MINORITY EDUCATION IN WESTERN THRACE UNDER THE ‘MODERN EUROPEAN MINORITY POLICY’ OF KOSTAS KARAMANLIS (2004-2009)
MINORITY EDUCATION IN WESTERN THRACE UNDER THE ‘MODERN EUROPEAN MINORITY POLICY’ OF KOSTAS KARAMANLIS (2004-2009)

Summary/Abstract: People who belong to the Muslim Turkish minority of Western Thrace and reside in Greece constitute the only officially-recognized minority in Greece. Along with the Greek Constitution, both individual and group-based collective rights of this community are under the protection of different bilateral and international agreements to which Greece is a party. Since the incorporation of Western Thrace into Greek national territories in the 1920s, subsequent Greek governments followed similar policies while dealing with Minority-related issues, including education of the minority students from nursery to tertiary education. The Modern European Minority Policy (MEMP) introduced under the Kostas Karamanlis government between 2004 and 2009 constitutes an exemption to this trend since it was a policy dedicated to members of the Western Thracian minority. The main purpose of this study is to emphasize the main principles of the MEMP, to what extent it differed from policies of previous Greek governments, and to what extent it achieved to solve fundamental problems in the realm of minority education in Western Thrace.

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