Will Kymlicka: Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1995.
By “minorities,” Kymlicka means, primarily, national minorities, that is groups “whose homeland has been incorporated into the boundaries of a larger state, through conquest, colonization, or federation.” Such incorporation has often been solemnized by treaty. With 600 “living language groups” spread out over the then-existing 184 independent states, and with increased tension between many of those minority groups and the states that ruled them, Kymlicka contends that “finding morally defensible and politically viable answers to these issues is the greatest challenge facing democracies today,” seeing that “since the end of the Cold War” (a few years prior to his writing), “ethno-cultural conflicts have become the most common source of political violence in the world, and they show no sign of abating.” This was also true in the earlier part of the twentieth century, when the treaties governing minority populations proved “inadequate.” On the one hand, “a minority was only ensured protection from discrimination and oppression if there was a ‘kin state’ nearby which took an interest in it”; Jews in Europe were out of luck. But even “where such kin states did exist, they often used treaty provisions as grounds for invading or intervening in weaker countries,” as Nazi Germany did in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
After the Second World War, “it was clear that a different approach to minority rights was needed,” and liberals turned to “human rights” as their new formula, causing the newly formed United Nations to replace the League of Nations’ references to ethnic and national minority rights with its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After all, they reasoned, the agony of religious warfare in Europe ended when regimes began to acknowledge the existence of natural rights of life, liberty, and property, protecting them by separating churches and states and guaranteeing individuals’ right to religious freedom. In the revised liberal view, “ethnic identity, like religion, is something which people should be free to express in their private life, but which is not the concern of the state.”
The problem was that human rights, whether conceived as natural or ‘historical,’ do not tell us much about “some of the most important and controversial questions relating to cultural minorities,” including the languages used in public institutions, education funding, representation in public offices, federalism, voting rights, and entitlement to natural resources. “The problem is not that traditional human rights doctrines give us the wrong answer to these questions. It is rather that they often give us no answer at all.”
“A liberal theory of minority rights…must explain how minority rights coexist with human rights, and how minority rights are limited by principles of individual liberty, democracy, and social justice.” Kymlicka had already taken up this challenge in his previous book, but this one is much better written because less ‘academic.’ He spends a lot less time contending rival liberal theorists, which has the effect of clearing things of jargon.
Although there are many forms of “cultural pluralism,” the main ones are national minorities—once self-governing, still territorially concentrated cultures incorporated (voluntarily or involuntarily) into a larger state—and ethnic groups—often immigrants (voluntary or involuntary, as in the case of American slavery), territorially dispersed, who seek not self-government as a people but self-government within the political institutions of the state. Kymlicka calls states with national minorities “multination states,” states with ethnic minorities “polyethnic states.” Some states are both multinational and polyethnic—for example, the United States. A “culture” is a defining element of a “nation” or “people,” along with a distinct language and a shared history. Indeed, as Kymlicka announces, he will use the terms “culture,” “nation,” and “people” as synonymous, defined as “an intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history.” In the United States, such incorporated nations as the several Amerindian groups, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, Chamorros, and the original Chicanos (those incorporated after the Mexican War of 1846-48) often acquired “a special political status”—reservations for the Indians, commonwealth status for Puerto Rico, protectorate status for Guam—and/or special economic status—e.g., land use rights for native Hawaiians, some Indian tribes, and Chamorros—and/or linguistic status—equal status in schools, courts, and other governmental entities, as for Hawaiians and Chamorros. To grant such special rights has made little difference in the country as a whole, since “most of these groups are relatively small and geographically isolated,” a “fraction of the overall American population.”
Multination states need not be disunited; such citizens may “view themselves for some purposes as a single people,” as in Switzerland. Kymlicka thus distinguishes between patriotism, “the feeling of allegiance to a state,” from “national identity, the sense of membership in a national group.” He goes so far as to claim that national groups “feel allegiance to the larger state only because the larger state recognizes and respects their distinct national existence.” On the contrary, it is quite likely that the larger state also provides a free trade zone for all groups and provides much stronger military defense than any single group could muster alone. These benefits in turn reinforce the patriotism that derives from a shared history. That is, the history of a national minority ‘taken in itself’ often overlaps with the history of a national minority living within a multinational state, as for example the Navajo and Lakota code talkers, who secured U. S. army messages against German codebreakers in two world wars.
The immigration that produces polyethnic states has been addressed quite differently at different times. In the United States, Canada, and Australia, for example, “prior to the 1960s, immigrants were expected to shed their distinctive heritage and assimilate entirely to existing cultural norms.” This was “seen as essential for political stability, and was further rationalized through ethnocentric denigration of other cultures”—the last point being Kymlicka’s rather solemn riff on G. K. Chesterton’s observation that wherever you go in the world, foreigners are seen as funny. Political stability, indeed: citizens in all three countries understood that many immigrants came from countries where republican regimes had never existed, that immigrants often brought anti-republican ideologies and habits of mind and heart with them, a point Kymlicka doesn’t trouble himself to emphasize. At any rate, “beginning in the 1970s, under pressure from immigrant groups”—who quickly learned to ‘work’ the republican regimes even as they did not entirely respect them—each of the “Anglo” countries “rejected the assimilationist model, and adopted” what Kymlicka is pleased to call “a more tolerant and pluralistic policy which allows and indeed encourages immigrants to maintain various aspects of their ethnic heritage.” Many of these policies were politically trivial—respecting the immigrants’ “food, dress”—and some not always so—religion. “In rejecting assimilation,” such immigrant groups did not usually attempt “to set up a parallel society, as is typically demanded by national minorities,” although this has been done in the past—quite notably by English-speaking colonists in North America and elsewhere, Spanish colonists in Puerto Rico, French colonists in Quebec. “It is an essential feature of colonization, as distinct from individual emigration, that it aims to create an institutionally complete society.”
Kymlicka aims at “mak[ing] a more tolerant and inclusive democracy” regarding the national minorities—civic nations as distinguished from ethnic nations—as the argument for equal inclusion of ethnic groups has been made by many other advocates of liberal democracy. This must raise the issue of regime—specifically, of what a “democracy” is and what justifies it.
Liberal-democratic republics typically offer three types of group-differentiated rights. First, they attempt to secure protection of the civil and political rights of individuals. Kymlicka rejects as “profoundly mistaken” the claims of “various critics of liberalism,” ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ who argue “that the liberal focus on individual rights reflects an atomistic, materialistic, instrumental, or conflictual view of human relationships.” In fact, “individual rights can be and typically are used to sustain a wide range of social relationships,” as Tocqueville saw when he described Americans as master of the art of association. Second, such regimes also offer several kinds of group-specific rights, various forms of self-government without full sovereignty. These include federalism, which leads to well-known difficulties in balancing “centralization and decentralization,” and reservations, which may include higher levels of self-government than seen in states (in the U.S.) or provinces (in Canada). Indian reservations today “are becoming, in effect, a third order of government, with a collection of powers that is carved out of both federal and state-provincial jurisdictions.” Regarding federalism, the United States and Canada differ, as Americans made “a deliberate decision” not “to use federalism to accommodate the self-government rights of national minorities,” whereas Canada established Quebec as just such an accommodation. While the American approach “has tended to make national minorities in the United States more vulnerable,” lacking as they do “the same constitutional protection as states’ rights,” it also provides “greater flexibility in redefining those powers so as to suit the needs and interests of each minority” within a given state.
The second form of group-differentiated rights in liberal-democratic republics are polyethnic rights: self-expression of cultural norms and customs, educational accommodations, public funding for ethnic associations, museums, and festivals, and exemptions from certain laws. These aren’t truly group rights, however, as they aim at “help[ing] ethnic groups and religious minorities express their cultural particularity and pride without it hampering their success in the economic and political institutions of the dominant society.” They are often intended to break down social prejudices against such minorities, again enhancing full civic and political participation for them as equal citizens in practice, not only ‘in theory.’
“Special representation rights” are the third form of group-differentiated rights. These are much more controversial than the others. Such rights would entitle minorities to reserved seats in state-provincial and/or national legislatures. Kymlicka considers them “a form of political ‘affirmative action,'” whereby republics would remedy “some systemic disadvantage in the political process which makes it impossible for the group’s views and interests to be effectively represented,” sometimes to the point of considering this “a corollary of self-government.” In this second, stronger rationale, representation would be offered not as a temporary, remedial measure (as ‘affirmative action’ was once advertised to be) but as a permanent institutional feature of the regime. As Kymlicka remarks, there is no reason in principle why such representation would not extend to the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court or (one might add) to the executive, in national and state/provincial bureaucracies.
What justifies such arrangements, beyond an intention to appease obstreperous constituents? “A liberal democracy’s most basic commitment is to the freedom and equality of its individual citizens.” If so, “then how can liberals accept the demand for group-differentiated rights by ethnic and national minorities?” Because, although “it is natural to assume that collective rights are rights exercised by collectivities, as opposed to rights exercised by individuals, and that the former conflict with the latter,” such “assumptions do not apply to many forms of group-differentiated citizenship.”
Kymlicka begins by distinguishing two kinds of claims made by national and ethnic groups: those made by the group “against its own members,” restricting internal dissent in order to protect the group from instability; and those made “against the larger society” in order to protect the group against decisions made by that society. Internal restrictions, external protections. All groups, qua group, impose restrictions on their members, whether the group in question is a country or a bridge club. “All governments expect and sometimes require a minimal level of civic responsibility and participation from their citizens.”
Some groups go further, going beyond restrictions needed to uphold freedom and equality and compelling members “to attend a particular church or to follow traditional gender roles”—restricting what Kymlicka calls “basic civil and political liberties,” although he doesn’t pause to explain why traditional gender roles violate basic civil and political liberties. [1] As always, he is particularly concerned with restrictions on the right of group members “to question and revise traditional authorities and practices.” In the United States, for example, Amerindian tribal councils were long exempt from penalties against violating the Bill of Rights, and even after the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act, a tribal member may not usually appeal an alleged violation to the United States Supreme Court. The tribes have argued that their regimes do respect government by consent but achieve it in ways unlike those stipulated in the American regime. Kymlicka evidently agrees, although he draws the line on Pueblo restrictions on religious liberty, again on the grounds of protecting the right to dissent.
Some groups might also deploy external protections in a way that violates freedom and equality, as white South Africans did with apartheid. “However, external protections need not create such injustice” because special representation rights, land claims, or language rights to a minority need not, and often does not, put [the minority group] in a position to dominate other groups.” Indeed, such external protections may “promote fairness between groups.” For this, Kymlicka deems it especially important to protect land rights, as “struggles over land are the single largest cause of ethnic conflict in the world.” Since “history has shown” that the power “to establish reserves where the land is held in common and/or in trust, and cannot be alienated without the consent of the community,” is “the most effective way to protect indigenous communities from” external economic and political power, he endorses such restrictions on individual property rights within minority national communities.
Kymlicka thus establishes that individual rights will always be compromised when individuals become members of groups, and that some individual rights must be restricted if the group intends effectively to defend ‘core’ individual rights. My individual right to liberty may be restricted if I threaten your life. So far, this is standard liberalism. The question then becomes, what is the hierarchy of rights? Which should be sacrificed in order to protect the others?
Kymlicka first turns to the history of liberalism, showing that “for most of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the rights of national minorities were continually discussed and debate by the great liberal statesmen and theorists of the age,” although they often disagreed with one another about what those rights should be. Wilhelm von Humboldt and Giuseppe Mazzini, for example, argued that “the promotion of individuality and the development of human personality is intimately tied up with membership in one’s national group, in part because of the role of language and culture in enabling choice.” [2] This form of liberalism opposed imperialism, or at least any form of imperialism that failed “to grant political powers to the constituent nations within” the empire. Some, like Mill, further argued that liberalism itself required nation-states, since without a shared “sense of political allegiance” buttressed by a “common nationality,” people will be reluctant to grant civil and political liberties to their fellow citizens.
Kymlicka doesn’t like the sound of that. Mill, he charges, was being “ethnocentric,” if not racist. Others who argued in his way really were racists. “The great nations were seen as civilized, and as the carriers of historical development.” By contrast, the smaller nationalities were considered “primitive and stagnant, and incapable of social or cultural development.” Historicism, then, is fine with Kymlicka as long as it undergirds equality and liberty, bad when it doesn’t. In fact, he observes, “other liberals” such as Lord Acton, “argued the opposite position, that true liberty was only possible in a multination state” because the several nationalities check and balance one another while effectively resisting overbearing centralized power. English liberals in particular “were constantly confronted with the fact that liberal institutions which worked in England did not work in multination states,” as “many English liberal institutions were as much English as liberal,” “only appropriate for a (relatively) ethnically and racially homogeneous society such as England.” The question would then be, how can the liberal principles of equality and liberty be secured in practice in any particular civil society? [3] This leads Kymlicka to call for “truly international mechanisms for protecting national minorities that do not rely on the destabilizing threat of intervention by kin states,” as he was seeing in the 1990s, when “Hungary declared itself the protector of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia and Romania” and “leaders in Russia and Serbia” made similar pronouncements regarding “ethnic Russians in the Baltics and ethnic Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia.” He also admits that internationalism failed when institutionalized under the League of Nations and does not show why the United Nations would do better.
Nor have socialists done any better than liberals. As historicists, they too have endorsed notions of historical evolutionism whereby some nations are deemed ‘progressive,’ others ‘backward.’ But Kymlicka applauds socialism’s more recent iterations “Whereas Marx thought that bigger was better, many socialists (and environmentalists) now think that small is beautiful,” since “certain kinds of community and collective action are only possible in small groups.” However, “this is not necessarily the case,” for “decentralization only meets the needs of national minorities if it increases the capacity of the group for self-government.” A small governmental unit might still leave a minority group in the minority, without defense against those who control the local government.
Moreover, in practice “socialists have often appealed to cultural identity where this was helpful in gaining or maintaining power.” In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party made such appeals for tactical reasons, “support[ing] nationalist movements in non-Communist countries in the hope of destabilizing Western countries or Western allies in the Third World.” Within the Soviet Union itself, Lenin cheerfully granted language rights to minorities, so long as those languages were used to convey socialist propaganda. For him and for his successor, Josef Stalin, national identity “was simply an empty vessel that could be filled up with Communist content.”
Given these theoretical and practical complications, Kymlicka needs to clear a theoretical path toward clarifying the relation between individual rights and national rights. He now moves “to show that minority rights are not only consistent with individual freedom, but can actually promote it.” He will argue that “the liberal value of freedom of choice has certain cultural preconditions, and hence issues of cultural membership must be incorporated into liberal principles.”
Although the term ‘culture’ “has been used to cover all manner of groups, from teenage gangs to global civilization,” he will use it to mean “societal culture,” that is, “a culture which provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres.” Usually “territorially concentrated and based on a shared language,” but often dwarfed by majority societal cultures around them wielding the resources of the centralized modern state, minority cultures now need institutional embodiment in “schools, media, economy, government, etc.” That is, what Kymlicka calls societal cultures are really what Aristotle calls regimes, which consist of rulers, ruling offices or institutions, ways of life, and purposes the rulers, ruling offices, and ways of life aim at securing. What these regimes lack, however, is full self-government or sovereignty.
They have been eclipsed by “the process of modernization.” Statesmen typically want “a common culture, including a standardized language, embodied in common economic, political, and educational institutions” fostering patriotism (including citizens’ or subjects’ willingness “to make sacrifices for each other”) and (if those states are republics) “equality of opportunity,” often in commercial markets with no internal trade barriers. Such a regime has in fact prevailed in the United States, which has “integrated an extraordinary number of people from very different backgrounds into a common culture,” with only “a relatively small number of minority cultures.” By the third generation, immigrant families find that “learning the mother tongue” of their grandparents “is not unlike learning a foreign language.” With the spirit of liberalism, modern states, especially those with republican regimes, enable citizens to “choose their own plan of life,” so long as their choices remain within the legal framework. “It is only through having access to a societal culture that people have access to a range of meaningful options” respecting their life plans.
But is such individual choice “tied to membership in one’s own culture”? If a person has “a deep bond” with his own culture, should immigrant groups “be given the rights and resources necessary to recreate their own societal cultures”? And “what if a culture is organized so as to preclude individual choice”? Kymlicka claims, dubiously, that to refuse to enable such persistent cultural bonding “treats the loss of one’s culture as similar to the loss of one’s job.” But of course liberal societies put few if any restrictions on changing one’s job because changing one’s job in no way threatens social solidarity and may well enhance social prosperity. While it is undoubtedly true that “people’s self-respect is bound up with the esteem in which their national group is held,” given Kymlicka’s tacit acknowledgment that a societal culture is really a regime, why should the dominant regime not insist on some substantial degree of conformity to its principles and practices? This is especially true of immigrants, who have placed themselves under the authority of the regime voluntarily. It is somewhat less true for refugees, if their presence is temporary—as it often turns out not to be. As for what Kymlicka calls national minorities, the question would be: To what extent will their self-government interfere with the regime of the state? It is true that large modern states are not small city-states, and so can tolerate a greater degree of divergence from the regime, especially if the national minorities are small, with enclaves not located on geostrategic chokepoints. The question remains, what degree? And what kind of principles and practices are tolerable?
To these questions, Kymlicka replies that “the aim of liberals should not be to dissolve non-liberal nations, but rather to liberalize them,” an ambition which “may not always be possible,” although sometimes it is: “it is worth remembering that all existing liberal nations had illiberal pasts, and their liberalization required a prolonged period of institutional reform.” And no regime or “societal culture” will likely allow immigrants to colonize it. Kymlicka remarks that “liberals want a societal culture that is rich and diverse, and much of the richness of a culture comes from the way it has appropriated the fruits of other cultures.” This, presumably, on the grounds that “richness” and diversity offer a widened palette of life-plan choices for the citizens.
What about the exigencies of justice? Every regime will enforce some idea of justice. To what extent can numerous and diverse cultures co-exist, and even enhance one another, without interfering with that idea. “Protecting one person’s cultural membership has costs for other people and other interests, and we need to determine when these trade-offs are justified.”
Kymlicka argues against those liberals who say that “a system of universal individual rights already accommodates cultural differences, by allowing each person the freedom to associate with others in the pursuit of shared religious or ethnic practices.” If a given way of life is perceived to be valuable, it “will have no difficulty attracting adherents,” and to give extra political heft to a minority national culture will place an unjust burden on those footing the bill with money or votes. Kymlicka charges that this view “is not only mistaken, but actually incoherent,” since “the state unavoidably promotes certain cultural identities, and thereby disadvantages others.” But so what?
He answers this question in four ways. The “equality argument” holds that “some groups are unfairly disadvantaged in the cultural market-place, and political recognition and support rectify this disadvantage.” This, on the basis of “the importance of cultural membership.” “External protections” will “ensure that members of the minority have the same opportunity to live and work in their own culture as members of the majority.” Members of the majority regime “cannot reasonably ask people” to sacrifice what remains of their own regimes. To be sure, “this equality-based argument will only endorse special rights for national minorities if there actually is a disadvantage with respect to cultural membership, and if the rights actually serve to rectify the disadvantage.” For example, “one could imagine a point where the amount of land reserved for indigenous peoples would not be necessary to provide reasonable external protections, but rather would simply provide unequal opportunities to them.” To protect the minority nation’s language, Kymlicka advocates government subsidy of education in that language, lest it become extinct; presumably, he would also insist on schooling in the dominant language, without which shared citizenship in the larger regime would be impeded. On the basis of the “equality argument,” a “fair way to recognize languages, draw boundaries, and distribute powers” consists of “ensuring that all national groups have the opportunity to maintain themselves as a distinct culture, if they so choose,” leaving decisions about which particular aspects” of that culture “are worth maintaining and developing” to “the choices of individual members,” whose right to do that will be ensured against the intentions of the minority regime if it denies the right itself.
Kymlica’s second answer rests on history. “What are the terms under which two or more peoples decided to become partners?” An existing treaty might be unfair in the light of liberalism. For example, “if the members of the national minority never gave the federal government the authority to govern them in certain areas, the federal government is unlikely to accept responsibility for funding minority self-government.” Generally, arguments drawn from the history of intergroup relations will not suffice because circumstances change and treaties may need to be renegotiated accordingly.
His third answer is the ‘value of cultural diversity’ argument, made earlier. Whereas the equality argument and the argument from history “appeal to the obligations of the majority, this third argument appeals to the interests of the majority,” defending “rights in terms of self-interest not justice.” In addition to the aforementioned appeals to the benefits of cultural richness and diversity, an example of this kind of argument is the claim that “traditional lifestyles provide a model of a sustainable relationship to the environment.” Such arguments may be persuasive, “but it is not clear that any of these values by themselves can justify majority rights” [emphasis added], because “the benefits of diversity to the majority are spread thinly and widely whereas the costs for particular members of the majority are quite high”: “unilingual anglophones residing in Quebec or Puerto Rico are unlikely to get government employment or publicly funded education in English.” Like the historical argument, then, the ‘cultural diversity’ argument will prove good as a supplement to the “equality argument,” but not as the primary argument for national rights or ethnic rights.
Finally, there is an argument based on an analogy with states. Liberals recognize that for the time being the world will consist of sovereign states with the right to ‘self-determination’ or self-government, and indeed sovereign self-government, often (as liberal internationalists will insist) within the framework of international law. Kymlicka maintains that “the right of states to determine who has citizenship rests on the same principles which justify group-differentiated citizenship within states and that accepting the former leads logically to the latter.” Even under liberalism, which makes so much of individuals’ rights, “not everyone can become a citizen, even if they are willing to swear allegiance to liberal principles.” While “some critics have argued that liberals cannot justify this restriction, and that the logic of liberalism requires open borders” under conditions other than a threat to the public order, this does not hold if liberalism remains “indifferent to people’s cultural membership and national identity.” As earlier remarked, in England, English rights and liberal rights have often mingled in ways the English would not care to disentangle. While this must be so, it is also true that Kymlicka scants the firm liberal insistence on social contract, sometimes formal but often (as in England and Canada) unwritten but nonetheless elaborated in a set of statutes and court decisions, changeable with changing circumstances.
Kymlicka quite sensibly writes, “There is no simple formula for deciding exactly what rights should be accorded to which groups.” Given these “unavoidable indeterminacies,” and given “the complexity of the interests, principles and historical circumstances at stake,” these matters “must be resolved politically, by good-faith negotiations and the give and take of democratic politics.” But, of course, this raises another set of questions concerning the institutional structure of democratic politics—issues such as redistricting, guaranteed representation, and proportional representation. While “the middle-class white men who dominate politics in most Western democracies are not demographically representative of the population at large, they are the elected representatives of the population at large,” often enjoying “widespread electoral support from minority and disadvantaged groups.” It isn’t at all certain that “people can only be fully ‘represented’ by someone who shares their gender, class, occupation, ethnicity, language, etc.” Oddly, Kymlicka never mentions ‘ideology’ or political doctrine as a criterion for ‘being represented. Yet what is more bound up with the idea of rights, individual or ‘groupish,’ than political doctrine? He does see that “the argument that members of one group cannot understand the interests of other groups” would “undermine the possibility of group membership as well,” since every group has a range of subgroups. “The principle of mirror representation seems to undermine the very possibility of representation itself”: under its terms, “How can anyone represent anyone else?” It also undermines the principle of democracy, since majorities are achievable but unanimity nearly impossible. Therefore, the only form of group representation he endorses is a temporary form, similar to affirmative action, intended to redress injustices entrenched in the past. He does not say how such a form of representation would not itself likely become entrenched, therefore (eventually) unjust. Generally, then, “the right of self-government is a right against the authority of the federal government, not a right to share in that authority,” as (for example) to guarantee Indians seats in the legislature might simply mean that they would have gained the right to be outvoted, particularly with regard to the issues of federalism, the degree of central government control over their own communities, that they are most anxious to guard.
To put it another way, if one wants to know what groups should be represented in the national legislature (or in any other branch of government), one would need to know if they experience “systemic disadvantage in the political process” and whether they have a reasonable claim to self-government, based on the ideas of justice sketched earlier. But if you add up the “oppressed groups” in the United States—women, ethnic, national, and sexual minorities, among others—they add up to 80 percent of the population. Why would they not begin to oppress the remaining 20 percent? While group representation “is not inherently illiberal or undemocratic,” it raises “difficult questions.”
And what if “the demands of some groups exceed what liberalism can accept”? Liberalism may not require one regime, but it cannot tolerate all regimes. Kymlicka has already articulate “two fundamental limitations on minority rights”: requirements by minority cultures “to restrict the basic civil or political liberties” of “their own members”; in terms of what he’s called “external protections,” “liberal justice cannot accept any such rights which enable one group to oppress or exploit other groups,” as in slavery, apartheid, or segregation. “In short, a liberal view requires freedom within the minority group, and equality between the minority and majority groups.” Groups that attempt to push past these limits may do so because to accept them “might imply that the internal structure of their community should be reorganized according to liberal standards of democracy and individual freedom”—it might indeed imply regime change. It isn’t only that such resistance would “limit the freedom of individual members within the group to revise traditional practices,” as Kymlicka points out; it would actually require the group to “revise” those practices.
Some might say means that “to find room for minority rights within liberal theory…requires qualifying these rights in such a way that they no longer correspond to the real aims of minority groups.” (I would be among those who say so.) “Is the insistence on respect for individual rights not a new version of the old ethnocentrism, found in Mill and Marx, which sets the (liberal) majority culture”—in the case of Marx, it must be said, a decidedly illiberal minority culture, the culture of communist parties—as “the standard to which minorities must adhere”? Only if liberalism is ethnocentric, one might well reply. While modern liberalism unquestionably originated in Europe, under conditions of modern statism, does that make it ethnocentric in principle, to its core? Not really, as the many non-European liberal regimes attest.
What Kymlicka wants to get at is that there are forms of toleration which are not liberal. In the past, they have centered on ‘culture’ in the original sense—on cult, on religion. For example, the longstanding Ottoman Empire permitted Muslims, Christians, and Jews to practice their religions more or less in peace, without requiring them to abstain from severe restrictions on individual liberties within each of those groups. “This system was generally humane, tolerant of group differences, and remarkably stable,” if not liberal, not respecting individual freedom of conscience, allowing intra-group repression of heterodoxy. The Ottoman state amounted to “a federation of theocracies.” Locke, Kant, and Mill would not approve, and Marxian atheists would shrink from it in horror and indignation.
“So it is not enough to say that liberals believe in toleration. The question is, what sort of toleration?” If “liberal tolerance protects the right of individuals to dissent from their group, as well as the right of groups not to be persecuted by the state,” then liberalism requires a regime with a state apparatus sufficiently powerful to reach into ethnic and even national minority communities to protect dissenters but sufficiently gentle not to injure religionists who do not persecute their own dissenters. But what if non-liberal minorities “want internal restrictions that take precedence over individual rights”? Should the liberal regimes act to prevent this? That is, “does a third party have the right to impose liberal principles on another society” by coercive measures? If so, to what extent?
“Many nineteenth-century liberals, including John Stuart Mill,” went so far as to say that “liberal states were justified in colonizing foreign countries in order to teach them liberal principles.” Although most “contemporary liberals” have “abandoned this doctrine as both imprudent and illegitimate,” depending instead upon such nonviolent methods as “education, persuasion, and financial incentives,” they continue to hold coercion legitimate in dealing national minorities. Kymlicka objects. “Both foreign states and national minorities form distinct political communities, with their own claims to self-government.” To the obvious question—So what?—he can only sputter about aggression, paternalism, colonialism, while worrying that “these attempts often backfire.” Indeed, they often do, but that is no principled objection. He is surely right to say that “liberal institutions can only really work if liberal beliefs have been internalized by the members of the self-governing society, be it an independent country or a national minority,” but that only begs the question of how that might more effectively be accomplished.
As for Kymlicka, he holds out the hope of negotiations. Given the fact that “members of some minority cultures reject liberalism,” representatives of “the liberal majority will have to sit down with the members of the national minority, and find a way of living together,” carefully identifying what the “views” of the illiberal minority are and seeking some modus vivendi on the basis of any shared opinions that may exist. He hopes that gradually, over time, the illiberal minority will liberalize and, in the meantime, with their right to self-government respected, their liberalization will be ‘from within,’ not imposed. That sort of approach might work with a national minority that posed no serious threat to the liberal regime of the surrounding state. There would surely be times when civil war might quite rightly result, however, and the policy gives little or no help when confronting formidable illiberal regimes ruling foreign states.
Will “group-differentiated minority rights” lead to disunity in a country, ruin a liberal regime? Whereas “the impulse underlying representation rights” for minorities “is inclusion, not separation,” such inclusion is on the basis of separation. Although “there is strikingly little evidence that immigrants pose any sort of threat to the unity or stability of a country,” and indeed subsequent generations of immigrants are often ardent patriots, national minorities “pose a more serious challenge to the integrative function of citizenship.” Such minorities may claim “that there is more than one political community” within the larger state, and that the state “cannot be assumed to take precedence over the authority of the constituent national communities.” Kymlicka acknowledges that “it seems unlikely that according self-government rights to a national minority can serve an integrative function.” Such rights instead “give rise to a sort of dual citizenship, and to potential conflicts about which community citizens identify with most deeply”; indeed, “there seems to be no natural stopping point to the demands for increasing self-government.” The dilemma is that “imposing common citizenship on minorities which view themselves as distinct nations or people is likely to increase conflict in a multination state.” Both liberal and Communist states have failed in wielding their substantial powers to change the “national consciousness” of minorities within their empires. “Since claims to self-government are here to stay, we have no choice but to try to accommodate them,” and, he maintains, “self-government arrangements diminish the likelihood of violent conflict,” especially since outright secession only establishes a national state on or within the borders of the larger state, with all the attendant dangers that implies.
Some liberals, including Rawls, have hoped to establish good relations among such different ‘cultures’ or regimes on the foundation of “a shared conception of justice.” But, as Kymlicka observes, “shared values are not sufficient for social unity.” Sweden and Norway share ‘values,’ but they have no interest whatsoever in uniting into one country. [4] What’s required for political union “seems to be the idea of a shared identity“—a “commonality of history, language, and maybe religion,” and especially “pride in certain historical achievements,” such as the American founding. Since “in many multination states history is a source of resentment and division between national groups, not a source of pride,” this may prove a dead end. Why would American Indians, or indeed most ethnic minorities in America, feel pride in the American founding, an achievement largely of English colonists?
There is, then, no “generalized” solution to the problem. “A country founded on ‘deep diversity’ is unlikely to stay together unless people value deep diversity itself, and want to live in a country with diverse forms of cultural and political membership.” And “even this is not always sufficient.” Rather, members of the several national groups “must value…the particular ethnic groups and national cultures with whom they currently share the country.” But on the basis of what? There must be a shared “patriotism” felt for the overall state, but “liberal theory has not yet succeeded in clarifying the nature” of this sentiment. With that admission, Kymlicka ends his book.
Patriotism is a form of the love of one’s own, a sentiment seen most naturally in the love of parents for their children and the love of everyone for most if not all of their property. Before the Rawlsian liberalism of recent decades, and before the historicist liberalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Americans grounded their regime on natural rights. Being natural, those rights respected love of one’s own without sacralizing it. The regime they founded was intended to secure those rights. They hoped to see the establishment of similar commercial-republican regimes, especially in America’s geopolitical ‘neighborhood,’ the New World. In the more remote areas of the Americas, they were content to promote regime change and to undermine European empires diplomatically, as when President Jefferson sent a copy of the Declaration of Independence to Brazil, carried by a young Brazilian acquaintance of his. In the nearer areas, Americans did not hesitate to conquer the peoples living under rival regimes, most notably those of the Amerindians and (some of) the Mexicans. They also changed, or attempted to change, the regimes of the conquered peoples, with mixed results. When it became clear that the states in the southern section of the country preferred oligarchic regimes based on substantial slave populations to American republicanism, a brutal civil war resulted. What natural rights-based republicanism lent to the ‘American mind’ was clarity not only on the level of reason or theory but on the level of sentiment. In the 1850s, Abraham Lincoln could tell his fellow citizens that he had never felt a political sentiment that did not derive from the Declaration of Independence. Knowing that the Southern oligarchs no longer shared that sentiment, he then could make prudential choices determining what to do about it. As is well known, the defeated Southern oligarchs held out for a century after the war, hamstringing the new regime of natural rights imposed by the Unionist republicans who very imperfectly imposed that regime upon them. But the regime won out, in the end and, in the meantime, Southerners fought loyally in two world wars, on the side of the hated ‘Yankees.’ They did so, knowing and feeling that the regimes they were fighting were worse than the American regime they were living in, and that (somewhat more ‘concretely’) they disliked German submarines sinking American merchant ships, some of whose sailors were Southerners as well as Americans. Shared enemies help, too, and enemies tend to be regime enemies, if your regime is a commercial republic.
Notes
- He may not think it necessary to defend his claim because he rejects natural right as the foundation of individual rights, although he might conceivably deny that natural right precludes civil laws against homosexual activity.
- Humboldt and Mazzini, it should be remarked, were historicist—Hegelian or neo-Hegelian—liberals, who eschewed natural-right liberalism. Kymlicka’s own pointed ignoring of natural-right liberalism suggests that he prefers to avoid the complications that liberalism would pose for his own project.
- According to Kymlicka, “American liberals” in this period mostly ignored the issue. He evidently doesn’t know about the successful efforts of the Washington Administration to effect regime change among the Five Civilized Tribes of the American southeast, efforts spoiled by whites in Georgia who went ahead and encroached upon Indian land rights, eventually leading to the catastrophic “Trail of Tears.” Efforts to settle the boundaries of Indian territories in part by settling the Indians into agricultural ways of life continued nonetheless, with very mixed success, depending in large measure on whether the lands reserved for the tribes were conducive to agriculture.
- Kymlicka leaves unremarked the fact that while the ‘values’ shared by Swedes and Norwegians don’t lead to political unification of the two nations, they do conduce to peace between them.
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