Hidden Minorities between Central Europe and the Balkans

The enlargement of the European Union will unify a multitude of nations and ethnic groups, but it also contains the possible danger that thought patterns which are characterised by uniformity will dominate. This can be a threat for the cultural and linguistic diversity and for the multitude of ethnic identities. This problem corresponds with the increasing attention to the research of ethnicity, ethnic minorities and collective ethnic identities. The results already allow a provisional summing up, but in concrete areas they represent only the beginning of upcoming basic research which has to be both theoretical and practical. Academic research is also faced with the problem that migrations constantly create new minorities. Some of those groups can be addressed as hidden minorities. But this term also describes those autochthonous ethnic groups, mostly living on new or old state borders, which have been neglected by academic research, because they are either simply to small or they do not belong to the traditional canon of minority research, since the question of their legal recognition is not solved or not on the agenda. Much more than recognised ethnic groups hidden minorities try to hide their specific cultural patterns. Sorne minorities became hidden minorities only during a lengthy process of ethnic assimilation or measures of persecution and liquidation. Five different ethnic groups have been selected for the project: the Bulgarian gardeners in Austria, the slovenophone population in the Soboth region of southern Styria, several germanophone villages in the so called Basin of Apace in northern Slovenia, some Serbian orthodox villages in the region of Bela krajina in southern Slovenia and the catholic Serbs in the Dalmatian city of Dubrovnik. Each of these five groups represents different facets of hidden minorities and is at least inadequately dealt with in modern research on ethnic minorities. The particular geographic setting that was chosen can be described as a zone of overlapping cultural areas between Central Europe and the Balkans and allows a mutual comparability of the case studies. lt will be one of the main tasks of the project to detect those codes and symbols by which the uniqueness of these groups is expressed in the context of their respective `lifeworld`. A special focus will be put on possible plural identities, since they are not only considered as a characteristic of hidden minorities but also as a concept which could overcome the often deadly mutual exclusiveness of ethnic groups. Since a theoretical analysis will be more profound if there is a multidisciplinary approach the project team consists of academics from different disciplines such as history, ethnology, cultural studies and social linguistics.