Multiculturalism and Diversity in the 21st Century Europe

Abstract

During the present time, the debate regarding European minorities is a problem of high interest. Even if it is a discussion of Basques and Catalans, Turks and Greeks in Cyprus, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Hungarians in Romania or genocide in the former Yugoslavia, the matter is high on the agenda. After centuries of confrontations in Europe, the European Union tries to legitimate the issue of national minorities, willing to eliminate any kind of discrimination and to preserve cultural identity. Recommendation 1201/1993 of the Council of Europe intended to draw up an additional protocol on the rights of minorities to the European Convention of Human Rights in order to provide the Council with a suitable mediation instrument.Considering the diversity of peoples and cultures living for centuries within the European space and their important contribution to the cultural development of the European states and civilization, the Recommendation seeks to recognize the rights of persons belonging to a national minority within a state and the international protection of those rights as an aspect of international co-operation, able to end the ethnic, linguistic and religious confrontations, and to guarantee justice, democracy and peace [1]. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the third millennium, the topic of minorities is still an actual one.Antony Alcock’s [2] book, A History of the Protection of Regional Cultural Minorities in Europe (From the Edict of Nantes to the Present Days), is an important study of the main historical events that changed the European approach of the issue of national minorities, providing an original account of the historical foundations of this direction of research. The book is divided in five parts, with seven chapters in total, accompanied by an introductory study, a comprehensive conclusion, two appendixes (one showing the main minorities and the percentage from the total population in 37 European states and another one showing the European states accession to the Council of Europe’s European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the protection of National Minorities) and several maps of ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic minorities.