Out of Empire: electoral rights, enlargement and the wider Europe

ENThis chapter will look at how the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) have addressed the issue of the political participation and integration of the large ethnic Russian minorities within their borders and how Slovenia has dealt with the issue of citizenship definition, given its history as a borderland state, situated at the cusp of many empires, states and blocs which have come and gone over the centuries. The common element in both these cases is that, where the issue of electoral rights for non-nationals has arisen, it has done somost often not because there has been a substantial population of non-nationals in the host state created by a process of migration, but rather because a state border has moved (or disappeared; or been created), in the recent and/or the more distant past.