Minority Actorness Through a Non-Europeanised Policy Area

What is it about?

The article brings together the literatures on Europeanisation and minority studies and helps to illustrate how unitended Europeanisation occurs through bottom-up actions by actors representing national minorities. Not only do their actions contribute and create a process of Europeanisation, but it also contributes to actorness formation. This is a key to understand Europeanisation of minority politics today. Although the EU repeatedly fails to develop a clear minority policy, an actor-centred approach adopted in this study helps to reveal how minority actors extend their political strategies to the European level through different channels and how they exploit various opportunities stemming from European-level politics. By using the concept of ‘usages of Europe’ the article traces how actors multiply channels and arenas of participation. Morever, the article helps to spot the emergence of tactics of experimentation with European-level norms and rules, contributing to an acquisition of new roles among minority actors and supporting an actorness formation among those active. As the actors engage in criticising EU institutions, they develop tactics of responsibilising which in turn affects their minority agendas and the actors themselves. In this respect, this study contributes to detecting new insights into the weakly studied literature about minority agency and Europeanisation.

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