The aim of this dissertation is to explore the dynamics of political change in minority language politics and policy in Europe. For this purpose, the study focuses on the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia, the Russian speakers in Ukraine, and the Carinthian Slovenes in Austria. One major finding is that the political strategies of minority elites that are sensitive to compromise and politically deemphasised solutions predict positive change in the political relations between language groups and in policy. Further, the political behaviour of minority elites is argued to be best explained by ideational as opposed to structural and institutional causes. While the latter certainly have some explanatory power, they nonetheless leave crucial variation in the behaviour of minority elites dependent on ideas which they carry in their heads and upon which they rely in order to analyse the surrounding structural conditions. The empirical analysis of the thesis exploits data from 30,000 press releases collected at Factiva and Lexis-Nexis Academic databases over the course of two years, 112 interviews conducted by the author over the course of one year in all the countries under study (including with 4 state leaders, 14 ministers, and 45 members of parliament), and extensive primary and secondary material in several foreign languages.