Along Ethnic Lines: Minority organizations in Europe and the limits and opportunities of institutional representation

International standards on national minority protection in Europe often encourage, implicitly or explicitly, states to adopt institutional models that foster and regulate the political participation and representation of minorities. But how do governments know which minority organizations are representative of a particular minority group or minority “identity”? And, once organizations have been selected (or elected) to form an official body, what does that say about the extent to which these organizations are deemed representative and legitimate? Can governments measure and monitor the overall quality and representative character of these associations? These questions sound straightforward and follow implicitly from the current international standards, but they require a complex answer. This paper has two objectives. First, it locates the concept of ‘minority representative organization’ against the background of related concepts, such as minority self‐governments, domestic national minority supportive organizations and transnational advocacy networks. Second, the paper offers a comparative study of a number of crucial cases in new as well as old EU member states. Since a number of years, several European countries have implemented institutional arrangements aimed at establishing, fostering and monitoring the political representation and participation of minorities. By exploring similarities and differences in these arrangements, the paper offers a number of tentative conclusions about their opportunities and limitations. The cases include the government’s consultative body for national minorities in the Czech Republic, the Sami parliament in Norway, the Hungarian minority self‐government system, and the board of minority self‐organizations in Belgium (Flanders).status: publishe