Complying with European Standards of Minority Protection

This thesis investigates the contribution of the EU, OSCE and COE to the evolution of Estonian minority policy from 1991 to 2000. After an initial phase of attempting to exclude Russian-speakers from society, the Estonian government began to encourage their integration, first on the basis of cultural assimilation and then on the basis of multiculturalism. All three European regional organizations sought to ensure Estonian compliance with European standards of minority protection. However, each relied on different mechanisms to achieve this end. The EU relied mostly on conditionality, the linking of economic assistance and political opportunities to Estonian compliance; the OSCE relied on a security dialogue, the attempt to persuade Estonian decision-makers that guaranteeing minority protection would advance the security of their state; the COE made use of a moral dialogue, the effort to transmit new expectations about appropriate behaviour to Estonian decision-makers. By attempting to determine the respective influence of each organization, the thesis has implications for IR theoretical debates about compliance and for the practice of the European minority rights regime.