Description

The presentation will discuss the main elements of the development and conundrums of human rights and minority protection in Europe in the academic disciplines of history, law, political theory and sociology and their interrelationships. Thereby, the following questions will be addressed: Why do we consider `ethno-cultural´ minorities of all sorts dangerous for political unity and legal equality to this day? Is this based on a path-dependency stemming from different normative and institutional models of state formation and nation-building in Europe, requiring either assimilation into the dominant `majority culture´ or leading to various forms of exclusion (segregation, ethnic cleansing) or even extinction of members of groups (genocide)? And is there no way out of this dilemma? The answer given will be in the affirmative: We have to make the ideological underpinnings and `family relationships´ (Wittgenstein) between racism, nationalism and liberalism visible which legitimize the monist-identitarian nation-state paradigm to this day and to develop a new normative and institutional model which follows from an ethical perspective of `cosmopolitan constitutional pluralism´ translated into `multiple diversity governance’, which are institutional arrangements providing for autonomy, subsidiarity, social and system integration.

About The Speaker

Joseph Marko is Professor of Comparative Public Law and Political Sciences at the Institute of Public Law and Political Sciences at the University of Graz. He previously served as one of the three international judges at the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1997 to 2002, appointed by the President of the European Court of Human Rights. From 1998 to 2002 and from 2006 to 2007, he was a member of the Council of Europe’s Advisory Committee of the Council of Ministers, established under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and is director of the Institute for Minority Rights at the European Academy Bozen/South Tyrol. From 2011 to 2016, he served as dean of the law faculty at Graz University. Since July 2016, he works for the Special Advisor to the UN’s Secretary General Espen Eide as legal advisor in the Cyprus re-unification negotiations.