Minority Political Inclusion in European Democracies: On Comparing East and West

Post-communist democracies have been a key focus in the study of minority exclusion in Europe. This is not least because of the perceived higher risk of inter-ethnic conflict, the emergence in these countries of ethnic parties, and the assumption that their politics is far more “ethnic” than in the “civic” West. However, issues of minority democratic exclusion are not unique to Central and Eastern Europe or indeed to new democracies. Ethnic, racial and religious minorities that are at risk from political marginalization can also be found in Western European democracies, and nationalist (or nationalizing) exclusionary discourses are widespread. Notwithstanding this, studies of minority representation in Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe have so far remained largely parallel to each other. Eastern and Western European democracies’ experiences with ethnocultural diversity are usually taken as incommensurable. Trans-European comparisons of minority representation are therefore rare, and – when they exist – they tend to be framed in terms of how far behind Central and Eastern European countries are compared to Western European ones, or how convincingly they have “caught up” with them. The aim of this paper is to question this “imaginary Iron Curtain” in the study of democratic representation with its implications of perceived incommensurability and implicit quality of democracy hierarchies. This paper makes a strong argument for trans-European comparisons of minority political inclusion and exclusion, demonstrating the case for both the viability and the necessity of such comparisons. It then proceeds to propose a theoretical and methodological approach to carry such a comparison out in practice. This approach is based on the concept of inclusiveness, which embeds issues of ethnocultural diversity and minority representation within the wider framework of quality of democracy. This paper argues that we must challenge the “imaginary Iron Curtain” and compare Eastern and Western European experiences with minority inclusion and exclusion in order to assess the extent to which real-exiting democratic practices in contemporary Europe manage (or fail) to represent ethnocultural diversity.