Do Professional Linguistic Requirements Discriminate? – A Legal Analysis: Estonia and Latvia in the Spotlight

Kochenov, Dimitry; Poleshchuk, Vadim; Dimitrovs, Aleksejs

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2122402

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The literature on nation-state building in the Baltic region leaves no doubt that concerns over cultural diversity continue to hold sway over domestic politics. Polarized views on national policies around minority accommodation explain electoral preferences, voter turnout, trust in state institutions, and satisfaction with democracy (Poleshchuk and Tsilevich 2004;Kochenov, Poleshchuk., and Dimitrovs 2013). Overall, the challenge of reconciling the competing logics of democratization and nation-state building in such divided societies is assumed to be the major reason why minorities disengage from politics (Agarin 2011;Nakai 2014;Cianetti 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political dejection in a divided society: a challenge for Latvia’s democracy?

Agarin

Nakai

2021

Journal of Baltic Studies

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Ethnically divided societies often seek political cohesion by pursuing nationalizing policies. Latvia has had some experience of this, for example, with the notion that citizens should speak the national language and respect government institutions coincides with portrayals of ethnic minorities as a challenge to democracy. The focus on nation-state building has resulted in persistently low levels of political engagement and public confidence among the citizenry. Public survey data shows that many voters believe their concerns have been neglected by elected representatives, who have fixed their attention on ethnopolitical issues. While we see no demonstrable correlation between ethnicity and levels of political dejection, ethnonational politics explains unstable voter-representative relations and electoral volatility during the Saeima elections from 2010-2018. These unanticipated effects of nation-state building on Latvia's electoral politics invite a rethinking of the relationship between voters and their elected representatives in democratically consolidated, yet divided nations.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political dejection in a divided society: a challenge for Latvia’s democracy?

Agarin

Nakai

2021

Journal of Baltic Studies

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“…More recently, Latvian and Estonian policy of humiliation of Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish minorities, based precisely on the same strategy of the denial of citizenship to supply a justification of exclusion from key rights did not work equally well: under pressure from the international institutions the majority of formerly 'citizenship' rights came to be extended to the minorities as 'human' rights. 38 Not yet the right to vote, the right to a name 39 or the right to speak the mother tongue at work, 40 but the trend is clear: 'they are not citizens' is not an automatically enforced valid pretext anymore to abuse settled resident populationsat least it does not come unquestioned.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Citizenship of Personal Circumstances in Europe

Kochenov¹

Questioning EU Citizenship : Judges and the Limits of Free Movement and Solidarity in the EU

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The EU's is a curiously atypical legal system which construes the ongoing shift from citizenship to personhood in global constitutional law in quite an atypical way. The advent of the person boasts, globally, a powerful ability to remedy the harsh edges of the arbitrary exclusionary legal fiction of citizenship by embracing those who do not qualify to benefit from it. In the EU, however, the turn of constitutionalism to personhood plays quite the opposite role: it disables the protections of EU citizenship. This curious turn, which this paper aims to document and discuss, has two consequences. Firstly, it annihilates citizenship as a meaningful legal status in the EU, since its declared benefits and protections can always be overridden by personal circumstances of the holder: precisely what citizenship, at its inception, was supposed to make impossible. Secondly, it deprives of protections of citizenship precisely those who need it the most, since they become invisible in the eyes of the powers that be. As a result citizenship in Europe is turning into a 'citizenship of personal circumstances'a figure of inescapable individualism imposed on those in need, who are thereby detached from other citizenry and branded out as not good enough in the eyes of the Unionleaving little space to the grand ideals of the past.

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Do Professional Linguistic Requirements Discriminate? – A Legal Analysis: Estonia and Latvia in the Spotlight

Cited by 2 publications

References 10 publications

Political dejection in a divided society: a challenge for Latvia’s democracy?

Political dejection in a divided society: a challenge for Latvia’s democracy?

The Citizenship of Personal Circumstances in Europe

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