Description

Europe, the birthplace of the nation-state, is in a process of rediscovering the many nations within its states. Most European states are confronted with more or less vocal autonomy claims of regions and communities. During the last decades, a number of countries have reacted to these claims and strengthened regional and local structures. The seminar will look at old and new European federations and other autonomy arrangements and assess their effects on pluralism. It will first present how Switzerland uses cantonal and local autonomy to manage its religious and linguistic diversity and discuss the shortcomings of the traditional approach when dealing with scattered and new minorities and rapid urbanisation. It will then look at other European experiences, such as the federal structure of Belgium and Bosnia and the regional arraignments in Italy and Spain, and discuss their potential to deal with pluralism.

About The Speaker

Eva Maria Belser holds a Chair for Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Fribourg and a UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Democracy. She is Co-Director of the Institute of Federalism and a Board Member of the Swiss Centre of Expertise in Human Rights. Her research interests are in the field of Swiss and comparative constitutional law, federalism, decentralisation and globalisation, human and minority rights and democracy as well as constitution making and conflict resolution. She regularly accepts mandates to serve as a Swiss expert in international cooperation and consultancy projects. Her recent consultancy activities were related to the Horn of Africa, Iraq, Sri Lanka and Syria. Eva Maria Belser is a member of the Group of Independent Experts of the European Charter of Local Self-government, Swiss experts for the Moscow Mechanism of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights and on the United Nations Development Programme list of constitutional experts (UNDP Constitution Making Experts Roster). She was awarded the Swiss federalism prize in 2019.