The liberal vision of the early 1990s envisaged the eastward extension of the Western European security community formed during the Cold War, based on intergovernmental cooperation and integration around the shared norms embodied by the EU, Council of Europe and OSCE. Over the past decade and a half, however, kin-state politics predicated on transborder ethnic ties have reemerged as a key security concern both across and within the boundaries of a European Union still nominally committed to further eastern enlargement.
As well as the obvious external challenges posed by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and growing tensions around Serbia’s role in the Western Balkans, transborder nationalism exhibited by Hungary and other member states has also become a focus for intra-EU discussion and disputes, as exemplified by the ‘Minority SafePack’ (MSPI) European Citizens’ Initiative (2013-2021) calling upon the European Commission to legislate on firmer guarantees of minority rights within EU member states.
Drawing on this and other recent examples, this paper explores the relationship between kin-minorities and kin-states from the theoretical standpoint of ontological (in)security, situating it as part of a wider multilevel security dilemma implicating European states, EU institutions and national minority organisations as security-seeking non-state actors. In this regard, the paper gives particular attention to longstanding claims to agency voiced by transborder kin-minority activists, while showing how and why these claims become subject to counter-securitizing moves by home-states (the states where kin-minorities reside) as well as instrumentalisation and manipulation by kin-states. The implications for the overall identity and cohesion of the EU and its credentials as a security community are also explored.
