National Minorities in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and the Post-Cold War European Security System

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This research project made it clear why and how the national minority problems appeared in the Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and how the European international community has tackled with this issue. The main results of this research are as follows. 1. The geopolitical element such as "between the powers" was one of the most influential reasons, which caused national minority issues in this region. 2. More concretely, the discrepancy between the territorial borderlines drawn after the First World War and real ethno-linguistic distribution in this region caused problems of national minority there. 3. The League of Nations System of minority guarantees was founded after the First World War in order to resolve the serious national minority issues, but the principle of sovereignty and the fragile Versailles system made it fail to accomplish its own responsibilities. 4. National minority issues there reappeared after the end of the Cold War, but all of them did not risk military conflicts like the cases of the Russian and the Hungarian minority issues in the Baltic and Central Europe respectively. 5. The post-Cold War European security system was created through the European international politics around the ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, and it contributed to the relative stability in Europe. This system has five characteristics: (1) the value, which considers national minority issues as an European significant security matter, and integral principle of "territorial integrity" and "respects for national minority rights" (2) institutionalization of mutual complimentary European security system composed of OSCE, Council of Europe, EU and NATO, (3) the effects of conditionality on the East European states for their accession to the EU and the NATO, (4) introduction of the concept of 'humanitarian intervention' and the enforcement by the NATO, (5) international cooperation system of the European international organizations for the post-conflict reconstruction.