“Integration without collective minority rights is tantamount to assimilation”

Achieving minority rights requires a proactive attitude: young people must be courageous and not worry about what the majority society tells them, Hungary’s Special Ministerial Envoy for Neighborhood Policy Development said in Budapest on Tuesday.

In his closing speech at the conference on the 75th anniversary of the Council of Europe, dedicated to the active political participation of young people belonging to national minorities, Ferenc Kalmár drew attention to the fact that young people are unfortunately not familiar with certain basic concepts. One of this is national identity, which he called part of human dignity. Among these, individual and collective identity are both important, he added.

If we talk about the protection of national minorities, we should talk about the protection of identity,”

he stressed.

Speaking about collective rights, Kalmár emphasized that governments have recently been calling for the integration of minorities into the majority society, but he made it clear that

this integration without collective minority rights is tantamount to assimilation, and unfortunately this is what many governments are trying to achieve.

National identity does not necessarily have to accompany citizenship, he argued, illustrating this with the example of people in Transcarpathia who, he said, had been granted five different citizenships in a narrow century, while it was clear that a person cannot change their identity five times. This basic principle is something that some governments find rather difficult to understand, he noted.

Via MTI, Featured image: Facebook/Potápi Árpád János