UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Friday 17 February 12:00 – 1:30: Panel E3: Minority Rights

Katerina Mantouvalou (University College London): ‘Between security and justice: the minority of western Thrace, Greece’

This paper seeks to explore what liberal justice requires for minorities in South Eastern Europe. Is there a universally applicable theory on how states should treat cultural groups, or diverse factors such as history, the size of the group and the importance of the claims for the claimants should be considered in order to provide a concrete answer to the question?

To provide my answer I will contextually examine Will Kymlicka’s theory of liberal pluralism in the Muslim minority of Western Thrace, in Greece. I will examine the case of Greece, an idiosyncratic case, which, although politically belongs to the West, till the early 90s shared the eastern model of nation-building and minority politics. In Greece minority politics evolve around the ‘triadic scheme’ (kin-state, host state, internal minority) that determines the most difficult conflicts in the Balkans. The Muslim minority is the remnant of a long period of coexistence of Orthodox and Muslim population under the Ottoman Empire. Today it numbers approximately 120,000 members. It is divided into three ethnic groups, the Turks that constitute its biggest part, the Pomaks and the Romas. Their minority status is guaranteed by the Treaty of Lausanne that was signed after the 1919-1922 war between Greece and Turkey. Till nowadays the minority is concentrated in the ethnically mixed region of Western Thrace.

In my paper I will examine comparatively two periods of the Greek minority policy as two distinct multicultural regimes, the 1955 to 1990 and 1990 to date and see how each one affected the minority’s claims to preserve its distinct identity. In the first period, the Security Regime, the minority was treated as Turkey’s agent and was collectively socially, culturally and politically excluded by the mainstream Greek society. In the second one, the Human Rights Regime, positive discrimination measures have been taken in the employment and education field in order to compensate the minority for past injustices. Nevertheless, no provision for the collective recognition of the minority’s distinct ethnic identity has been made.

The main questions that I will address are: How did each multicultural regime affect minority’s claims to preserve its distinct identity? What was the impact of each regime in the minority members’ status in the Greek state? And, finally, how did the different regimes influence the relations between the minority and the majority population? Through these questions I seek to explore if cultural commitments should be taken into account when one addresses issues of liberal justice in pluralist societies.

As to sources, I consult the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ archive. I also consult the local press (Greek and Turkish) to see the impact of official state policies on the intercommunity relations. I have further conducted interviews with members of both communities combining the written sources with peoples’ memories. The first conclusions show that, although collective identification runs the risk to constrain individual autonomy, equality and justice between the majority and minority population cannot be granted in the ethnically mixed regions of Western Thrace if the Greek state does not recognise cultural pluralism first.