DEMOCRACY, MINORITIES AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

Vol. 16 No. 6 (June, 2006) pp.492-495

DEMOCRACY, MINORITIES AND INTERNATIONAL LAW, by Steven Wheatley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 226pp. Hardback. $90.00/£50.00. ISBN: 0-521-84898-9.

Reviewed by Magdalena Zolkos, Institute of Political Science, Copenhagen University. Email: mzolkos [at] gmail.com.

Steven Wheatley is known to the international scholarly audience for his work on minority rights, human rights and democratic governance (in Europe and elsewhere). He has recently written a book that deals with the issues of democracy, minority rights and collective territorial self-determination in international law. It is an excellent and thorough introduction to the legal and institutional arrangements of the contemporary minority rights regime in the Western world. A great value of that book is precisely that it positions questions of minority rights and self-determination right in the analytical propinquity to democracy, and as such it manages to address an important lacuna within the rights-oriented literature of today. While this book is written from a legal point of view, it will also provide a useful read for many political scientists, international relations scholars and other social scientists. The readership of this book includes, therefore, undergraduate students of legal and social sciences, as well as those graduate students and academic scholars who work with issues of democratization, minority groups, human rights, self-determination, consociationalism and national sovereignty.

The main purpose of DEMOCRACY, MINORITIES AND INTERNATIONAL LAW is “to examine the position of cultural minorities in international law, with a particular focus on democratic States” (p.2). Furthermore, this cleaves into two main objectives. The first objective is to provide a comprehensive overview over the legal and institutional democratic arrangements that relate to minority rights, territorial self-determination and democratic solutions to minority-related problems. Steven Wheatley indisputably achieves that objective as his DEMOCRACY, MINORITIES AND INTERNATIONAL LAW provides an extensive, detailed and amply documented and referenced account of the minority problematique in international law. The book also has a clear and coherent argumentative structure, and it is well organized and written in an accessible and comprehensible academic style, largely devoid of legal jargon. The second objective of this book is critical and normative, namely to indicate weaknesses of the contemporary approaches and solutions of the international community as regards minority rights and self-determination rights. Accordingly, the author has convincingly argued that the international community “has failed to define the relevant beneficiaries of the [self-determination] right, or to detail the circumstances in which measures to protect and promote cultural security should be introduced, or territorial self-government regimes established” [*493] (p.127). However, due to the dominant descriptive mode of Wheatley’s analysis, he fails to achieve more than offer (rather vague) suggestions of what needs to be emendated, what should be the legal and institutional trajectories of such corrective endeavor, and how it should be achieved.

Another great asset of DEMOCRACY, MINORITIES AND INTERNATIONAL LAW is that this book not only provides an extensive synchronic comparison of the national laws and minority rights institutions nowadays, but that it also shows how international legislation, legal practice, as well as meanings and interpretations of such terms as “minority,” “minority rights,” “self-determination,” or “democratic governance” have changed throughout the decades. This makes it possible for the reader to map the evolutionary change in conceptual and legal thinking in, for instance, complementing the primacy of individual rights with collective considerations, or the initial negative rights discourse of the international human rights instruments with positive rights formulations. Also, Wheatley has thoroughly depicted the complicated relationship of law and politics in the areas that are in the focus of his research. This is particularly visible in regard to the controversial and contentious issue of forming an international definition of “minorities.” Wheatley shows how very different legal notions and national interpretations are, as a matter of fact, underpinned and influenced by historical developments and contemporary political considerations. An example here is Denmark’s definition of “national minorities” and “indigenous people” as two separate (and alternative) categories of social belonging, which has allowed Denmark to exclude the groups of Greenlanders and Faroese from the national protection of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities of the Council of Europe. Another example is Estonia’s requirement that national minorities include groups that are in possession of Estonian citizenship, which has made it possible for Estonia to exclude from that category numerous stateless Russian-speakers. The only deficiency is that in the context of his discussion of defining national minorities in Europe, Wheatley does not provide the reader with extensive political and historical background information. Such information would be a definite asset provided that the book is directed at the undergraduate readership group. Therefore, as the scope of this book has been limited to the overview of legal and institutional instruments of the European minority rights regime, it has maintained perspicuity of its main argumentative line, but at the same time its explanatory potential has been curbed.

The focus of Wheatley’s book is primarily on Europe, but it includes examples of legal cases and organizational solutions from, for instance, Canada and New Zealand. There are examples from outside of the Western world, such as post-colonial Somalia and Morocco, and the ethnic federations of Malaysia, Pakistan and India (mostly discussed in the sub-section “Decolonialisation”), but they remain sparse and somewhat under-[*494]explored. On the one hand, the Europe-centrism (or West-centrism) of this book is understandable due to the developed political and legal framework of European institutions dealing with human and minority rights, as well as the historical securitization of the minority issues in Europe in the 20th century and the alleged idiosyncratic intricacy of minority-majority relations in contemporary Europe. On the other hand, however, this book’s primary focus on Europe underplays the importance of the minority problematique elsewhere in the world, where regional institutional networks of human rights protection remain in much more rudimentary condition, and where nevertheless belonging to underprivileged ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural groups has important consequences for people’s security and social well-being. Wheatley’s book might have avoided this criticism if he had explicitly narrowed the geo-political focus of its analysis to the West, rather than give an impression of adopting a comprehensive global perspective.

Finally, while DEMOCRACY, MINORITIES AND INTERNATIONAL LAW is likely to attract attention of both legal and social scientific readership, it nevertheless demonstrates the difficulties with practicing interdisciplinarity and, in particular, the tension that often resonates between legal and political scholarly approaches to such social phenomena as “minorities” and/or “rights.” The author makes an admirable attempt to expand and sophisticate the disciplinary perspective of his analysis, but it remains debatable to what extent he actually succeeds. For instance, throughout the book the reader encounters such intriguing assertions as “[e]thno-cultural groups are imagined communities” (p.62). However, Wheatley does not explain what he actually means by this claim; he does not refer to the extensive body of cultural and social scientific literature that has dealt with the constructed nature of national and ethnic identities; and he does not show how the conceptual prism of “imagined communities” actually complicates and problematizes the contemporary legal and political approach to minority rights (see e.g. contributions by Adrian Hastings, Benedict Anderson and Joane Nagel in Spencer and Wollman 2005). Rather, he seems to be taking minorities as “imagined communities” for given. Another, and possibly more important, issue is that Wheatley uses terminology that is common to law, as well as political science and international relations, but he seems to pay no attention to the fact that these concepts are interpreted and problematized along very different trajectories within these disciplines. One example here is the concept of sovereignty that the author seems to equate simply with territorial self-government, and consequently he takes little notice of the complex and potentially insightful debates on sovereignty conducted by international relations scholars (e.g. Walker and Mendlovitz 1990; Walker 1993; Weber 1995; Biersteker and Weber 1996).

In spite of these few problems and deficiencies, Steven Wheatley’s DEMOCRACY, MINORITIES AND [*495] INTERNATIONAL LAW constitutes an important and well-argued contribution to the on-going academic discussions on minorities, self-determination and democracy. It is particularly recommended for those who, without necessarily having much prior knowledge on that topic, would like to gain a thorough introduction.

REFERENCES:

Biersteker, Thomas J., and Cynthia Weber (eds). 1996. STATE SOVEREIGNTY AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Spencer, Phillip, and Howard Wollman (eds). 2005. NATIONS AND NATIONALISM: A READER. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Walker, R.B.J. 1993. INSIDE/OUTSIDE: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AS POLITICAL THEORY. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Walker, R.B.J., and Saul H. Mendlovitz (eds). 1990. CONTENDING SOVEREIGNTIES: REDEFINING POLITICAL COMMUNITIES. Boulder: L. Rienner Publishers.

Weber, Cynthia. 1995. SIMULATING SOVEREIGNTY: INTERVENTION, THE STATE, AND SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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