South Tyrol is famed for its scenic beauty. Maxipixel. PD.Amid highly contested independence referendums in Catalonia and Iraqi Kurdistan, the impasse between Northern Ireland’s leading Nationalist and Unionist parties, and Scotland’s rejection of Brexit and independence vote not long ago—to give just a few examples—relations between majority and minority nations within the same state appear to be at their weakest since the 1990s.
This is not the case everywhere, though: South Tyrol, the predominantly German-speaking province in Italy best known for its idyllic Dolomite mountains and world-class wine, has just completed an eighteen-month participatory-democratic process to debate and draft a proposal for revising the 1972 Autonomy Statute, which granted the Province extensive autonomy and instituted power-sharing between its three official linguistic groups (German, Italian, and Ladin).
The ‘Autonomy Convention’ fell short of its participatory billing, and its results demonstrate that German- and Italian-speakers are generally concerned about different aspects of the autonomy arrangement. But the fact that it occurred at all is evidence that the combination of territorial autonomy and power-sharing has successfully transformed the relationship between South Tyrol’s linguistic groups.
