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Categorizing Groups, Categorizing States: Theorizing Minority Rights in a World of Deep Diversity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Will Kymlicka
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Abstract

Since 1989 we have witnessed a proliferation of efforts to develop international norms of the rights of ethnocultural minorities, such as the UN's 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the Council of Europe's 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and the Organization of American States' 1997 draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This activity at the level of international law is reflected in a comparable explosion of interest in minority rights among normative political theorists.

In this context, Michael Walzer's work occupies an important but somewhat anomalous role. On the one hand, he was arguably the first political theorist, at least in the postwar era, to take seriously the issue of minority rights. Nonetheless, Walzer's work has had surprisingly little enduring impact on multiculturalism debates in either academic political theory or international law.

One explanation for this puzzle is that Walzer's substantive discussion of minority rights seems to sit uneasily with his more foundational theory of justice, laid out in Spheres of Justice. I want to suggest a distinct (but complementary) explanation for why Walzer's work has not permeated the debate, focusing less on metaethical worries about his account of common meanings, and more on the practicalities of how he categorizes ethnic diversity. Walzer's state-differentiated but minority-undifferentiated approach simply does not connect to the governing premises of the larger academic and public debate, which treat minorities as differentiated and states as undifferentiated. I believe it is Walzer's idiosyncratic approach to categorization—more than his controversial theory of justice-as-common-meanings—which explains his relatively marginal role in the multiculturalism debate.

Type
Symposium: Walzer and the Moral Standing of States
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , Winter 2009 , pp. 371 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2009

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References

Notes

1 This is just a small subset of the relevant declarations, conventions, and charters. For a more comprehensive description, see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

2 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Jeff Spinner-Halev, The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a useful collection that surveys the field, see Anthony Laden and David Owen, eds., Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

3 Jacob Levy, “Michael Walzer on Political, Moral, and Cultural Pluralism,” in Yitzhak Benbaji and Naomi Sussmann, eds., Reading Walzer: Sovereignty, Culture, and Justice (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

4 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 28.

5 Levy, “Michael Walzer on Political, Moral, and Cultural Pluralism.” My own version of this criticism of Walzer is elaborated in Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 11.

6 For versions of this sort of typology, see Spinner-Halev, Boundaries of Citizenship; Carens, Culture, Citizenship and Community; Jacob Levy, The Multiculturalism of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

7 Charles Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values,” in Ronald L. Watts and Douglas M. Brown, eds., Options for a New Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 53–76.

8 I take the phrase “nationally anonymous” liberal values from Christian Joppke, “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy,” British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 2 (2004), pp. 237–57.

9 More accurately, it treats Western liberal democracies as an undifferentiated category, on the assumption that they are all constitutionally committed to nationally anonymous principles of freedom, equality, and democracy. This raises an interesting question about whether or how one can extend theories of minority rights to nonliberal or nondemocratic states. I return to this below.

10 For versions of this critique, see James Johnson, “Why Respect Culture?” American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 3 (2000), pp. 405–18; and Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

11 For a detailed discussion of the “targeted” nature of European minority rights norms, see Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys.

12 See, e.g., Jane K. Cowan, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, and Richard A. Wilson, eds., Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and the voluminous debate around essentialist assumptions in the international legal discourse of indigeneity (e.g., Adam Kuper, “The Return of the Native,” Current Anthropology 44, no. 3 [2003], pp. 389–402).

13 Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Peace Press, 1993); and Ted Robert Gurr, Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Peace Press, 2000).

14 Michael Walzer, “States and Minorities,” in Charles Fried, ed., Minorities: Community and Identity (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1983), p. 227.

15 Michael Walzer, “Pluralism in Political Perspective,” in Michael Walzer, Edward T, Kantowicz, John Higham, and Mona Harrington, The Politics of Ethnicity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 6–7.

16 Ibid., p. 9.

17 Ibid., pp. 9–10.

18 Ibid., pp. 10–11.

19 Walzer, “States and Minorities,” p. 224.

20 See, e.g., Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 20–21.

21 Actually, Walzer's views on the appropriate norms for the treatment of immigrants in Old World nation-states like France have evolved over time—compare Walzer, “Pluralism in Political Perspective,” to Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), to Michael Walzer, “Nation States and Immigrant Societies,” in Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski, eds., Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 150–53. It would take me too far afield to track these changes, which I do not think affect the more basic issue of the choice between state-differentiated and group-differentiated approaches.

22 Walzer, “Nation-States and Immigrant Societies,” p. 153. For other statements of this commitment to a post-ethnic pluralism in the United States, see Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New York: Marsilio, 1992); Michael Walzer, “The New Tribalism,” Dissent (Spring 1992), pp. 164–71; and Michael Walzer, “Multiculturalism and Individualism,” Dissent (Spring 1994), pp. 185–91.

23 Walzer, “Nation-States and Immigrant Societies.”

24 Walzer, “Pluralism in Political Perspective,” pp. 27–28.

25 Ibid., p. 27, my emphasis.

26 For a similar critique, see Bonnie Honig, “Democracy and Foreignness: Democratic Cosmopolitanism and the Myth of an Immigrant America,” in Laden and Owen, eds., Multiculturalism and Political Theory, pp. 373–407. Honig argues that Walzer's approach to minority rights “normatively privileges one particular trajectory to citizenship: from immigrant to citizen. [This] account captures something about American democracy, while also missing a great deal. American democracy is founded not only on immigration, but also on conquest (Native Americans) and slavery (the forced importation of African slave labor), and, in the post-founding era, on expansion (Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, etc.), annexation (French settlements in Illinois, St. Louis, and New Orleans as well as a significant Spanish-speaking population in the southwest as a result of the war with Mexico)” (p. 375). As she notes, while “Walzer does invite these other groups to become part of his immigrant America,” he “never asks whether his normative privileging of the immigrant-ethnic-citizen trajectory to membership, and the invitation to adapt to it, may itself obscure particular claims, injustices, and bases of organization for specific groups” (p. 386, n. 33).

27 This is an important point in relation to the “essentialism” critique mentioned earlier. Both within normative theories of liberal multiculturalism and within contemporary international law, minority rights are understood precisely as rights, not duties. Indigenous peoples have a right to seek land claims or self-government rights, but they are under no duty to do so if they would prefer instead to participate through an ethnic pluralism model. Similarly, national minorities have a right to claim official language status and regional autonomy if they so choose, but are under no duty to make these claims if these aspirations are not present in the group. Neither liberal theory nor international law is compatible with assigning duties of cultural preservation on people who no longer wish to preserve their language or cultural practices. A theory of minority rights, however, ensures that this is indeed their own choice, to be resolved by democratic debate and decision-making within the group, and not something decided for them by the state.

28 Walzer, “Nation-States and Immigrant Societies,” p. 153.

29 Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 28.

30 For a more detailed exposition of how international organizations link group-differentiated minority rights to core liberal-democratic values, see Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys.

31 For an interesting discussion of the “stories of peoplehood” that countries tell themselves, see Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

32 What about countries that do not view themselves as members of the family of liberal democracies? In these contexts, both liberal theories of multiculturalism and international legal norms of minority rights may well be perceived as an external imposition at odds with local self-understandings. Indeed, I am not optimistic about the prospects for an international consensus on these issues, in part for this reason. However, even here I think we should be cautious about jumping too quickly to the assumption that the problem lies at the level of different shared meanings of justice. In reality, most minority rights claims can be understood by appeal to very elementary and widely accepted norms of fairness and reciprocity—majorities around the world are doing things to minorities that they would never want done to themselves. One need not be a liberal to see the injustice in that. So the opposition to international norms of minority rights is not so much the inability to find a widely accepted idea of justice to underpin these claims, but rather the fact that these claims objectively pose a much greater threat to individual well-being and collective security in some countries than in others. Within the consolidated liberal democracies, the risks of adopting minority rights are relatively small; in much of the rest of the world, the risks of violence or instability are much higher. This provides ample grounds for being cautious about exporting Western models of multiculturalism, but we misidentify the problem if we assume that it is only or primarily a matter of different cultural values or different understandings of justice. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys, chs. 6 and 7.