The need to handle ethno-cultural diversity, as wells as the external pressures stemming from the processes of Euro-Atlantic integration have lead to the adoption of diverse institutional and policy solutions designed to foster the inclusion of ethnic, national, linguistic or religious minorities in Central and Southeast European state. The totality of the regulations concerning national minorities in a specific country is often referred to as the system of minority protection of that state. The aim of this paper is to perform a comparative analysis of the systems of minority protection of the Central and Southeast European states (plus Greece and Turkey), according to a series of clearly identifiable variables. We focus mainly on constitutions, special minority protection laws and on legislation regulating political participation (laws on political parties and electoral laws). We first classify the countries over a series of variables, such as: whether ethno-cultural diversity is officially recognized or only informally acknowledged; how does the state define itself and how does it define the minorities (as individuals or communities); are there any communities specifically listed in the constitution or special laws; are new entries possible and how is this regulated; are the policies and practices targeting minorities uniform for all the minorities living in that specific country or is there any (explicit or implicit) differentiation according to the specific features of these groups; are there any special arrangements that regulate the political participation of the minorities (e.g. easier registration of political organizations, reserved seats or other special rules)? In the second step we attempt to identify patterns in the regulations of the different countries, aiming to highlight whether certain regulations appear together, or whether some do not occur in the absence of others. In the end, the analysis will yield a classification of the minority protection systems according to two main dimensions: the informality-institutionalization axis and the uniformity-differentiation axis.
