given the regional mismatch between ethnonational and political boundaries. In the new or reconfigured states that emerged, 20–30% of inhabitants on average did not identify with the “core” majority ethnic group (Pearson Reference Pearson1983). While newly minted statehood increased the political rights of citizens affiliating with these majority peoples, the gain was less obvious for those who did not, especially where they identified with a group that had been separated from its existing national state through border changes or had otherwise seen its aspirations for self-determination thwarted during the peace settlements.

In this respect, the post-1918 reconfiguration of political space did not resolve the nationality question in CEE, but recast it as the minority question (Dalle Mulle, this issue). Rogers Brubaker (Reference Brubaker1996) outlines how new ruling elites in majoritarian but “incomplete” post-imperial nation-states prioritized the needs of their ethnolinguistically defined core nations; these policies, however, encountered opposition from among politically mobilized minority populations excluded from within the new state structure. In many cases, these minority actors were resented for having previously held power during the imperial era, and could also be associated (by dint of ethnicity) with an “external national homeland” or “kin-state,” often a former imperial metropole harboring revisionist sentiments. This engendered a “triadic nexus” of conflictual and mutually reinforcing “nationalizing state,” “national minority,” and “external homeland” nationalisms, which Brubaker illustrates using the example of the sizeable ethnic German populations consigned to minority status in the new states of CEE.

For Western governments interested primarily in upholding the territorial integrity of these newly created buffer states, minorities were understood as posing not merely a question, but a security problem. Continued hopes, it is true, were invested in the new League of Nations as the basis for a new international order based on collective security. The centerpiece of a Wilsonian post-war vision from which the USA ultimately withdrew, the League was entrusted with implementing minority protection clauses enshrined in the treaties drawn up with the CEE states. In this regard, as Volker Prott (Reference Prott2016, 228) observes, the peacemakers sought to channel still unsatisfied “claims for self-determination into demands for cultural, that is, non-political, minority rights,” hoping that this would resolve tensions arising from continued ethnonational diversity within these states.

The minority clauses in the treaties were designed to ensure that individuals affiliating with ethnonational minorities would have equal citizenship rights within the new societies of which they formed part. This implied protection from discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity, but also the positive right to preserve one’s distinct national culture through access to state-funded primary education in the relevant language. The treaties, however, made no provision for public-legal recognition of minority communities or their collective right to autonomy, despite calls for such by national activists during the peace negotiations. To have done so would have cut against the perceived political normalcy of the majoritarian nation-state, built on a homogenizing logic that prescribed equality as sameness. Moreover, while the treaties ostensibly made minority issues a matter of international concern, the League’s credentials in this area (and as a collective security provider more broadly) were undermined by its fundamentally intergovernmental character. Minority protection was, in essence, “a political procedure, in which the sovereignty of the states was scrupulously respected and safeguarded” (Crols Reference Crols and Smith2005, 188). Petitions protesting alleged violation of the treaties could be lodged with the League, but of those received, only around two per cent made it to the Council, where the accused state had a seat and could exercise a veto. The remainder were either rejected by the League Minorities Section or addressed in an informal and non-transparent manner with the state concerned via the mechanism of “committees of three” (Prott Reference Prott2016, 225).

The new concept of minority protection thus appeared every bit as ambiguous and contested as that of national self-determination. In a speech to the League Council in 1930, French Premier Aristide Briand declared that, by guaranteeing minorities their language, their religion, and their tradition, states could “maintain … a kind of small family in the lap of a greater one, not to the detriment of the greater aggregate, but to ensure harmony between all its members.”Footnote ² A more commonly held vision, however, was expressed in 1925 by British Foreign Minister Austen Chamberlain, who claimed that “the object of the treaties was to secure for the minorities that measure of protection and justice which would gradually prepare them to be merged in the national community to which they belonged” (Schott Reference Schott1988, 169). In other words, minorities should undergo gradual assimilation into the dominant majority societal culture of the state in which they live.

Reconciling state and nation: The CEN and minority protection

It was to remedy the perceived shortcomings of this system that minority activists came together in 1925 to establish the CEN. The Congress had ethnic Germans at its core, emerging out of an established umbrella association (Verband) of German organizations across Europe, founded in 1922. Pivotal to both bodies were activists from the Baltic States, such as Ewald Ammende (CEN founder and its Secretary General until his death in 1936) and Werner Hasselblatt from Estonia and Paul Schiemann from Latvia. As the word “nationality” in the title suggests, CEN’s founders regarded the status of “minority” ascribed to them within Europe’s new nation-states as problematic (Schiemann 1927), as it treated the communities in question as objects requiring protection from states rather than legal subjects with autonomous voice and agency. Some members, particularly Hasselblatt, rejected the post-war territorial and political order altogether and remained committed to the wartime goal of making CEE a German-led realm under the tutelage of a powerful Reich (Piirimäe Reference Piirimäe2025). The strong German presence within CEN would prove to be a complicating factor, since the Verband (and, by extension, the wider Congress) was heavily reliant on funding from Germany to support its activity. With Hasselblatt having assumed leadership of the German grouping in 1931, Hitler’s rise to power in Germany two years later meant that the Nazi regime quickly appropriated CEN for its own ends. In light of this, subsequent historiography has tended to start from the 1930s and extrapolate backwards, arguing that CEN was never anything other than a Trojan Horse for particularist German revisionism (Bamberger Stemann Reference Bamberger Stemann2000; Salzborn Reference Salzborn2005).

This interpretation, however, occludes the fact that, despite the broad spectrum of political orientations within both, the Verband and CEN were initially conceived and nested firmly within the League of Nations framework. The Verband, for instance, initially billed itself as speaking for deutschen Minderheiten as opposed to the more politically contentious term Volksgruppen, later adopted after Hasselblatt became leader. Similarly, CEN — also frequently referred to under the alternative title “Congress of Organised Ethnical Minorities (Nationalities) in European Countries”— began life as a genuinely transnational coalition committed to advancing the rights of all its members. It encompassed over 200 delegates speaking in the name of 20 minorities from 15 states (Bamberger Stemann Reference Bamberger Stemann2000), mainly in CEE, but also in Western Europe (for example, from Denmark and from Spain, where the political autonomy granted to Catalonia in 1914 was curtailed during Primo Rivera’s dictatorship of 1923–1930). Furthermore, Jewish representatives constituted the second largest grouping, and German-Jewish cooperation became the defining axis of the organization during the late 1920s (Smith, Germane, and Housden Reference Smith, Germane and Housden2019). Deliberately convened in Geneva, CEN’s opening meeting welcomed the League of Nations’ engagement to address minority issues, declaring a “firm will to contribute as far as possible to [its] achievement of this goal.”Footnote ³ Even in the far less propitious context of 1933, the CEN General Secretary and President reiterated that “the Congress does not envisage sweeping away the foundations in place, but rather seeks to increase the sturdiness of the existing edifice on a platform that is much bigger, better cemented and designed to satisfy everyone.”Footnote ⁴

CEN activists questioned the adequacy of the peace settlements and the League system because they offered minorities no guarantees for their longer-term autonomous national existence within states (Hiden and Smith Reference Hiden and Smith2006, 388). Instead, argued Ammende, the League should seek to “[bring] about in minorities a synthesis of two conflicting elements, loyalty to the state and loyalty to descent.”Footnote ⁵ Inspired by the ideas of Renner and Bauer and their own traditions of corporatist self-rule within the former Tsarist Empire, the Baltic Germans at CEN’s core redefined NSD as a matter of cultural rather than territorial sovereignty, seeing this as the key to “inclusion of minorities in normal state life” (Schiemann Reference Schiemann1927b). A CEN founding resolution thus declared that “in European states containing other national groups, each national group must be authorized to preserve and develop its national individuality in organizations at public law constituted—according to circumstances—either territorially or on the basis of the personal principle. … [T]he said right to autonomy offers a path to ensuring that the loyal cooperation of all—minorities and majorities—within the aforementioned states can take place without conflicts and that relations between the peoples of Europe are improved.”Footnote ⁶

This initial stance reflects the influence of CEN Vice-President Paul Schiemann, dubbed the “thinker of the European minorities movement” (Hiden Reference Hiden2004, 127). As an alternative to the “Western, territorial understanding of self-determination” (Piirimäe Reference Piirimäe2025), Schiemann (Reference Schiemann1927a, 39) proposed the concept of an anational state, understood as a shared territorial space inhabited by autonomously organized national groups. While he agreed with Hasselblatt on the importance of Volksgemeinschaft as a source of identity and belonging, the views of the two men were otherwise completely opposed: first, contra Hasselblatt’s deterministic, so-called “objective” conception of ethnicity (Piirimäe Reference Piirimäe2025), Schiemann (Reference Schiemann1927a, 39) reiterated Renner and Bauer’s view that collective cultural autonomy for nationalities was first and foremost a matter of individual self-determination — that is, free identification of ethnic affiliation by each citizen. Secondly, Schiemann stressed the need to balance the interests of the Volksgemeinschaft with those of the state, which he regarded as an essential guarantor of social peace and source of shared historical identity for all its residents, irrespective of ethnicity (Piirimäe Reference Piirimäe2025). As he put it, “politics entails work for the good of the place where one resides — any diversion to other ends is suicide” (Schiemann Reference Schiemann1937, 31). Schiemann thus urged his fellow Baltic Germans to work with the state-bearing national majorities of Estonia and Latvia to build a unifying Staatsgemeinschaft. How to build overarching solidarity in a post-imperial context raised as many questions as it answered. Anticipating important precepts of present-day minority protection norms, however, CEN presented the need for minorities to learn the majority language not just as an obligation but as a right.Footnote ⁷ Moreover, discussion of redrawing territorial state borders or complaints directed against specific governments were prohibited under the CEN statutes. In this way, the CEN of the 1920s signalled its readiness to work within the parameters of the peace settlements and its recognition of the need to adapt Renner and Bauer’s ideas to post-war European realities. In Schiemann’s (Reference Schiemann1927b) words, “a minority that is more concerned with its own interests than with the general good acts against public interest and violates the fundamental idea of our Nationalities Congress, which seeks not to set minorities apart from the state but to engage them in its life. We want to show the world that granting rights to minorities does not threaten the state but strengthens it.”

On this basis, CEN lobbied the League to replace its geographically limited treaty system with a genuinely pan-European guarantee of minority rights based on NTA. It also argued that minorities should be given international legal subjectivity through the creation of a League Standing Committee comprising representatives of minorities as well as states. As the 1925 founding resolution also shows, Schiemann and his like-minded colleagues were committed to building a more durable European peace and were closely associated with the Pan-Europe Movement and other progressive currents of transnational civil society, such as the Union of League of Nations Societies (Nunez-Seixas and Smith Reference Nunez-Seixas, Smith, Mulle, Rodogno and Bieling2023). Understanding that domestic and international dimensions of majority-minority relations were inextricably linked, they nested their vision within projects of supranational integration geared to building a “United States of Europe.” As Schiemann put it, “Nobody is as committed to the European project and the elimination of war as national minorities, who are good Europeans because of their fate” (Hiden Reference Hiden2004, 225). Such a project, he argued, would render the concept of “minority” obsolete, as individuals would be free to identify both with a state community (Staatsgemeinschaft) and a supra-state national community (überstaatliche Volksgemeinschaft) within a Europe defined by nationalities as well as states (Schiemann Reference Schiemann1927a; see also Piirimäe Reference Piirimäe2025).Footnote ⁸ Within this framework, CEN insisted that trans-border relationships between states and external “kin” communities should be solely cultural and economic and not political in nature.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, it argued that politicization of these relationships was more likely to arise in cases where the external “kin” faced discrimination within their state of residence.Footnote ¹⁰

The establishment of CEN coincided with growing optimism (exemplified by the 1925 Locarno Agreements) that Europe might be rebuilt on more stable political and economic foundations. Nevertheless, for the dominant actors who understood the League as an association of sovereign, unitary states, the alternative modality of NSD articulated by the Congress — and even the very fact of its existence — represented a normative threat. This can be seen in the remark by Sir Eric Drummond, League Secretary General, that “a meeting of this kind shows that the Minorities who come to it do not appreciate their obligations of loyalty towards their new countries.”Footnote ¹¹ Officials from the League’s Minority Secretariat came to view the CEN more sympathetically, with one noting “a spirit of respect for the law, human solidarity and high ideals to which the highest respect is due … Provided this spirit predominates within the Congress, it could create a place and an authority among the organisations working to develop international society” (Krabbe Reference Krabbe1932). Nevertheless, when Ammende called on the League to support a more general application of Estonia’s NTA model, the same official concluded that while this approach merited scrutiny, CEN had failed to make a convincing case (Krabbe Reference Krabbe1931).

The League’s response correctly observed that even in Estonia, only the numerically small, dispersed, and relatively prosperous German and Jewish minorities had implemented the 1925 autonomy law, whereas the larger, more compactly settled, and more deprived Russian and Swedish minorities had not. Moreover, minority activists elsewhere had rejected institutionalised collective autonomy in favour of a more liberal individual conception of individual rights, arguing that enrolment on a national register might lead to minorities being viewed as a “caste apart” (Krabbe Reference Krabbe1931). Indeed, given that many minority communities in Europe had not joined CEN (and others had left due to internal dissensions), its frequent claim to speak in the name of 40 million Europeans belonging to minorities had little substance. Especially notable, however, was the principled objection to autonomy voiced by the League representative, who asserted that “the ‘complete’ solution to the minorities problem remains the development in countries of mixed population of a spirit of national tolerance and liberalism, a development … which will become all the more difficult if a system of separatism in certain branches of the state becomes generalized” (Krabbe Reference Krabbe1931).

This reaffirmation of the status quo disregards the fact that the League’s more limited procedures — predicated on the classic liberal unitary nation-state model — were by now failing to deliver even the basic “measure of protection and justice” of which Chamberlain had spoken in 1925. Indeed, only a year later, the author of the report himself acknowledged that League procedures increasingly constituted a source of frustration for CEN’s membership (Krabbe Reference Krabbe1932). As this frustration mounted, German activists within the Verband gravitated towards irredentist nationalist circles within Germany itself and ultimately fell under the coordination of a Nazi state that egregiously manipulated the question of NSD for its own ends. At the 9^th CEN meeting in Bern in 1933, German delegates blocked a motion condemning anti-Semitic policies in Germany, prompting Jewish representatives to leave the Congress. With them went Paul Schiemann (not present in Bern), who in 1932 had warned of a “New Nationalist Wave” crashing over Europe from Germany (Schiemann Reference Schiemann1932). Schiemann had also warned his fellow Baltic Germans that by supporting the exclusionary doctrines of Nazism, they would leave themselves open to similar treatment (Hiden Reference Hiden2004, 223). In this way, he anticipated the subsequent resettlement of Germans from the Baltic States in 1939–1940, following the Nazi-Soviet Pact that paved the way for the illegal occupation and forcible annexation of the three countries by the USSR. Schiemann would himself later lament how the concept of überstaatliche Volksgemeinschaft was poisoned by the totalizing, state-led connotation that the Nazis attached to it (Núñez Seixas Reference Seixas and Manoel2016, 615).

The onset of World War II gave Hitler’s regime free rein to address the nationality question in the most grotesque way imaginable. The brutal approach of seeking to render ethnic and territorial boundaries congruent was also extended to the war’s aftermath, when ethnic Germans and other minorities linked to defeated Axis states were expelled en masse and borders redrawn in the interests of creating more “complete” nation-states. In light of these events, history has not been kind to Woodrow Wilson, with Bideleux and Jeffries (Reference Bideleux and Jeffries2007, 325) going so far as to assert that his “eloquent enunciation of the principle of national self-determination inadvertently gave the green light to vicious ethnic chauvinism and ethnic collectivism by suggesting that, if a particular ethnic group was in the majority within a specified area, then that gave it a moral right to impose its culture and identity on everyone living within that territory.” To see this outcome as preordained, however, is to overlook the efforts of those like Schiemann, who grappled with the indeterminacy of NSD and minority protection concepts and sought ways of refining and reconciling them democratically within existing state borders. Ultimately, however, a combination of post-imperial legacies and unfavourable geopolitical and (post-1929) economic contexts meant that the transnational activism conducted by minorities “on their own behalf” (Housden 2014) fell prey to the “totalising impulses” (Koskenniemi Reference Koskenniemi1994, 260) of national states — both the states in which these minorities lived and their external kin-states that instrumentalized minority issues for revisionist ends. With this, the League’s minority protection concept became wholly discredited.

“The small people have a special part to play”: The FUEN and Cold War Europe

As far as Europe was concerned, the post-1945 peace settlement basically confirmed the nation-state as the only legitimate modality of NSD. At the same time, the growing conflict between the Western Allies and the USSR and the de facto Soviet control of much of CEE meant that this settlement violated the principles of the 1941 US-UK Atlantic Charter, which had promised no territorial changes against the wishes of the people and restoration of self-government to those deprived of it. Illustrative in this regard is the fact that the three Baltic States were forcibly reincorporated into the USSR at the end of the war, even though the Western Allies had condemned the 1940 Soviet takeover as an illegal occupation and had not extended de jure recognition to Soviet rule over these territories. When it came to minority protection, meanwhile, the post-war consensus was anticipated in 1942 by exile Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Eduard Benes, who stated that “the protection of minorities in the future … should consist in the defense of human democratic rights and not of national rights. Minorities in individual states must never again be given the character of internationally recognised political and legal units, with the possibility again becoming sources of disturbance” (Mazower Reference Mazower2004, 388).

The principle of NSD retained international relevance in that it was invoked within the decolonization of territories previously forming part of the overseas European empires, which provided the context for UNGA Resolution A/RES/1314(XIII) of 1958. Minority protection, however, found no explicit mention in the Charter of the United Nations (1945), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), or the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR, 1953). These referred only to individual human rights, including the right to non-discrimination on ethnic grounds. For all that human rights were supposed to be universal, it was clear that “the right to have rights” was contingent upon state citizenship (Weitz Reference Weitz2019). In its Preamble and Article 1, the 1945 Charter defined the UN as a body dedicated to “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction to race, sex, language or religion.” Article 2, however, underlined that the UN was “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members” and that “nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter.”Footnote ¹² The absence of institutions or legal mechanisms which individuals might if their human rights were infringed led Mark Mazower (Reference Mazower2004, 379) to observe that “in respect of the degree to which the principle of absolute state sovereignty was threatened by these arrangements, the rights regime of the new UN represented a considerable weakening of international will compared with the interwar League.”

The narrative was that henceforth, respect for individual human rights would deliver equality and dignity for persons belonging to national majorities and national minorities alike. Behind this contention, there stood an implicit assumption that ethnic diversity within states and the problematic collective claims it had previously engendered would disappear as part of democratization and socio-economic modernization. Long held in Western states, this view was applied to the case of decolonization in Africa and Asia, where borders drawn by colonial jurisdictions became the borders of new sovereign states, and it was assumed that diverse ethnic affiliations would be subsumed within an overarching “gesellschaftlich” concept of identity through top-down nation-building policies (Koskenniemi Reference Koskenniemi1994, 256). In the post-Stalinist USSR, meanwhile, the authorities paid continued lip service to NSD and federalism as founding principles of the state but denuded them of any political substance within a hierarchical one-party system increasingly committed to Russocentric policies of cultural standardization.

Addressing collective sub-state national claims nevertheless remained a salient issue in Western Europe after 1945. While Franco’s dictatorship continued to suppress the aspirations of Catalans and other historic peoples in Spain, the status of Italy’s largely German-speaking border region of Süd Tyrol (detached from Austria in 1918) and the German and Danish minorities that lived on the respective sides of the 1920 Denmark-Germany frontier in Slesvig/Schleswig was resolved democratically. Internationalized after the end of World War I, these issues were now addressed bilaterally through the 1946 Gruber-De Gasperi Agreement, granting autonomy to Süd Tyrol, and a set of cross-border arrangements later formalized by the Bonn-Copenhagen declarations of 1955. The ability to conclude such agreements reflected a new Western European context shaped by the experience of war and the perceived threat of Soviet communism. The establishment of the Council of Europe (CoE) in 1949 also underscored a shared commitment to rebuilding Europe on democratic foundations, while the advent of the European Economic Community (EEC) during the 1950s embodied an openness to the goals of supranational integration advocated by the likes of Schiemann during the 1920s.

These broader European developments provided the formative context for the Federal Union of European Minorities and Regions (FUEMR), which emerged out of a meeting of the European Federalist movement in Paris in April 1949, initiated by Breton activist Joseph Martray. After the leadership of FUEMR passed to political actors from Denmark-notably Povl Skadegård, who served as General Secretary from 1951–1974 the name of the organisation was changed to the Federal Union of European Nationalities and Regions (FUENR) in 1953, and the word ‘Regions’ then dropped in 1955. The new Danish leadership group was specifically concerned with the situation of the Danish population in South Slesvig/Schleswig, which it sought to abstract to general issues of concern to minorities across Europe. In this connection, it emphasized the right to self-determination, an issue which “in international politics had become effectively banned and taboo after 1945” (Kühl Reference Kühl2000, 40). The corresponding resolution at FUEMR’s 1951 Copenhagen Congress couched self-determination as one of the “free rights of the European minorities,” including “the right to make free decisions in all aspects of cultural or political life, of administration and matters concerning membership of a state, in so far as these rights are exercised in accordance with the principles of democracy.”Footnote ¹³

While the demand for minority self-determination potentially placed “a bomb under the new state order … established in Europe after 1945” (Kühl Reference Kühl2000, 39), none of the organizations grouped within FUEN were committed to secession from the states where their communities lived. Reporting to the 5^th Congress in 1955, Skadegård declared that “the principal aims of the Union of Nationalities are politically to work for any progress as to securing of human rights, comprising self-determination, and cultural and linguistic activities, of any small people actually bound to a national state under minority circumstances [my italics].”Footnote ¹⁴ Nineteen years later, in an address given to mark Skadegård’s retirement, the FUEN President Hans-Ronald Jørgensen noted how the experience of the 1930s and World War Two had underlined the need for political neutrality and work on the basis of existing state frontiers.Footnote ¹⁵

For FUEN, therefore, self-determination was synonymous with cultural autonomy within the framework of existing states, a goal it formally adopted at its 6^th Congress in 1956. The organization also remained firmly anchored in Martray’s 1950 vision of “[creating] a united Europe on federal principles,” a task in which the FUEN founder had argued, “the small people have a special part to play, as they are more sensitive than the great centralised states to the idea of European Unity” (Kühl Reference Kühl2000, 25). Like CEN in the 1920s, then, FUEN sought to work with rather than against existing international institutions, welcoming “the work of the United Nations and of the Council of Europe for the securing of the human rights and fundamental freedoms based on a federal structure of the European community which will secure for [European nationalities] the maintenance of their particular characteristics.”Footnote ¹⁶ The FUEN Central Committee nevertheless regretted that:

To address such disputes, FUEN proposed a European Court to which not only states but also individuals, groups, and organizations could appeal. It also lobbied the CoE to add specific minority rights clauses to the ECHR. By focusing its efforts on the existing CoE human rights-based system, FUEN began over time to operate increasingly within the conceptual field of minority rights rather than emphasizing the principle of national self-determination. With the important caveat that it used the language of group rather than individual rights, the “Basic Principles of a Right of Nationalities” unveiled by FUEN in 1967 do not appear strikingly different from the later instruments on minority protection introduced following the end of the Cold War.Footnote ¹⁸ By this time, FUEN had already parted company with sub-state movements in contexts such as Catalonia and Scotland, which billed their communities as stateless nations rather than “nationalities” or “national minorities” and continued to advocate self-determination either through autonomous territorial self-government or outright secession.

The continued presence of sub-state sovereigntist movements and minority claims, both within Western Europe and globally, challenged the assimilationist assumptions held by the liberal nation-building school of the early post-1945 period. This brought a shift, as reflected in documents such as the 1966 UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which included a provision on the rights of persons belonging to national minorities. More notable still, at least in the context of Europe, was the inclusion — alongside respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms - of equal rights and self-determination of peoples as one of the guiding principles of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). One should not underestimate the boost that the Helsinki Final Act gave to dissident groups within the Soviet Bloc, including the growing national activist constituency in the USSR and its satellites that highlighted the colonial character of the Soviet system and the restrictions it placed on NSD. Yet as Koskenniemi (Reference Koskenniemi1994, 242) observes, “in the context of the day, it is doubtful whether that statement of principle was intended to be taken literally.” Within the Act, these principles (VII and VIII, both contained in the third “basket” of CSCE issues) were outweighed by the emphasis given in the first basket to sovereign equality and respect for the rights inherent in sovereignty (I), inviolability of frontiers (III), territorial integrity of states (IV) and non-intervention in internal affairs (VI).

In this regard, the provisions of the Helsinki Final Act appear fully consistent with the further UNGA Resolution 2625(XXV) of 24 October 1970, on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations (UNGA 1970). On the one hand, this affirmed the right of all peoples “freely to determine, without external interference, their political status and to pursue their economic, social and cultural development,” thus in principle extending the scope of NSD beyond the former European colonies to which it had initially been limited after 1945. It further stated that “the establishment of a sovereign and independent state, the free association or integration with an independent state or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people constitute modes of implementing the right of self-determination by that people.” On the other hand, the Resolution stated that “Nothing in the foregoing paragraphs shall be construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent states conducting themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples as described above and thus possessed of a government representing the whole people belonging to the territory without distinction as to race, creed or colour” (UNGA 1970; see also Piirimäe Reference Piirimäe2018).

Writing on the Helsinki Final Act, Koskenniemi (Reference Koskenniemi1994, 256) thus highlights the paradox whereby an instrument affirming peoples’ right to self-determination does so by emphasizing the preservation of the territorial integrity of existing States. “The tension between the two opposite notions,” he concludes, could only be “moderated by modifying the substance of the right so that it leads into minority protection rather than secession.” For Western European governments no longer so encumbered by decolonization, it would seem, self-determination could now be safely instrumentalized as part of the Cold War struggle against the USSR, within an overarching discourse on human rights and without any real expectation of change to the territorial status quo (Burke, Duranti, and Moses Reference Burke, Duranti, Moses, Moses, Duranti and Burke2020, 17). Conversely, the Soviet Union could interpret principles III and IV of the act as confirming de facto Western acceptance of post-1945 borders in Eastern Europe (including the illegal annexation of the Baltic States), while remaining confident of its ability to contain pressures for greater human rights within its borders and those of its satellite states.

As Western European states continued to democratize and forge a new integrated security community during the late Cold War and its aftermath, several of them gave more explicit recognition to “stateless nations” living within their borders. Notable in this regard were the substantial competencies in education, linguistic policy, and other functional areas granted to the “historical nations” of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia under the post-Franco Spanish Constitution of 1978. It is notable, however, that these three regions were accorded the same legal status as Spain’s 14 other “autonomous communities,” highlighting a continued tension between Spanish centralism and sub-state claims for internal self-determination (Soler Alemany Reference Soler Alemany, Brian and Ichijo2022, 2). Meanwhile, other CoE and EEC governments continued to implacably oppose even a more limited recognition of linguistic and cultural diversity within their borders, beyond the “Western minimalist redefinition of human rights that occurred across the 1970s” (Burke, Duranti, and Moses Reference Burke, Duranti, Moses, Moses, Duranti and Burke2020, 3).

Amidst this contestation, FUEN’s attempts to build a case for greater minority subjectivity and voice through a European Convention on Minority Protection were unsuccessful. Far more influential with the CoE and the EEC at this time were organizations such as Amnesty International and Helsinki Watch, which appeared more in tune with the Human Rights Zeitgeist (Burke, Duranti, and Moses Reference Burke, Duranti, Moses, Moses, Duranti and Burke2020, 14–16), or language advocacy bodies such as the European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages (EBLUL), which was established in the 1980s and obtained EEC funding. EBLUL was the brainchild of the European Parliament Intergroup for Minority Languages and Cultures founded in 1983, which, as its name suggests, initially “dealt with comparatively politically ‘soft’, noncontroversial subjects rather than the more ‘hard’ political issues concerning national minorities” (Gál and Hicks Reference Gál and Hicks2010,) In this context, FUEN’s emphasis on the collective rights of nationalities continued to be viewed by many CoE and EEC member states as anachronistic and a reminder of a European past best forgotten. Such misgivings had increased from the late 1950s when FUEN admitted representatives of Sudeten Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia after 1945, as well as some individuals previously associated with interwar völkisch German nationalism, even though the only relevant lines of continuity between the FUEN and the CEN related to the 1920s rather than the 1930s (Smith, Germane, and Housden Reference Smith, Germane and Housden2019). Thus, it was only in January 1989, just ahead of its 40^th anniversary, that FUEN was finally granted consultative status at the CoE. Marginal and representing primarily a small number of minority organizations from Northwestern Europe, by this time, the organization was described as having “an old and tired face” (Kühl Reference Kühl2000, 106).

FUEN: Minority Safepack and the post-Cold War turn

The recognition granted to FUEN in 1989, however, coincided with the start of political changes that brought about the fall of Soviet-imposed regimes in CEE and the collapse of Yugoslavia and the USSR. This wave of democratization saw an influx of new member organizations from the region into FUEN, which has since become “the largest umbrella organization of Europe’s autochthonous national minorities, nationalities, and language groups” (FUEN 2022), with over 100 members from 36 states. FUEN’s center of gravity has accordingly shifted eastwards, and from 2016-2025, Loránt Vincze, a representative of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, held the presidency.

As these developments within FUEN suggest, the end of the Cold War also placed the tension between state determination and self-determination of peoples firmly back on the European political agenda. Consistent with the approach applied during the decolonization of Europe’s overseas territories after 1945, the demise of Yugoslavia and the USSR saw their previously internal federal boundaries transformed into the borders of new sovereign states, according to the principle of uti posseditis juris. The challenges of state- and nation-building arising from the legacies of institutionalised ethnicity in the region, however, quickly came into focus amidst the wars of succession in former Yugoslavia. Drawing on this example to make a direct parallel with the situation in CEE after 1918, Brubaker (Reference Brubaker1996, 43) cautioned that while the former Soviet republics had secured juridical independence, “their sociological ‘stateness’ remain[ed] to be established.” This question of “stateness” was also germane to the former Soviet “satellite” countries of CEE, where the 1989 revolutions had been “sovereigntist” as much as they were liberal (Malešević Reference Malešević2019). While these latter states were longer-established and more obviously “national” in character following the demographic changes wrought by World War Two and its aftermath, most remained ethnoculturally diverse. As such, they would also have to contend with the unresolved legacies of the post-1918 peace settlements.

It was in this context that, in August 1991, the EEC established the Badinter Arbitration Committee, charged with addressing legal questions related to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. When asked, “does the Serbian population in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, as one of the constituent peoples of Yugoslavia, have the right to self-determination?” the Committee ruled first and foremost that the right to self-determination must not involve changes to existing frontiers. It nevertheless stated that “where there are one or more groups within a state constituting one or more ethnic, religious or language communities, they have the right to recognition of their identity under international law”; in this regard, the Serbian populations in question should be “entitled to all the rights concerned to minorities and ethnic groups under international law […] including, where appropriate, the right to choose their nationality” (Pellet Reference Pellet1992, 183–184). Pellet (Reference Pellet1992, 179) argues that this ambiguously phrased ruling linked the rights of minorities to the rights of peoples, in that the latter concept was applied not only to the entire population of a state, but also to various communities living within it. He thus postulates “a second breath for the [internal] self-determination of peoples.” The notion of “collectively pursued minority rights” (Csergő and Regelmann Reference Csergő and Regelmann2017, 216), along the lines already advocated by FUEN, also figured in initial discussions on minority protection under CSCE auspices at the start of the 1990s. Amidst the turmoil in former Yugoslavia, however, the dominant approach soon shifted to one of, in the words of Koskenniemi (Reference Koskenniemi1994, 257), “[domesticating] self-determination by treating self-determination claims as claims for the advancement of the human rights of the individual members of various national groups.” A similar “individualist politics of non-discrimination” (Csergő and Regelmann Reference Csergő and Regelmann2017, 216) shaped the CoE European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages (ECRML — 1992) and Framework Convention on National Minorities (FCNM — 1995), the latter of which explicitly eschews any concept of collective rights while giving states wide discretion to define the term “national minority.”

The FUEN leadership welcomed the renewed international attention given to minority protection from the early 1990s but characterized the new CoE instruments as “light products” designed to “buy off” minority claims in the interests of states (Hansen Reference Hansen2009, 3–4). In an echo of the interwar period, it also highlighted the double standard inherent in the new European Union’s (EU — formerly EEC) decision to include “respect for and protection of minorities” among its 1993 Copenhagen Criteria for CEE states seeking to join, while not applying this same criterion to longer-established members. Moreover, while this criterion was important for entering the EU, it carried no legal force thereafter. In the context of a union that is still fundamentally intergovernmental rather than supranational in character, minority issues have remained within the jurisdiction of member states.

Ongoing EU integration has, however, increased the political space for transnational minority activism, while the 2004 eastern enlargement brought to the European Parliament new MEPs from “large and assertive national minorities” in CEE, as well as their respective “kin-states” (Gál and Hicks Reference Gál and Hicks2010; see also Waterbury Reference Waterbury2016). According to one such minority representative, “a ban on discrimination [did] not in itself represent a solution to the problems” faced by members of her community, who wished to “autonomously exercise their cultural, educational and linguistic rights.”Footnote ¹⁹ In this regard, they sought the same level of recognition and rights that existing member states had already accorded to stateless nations like the Catalans or regionally concentrated minorities such as the Germans in Süd Tyrol. This new situation was reflected in the revived focus adopted by the European Parliament’s Intergroup, which, from 2004, was headed by Hungarian MEP Csaba Tabajdi with Kinga Gál (a Hungarian from Romania) as his deputy. The new name (Intergroup for Traditional National Minorities, Constitutional Regions and Regional Languages) that the grouping adopted under their leadership signalled its shift from a focus on language provision towards the more politically charged arena of minority protection and regional autonomy (Gál and Hicks Reference Gál and Hicks2010).

Against this background, it was logical that the Intergroup, while maintaining its prior links to EBLUL, also began to develop closer ties with FUEN. A common focus for the activism of all three organizations became the deliberations around an EU constitution during the 2000s, eventually giving rise to the European Charter for Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, which entered into force in 2009 along with the Lisbon Treaty (Warasin Reference Warasin and Craith2007; Gál and Hicks Reference Gál and Hicks2010). Although both these documents established respect for and protection of minorities as core EU values, FUEN complained that they did not extend to granting the EU Commission any legal competencies in this area (Hansen Reference Hansen2009, 4–5).Footnote ²⁰ In its view, this demonstrated that the 2000 EU motto “United in Diversity” encompassed the Union’s diverse member states but not the peoples within them. The Lisbon Treaty did, however, introduce the new European Citizens’ Initiative mechanism,Footnote ²¹ which FUEN used as a basis for its “Minority Safepack” (MSPI), a package of legislative provisions presented to the Commission in 2013. The MSPI initially comprised 11 proposals in which effective equality for EU citizens identifying with stateless minorities was linked to preservation and development of their distinct identity and language within their historical homeland regions (Willis Reference Willis2021). By omitting any explicit reference to collective rights for national groups, FUEN carefully calibrated the initiative to the existing EU legal framework grounded in respect of individual human rights within member states (Crepaz Reference Crepaz2020; Willis Reference Willis2021). It did, however, call upon the Commission to adopt new directives that would oblige EU governments to grant fuller legal guarantees to their national minorities.

Though essentially modest in scope, the MSPI elicited fierce debates lasting seven years, with the eventual outcome reaffirming the existing model of minority protection embodied by the CoE system.Footnote ²² While acknowledging that some of the proposals “might fall within the framework of [its] powers,” the EU Commission initially rejected MSPI, arguing that it could not consider only part of a citizen’s initiative (Tárnok Reference Tárnok2017). This prompted the FUEN President Hans-Heinrich Hansen to remark that “we discuss the … diversity of Europe from the perspective of the poor relations. We know that poor relations aren’t meant to have much of a say, and that is why we are annoying” (Hansen Reference Hansen2014). The decision was, however, overturned in 2016 by a European Court of Justice ruling that deemed nine of the original proposals legitimate, after which the MSPI went on to fulfil the requisite criteria for consideration by the Commission, obtaining 1.12 million statements of support and meeting threshold requirements in 11 member states (Tárnok Reference Tárnok2017; European Commission 2022). It was approved by a European Parliament resolution in December 2020 but rejected by the Commission, which claimed that the initiative’s goals could be realized through better implementation of existing EU legislation and policies by member states (European Commission 2021). This, however, begs the question of what would actually oblige state governments to take further action in this area.

The Commission’s decision was taken against the background of strong opposition to the MSPI expressed by several EU member states and their (national majority) MEPs. Most virulent in this respect were MEPs from Spain’s centralist Partido Popular and radical right Vox parties, who highlighted the backing given to the initiative by the Catalan autonomist movement amidst the constitutional crisis of the 2010s.Footnote ²³ In the CEE context, Romania’s consistent pushback against the MSPI reflected the strong support and financial backing given to the initiative by Hungary, which, during Vincze’s presidency, has attained growing influence within FUEN (Smith and Willis Reference Smith and Willis2024). In this regard, it is notable that, of the 1.12 million signatures collected in support of MSPI, 70% came from Romania and Hungary (European Union 2022). Under Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party (1998-2002 and from 2010), Hungary has institutionalized ties with Hungarian minorities in Romania and other neighboring states, as part of a transsovereign nation-building strategy. This narrative of enhancing the self-determination of a transborder Hungarian people within a Europe not just of states but of nationalities has proved as controversial in the 21^st century as it did in the 1920s, especially given Fidesz’s turn to illiberal politics since 2010. FUEN’s close links to Hungary were inevitably referenced in the course of an MSPI debate that occurred amid a wider populist and nationalist challenge to the liberal EU order and the resurgent geopolitics embodied by Russia’s egregious weaponization of NSD discourse in its annexation of Crimea. In a 2013 Programmatic Declaration that echoed Schiemann’s “new nationalist wave” speech of 1932, FUEN (2013) characterized the MSPI as a necessary response to the “renationalization of Europe” following the global economic crisis. This document, however, spoke only of the growing threat to minorities posed by majoritarian nationalist tendencies within EU member states, neglecting to mention the assertive external “kin-state” policies pursued by the likes of Hungary and Russia. These can hardly be left out of the equation, since they inevitably elicit counter-narratives reasserting the statist understanding of peoplehood.

Since MSPI, however, FUEN’s growing links with Hungary have attracted internal dissension as well as external scrutiny, opening up fissures reminiscent of those seen within CEN during the 1930s (Smith and Willis Reference Smith and Willis2024). This became apparent at the 2022 FUEN Congress, where a resolution criticizing democratic backsliding in Hungary — proposed by the Minority Council in Germany — was rejected by the president, Loránt Vincze (Smith and Willis Reference Smith and Willis2024). Amid calls from the older —Western and “Eurofederalist” — generation of members to restore an “independent and credible course” (Hansen Reference Hansen2022), the current leaders of the expanded FUEN thus appear reluctant to criticize its principal financial backer. That this dilemma also faced its CEN predecessors in the 1930s underlines how difficult it is for non-state minority actors to assert their own agency in a statist international order, all the more so where their claim to peoplehood can be linked to (and manipulated by) an external “kin-state.”

Yet, returning to Hans Kohn’s (Reference Kohn1958, 528) assessment of self-determination, the “complexities and ambiguities” surrounding transnational minority activism are not occasioned by the nature of the international system alone. After the EU Commission rejected the MSPI in 2021, Vincze accused it of turning its back on “millions of people who live in a situation of inequality in their own country” (FUEN 2021), recalling a campaign which had presented the Initiative as speaking for 50 million EU citizens belonging to minorities. Given the limited mobilization in many member states, however, claims of a generalized perception of inequality appear exaggerated.Footnote ²⁴ As this article has shown, both CEN and FUEN have promoted the idea of collective rights for national minorities construed as bounded political subjects. This may resonate with “kin” communities historically separated from a pre-existing national state; in other contexts, however, the more flexible individual-liberal modality of minority protection has greater appeal. Historically, the concept of (non-territorial) cultural autonomy has been predicated on individual democratic self-determination — namely, the right of individuals to define their ethnic affiliation. Yet, establishing formal structures of autonomy impels a person to opt for only one such affiliation, whereas in practice (and according to current international norms) individual self-determination is a complex phenomenon that encompasses multiple affiliations.