17 - Liberal Multiculturalism & the Problems of Institutional Instability

Summary

THE last decade of the twentieth century was marked by the global resurgence of particularist claims, especially national claims, and the seeming inability of even well settled democratic states to accommodate these claims. This has triggered academic debate about the relevance of traditional liberal theory for multinational states and the ways in which it could be revised to make it more fitting. On one side is the conventional liberal argument that acknowledges moral and concrete identities but excludes these pluralisms from political life by constructing what it considers to be a just and stable constitutional order from the universal qualities of individuals. At the heart of this argument is the political liberalism of John Rawls. On the other side are the multicultural liberal arguments that recognize and accommodate identities in the construction of a just and stable political order. This second set of arguments engenders institutional arrangements that pay attention to national/ethnic groups. I intend to take up the problems associated with institutions of this type and to discuss possible solutions to them.

Political Liberalism and its Correlative Institutions

As a doctrine, liberalism appeals to the universal moral qualities of human beings and uses these as the basis for treating everyone equally. This gives rise to a conception of citizenship that is undifferentiated and expressed in identical legal and political rights. This conception receives an excellent elaboration from John Rawls who develops a political liberalism that acknowledges the pluralism of society but does not recognize it.

Rawls develops his theory by using the ‘original position’ as a hypothetical device to model a condition in which representatives of free, rational and equal beings negotiate fair terms of social co-operation by which none has bargaining advantage over the other. The ‘original position’ eliminates contingencies of the social world, making it possible for representatives to be symmetrically situated behind a Veil of ignorance'. So situated, representatives cannot foretell who will occupy the top or lower positions of the society being formed.