Will Kymlicka

Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship

PART L. THE EVOLUTION OF MINORITY RIGHTS DEBATE 1. The New Debate over Minority Rights 2. Liberal Culturalism: An Emerging Consensus? 3. Do We Need a Liberal Theory of Minority Rights? REPLY TO CARENS, YOUNG, PAREKH, AND FROST PART LL. ETHNOCULTURAL JUSTICE 4. Human Rights and Ethnocultural Justice 5. Minority Nationalism and Multination Federalism 6. Theorizing Indigenous Rights 7. Indigenous Rights and Environmental Justice 8. The Theory and Practice of Immigrant Multiculturalism 9. A Crossroad in Race Relations PART LLL. MISUNDERSTANDING NATIONALISM 10. From Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism to Liberal NATIONALISM 11. Cosmopolitanism, Nation-States, and Minority Nationalism 12. Misunderstanding Nationalism 13. The Paradox of Nationalism 14. American Multiculturalism in the International Arena 15. Minority Nationalism and Immigrant Integration PART LV: DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP IN MULTIETHNIC STATES 16. Education for Citizenship 17. Citizenship in an Era of Globalization: Commentary on Held 18. Liberal Egalitarianism and Civic Republicanism: Friends or Enemies?

Citizenship in Diverse Societies

1. Citizenship in Diverse Societies: an introduction PART I: CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY 2. Discrimination and Religious Schooling 3. Extending Diversity: Religion in Public and Private Education PART II: POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AND GROUP REPRESENTATION 4. What Does a Representative Do? Descriptive Representation in Communicative Settings of Distrust, Uncrystallized Interests, and Historically Denigrated Status 5. The Uneasy Alliance of Deliberative Democracy and Group Representation PART III: IMMIGRATION, IDENTITY AND MULTICULTURALISM 6. Cultural Identity and Civic Responsibility 7. Anti-Essentialism, Multiculturalism and the Recognition of Religious Groups PART IV: GENDER AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY 8. Should Church and State be Joined at the Altar: Womens Rights and the Multicultural Dilemma 9. Female Autonomy and Cultural Imperative: Two Hearts Beating Together PART V: LANGUAGE RIGHTS 10. Official Language Rights: Intrinsic Value and the Protection of Difference 11. Citizenship and Official Bilingualism in Canada PART VI: THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES 12. Three Modes of Incorporating Indigenous Law 13. Landed Citizenship: Narratives of Aboriginal Political Participation PART VII: FEDERALISM AND NATIONALISM 14. Sustainable Federalism, Democratisation and Distributive Justice 15. Why Stay Together: A Pluralist Approach to Secession and Federation

Language Rights and Political Theory.

After years of neglect, political theorists in the last few years have started to take an interest in issues of language policy, and to explore the normative issues they raise. In this chapter, we examine why this interest has arisen and provide an overview of the main approaches that have been developed. A series of recent events has made it clear that language policy is central to many of the traditional themes and concepts of political theory, such as democracy, citizenship, nationhood, and the state. The rise of ethnolinguistic conflict in Eastern Europe, the resurgence of language-based secessionist movements in Catalonia, Flanders, and Quebec, the backlash against immigrant multiculturalism, and the difficulties in building a pan-European sense of European Union citizenship—in all of these cases, linguistic diversity complicates attempts to build stable and cohesive forms of political community. In the past, political theorists have often implicitly assumed that this sort of linguistic diversity would disappear, as a natural concomitant of processes of modernization and nation-building. However, it is now widely accepted that linguistic diversity is an enduring fact about modern societies. As a result, political theorists have started to explore the justifications for minority language rights claims, and to consider how different models of language rights relate to broader political theories of justice, freedom, and democracy.

Multiculturalism in Asia

The growing influence of liberalism in China has made it important to determine the response of traditional Chinese political thought to Western liberal ideas of multicultural citizenship, and the impact of the Western liberal model of minority rights on China’s ethnic minority policy. This chapter begins by discussing the basic characteristics of the Confucian approach to minority questions and minority rights. It examines the influence of Marxism on minority rights, in general, and on Chinese practice, in particular. It then discusses China’s policies on ethic minorities, and compares current Chinese practices with the Western liberal model of minority rights.This book explores the different ways that issues of ethnocultural diversity are conceptualised and debated in South and East Asia. It looks at the legacies of precolonial and colonial traditions for managing diversity, their reinterpretation under postcolonial independence and globalisation, and their relationship to Western liberal models of multiculturalism and emerging international norms of human and minority rights. It shows that political actors draw on a range of intellectual resources and traditions when thinking through these questions. Appeals to international human rights instruments and Western policies of multiculturalism are interspersed with appeals to local traditions, national mythologies, regional practices, and religious doctrines. An attempt to understand these debates or contribute to them requires an understanding of the complex interaction between the different ways of conceptualising diversity and citizenship.

National Identity and Support for the Welfare State

This paper examines the role of national identity in sustaining public support for the welfare state. Liberal nationalist theorists argue that social justice will always be easier to achieve in states with strong national identities which, they contend, can both mitigate opposition to redistribution among high-income earners and reduce any corroding effects of ethnic diversity resulting from immigration. We test these propositions with Canadian data from the Equality, Security and Community survey. We conclude that national identity does increase support for the welfare state among affluent majority Canadians, and that it helps to protect the welfare state from toxic effects of cultural suspicion. However, we also find that identity plays a narrower role than existing theories of liberal nationalism suggest, and that the mechanisms through which it works are different. This leads us to suggest an alternative theory of the relationship between national identity and the welfare state, one that suggests that the relationship is highly contingent, reflecting distinctive features of the history and national narratives of each country. National identity may not have any general tendency to strengthen support for redistribution, but it may do so for those aspects of the welfare state seen as having played a particularly important role in building the nation, or in enabling it to overcome particular challenges or crises.

Two Models of Pluralism and Tolerance

Abstract In his most recent work, John Rawls argues that political theory must recognize and accomodate the ‘fact of pluralism’, including the fact of religious diversity. He believes that the liberal commitment to individual rights provides the only feasible model for accomodating religious pluralism. In the paper, I discuss a second form of tolerance, based on group rights rather than individual rights. Drawing on historical examples, I argue that this is is also a feasible model for accomodating religious pluralism. While both models ensure tolerance between groups, only the former tolerates individual dissent within groups. To defend the individual rights model, therefore, liberals must appeal not only to the fact of social pluralism, but also to the value of individual autonomy. This may require abandoning Rawls’s belief that liberalism can and should be defended on purely ‘political’, rather than ‘comprehensive’ grounds.

Multicultural citizenship within multination states

In many western democracies today, there are calls to strengthen a sense of common citizenship as a way of building ‘social cohesion’ in increasingly diverse societies. Citizenship is to be promoted by, amongst other things, adding or strengthening citizenship education in schools, providing citizenship classes to immigrants, imposing new citizenship tests for naturalization, and holding citizenship ceremonies. In this article, I will examine this new citizenship agenda in the specific case of ‘multination’ states — that is, in states that have restructured themselves to accommodate significant sub-state nationalist movements, usually through some form of territorial devolution, consociational power-sharing, and/or official language status. What does it mean to promote a sense of common citizenship in multination states, and how does the new immigration-focused citizenship agenda relate to older debates on multinationalism? I will argue that in the particular context of multination states, these new citizenship agendas must promote a distinctly multinational conception of citizenship if they are to be fair and effective. But equally, we need to adapt familiar models of multinational citizenship to be more inclusive of immigrants. In short, if the citizenship agenda is to be effective, and to be fairly inclusive of both sub-state national groups and of immigrants, we need a more multinational conception of citizenship, and a more multicultural conception of multinationalism.

Nation-building and minority rights: Comparing West and East

Until quite recently, the area of ethnocultural relations has been surprisingly neglected by Western political theorists. For most of this century, ethnicity was viewed by political theorists as a marginal phenomenon that would gradually disappear with modernisation, and hence was not an important topic for forward-looking political theorists. As a result, even into the mid-1980s, there were very few political philosophers working in the area. The question of the rights of ethnocultural groups, however, has moved to the forefront of Western political theory in the last few years. The aim in this article is to describe this emerging literature on the normative principles for managing ethnocultural diversity in a liberal democracy, and to consider whether it has any applicability to ethnic conflict in Eastern and Central Europe. The goal is not to propose the unrealistic transplanting of institutions and policies from the West to the East, but rather to outline some of the interesting recent work done by Western political theorists, and to see whether any of it is relevant to selected cases of ethnic politics in ECE, including those analysed in the Ethnobarometer annual report.

The Ethics of Inarticulacy

In his impressive and wide‐ranging new book, Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor argues that modern moral philosophy, at least within the Anglo‐American tradition, . offers a ‘cramped’ view of morality. Taylor attributes this problem to three distinctive features of contemporary moral theory ‐ its commitment to procedural rather than substantive rationality, its preference for basic reasons rather than qualitative distinctions, and its belief in the priority of the right over the good. According to Taylor, the result of these features is that contemporary moral theories cannot explain the nature of a worthwhile life, or the grounds for moral respect. Indeed, they render these questions unintelligible. I argue that Taylor has misunderstood the basic structure of most modern moral theory, which seeks to relocate, rather than suppress, these important questions. In particular, he fails to note the difference between general and specific conceptions of the good, between procedures for assessing the good and s...

Comment on Meer and Modood

Academic and public debates go through cycles, and one of the current fashions is to defend a (new, innovative, realistic) ‘interculturalism’ against a (tired, discredited, naive) ‘multiculturalism’. As Meer and Modood show, there is very little intellectual substance underlying this fad. It is not based on a careful conceptual analysis of the principles or presuppositions of the two approaches, but rather rests on a crude misrepresentation, even caricature, of multiculturalist theories and approaches. Nor is it based on a systematic empirical comparison of the actual policy outcomes associated with the two approaches, since defenders of interculturalism rarely make clear how their policy recommendations would differ from those defended by multiculturalists. As a result, the ‘good interculturalism vs. bad multiculturalism’ literature is essentially rhetorical rather than analytical, and we do not have a clear basis for judging how interculturalism differs from multiculturalism, if at all. As a long-time defender of multiculturalism, I am not exactly a disinterested observer of this debate, and so unsurprisingly, I share Meer and Modood’s frustration with this new fad and agree with their analysis of its limitations. Indeed, I am tempted to buttress their argument by providing further examples of the intellectual weakness of recent claims regarding the superiority of interculturalism over multiculturalism. Consider, for example, the influential 2008 ‘‘White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue’’ from the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. It argues that interculturalism should be the preferred model for Europe because multiculturalism has failed: