Today, South Tyrol (Italy) with its three officially recognized language groups (Germans, Italians, Ladins), is internationally considered a successful model of how a minority problem can be solved. It is based upon the principle of dissociative conflict resolution, separating the language groups, as well as the principle of consociational democracy, which focuses primarily on the cooperation between the language groups’ elites. Both principles, established in the Second Autonomy Statute, are now included in South Tyrol’s constitution and successfully applied. The Second Autonomy Statute was approved in 1970. 40 years later it can be observed that while the institutional frame hasn’t changed, society did, starting to undermine the existing political and institutional system from below. This concerns mainly the ethnic division, which is being more and more questioned by civil society, as well as aspects of cooperation between the elites. In order to preserve ethnic peace in a fragmented society like South Tyrol, improvements on the Autonomy Statute need to be done, in order to enable new perspectives of coexistence and to stem centrifugal powers which stoke Nationalism. Taking into account these developments, this paper assumes that a dissociative model of conflict resolution should be replaced in the medium term by an associative model of conflict resolution aiming at the integration of language groups. In this context the impact of the EU within the process of integration will be analyzed.
