The world nowadays, under international law, should strive to be one of good connections and friendships between states. Especially in Europe the idea of co-operation and friendship has lead to a great many organisations being set up to ensure these goals are achieved (the EU, the Council of Europe and OSCE to name a few). That is why it is particularly worrying to see two member states of these various European institutions treating each other with hostility. And this has certainly been the case with regards to Hungary and Slovakia.
There’s no need to go into the history of the relations between the two countries. It is sufficient to say that since Slovakia’s independence in 1993 the relations were tense. A turnaround came after 1998, when a party representing the Hungarian minority in Slovakia was one of the parties in the new coalition government. However since 2006 the relations have dropped steadily, eversince the nationalist party and the populist social democrats got into power in Slovakia. To add the the already bad situation in Hungary the opposition party FIDESZ saw this as a way to gaining mass support against the weak socialist government in Hungary and so began to spread nationalist populism, just like the two governing in Slovakia. Over the four years of this carry on many incidents occurred, such as not allowing the Hungarian President to enter Slovakia to celebrate with the Hungarian minority because of the alleged failure of the Hungarian diplomatic service to give sufficient prior notification (2 weeks, apparently was not sufficient).
The history only shows how bad the situation is. However, it seems to be getting worse again. The newly elected FIDESZ government plans to pass a bill allowing a dual-citizenship for anyone who had Hungarian ancestors at any point in their family tree. Thus, all of the Hungarian ethnic minority in Slovakia could ask for this dual-citizenship. However this is not through anything like naturalization or marriage but simply because of ancestry. The bill provides for a few more perks with regard to the dual-citizenship, but there is no need to get into them.
The Slovak government opposes this, quite vehemently. In fact it plans to call the parliament to meet to discuss counter-measures. One of the proposed ones on the table is even to make any Slovak citizen who applies for citizenship of another country lose his/hers Slovak citizenship, another proposal is to limit this to just applying for the Hungarian citizenship. Either of the two proposals is, however, fundamentally flawed. If the former is adopted it effectively means an end to dual citizenships for Slovak citizens (and I wonder what knock-on effect it would have on the EU citizenship, which all EU country citizens hold as well as their country’s citizenship). If, on the other hand, the latter is adopted this would be an unjust discrimination and a court case should, hopefully, follow.
We can thus see two extremes on both sides. But how is one to remedy this situation? The answer to that question is very hard to figure out. At this point the conflict is not only between the populist parties on both sides of the border. In Hungary the opposition is also backing the controversial bill, while in Slovakia the opposition tried to make themselves look better by offering to enter negotiations with FIDESZ under the guidance of the the European People’s Party.
The reason behind this are the elections. While in Hungary the elections took place not even a month ago in Slovakia the elections are set to take place in two weeks time. Thus the parties on both sides, knowing that drastic public finance cuts will need to be made soon to make the the public finances stable yet again, try to simply overshadow this forcing out a problem like this and the voters, full of anger from the job losses and pay cuts believe every bit of hatred the parties spread.
So yet again we can ask ourselves how to solve this situation? It’s simple really, once people stop believing, politician’s will stop playing.
Kosovo’s interpretation
Posted by mariobilo on July 29, 2010
In his interview to the Times the Prime Minister of Kosovo Hashim Thaci has provided a rather strange and bizarre interpretation of the judgment of the ICJ regarding the autonomy of Kosovo. During he interview Mr Thaci appealed on the remaining 5 countries in the European Union (Spain, Cyprus, Slovakia, Greece and Romania) to recognise Kosovo as a sovereign state stating that by not doing so they are breaking international law.
To hear such an interpretation of the ICJ’s judgment is quite staggering, even more so when a Prime Minister of a country recognised by another 69 states makes it. The ICJ judgment simply stated that as there is no international law regulating the one-sided proclamation of sovereignty and because of the specific situation in the Balkan region the steps taken by Kosovo do not go against international law. The judgment was reported in the newspapers as giving credibility to the sovereignty of Kosovo and that the declaration was ‘in line with international law’.
It is easy to see that the newspaper headlines did water down the judgment quite significantly. However it is another thing entirely for Mr Thaci to interpret it in a way that anyone who doesn’t recognise Kosovo is breaking international law. Yet again one needs to point out to the absence of international law on the issue. Thus if there being no international law to govern this means that Kosovo’s declaration of independence is in line with international law then also it must mean that other states not recognising this is also in line with international law. Why? Simply because there is no law to mandatory state what should and what should not be done.
Such a misinterpretation of a judgment by a high government official can severely damage the image of the country and even make it seem as if Kosovo was making threats to the above mentioned five countries, never mind the fact that the judgment was of advisory nature only. But since we’re talking about breaking the law here, maybe Mr Thaci should also look at the domestic law of Serbia that Kosovo is breaking by its existence and then lecture other states on how to be law-abiding countries.
Posted in International Relations, Political Commentary | Tagged: EU, ICJ, International Relations, Judgment, Kosovo | Leave a Comment »