Lilla Balazs

Research on the protection of national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe has highlighted the instrumental role of European Union conditionality as an external incentive for bringing about positive developments, despite domestic opposition. At the same time, critics of the long-term effectiveness of EU conditionality have pointed to the question of both its temporal, post-accession sustainability, as well as its limits in the domain of policy implementation itself. In this context, the current project proposes to examine the sustainability of minority protection measures in the implementation phase in Slovakia. More specifically, it will conduct an in-depth case study and comparative analysis in order to highlight various paths and mechanisms of the implementation and non-implementation of minority language use provisions in public institutions from chosen administrative districts in the country.