The changing significance of the criteria for (national) minority identification. The article analyses the development of minority identification and different approaches towards identification of minorities as objects of minority protection. Based on a comprehensive analysis of numerous primary sources (documents), the article studies the prevailing understandings of minorities in the period from the League of Nations to the contemporary post-Cold War international regime for national minority protection. Three prevailing approaches to minority identification can be traced in this period; they are identified as the legal, the normative and the implementational approach. The article shows, firstly, that although there is no consensual definition of the term minority, there appears to be an agreement that for minority identification, two criteria need to be met: the de facto existence of distinct communities, and the willingness/desire of persons belonging to them to preserve their distinct identity. Also, recognition of minorities in itself has no constitutive significance: a minority's existence is not dependent on its formal recognition by the relevant authorities. The article shows, secondly, that the criteria (their contents, significance and their meaning) for minority identification in the international community have gradually changed to the extent that the contemporary understanding of the objects of minority protection extends beyond the traditional one referring to historical, territorially based national minorities, whose members maintain firm and long-lasting ties with the state of their residence (i.e. are citizens and live permanently for a long time in that state). In turn, such changing significance of the criteria for minority identification has affected minority protection in practice.
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