MINORITY RIGHTS OR HUMAN RIGHTS?

Year 1997, Volume: 2 Issue: 1, 0 - 0, 01.03.1997

Helmut Rıttstıeg

Abstract

Since religion became a private affair in Europe and a matter of tolerance, minority questions have been dominated by ethnicity. Thus, minority rights became mainly an antidote against a political illness which developed in nineteenth century Europe and has its worst fits in the twentieth century: Ethnic nationalism. This does not deny the existence of other minority problems, but as ethnic questions prevail, this paper shall concentrate on them. Ethnicity as a political myth creates the idea of human relationship beyond family, kinship, village, town, factory and other modern organisations. It conceives a relationship relying on common language which has to be purified and reconstructed by linguists, a common history which was distilled out of European history by the famous national historians, on the construction of a common biological descent which may go as far as racism, and mostly it believes as well in a common destiny. The myth of ethnicity is connected with the political claim for a national state, and where the national state is realised, ethnicity becomes the main factor of integration for the market society with its individualism and its clashes of interest between classes and groups.

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