Roundtable: Possibilities of Cooperation in Researching the Phenomenon of Multiculturalism

The European Centre for Minority Issues – ECMI (www.ecmi.de) is a research institute from Flenburg, Germany, dedicated to researching the relations between minorities and the majority in Europe. The ECMI was founded in 1996 by the governments of Denmark, Germany and Schleswig-Holstein. The centre is managed by the board consisting of nine members: three from Denmark, three from Germany, one representative of the OSCE, one from the Council of Europe and one from the European Union. The centre employs experts and associates who apply themselves with dedication to national minorities’ issues, and especially to: evaluation and further development of universal, regional, bilateral and national standards that may help in consolidating democratic government based on ethnic variety and human rights; harmonisation of standards between the EU members and candidate countries; procedures and mechanisms of implementation of these various standards and exploration of their effectiveness; and, finally, evaluation of these standards’ effects and relationships between the majority and minorities in individual countries.

The centre directors included Stefan Troebst, professor of Eastern-European culture studies at the University of Leipzig, by 1999, Professor Marc Weller of the University of Cambridge from 1999 to 2009, succeeded by Professor Tove Malloy from the Tom Lantos Institute.

The current ECMI Director, Prof. Dr Vello Pettai will visit the Institute of Social Sciences on 10 February 2023, between 12:00 and 14:00 and on that occasion we will organise a roundtable discussion concerning the position of national minorities in Serbia.

In the future, the Institute of Social Sciences and European Centre for Minority Issues would develop different modes of cooperation (summer school of minority rights, COST programme and other research initiatives, study visits) and the idea is, during the aforementioned discussion, for the associates of the Centre to become acquainted with the work of the Institute and research opportunities concerning the issues of multiculturalism and ethnicity, and especially when it comes to the policy of multiculturalism in Serbia.