ŽDANOKA v. LATVIA JUDGMENT – DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE ZUPANĆIĆ The two processes (of particularisation and universalisation) run in parallel and dialectically condition one another. The process of particularisation implies, as if the breakdown into a number of pocket States in Europe were not enough, regression to ever smaller units of ethnic defensiveness. Parallel to this, the inevitable universalisation (economically: “globalisation”) makes these defensive postures both more and more irrelevant but also more aggressive. As usual, this aggression is then displaced to the target that is closest and most at hand. In Nachova and Others v. Bulgaria1 it was the Roma people, in Blečić v. Croatia2 it was Serbians, in Serbia it was Albanians, in Germany and France it may be immigrant workers and their children, and so on. In many of these realms we detect the unhealthy trend from patriotism on the one hand to nationalism, chauvinism and racism on the other. This intolerance is the European scourge. Because European history is replete with instances of aggression deriving from regressive nationalism, the European Court of Human Rights must take an unambiguous and unshakable moral stand on this predicament. Inter-ethnic tolerance is a categorical imperative of modernity. From intolerance derive too many violations of human dignity and human rights. Protocol No.12 will bring discrimination as such into play. There can be absolutely no doubt that discrimination on the basis of the suspect class of national origin is par excellence an issue of constitutional and human rights. In my opinion the future of the European Union, too, depends on such moral leadership and on the ability of united Europe to rise above the petty nationalistic prejudices that have hitherto been the cause of so many wars and of so much human suffering. Here, above all, the Court will be tested as to its wished-for historical role. 2005; Koskenniemi, Marti, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002; Tuck, Richard, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999.) For an account of how imperialism has impregnated culture to the point that we take it for granted, see the works of Edward W. Said (Orientalism, Pantheon Books, New York, 1978; Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London, 1994). For an overview of imperialism-influenced theories across the spectrum of social thought, see Curtin, Philip D. (ed.), Imperialism, MacMillan, London and Basingstoke, 1972. 1. [GC], nos. 43577/98 and 43579/98, ECHR 2005-VII. 2. [GC], no. 59532/00, ECHR 2006-III.