Protection of the national rights of a minority is a human and civil right; but Ethnicity as the source of rights cannot be the rule in a democracy.
It can be considered a realistic and sometimes wise compromise, but can also bring
to a "balcanization" of the situation.
The Italian minority faces the privileges of the German majority, feels under-guaranteed and "stranger at home". And
while the death-march, that is, a progressive and spontaneous diminuition of a minority, was a realistic threat for the German group,
is now concerning the other community.
While the word "apartheid" appears an exageration, the two communities still live as separate blocks; any attempt for mixed schooling,
for instance, has always been fiercely rejected by the German leadership; and while all Germans there are
bi-lingual, many Italians still refuse to study German or have great difficulty in learning it.
Many people especially the younger generations feel this system
as a sort of "cage" and a relic of the past in the perspective of a united Europe.
There is the problem of the other minorities, the mixed-culture people, and those
that simply refuse to be registered under an ethnical label. All these groups do not share
some forms of tutorship (i.e.: housing, public service application, etc.).
Most of the success of this "model" depends on the brilliant economic performance
of the last decades. A huge public budget that comes from the central state
(4,9 billion Euros this year, for less than 500,000 people), the resources of landscape
and tourism (and an undeniably good local administration) have turned South Tyrol
(the German side at least) into a sort of Swiss garden.
How much would all this work under a less generous financial situation?
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