CYIL Vol. 7, 2016

CYIL 7 ȍ2016Ȏ LEGAL REGULATIONS FOR AND PRACTICES OF THE USE OFMINORITY LANGUAGES lack of regulation requesting that officials who work in minority municipalities speak the minority language). The two contributions by Harald Ch. Scheu on South Tyrol (on the use of minority languages before administrative authorities and courts and on topographical signs) reveal how uneasy is to achieve a fair and workable solution. Lengthy adoption of legal regulations, which started with the 1946 Treaty between Italy and Austria and extended up to 1992 (use of languages) and 2012 (topographical names) respectively, provides little encouragement for legislators, given that the South Tyrol case is often presented as a model solution. Articles by René Petráš (on the history of use of minority languages and topographical designations in Czechoslovakia) and by Blanka Soukupová (on opinions of Czechoslovak public on the 1920 Language Act) offer a pleasant surprise by their unbiased view of Czech (Czechoslovak) history. Thus Petráš sees the endeavours of the drafters of the 1920 Language Act to achieve a radical distance from the monarchy (which also lead to the exclusion of Austrian emperors and their family members from the potential list of toponymical names) critically. Soukupová leaves no doubt that Czechs entered the new state with ideas of their own superiority. As a result, public opinions on the 1920 Language Act remained deeply divided. Czechs saw it largely as an incarnation of Czechoslovak tolerance, the Czech-German population rather as a betrayal of democratic principles and means of oppression of non-Czech minorities. The second part of the volume contains seven studies under the title Legal status of kin states within the system of the international protection of national minorities . The texts, read as a whole, point to a paradox. On the one hand, attempts of kin states (for which the editors and some authors use the term mother states 2 ) to influence the situation of kin minorities living beyond their borders belong to the most dangerous elements of international politics. As René Petráš and Veronika Bílková remind us in their contributions, the outbreak of WWI and WWII, the Turkish intervention in Cyprus in 1974 or the mentioned intervention of Russia in Ukraine in 2014 were all linked to this phenomenon. On the other hand, the response of international law to the reality of international politics, where old and new cross border ties between kin states and kin communities are common (not excluding the Czech Republic, as shown by Monika Forejtová on the case of Czech minority in Ukraine) is weak and rather ambiguous. One element explaining the paradox, namely the clash of the particularity of special relations between a kin state and a kin minority with the universality of the 2 The kin state is generally understood as a state whose dominant ethnic population (kin majority) has identified itself with a co-ethnic community (kin minority) living beyond its borders. The term kin state and kin minority are used by the Council of Europe. They were introduced by the Venice Commission in 2001. In Czech the terms used by different authors vary. They include inter alia „spřízněný stát“ a „spřízněná menšina“, „mateřský stat“ a „příbuzná menšina“.

493