From Ireland to Egypt, the genealogy of minority as a category of practice is more complex than we think

The history of minority rights has a consolidated narrative. According to this account, minority rights originated in the religious wars of the 16th and 17th century, then moved towards a definition based on nationality in the 19th century around the so-called Eastern Question, i.e. the slow dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. This process culminated in the minority treaties and declarations supervised by the League of Nations after the First World War. Yet recent works on the topic have emphasised how the term minority did not appear in any of the treaties that are supposed to punctuate this linear story until 1919. In other words, this traditional account has been written considering minority exclusively as a category of analysis, defined by researchers and projected into the past, rather than as a category of practice used by historical actors. These recent revisionist works have thus come to the conclusion that minority and majority were not driving concepts in discussions about diversity until the end of the First World War.

In the first chapter of the book that he is currently writing, which he presented at the University of Vienna on 25 April 2024, Emmanuel draws an alternative history of the perception of diversity in Europe, one that relies on the semantic approach recently proposed by revisionist authors but does not dismiss the 19th century entirely from the history of minorities and minority rights. Relying extensively on large corpuses of texts available, and searchable online, in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian, the chapter locates the first instances of the use of the terms minority and majority with reference to permanent (linguistic, religious, ethnic, or national) minorities in discussions about the Union between Ireland and Great Britain at the turn of the 19th century. The concepts later appeared in Canada, in the 1830s, to refer to French and English in Lower and Upper Canada, as well as in India in the 1880s with regard to Muslims and Hindus. By the last quarter of the 20th century, the couplet majority and minority had become important, although not hegemonic, terms to describe relations among groups in different places in Europe, North America, South Asia and Northern Africa. In the latter, in 1911, the Coptic community of the country even formulated one of the first rights programmes that openly used the word minority in history. The evolution of the use of the terms was particularly interesting in the Habsburg Empire, especially in statistical descriptions of demographic and political relations among groups. There we can see a transition from a vocabulary based on non-numeric words, such as nationality and Volk, to one in which the competitive categories of majority and minority became ever more salient. In all these contexts, the slow expansion of nationalism and popular sovereignty, as principles of political legitimacy, especially in situations where nation-state like scenarios of autonomy or independence were discussed within imperial settings, brought the categories of majority and minority into sharper focus.

In a keynote lecture given at the Geneva Graduate Institute (on 6 May 2024) and that has just been published as an issue of the Current Affairs in Perspective working paper series of the Pierre du Bois Foundation, Emmanuel expanded the application of this semantic approach to the period after 1945. There, he highlighted how the concept of minority lost salience in Europe, but acquired it in the United States to describe race and intergroup relations. While in the late 1940s Eleanor Roosvelt had made clear that ‘minority questions did not exist on the American continent’, by 1965 Edgar Friedenberg, an American scholar of education studies, could claim that ‘the minority group is a special American institution’. In the United States, the concept expanded to include groups such as women and people with disability. It also shifted towards a stronger emphasis on non-discrimination, thus moving closer to the understanding that is dominant in contemporary European debates.

The paper and the chapter thus highlight how the history of minorities do not revolve only around central and eastern Europe. It rather argues that majority and minority became salient categories through a slow process that began in the late 18th century and it is going on until today. During these two centuries, the changing meanings of majority and minority mirror a shift in the perception of difference. While difference was mostly irrelevant in political terms at the beginning of the 19th century, it later became a ‘problem’ to be solved by ensuring the homogeneity of national populations. Since the 1970s, however, minorities have also become an element that enriches society by promoting diversity – the latter understood in positive terms – although this last contemporary shift is still contested.