Minority Rights and Majority Rule: Ethnic Tolerance in Romania and Bulgaria

How does Intergroup Contact Generate Ethnic Tolerance? The Contact Hypothesis in a Scandinavian Context

“…This article focuses on ethnic tolerance, partly inspired by the work of Gibson (2006, 22), who defines a tolerant citizen as ‘one who would not support unreasonable or discriminatory governmental restrictions on the rights of groups to participate in politics … to tolerate is to allow ’ (italics added). Gibson's approach addresses the rights of groups to participate in politics, but when addressing ethnic minorities in contemporary societies there is a need to expand the concept of tolerance (see McIntosh et al. 1995).…”

“…In fact, the right to freedom of religion is probably the oldest human right recognized internationally. Accordingly, ethnic tolerance/intolerance concerns whether citizens support or oppose the rights of and civil liberties for ethnic minorities (see also Gaasholt & Togeby 1995; McIntosh et al. 1995).…”

Education and Ethnic Prejudice in Europe: Explanations for cross-national variances in the educational effect on ethnic prejudice

“…In several European countries, where research on inter-ethnic relations became more and more important due to increasing numbers of ethnic minorities, a strong negative association between education and ethnic prejudice has been established (Eisinga & Scheepers, 1989;Jenssen & Engesbak, 1994;Knudsen, 1995;Wagner & Zick, 1995;Pedersen, 1996;Coenders, 2001). However, some cross-national studies, mostly dealing with European countries, brought into question the presumed universality of the liberalizing effect of education, since it turned out that in some countries, education was only a moderate determinant of ethnic prejudice or tolerance (see for example Muller et al, 1980;Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1980;Weil, 1982Weil, , 1985McIntosh et al, 1995;Billiet et al 1996) [1]. Thus, these studies suggest that there are cross-national variances in the strength of the educational effect on ethnic prejudice.…”

“…Some studies were carried out in a small set of countries (Weil, 1982(Weil, , 1985McIntosh et al, 1995) and some contained incomparable measurements (Weil, 1982(Weil, , 1985. Furthermore, some studies did not attempt to explain variances in the strength of the educational effect (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1980), whereas other studies did not test these explanations systematically at the country level (Muller, 1980;Weil, 1982Weil, , 1985McIntosh et al, 1995;Coenders, 2001). Moreover, these explanations only considered education from a cultural perspective.…”

Minority Policies in Bulgaria and Turkey: The Struggle to Define a Nation

“…Although state policies were relatively less destructive in Bulgaria compared with those of other fascist regimes in Europe, the mistreatment of Jews was common (Anson et al, 1993;McIntosh et al 1995). The regime was intolerant of other minorities too.…”