1st ENTAN conference: Non-Territorial Autonomy as a Form of Plurinational Democracy: Participation, Recognition, Reconciliation
Belgrade, 22-23 November 2019
The European Non-Territorial Autonomy Network (ENTAN) invites applications to participate in its first conference in Belgrade(22.11.2019-23.11.2019).
ENTAN is a recently approved Action from the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Association. ENTAN is mandated to study how modalities of Non-Territorial Autonomy (NTA) can help resolve or alleviate national and ethnic conflicts in states were national and ethnic communities demand the recognition of their collective rights. Liberal democracies produce vital notions of citizens’ rights, but citizens are often understood as homologous quantities, leaving little room for the political recognition of difference and pluralism, and, for national minority collective rights. At the same time, in the international arena, the concept of National Self Determination (NSD) is understood to mean the creation or consolidation of nation-states for aggrieved national communities. However, the number of national communities outnumbers the number of nation-states by far, and, in most cases, different ethno-national populations overlap in the same territorial space, making a territorial solution unworkable and destructive. In various parts of the world, these unfulfilled demands have led to bloody and entrenched conflicts.
The problem of scattered minorities’ representation is not new, and there have been historically, important attempts to create modalities of NSD that do not require the creation of nation states. Among the most influential are the National Cultural Autonomy (NCA) model developed by the Austrians Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, the latter a former president of Austria. However, while NCA was for a period important and influential in Central and Eastern Europe, it had limited influence in Western Europe and other parts of the world.
There are, however, many other modalities of NTA that emerge simultaneously in different parts of the world, showing that the problem of minority self-determination is recurrent in many different countries.
The aim of the first ENTAN conference is to examine how and in what context modalities of NTA can improve the value of democratic … READ MORE