Sune Lægaard

Immigration, social cohesion, and naturalization

The standard appeal to social cohesion in relation to immigration concerns admittance and residence. But social cohesion is sometimes also invoked as a relevant concern in relation to the attainment of citizenship in the state through naturalization. Many western states have recently tightened conditions for naturalization and introduced tougher language requirements and knowledge of society tests. The article discusses how concerns for social cohesion might function as a part of justifications of such restrictive naturalization requirements. It argues that standard concerns with generalized social trust do not connect with issues of naturalization at all. Other conceptions of social cohesion are either politically controversial, problematic as part of the justification of stricter naturalization requirements, or in fact justify less demanding naturalization requirements.

Unequal recognition, misrecognition and injustice: The case of religious minorities in Denmark

Euro-multiculturalism is (1) concerned with religiously defined immigrant minorities; (2) sees policies of recognition as a means to secure multicultural equality between groups; (3) endorses the moderate secularism of European states; and (4) adopts a contextualist approach to answering the normative question. Proponents of ‘Euro-multiculturalism’ want to ask when unequal recognition by the state of religious communities is a form of misrecognition and when it is unjust (or wrong). The article discusses the question by way of an examination of the Danish case of unequal recognition by the state of religious minorities. It argues that state–religion relations can be analysed as relations of recognition, which are not only unequal but also multi-dimensional, and that it is difficult to answer the question whether multi-dimensional recognitive inequalities are unjust or wrong if one endorses moderate secularism and contextualism.

Multiculturalism and contextualism: How is context relevant for political theory?:

Many political theorists of multiculturalism (e.g. Joseph Carens, Bhikhu Parekh, James Tully) describe their theories as “contextualist.” But it is unclear what “contextualism” means and what difference it makes for political theory. I use a specific prominent example of a multiculturalist discussion, namely Tariq Modood’s argument about “moderate secularism,” as a test case and distinguish between different senses of contextualism. I discuss whether the claim that political theory is contextual in each sense is novel and interesting, and whether contextualism is a distinct feature of political theory of multiculturalism. I argue that the forms of contextualism which concern the scope and methodology of political theory are sensible, but not novel or distinctive of multiculturalism. I then discuss the more controversial forms of contextualism, which I call political and theoretical contextualism. Finally, I apply the distinctions to Modood’s argument. I argue that it is not a form of theoretical contextualism and that theoretical contextualism would in fact undermine arguments for multiculturalist policies of accommodation.

Multiculturalism and secularism: Theoretical understandings and possible conflicts:

Multiculturalism in a European context increasingly has come to denote a concern with religious minorities. Claims for multicultural accommodation of minorities therefore potentially conflict with secularist requirements of separation of politics and religion. Whether there is a conflict depends on the general understandings of multiculturalism and secularism. The paper therefore distinguishes and examines different general understandings. Both multiculturalism and secularism can be understood as sets of policies, or as forms of minority accommodation or views about the relationship between religion and politics defined in relation to liberalism. Both understandings are problematic, so the paper proposes alternative formal understandings of multiculturalism and secularism. Multiculturalism denotes interpretations of what underlying (often liberal) principles imply under new circumstances of diversity. Secularism denotes what such principles imply for the relationship between politics and religion. Such formal understandings provide theoretical frameworks for specifying different conceptions of multiculturalism and secularism and for determining in precisely which respects conflicts might arise. But the frameworks also indicate that conflicts are not general or necessarily fundamental, and they provide tools for reinterpreting conceptions in ways that might avoid apparent conflicts.

Disaggregating Corporate Freedom of Religion

Jean L. Cohen identifies the idea in recent American Supreme Court jurisprudence that freedom of religion should not simply be understood as an ordinary legal right within the framework of liberal constitutionalism but as an expression of deference by the state and its legal system to religion as a separate and independent jurisdiction with its own system of law over which religious groups are sovereign within their own spheres of competence.1 Cohen argues that this is a revisionary and controversial idea which threatens the liberal constitutional order. While Cohen focuses on a specifically American legal-constitutional issue, her discussion nevertheless raises more general issues concerning the understanding of freedom of religion which are also relevant outside of the US.

Laborde’s religion

ABSTRACT Cécile Laborde’s Liberalism’s Religion proposes liberal principles to address political controversies over religion. One is the public reason requirement that reasons for state policies should be accessible. Another is the civic inclusiveness requirement according to which symbolic religious establishment is wrong when it communicates that religious identity is a component of civic identity. A third is the claim that liberal states have meta-jurisdictional authority to settle the boundary between what counts as religion and what counts as non-religion. The article considers whether Laborde has managed to articulate these three principles in a way that is operationalisable and can serve to provide solutions to practical controversies over religion. It is argued that Laborde’s formulations leave important issues open, and some ways of settling these issues are considered.

Book Review: Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights, by Alan Patten

can we imagine a model of democratic politics that does justice to the human essence (even if this essence is conceived in “nonidentitarian” terms), both Marcuse and Arendt generally ask: how can we think a model of democratic politics that does justice to the human essence in our current historical moment or in our current world? (in light of late capitalism, the rise of bureaucracy, the decline of the nation-state, etc.) Holman only addresses the present historical moment in a few paragraphs on a “crisis of contemporary liberal democracy” in the introduction and in a few pages on anti-globalization and global justice movements in the conclusion, but these very brief reflections do not include a critical comparison with the historical moments that Marcuse and Arendt confront in their work. Such a comparison would have seemed relevant in a book that seeks to develop a new theoretical model of democracy by returning to two thinkers who were active between the 1930s and the 1970s. Holman also does not discuss the strong historical similarities between Marcuse and Arendt, who both studied with Heidegger, were both Jewish refugees who fled from Nazi Germany to the United States, and both wrote in-depth theoretical analyses of Nazism and Stalinism. And in light of what Holman describes as the “mutual antipathy” between Arendt and the Frankfurt School, it might have been productive to bring Walter Benjamin more explicitly into the conversation, because Benjamin was a close friend and major source of inspiration not only for Arendt, as Holman mentions in his reading of On Revolution, but also for Marcuse. Nevertheless, Holman’s staging of a systematic dialogue between Marcuse and Arendt is a welcome attempt to forge connections between critical theory and Arendt’s political thinking. Most of Politics as Radical Creation consists of rigorous interpretations of texts by Marcuse and Arendt, in critical dialogue with interpretations by other (mostly Anglophone) scholars, that bring out the richness of these texts and suggest promising possibilities for further connections between critical theory and Arendt’s political thinking.

The role of interpretation of existing practice in normative political argument

Abstract In political theory concerned with normative evaluations and prescriptions facts can play two roles: (1) Facts can be of importance for the application of general normative principles to particular cases, and (2) facts can be of importance for the justification of normative principles as such. Political realists are critical of the first role, which they take to express a conception of political theory as ‘applied moral philosophy’. The paper investigates how interpretation of existing practices can be part of the second justificatory role, as suggested by proponents of different versions of contextualism and practice-dependence. The paper focuses on Andrea Sangiovanni’s methodological claims about social interpretation to illustrate both how facts can be part of the justification of principles and how interpretation is also faced with a number of problems as a way of justifying normative principles. The paper finally argues that some of these problems can be avoided if one considers the two roles together; what enables interpretation of facts as part of the justification of normative principles precisely is that application and justification are not separate exercises.

Misplaced idealism and incoherent realism in the philosophy of the refugee crisis

ABSTRACT Many contributions to the philosophical debate about conceptual and normative issues raised by the refugee crisis fail to take properly account of the difference between ideal and nonideal theory. This makes several otherwise interesting and apparently plausible contributions to the philosophy of the refugee crisis problematic. They are problematic in the sense that they mix up ideal and nonideal aspirations and assumptions in an incoherent way undermining the proposed views. Two examples of this problem are discussed. The first example is David Miller’s contribution to the conceptual debate about how we should understand refugeehood. The second example is a common argument from the normative debate about how states should discharge their duties to help refugees, namely the claim that states should help in neighboring countries rather than by taking in more asylum seekers. Both are examples of arguments about how we should understand or respond to the refugee crisis, which appear to offer coherent principles for the moral guidance of political actors but which are actually incoherent as principles of practical reasoning for the context they aim to address.