KINPOL: Observatory on Kin-State Policies

Conference: Poland’s Kin-state Policies: Opportunities and Challenges, 23-24 May 2019, University of Warsaw

In our presentation we aim to situate Karta Polaka more firmly within contemporary European debates surrounding kin-states and kin-minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. One central question has been the extent to which kin-state engagement actually prioritises the needs and interests of external co-ethnic communities, said differently it upholds minority protection, rather than simply amounting to instrumentalization of said communities by kin-state actors pursuing their own particular political ends. We show that, in so far as the ethno-cultural nation serves as the underlying legitimation for the state, all kin-state policies ultimately derive from an assumed moral responsibility to address historical injustice occasioned by the circumstances in which co-ethnics abroad and/or their descendants lost the national citizenship they previously held. Applying the distinction between moral and political responsibility in International Relations, we argue that when the ties between a kin-state and its co-ethnics abroad become not only the source of responsibility but also its object, the politics of kin-state engagement and its institutionalisation play an important role in defining the nature of a kin-state’s responsibility.

The full programme is available to view. 

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First published: 29 July 2020