Minority Report: Explaining the Restriction of Citizenship and Language Rights in Slovakia after EU Accession

Conditionality was essential in ensuring Slovak compliance with EU minority rights standards. EU officials nevertheless expected that compliance would continue post-accession. Hungarian Slovaks assumed that EU membership would protect them from new anti-minority policies. Yet, the first Fico government (2006-10) restricted minorities’ language and citizenship rights by limiting the public use of minority languages, imposing fines for the incorrect use of Slovak and by restricting dual citizenship. How can this backsliding be explained? The straightforward explanation is that the EU no longer has carrots and sticks for ensuring compliance after accession. Many scholars of EU enlargement indeed predicted such backsliding. This explanation, however, cannot account for the language of the Fico cabinet: the governing parties went to great lengths to argue that their policies actually conformed to EU standards. I therefore offer a two-step explanation of norm contestation that combines rationalist and constructivist insights. First, the Slovak government wanted to avoid social sanctions from Brussels. It therefore refrained from attacking the Hungarian minority and from adopting policies that were undeniably discriminatory. Second, however, the ambiguity of EU values enabled Slovak politicians to frame the retrenchment of minority rights as consistent with the Union’s norms on minority rights. The Fico government was keenly aware that EU values could accommodate anti-minority policies and made skillful use of this opportunity. I develop this argument on the basis of extensive fieldwork in Brussels and Bratislava, which resulted in a wealth of original data that includes elite interviews, parliamentary transcripts and over 1,000 news articles.