Parliamentary structures and their impact on empowering minority language communities
This chapter analyses the impact of political decentralization in a state on the position of ethnic and linguistic minorities, in particular with regard to the role of parliamentary assemblies in the political system. It relates a number of typical functions of parliaments to the specific needs of m...
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| Format: | Book Part |
| Language: | English |
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Cham : Springer
2023
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| Online Access: | https://ids-pub.bsz-bw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11578 https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-115782 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10455-3_10 https://ids-pub.bsz-bw.de/files/11578/Marten_Parliamentary_structures_2015.pdf |
| Summary: | This chapter analyses the impact of political decentralization in a state on the position of ethnic and linguistic minorities, in particular with regard to the role of parliamentary assemblies in the political system. It relates a number of typical functions of parliaments to the specific needs of minorities and their languages. The most important of these functions are the representation of the minority and responsiveness to the minority’s needs. The chapter then discusses six examples from the European Union (and Norway) which prototypically represent different types of parliamentary decentralization: the ethnically defined Sameting in Norway and its importance for the Sámi population, the Scottish Parliament and its role for speakers of Scottish Gaelic, the German regional parliaments of the Länder of Schleswig-Holstein and Saxony and their impact on the Frisian and Sorbian minorities respectively, the autonomy of predominantly German-speaking South Tyrol within the Italian state, and finally the situation of the speakers of Latgalian in Latvia, where a decentralized parliament is missing. The chapter also makes suggestions on comparisons of these situations with minorities in Russia. It finally argues that political decentralization may indeed empower minorities to gain a greater voice in their states, even if much ultimately depends on individual factors in each situation and the attitudes by the majority population and the political center. |
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