The Charter as a Product from the 19th Century

When in November 1992 the Council of Europe accepted a Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, it was three years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and in the same year as Francis Fukuyama published his striking book The End of History and the Last Man. The Charter is an international convention meant to protect and promote languages used by traditional European (linguistic) minorities and which were often discriminated in the past. Hence, one may think that the Charter is one of the results of the increasing influence of Western liberal democracy with its focus on civil rights in the early ‘90’s of the 20th century.
However, the Charter does not reflect the new wave of liberal democracy of the ‘90’s as will be shown in this paper. The Charter is rather an attempt to settle linguistic conflicts that have arisen from 19th century nationalism, as will be exemplified in the first part of this paper. In addition, it will be shown that the original aim of the Charter was not to resolve language conflicts in Central or Eastern Europe, but to put an end to long-known linguistic issues that play out in Western Europe. These conflicts are what will be dealt with in the second part.
In the third part of this paper it will be explained who the initiators of the linguistic minority debate in the European institutions were. In the last part a conclusion follows.