What does it mean to live as a minority “at home”? How do non-titular populations navigate political systems designed to secure a comfortable majority? And under what conditions can minorities exercise meaningful democratic agency? In this episode of Studio Central and Eastern Europe, Peter Vermeersch, Professor of Political Science at KU Leuven, speaks with Professor Zsuzsa Csergő, Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies at Queen’s University in Canada. A leading scholar of nationalism and minority politics, Csergő reflects on her long-standing research into the tensions between nation-building and democratic pluralism in Central and Eastern Europe, alongside her current work on resilient minorities and the Minority Institutions Database. At the heart of the conversation is what Csergő terms the “minority condition”: a persistent positionality that shapes how individuals and communities relate to the state. Rather than viewing minorities as guests in a host country, she reframes them as “homeland minorities”—populations rooted in place, yet often denied full recognition. This shift opens onto deeper questions of historicity, language rights, and the criteria by which belonging is politically acknowledged. Drawing on comparative insights—from Hungarian and Polish minorities to Russian-speakers in the Baltic states—Csergő outlines four key structural axes that shape minority life: numbers, place, time, and status. These dimensions, she argues, define the resources and constraints within which minorities organise, sustain cultural institutions, and pursue collective goals. The discussion invites listeners to rethink the democratic stakes of diversity, and the subtle, ongoing labour required to inhabit it. Peter Vermeersch: Hello, everyone. You're listening to the podcast of Studio Central Eastern Europe of the KU Leuven. In our 20-minute episodes, we discuss the latest research on the region. I'm Peter Vermeersch, professor at KU Leuven, and with me today is Zsuzsa Csergo. Zsuzsa is professor of nationalism and democracy studies in the Department of Political Studies at Queen's University in Canada. She specializes in the study of nationalism and contemporary challenges to democracy, with a particular expertise on Central and Eastern Europe. Zsuzsa's research contributes to the understanding of tensions between nationalism and democracy in multiethnic societies, and she is the author of many books and articles, among them, Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia from 2007, Cornell University Press. And currently, she is working on the topic of resilient minorities and sources of minority democratic agency in majoritarian states based on comparative research in Central and Eastern Europe. And she's also leading the Minority Institutions Database. So, lots to talk about. Zsuzsa, welcome to the studio. Zsuzsa Csergo: Thank you for the invitation, Peter. I'm delighted to be here. Peter Vermeersch: Let's talk about the focus of your research, ethnolinguistic minorities in Central Europe. Could you explain a little bit how you came to this topic? Zsuzsa Csergo: Yes, I'm happy to do that I think many of us, or maybe most of us who are doing research, especially empirical research are guided by some broader, larger question that motivates our research. And in my case, that has been the question of how persistent ethnic minorities seek political agency in majoritarian states. By majoritarian states, I mean states where the state center is engaged in majoritarian nation building, establishing policies, institutions to ensure that the mainstream culture, the core culture becomes dominant in the state. This is what the logic of the nation-building project has been: to create comfortable cultural majorities in states for reasons that have to do with legitimacy and all that. And it always leaves some people outside the mainstream. I focus on persistent ethnic minorities in the sense that these are minorities that are not just different from the mainstream because there are always all kinds of different reasons why people do not align with the mainstream. But these are ethnocultural minorities in the sense that they have something that creates a commonality, a shared culture that is different from the mainstream, from the core culture, and they want to maintain it. Peter Vermeersch: And language is an important part of it, I suppose? Zsuzsa Csergo: Language is an important part of it, not only in Central and Eastern Europe. But I think in Central and Eastern Europe, the boundary maker tends to be language. So, I think of language as well as ethnicity, race and religion and other forms of boundary making, cultural boundary making as theoretically equivalent in a sense. In most cases they are interrelated. But there's something about language that makes it easier for linguistic minorities to tell their own story to create some kind of cultural narrative that creates the boundary. This is also why I think language is important. Peter Vermeersch: Could you give some examples of cases that you've been, working on extensively? Zsuzsa Csergo: I'm a comparativist and, within that framework, I have been working primarily on Hungarian minorities. That's a language I speak, which makes it easier, obviously. I've been working on Hungarian minorities in Romania, Slovakia, recently I have also added Hungarians in Serbia. But about 15 years ago, I started doing research also on Russian speakers and Poles in the Baltic states. Peter Vermeersch: Very important topics. When you research these minorities and you compare these cases, you look at what you call democratic agency. What do you mean by that? What is exactly the democratic agency in these linguistic minorities, in all these places? Zsuzsa Csergo: Great question that I've been thinking about for many years. Political agency generally means that people have the capacity to have a say in the rules by which they live. And in majoritarian states where there is majoritarian nation-building, typically members of the core population, let's call them the majority members, have a sense of titularity in the state. That also means that they have a right within the boundaries of the state to have institutions in their language or in their culture, depending on what the boundary maker is. [As part of] the institutions that reflect their culture, in the case of linguistic minorities, there will always be schools in their language, culture institutions in their language, courts are going to be speaking their language, government at all levels is going be speaking their language. Whereas minorities have to demonstrate that they're worthy of it. This is what drives my research: the question of how minority members, persistent minority members, seek agency in this way. Peter Vermeersch: I can imagine that it's different in various contexts. In Slovakia, let's say, the Hungarians have opportunities to have schools in Hungarian or libraries or cultural institutions in Hungarian, but it might be different for the Russian-speakers in the Baltic States. Zsuzsa Csergo: Absolutely. And that is something else. I use this term that I think I may have coined, which is the minority condition, by which I mean that there is the persistent minority condition that makes people who live in this condition to see the state from a different angle. They look at the state from a different angle. It's a perspective matter because they are not titulars. They're constantly encountering that they are not titulars unless they assimilate individually. I'm talking about people who are not individually assimilated, but they want to keep speaking their language. They want to not just use it around the dinner table necessarily but also to live in the language where they live, develop their literature, their culture not just preserve some archaic culture. Those are interesting [cases]. Those are the minorities I'm thinking about. Peter Vermeersch: I think it's important to stress that when we are speaking about these ethnolinguistic minorities in majoritarian states, that they still might feel attached to, or at home in, the state where they live. Zsuzsa Csergo: Exactly. Peter Vermeersch: It's not the case, or not always the case, I suppose, that they are connected to some external state. Is that correct? Zsuzsa Csergo: Yes, it is, and that's again something that I like to emphasize. I use the term homeland minorities, homeland populations, because there has been a tendency to talk about such minorities as living in a host state. As if they're guests, not at home. And you have also done a lot of research on minorities and know that there is... there are debates about how historicity, the length of time that a population has been living in a place becomes a source of rights. Peter Vermeersch: We're talking also in this context about migration in a certain sense. The minorities that you are talking about are typically not seen as immigrants. They're typically seen as longstanding members of the state. Zsuzsa Csergo: Although one of the interesting comparisons or reasons to compare Russian-speakers in the Baltic states and more traditional, historic, established minorities, like Hungarians or Poles, in the region, is precisely that the Baltic states are majoritarian nation builders and do not look at them as homeland minorities. They are not considered even national minorities. The question of course arises, how much time do you need? How many generations have to live in a place to have rights to language use, for example? Peter Vermeersch: Exactly, and it's also, I think, about the dominant self-understanding of the state and the population in that state. How diverse do they see themselves? How many languages do they think they can accommodate within their idea of being a nation? Zsuzsa Csergo: Yes. And I h
