Securitization reversed. Does Europeanization improve minority/majority relations?

The Hypothesis: National Minorities and (De)Securitization

Studying national minorities through security analysis, specifically through securitization theory, is not new. Over a decade ago now, the pages of Security Dialogue started a vivid debate on the inevitability of securitizing national minorities. The debate touched on the link between security and identity, which seemed central to understanding national minority regulation. Referring to the Copenhagen School’s conceptualization of societal security as concern with the integrity of a presupposed community^[21] and Jef Huysmans’ conceptualization of deconstruction strategies,^[22] Paul Roe argued in 2004 that minority rights are logically impossible to desecuritize.^[23] Because they are predicated on the ethnonational difference of the minority community as a primary identity marker, they ‘belong to [societal] security’,^[24] which is reflected in the threat they are seen to pose to the integrity of the titular majority community in the nation-state. This is a rather pessimistic view because it suggests that minorities can never be regulated within the ‘established rules of the [political] game’, that they perpetually remain an issue ‘above normal politics’.^[25] Matti Jutila was the first to convincingly engage with and challenge this gloomy conclusion.^[26] Jutila recognized that national minorities were particularly easy to securitize in contemporary Europe because of nationalism’s primary role in constructing minority and majority identities and in formulating their demands.^[27] Juxtaposing societal security to state security, national minorities constantly subvert the central claim of nationalism (‘one nation, one state’) and thus challenge the very structure of European international society. Albeit very difficult in practice, however, Jutila argued, the desecuritization of national minorities was still logically possible. Pointing to the multilayered narrativity of collective identities and their non-fixed nature, Jutila identified a so-called reconstructivist strategy of desecuritization,^[28] which picked up the identity narratives that enabled securitization in the first place and reconstructed them in an inclusive, non-antagonistic manner. The goal was to renarrate minority identities as part of the political community of the state, not as its constitutive Other. Jutila linked his conceptualization of minority desecuritization to the policies of multiculturalism (pointing to Kymlicka^[29]). But given the many problems identified in the practice of multiculturalism (e.g. consolidating group differences and group borders^[30]), perhaps it is easier to allow for various avenues for desecuritization: Lene Hansen speaks of stabilization, replacement, rearticulation, and silencing as possible forms that the process might take.^[31] Rumelili conceptualizes the possibility of desecuritization within a distinction between ontological security (concerned with the being and identity of the national collectivities) and physical security (concerned with the sovereignty and survival of the state).^[32] He argues that breaking the security continuum is possible, thus indirectly breathing optimism into the project of desecuritizing national minorities. In any case, the link between renarrating collective identities and the possibility of (de)securitizing national minorities has been consistently reaffirmed.

From the pages of Security Dialogue again, David Galbreath and Joanne McEvoy brought the debate on the (de)securitization of national minorities to Europeanization by exploring how the EU (among other organizations) transforms minority outcomes.^[33] Galbreath and McEvoy argued that of all the European organizations that regulate national minorities, the EU was uniquely positioned to launch and oversee successful desecuritization. The key to its success were its narratives of regional integration and common interests, which had the potential to transform the zero-sum logic of minority/majority relations within the nation-state into non-zero-sum logic.^[34] Furthermore, as Galbreath and McEvoy argued, the EU can more successfully push, through its multilevel governance structure, to empower (rather than protect) national minorities, which has been widely identified as the principal omission of existing minority regulation in Europe.^[35] Indeed, students of minority regulation in the EU point to the vast potential that primary and secondary EU law changes of the recent decade have opened for promoting minority rights and improving minority positions.^[36] Despite Galbreath and McEvoy’s optimistic vision of Europeanization, however, even the authors’ own findings go little beyond the theoretical possibility of actual EU achievements in desecuritizing minority/majority relations.^[37] This article aims to advance the debate on the (de)securitization of national minorities within the realm of Europeanization in three ways: by combining the Copenhagen School’s conceptual frame of (de)securitization theory with the English School’s focus on primary institutions in international society and applying it to the study of national minorities in the EU; by investigating the mechanisms of engagement or avoidance of Europeanization’s norms, narratives, and practices in the dynamics of securitization of national minorities; and by looking for opportunities for desecuritization.

The Argument. The Role of the EU

Modern attempts to adapt national sovereignty’s normative basis of legitimacy to the national diversity of political communities within the state have perpetually hit the normative limit of nation-state politics and nationalism as a primary institution of the European international structure.^[38] European states’ decades-long disengagement from minority regulation^[39] illustrates this point, as does postcommunist states’ resistance to substantive minority reforms.^[40] Roe’s argument about the pre-given condition of securitization of minority rights, however, does not address Europeanization, and this is where this article picks it up. Europeanization radically challenges the normative logic of nation-state politics by offering, for the first time in modern history, a new, multilevel model for the exercise of sovereignty. The EU is based on the primary institution of supranationality and its subsidiarity principles. The polity that the integration project gradually created sources its legitimacy not from a national community but from a supranational one, one that comprises a variety of titular nations, national minorities, and ethnonational groups. Unlike national sovereignty, where power is exercised within political units demarcated on the basis of nationhood, supranationality transcends the structurally defining role of nationhood and pools sovereignty. By breaking the link between nationhood and political power, Europeanization opens up new possibilities for redefining the unequal position of national minorities as minorities in view of the exercise of political power by the titular majority. Sovereignty—and, with it, rights—cease to be defined exclusively by nationhood and national borders.^[41] Within the EU, the permanent opposition between national minorities and titular majorities in restating their claims on state resources (legal rights, social benefits, educational opportunities, access to the ‘good life’, and so forth) can begin to lose relevance. And this is precisely where European integration’s potential to transform minority/majority relations—in other words, to desecuritize them—lies.

This is not to say that Europeanization automatically enables equality for national minorities or that Europeanization immediately detaches national minorities from the nation-state’s security agenda. But it is important to understand that the predicate that makes national minorities’ and titular majorities’ legitimacy claims always-already mutually exclusive is no longer necessarily valid within the logic of Europeanization. Even before a nation-state accedes to the EU, it can transfer sovereignty outside and beyond its national political community, and in this way already begin to transform ways of thinking and narratives of belonging within it. This needs to be accounted for.^[42] Europeanization has introduced an alternative discursive field, one that challenges national sovereignty and grants legitimacy to a different political structure for the exercise of political power. The very presence of this alternative discursive field initiates a radical systemic change that affects the system’s primary institutions, institutions that determine the dynamics of minority/majority relations. Beyond accession, the functioning of the EU can add so many new levels, checks, and opportunities to national politics^[43] that national minorities and the problems of inequality associated with them should no longer be constrained by the limits of nation-state sovereignty and its normative logic.

Most recent academic research on national minorities and Europeanization has begun to recognize this.^[44] Students of European national minorities now study not only how legislation and policies are implemented but also the transformative effects of informal rules and practices.^[45] Europe is seen as ‘a venue for leadership, discourse and policy action’,^[46] where formal and informal domestic actors engaged with minority outcomes treat Europe as a resource for domestic political action.^[47] The effects for policy and regulation changes at the EU level of such action form the empirical field of the so-called bottom-up approaches that have mostly challenged the domination of EU-centric perspectives.^[48] Although popular support for integration is waning and although anti-European agendas are rising across the EU, the normative fundament of the Europeanization project, together with its efforts in formalizing a minority rights regime, has provided an opportunity structure for improving national minority outcomes. National minority activists have increasingly taken advantage of that for the benefit of the communities they represent.^[49]

Improving national minority outcomes within a governance structure that transcends national sovereignty and that sources its legitimacy from shared interests rather than from nationhood seems to offer a long-term solution to the inequalities suffered by minorities. At the same time, the zero-sum implications of compromising national sovereignty by sharing it with minorities begin to lose their dramatic quality when seen from the perspective of sovereignty transfers to the supranational level. This is what suggests a possibility for desecuritizing minority/majority relations within the realm of Europeanization, and is what the analysis that follows will attempt to probe in specific empirical contexts of minority/majority tensions. The supranational structure introduced by Europeanization has in no way supplanted the normative imperatives of nationalism in making sense of nation-state politics.^[50] But it has provided an alternative discursive field within which minority demands gain legitimacy and nationalist concerns appear less relevant. It is in the interplay between these two fields (the raison de système and the raison d’état in the English School) that the dynamics of (de)securitization of minority/majority relations will be examined.

The cases discussed in the next section investigate the mechanisms of this interplay by looking for flashpoints of minority/majority tensions across several sectors in two national contexts (table 1). The analysis establishes that negative outcomes in minority/majority relations are linked to two main mechanisms: first, borrowing from the systemic level of EU politics legitimate narrative elements that are subsequently employed in advancing nationalist political agendas; and, second, mechanically translating the security logic of nation-state politics into the language of Europeanization without regard to the specific normative difference of the EU project, in line with what Karolewski and Suszycki describe as EU ‘nationalism light’.^[51]

Investigating the interplay between the normative fields of Europeanization and nationalism in governing minority/majority relations in specific national contexts seems promising because it provides a much more fine-grained conceptual framework for understanding the changing logic of intergroup relations. Applying this conceptual framework reveals a dynamic that continues to place national minorities on the state’s security agenda, despite supranationality’s primacy within the realm of Europeanization. Minorities are continuously inscribed into security, whether as threatening national integrity, sovereignty, or culture, or even titular citizens and the national community as a whole. Even though European integration has enjoyed many formal successes in upholding a minority rights regime, minority/majority relations have not necessarily improved. That both the EU candidate state and the new member state studied here display instances of reinforced securitization rather than desecuritization suggests that it makes little sense to think of improving minority/majority relations through EU conditionality and the transfer of EU-centric minority norms. Instead, the conceptual framework employed here enables us to highlight the political rhetoric and practices that need to be addressed if desecuritizing national minorities is to become possible. It may thus prove useful in harnessing Europeanization’s potential to desecuritize minority/majority relations by identifying the narrative avenues that have led to their securitization.

Europeanization as a Source of Securitization

Europeanization has been engaged in the securitization of minority/majority relations as a source of legitimate narratives and practices that can be employed in advancing nationalist platforms and agendas. In the cases presented below, securitizing national minorities within the functioning of the state’s institutional structure (the judiciary, police, and civil service) has been aided by Europe-wide processes perceived either as an integral element of all-European cooperation (e.g. combating radical Islamic terrorism) or as an integral element of Europeanization itself (e.g. ensuring institutional representation for national minorities in line with EU commitment to promoting minority rights).

The powerful us-vs-them narratives that have sprung from the global war on terror have negatively impacted on intergroup relations in political communities such as Macedonia and Bulgaria that comprise Muslim groups in minority positions (Macedonia and Bulgaria have large Albanian and Turkish minorities respectively). Both states have histories of interethnic tensions and conflict, so securitizing Islam by linking it to radical acts of political violence across Europe (and the globe) has been reflected in that, and appears to have been employed for nationalist political contest.

In Macedonia, an incident that illustrates these tensions and their long-term implications is a widely publicized criminal case: the murder, in April 2012, of five Macedonian men by ethnic Albanians. A series of minor interethnic incidents in the months preceding the murder had not had the same repercussions.^[52] But the severity of this crime captured antagonistic narratives between the Macedonian majority and the Albanian minority, straining minority/majority relations for years after the incident.^[53] Attempts were made initially not to frame the event in ethnoreligious terms. For example, the head of Macedonia’s Journalists’ Association, Naser Selmani, called on journalists to exercise utmost caution in reporting the incident to avoid ‘inciting inter-ethnic violence’.^[54] He was originally joined by Minister of the Interior Gordana Yankulovksa, who called for calm amidst mass protests demanding retribution.^[55] Immediately thereafter, however, the investigation claimed a link between the perpetrators and the organized arms trade, the dissemination of radical propaganda, and illegal transnational networks. From then onwards, the murders were framed as an act of radical Islamic terrorism, even though some Macedonians actively protested, on behalf of the Albanian community, against such framing. Yankulovska changed her original stance, claiming the ‘day of the murders has not been selected randomly’, while the victims (four young men between the ages of 18 and 20, and a man of 45) become consistently referred to as ‘our boys’.^[56] It is beyond the interest of this article to investigate the political mechanisms that led to this change. What should be highlighted, however, is that the power response of the Macedonian authorities in ensuring retributive justice was served, tapped into Europe-wide antiterrorism narratives and practices without necessarily having the legal case for it. Islamic terrorism ultimately dominated reporting on the event and was confirmed in the verdict issued at the end of a trial, even though observers point to biases revealed in ‘closed session court hearings […] predominantly relying on the unsubstantiated claims of a protected witness’.^[57] Ali Ahmeti, the head of the Albanian junior coalition party, Democratic Union for Integration (Bashkimi Demokratik për Integrim / Demokratska unija za integracija, DUI), even publicly called for an independent retrial. Beyond the actual criminal substance of the case, that it could mobilize such long-term identity-maintenance practices on both the minority and the majority sides indicates a critical intergroup fault line in the political community of the state. The protests and counterprotests—organized along ethnonational lines and often leading to violence—that accompanied the criminal investigation and the court proceedings demonstrate that the terrorism narratives impacted very negatively on intergroup relations. That these narratives were sourced from European antiterrorism cooperation seems to have reinforced their legitimacy and to have further strained minority/majority relations.

A very similar outcome can be observed in Bulgaria, even though it enjoyed far more stable interethnic relations post-communism,^[58] and even though it also enjoyed, from 2007 onwards, full EU membership. A large-scale antiterrorism case involving the spiritual leadership of the Muslim community in the town of Pazardzhik (the case against the thirteen imams) gained popularity around the same time. The proceedings, which resonated widely with Muslim communities in the country, culminated in 2014 with all defendants being convicted for belonging to an illegal (Islamic) organization, and with all but three of them being acquitted of disseminating radical Islamic (Salafist) propaganda. The prosecution was widely criticized for having relied too heavily on experts who lacked competence in Islamic theology and who were unable to provide a reliable translation from Arabic. Questions were raised about how evidence had been gathered and about the character of the witnesses.^[59] The prosecution justified its case by claiming that ‘a grave threat had been posed against the national security and the democratic form of the state’.^[60] The outcome of the trial, however, does little to show how the national security and the democratic form of the state had been safeguarded: all but one of the imams were released and free to continue preaching because the prosecution could not provide a legal reason against it, ultimately all but dropping its main charges. Given the problematic criminal substance of the charges, launching such a large-scale initiative against local Muslim leaders raises questions. The main justification for it had been antiterrorism measures, in line with Europe-wide trends, but no acts of Islamic terrorism had occurred in Bulgaria. The narrative borrowed from Europeanization legitimated a justice campaign that appeared to lack legal merit. The outcome for minority/majority relations was increased tension. Analysts point to consolidated local support for the tried religious leaders, despite their arguably radical rhetoric and backgrounds, as a result of the anti-Islamic narratives that the trial invoked. A witness recounts their impression as one of ‘being tried for being a Muslim’.^[61] Parallels have been drawn with communist-era repressions against the ethnic Turks in Bulgaria.^[62] Chief Secretary of the Mufti Office Ahmed Ahmedov is categorical that the trial ‘antagonized people and […] worked against the interests of the state’; ‘Muslim people are thinking: “Are they starting again? […] When will I be accused for my beliefs?’’’.^[63] The ease with which the judiciary could be involved in reinforcing intergroup tensions is a clear indicator of securitization: drawing an issue from the agenda of ‘normality’ to the level of high security and ‘emergency’.

The police are another central actor in this dynamic. Security and law enforcement agencies have strained intergroup relations in postconflict Balkan societies. Police in Macedonia have often been accused of ethnonationally biased treatment of Macedonian citizens. Command and communication in the police happen in the Macedonian language, despite the legal amendments of 2011, which have been widely interpreted by Albanians as granting equal status to the Albanian language within the structures of the defence and interior ministries, among others.^[64] As a result, Macedonian police have often been accused of using excessive force or engaging in misconduct against members of the Albanian minority.^[65] Engaging the police in intergroup strife indicates high levels of securitization of minority/majority relations under the imperatives of ensuring stability and peace. These have also been the priority of EU policies in Macedonia, as evidenced by the EU’s involvement in managing the aftermath of the 2001 interethnic conflict.^[66] Stability and peace as security imperatives have thus become closely intertwined with narratives of Europeanization. But while Europeanization’s impact (or lack of it) here can be analyzed only within a broader contextualization of Macedonia’s EU trajectory, it appears that security practices have had ambivalent effects on minority/majority tensions around the work of the Macedonian police.

The work of the Bulgarian State Agency for National Security (Dărzhavna agentsiya ‘Natsionalna sigurnost’, DANS), whose operations in 2010 were at the heart of the imams’ trial, has also been criticized for bias against minorities. In late November 2014, DANS launched a large-scale operation in the Muslim (mostly Roma) neighbourhoods of four towns, with the official purpose of uncovering a reportedly ‘dormant cell of Islamic State’.^[67] The operation happened at dawn, covering densely populated residential neighbourhoods, and graphic materials recovered from the operation were immediately shared on social media, attracting protests on behalf of the Muslim community. The head of the DANS, Vladimir Pisanchev, later described the operation as ‘general prevention’.^[68] That it was launched on the basis of ‘no specific operative information’ did lead to his being summoned to a closed-doors hearing in parliament, where his resignation was demanded, but he remained in post. Experts and analysts are almost unanimous in their opinion that the only visible result from DANS’s operation was to instil fear and seriously strain relations with Bulgaria’s Roma Muslims.^[69] This happened against the backdrop of the ultranationalist factions in the Bulgarian parliament (mostly around the Ataka movement) spreading anti-Islamic narratives. But in view of similar processes in most EU member states, no substantial correctives have been established against employing antiterrorism narratives to justify arguable security practices in dealing with Muslim minorities. Europeanization has thus appeared unable to improve minority outcomes.

Another element borrowed from Europeanization, and employed in securitizing national minorities, is the focus on minority representation in state institutions and decision-making. Minority representation is an element of the minority rights regime upheld by the EU. It is therefore both a minority-specific European norm and also part of a supranational regime that represents one dimension of Europeanization (minority protection). How states interpret and implement this norm should thus reveal more about how Europeanization impacts minority/majority relations. In Macedonia, the Ohrid Framework Agreement (OFA) (also closely intertwined with the dynamics of Europeanization^[70]) addresses the problem of Albanian under-representation in the public administration in its Section 4. The OFA’s target of equitability was seen to be 25% (approximately in line with the proportion of the Albanian minority population). Applying the criterion of equitable representation only formally, however, produced a contentious outcome: as Vice Prime Minister Musa Xhaferi openly admitted, an unspecified number of Albanians employed in the public administration received wages but had no real job.^[71] It has been pointed out that nominally increasing the number of Albanians in the civil service (from 3-4% in 2001 to 18-20% in 2011) has been turned into ‘a mechanism for the employment of unqualified party activists and soldiers’.^[72] The so-called framework payouts contributed to the perception that OFA public sector representation arrangements had failed.^[73] That no other minorities benefited from the arrangements suggests the instrumental implementation of narratives and practices of inclusion ‘borrowed’ from Europeanization to advance a power-sharing agenda that served the participating ethnonational elites but not the minority those elites represented. The formal implementation of a minority norm, brokered by the EU as it was, and characteristic of the EU minority rights regime, does not seem to have substantively improved minority/majority relations.

In Bulgaria, instrumentally engaging with the imperative of minority inclusion in public decision-making and institutional representation produced a similar outcome for the Roma minorities. Recognizing the endemic quality of Roma segregation and discrimination, Bulgaria set up a governmental body, the National Council for Cooperation on Ethnic and Integration Issues (Natsionalen săvet za sătrudnichestvo po ethnicheskite i integratsionnite văprosi, NCCEII) and hosted in Sofia the launch of a large-scale European strategy (Decade for Roma Inclusion, 2005-2015) together with eleven other EU member and candidate states. The efforts in preparing a national strategy for integrating the Roma (2012-2020) within the framework of Bulgaria’s EU membership indicate that combating Roma segregation was seen as normatively imperative. But beyond the laudable rhetoric, NCCEII struggled to include the Roma. Thirteen leading Roma political parties and activist organizations walked out of the NCCEII in 2013 after their requests for administrative restructuring and regulatory reforms were repeatedly ignored. Over the following months the head of the NCCEII (and vice prime minister), Zinaida Zlatanova, refused all contact with them. After she failed to show up at a national monitoring conference for the implementation of the National Strategy for Roma Inclusion in December 2013, the thirty-five participating Roma activists also left the event and headed for the Ministerial Council building, where they demanded to speak to Zlatanova. The incident developed in absurd tones, with the dissenting Roma activists ‘occupying’ the building for several hours until they negotiated a meeting through intermediaries, as Zlatanova was reportedly reluctant to meet them in person and as a group. Even so, the meeting did little to ease disagreements, as Zlatanova insisted that she ‘would only work with the Roma within the format of the National Council’ and, unless they rejoined it, she ‘would find other Roma activists willing to work with her’.^[74] While occurring within a nominally representative body, the power struggle taken up by the vice prime minister contributed to Bulgaria’s failure to co-opt Roma leaders and break the cycle of the Roma community’s chronic lack of representation. It points to a dynamic within which the EU narrative is borrowed without regard to its normative contents and aims. Rather, the opportunity for minority representation and participation offered in the body of the Council was used to reinforce the majority’s power position in dictating the terms of minority/majority relations.^[75]

This subsection has highlighted minority-relevant problem areas, policies, and practices that appear not to have benefited from Europeanization, in that minority/majority relations have not improved. We observe either new avenues for securitization (the Islamic terrorism narratives and antiterrorism policies) or reinforced securitization (the bias of the judiciary and law enforcement agencies against minorities) or a lack of desecuritization despite minority-specific norms pertaining to Europeanization having been adopted (minority representation arrangements and participation bodies). The observations indicate that minority/majority relations have not improved within the context of Europeanization and that elements of Europeanization itself seem to have been employed in securitizing national minorities.

Nationalism as a Source of Securitization

Another mechanism of securitization revealed by the investigation captures the reverse dynamic: translating the logic of nation-state politics to the EU level. The cases below, touching on problems of political representation, education, and health care, demonstrate that whenever the engagement of national minorities reflected the primacy of national security and nation-state integrity, or treated minorities as a dangerous collectivity within the state, Europeanization not only did not improve minority/majority relations; it often seemed to reinforce existing tensions.

The Macedonian OFA’s key focus on maintaining and preserving the integrity of the state has, as analysts have observed, to a large extent impeded substantial implementation of minority rights per se.^[76] It has, instead, simply cemented a power-sharing deal between ethnic party elites^[77] perceived as ‘sultan-parties’.^[78] Besides the Albanians, no other minorities have benefited from the reforms.^[79] What is more, a rift has opened up between the ruling elites and their publics,^[80] suggesting that minority outcomes on the ground are not seen as adequately pursued at the level of state politics. This is visible, for example, in the coalition government’s resistance to allowing other political actors to represent the Albanian minority: DUI’s Ali Ahmeti’s position is that ‘a third Albanian party would fracture the Albanian vote’.^[81] The large-scale scandal involving longstanding wiretapping practices by the government only show the extents to which the coalition government had entrenched its positions in dealing with the opposition ‘at any cost’.^[82] But even before the scandal, the OFA’s power-sharing arrangement had been assessed as deficient (‘a dead man awaiting his burial’^[83]). The OFA’s failure to establish a sustainable route to minority representation reflects its central concern with the stability and integrity of the sovereign state. The gradual loss of hopes for progress on the EU membership agenda has only reinforced the lack of an alternative model for the exercise of sovereign power.

The role of Bulgaria’s Turkish minority party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (Dvizhenie za prava i svobodi, DPS), as a perpetual veto player in the forming of governments has also often been criticized for attempting to appropriate the minority vote for the benefit of its own elite.^[84] In both Macedonia and Bulgaria the minority/majority power-sharing deals established in different periods of the postcommunist transitions have ultimately benefited only one focus minority which had been critical in ensuring the stability and integrity of the state. The growing alienation between the ethnonational elites, whose positions the deals consolidated, and their publics indicates, among other things, that they have had questionable impact on advancing positive outcomes for minority groups and for intergroup relations in general. The imperative of ensuring stability and integrity as primary raison d’état within the nation-state has thus interfered with the systemic logic of supranationality. The minority elite engagement that has followed this logic has not ‘trickled down’ to members of the minority—or to members of other minorities—and has not removed minority issues from the state’s security agenda.

Implementing another European minority rights norm—minorities’ right to be educated in their mother tongue—within the constraints of nationalist politics, albeit within the context of Europeanization, has also had very ambivalent results in terms of minority/majority relations. OFA provisions on education (under Section 6) consolidated Albanian ‘functional autonomy’ in the education sector and de facto reinforced intergroup segregation. Albanian elites vehemently resisted, including by popular mobilization, any attempt to break the segregation—for example, by making the study of the Macedonian language in primary schools compulsory—because they perceived such attempts as encroaching on their rights.^[85] Meanwhile, the concern with ethnic intolerance in schools and interethnic youth violence has become ever more pressing.^[86] Data from the Macedonian Helsinki Committee and the Nansen Dialogue Centre suggest that the majority of the 175 reported hate crimes in 2014 were interethnic and involved underage children, often happening in and around schools. Since 2012 the Macedonian Ministry of Education has implemented a strategy for reducing school violence through, inter alia, integrated education. The education minister, Abdylaqim Ademi, insists that teachers need to be trained to teach in interethnic schools, but the goal of integrated education has so far been impossible to reconcile with the Albanian minority’s right to educational autonomy. Interethnic violence in schools has been controlled with the help of the police or through maintaining physical segregation, but no long-term policy solution has so far been found. A possible intergroup cooperation strategy could have been provided through the EU membership preparation route, but accession negotiations have repeatedly been postponed.

EU membership, however, is not an automatic solution to segregation and the intergroup tensions linked to it, as a recent case from Bulgaria indicates. After an attack on medical personnel attending an emergency call in a Roma neighbourhood in late November 2014, the minister of health services, Petar Moskov, stated that no emergency medical attention would be provided to Roma areas until the safety of the medical personnel in the ambulances had been ensured by police cars.^[87] The minister claimed that out of 227 recorded cases of violence against medics, 174 had happened in Roma areas. The Evroroma Party leader, Tsvetelin Kanchev, objected that the roots of the problem were to be sought not in Roma violence but in the purportedly tardy responses of medical teams when called to Roma neighbourhoods.^[88] The ensuing public debate on the subject has been rich in antiminority narratives and accusations of racism. The Bulgarian Union of Medical Doctors stood behind the health minister, even as the minister of justice condemned his words as hate speech. Eventually, Moskov partially retracted his statement, but insisted that the segregation of Roma areas was so severe that they were beyond state reach and thus ‘extremely dangerous’. This explicit securitization rhetoric, an attempt to justify a political faux pas, reveals the consensual quality of the logic of securitizing the Roma. Analysts point out that Europeanization has effectively changed little of that, both in Bulgaria and across Europe.^[89]

The examples in this subsection have highlighted contexts in which the normative logic of nation-state politics is translated to Europeanization, thus (re)producing minority securitization. The emphasis on national integrity and stability when renegotiating intergroup relations (rather than on rights, protection, substantive inclusion, and so forth) has contributed to retaining the high-security marker attached to minorities’ access to political power, without necessarily enhancing effective participation (the alienation of ethnonational minority elites from their publics). The same is true of enforcing minority group rights (mother-tongue education) without regard to maintaining access to a shared public space, which is essential in a common political community. The purposeful securitization of minority spaces as zones beyond the responsibility of the state is another example of employing the nation-state logic of legitimation, disregarding the context of Europeanization, and specifically its concern with minority integration.