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The Liberal Foundations of Cultural Nationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Chaim Gans
Chaim Gans*
Affiliation:
The Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel-Aviv, Israel69978
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Extract

According to cultural nationalism, members of groups sharing a common history and societal culture have a fundamental, morally significant interest in adhering to their culture and in sustaining it for generations. Moreover, this interest should be protected by states. I shall examine three theses included in this statement. The first, the adherence thesis, relates to the basic interest people have in adhering to their national culture. The second thesis is historical. It concerns the basic interest people have in recognizing and protecting the multigenerational dimension of their culture. The third thesis, a political one, holds that the interests people have in living their lives within their culture and in sustaining this culture for generations should be protected politically. Some contemporary writers who support a liberal version of cultural nationalism do so by arguing that people have an interest in culture mainly because it is a prerequisite for their freedom and also because it is a component of their identity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , September 2000 , pp. 441 - 466
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2000

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References

1 I am grateful to Meir Dan-Cohen, Alon Harel, Andrei Marmor and two anonymous referees of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for many helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

See Kymlicka, Will Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989)Google Scholar; Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995); Raz, Joseph Ethics in The Public Domain (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1994)Google Scholar, chap. 8: ‘Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective.’

2 See Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture and Multicultural Citizenship; Joseph Raz, Ethics in The Public Domain, chap. 8.

3 A Margalit, vishai and Halbertal, Moshe ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture,’ Social Research 61 (1994) 491–510, at 504Google Scholar; Waldron, Jeremy ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,’ University of Michigan Journal of Legal Reform 25 (1992) 751–93Google Scholar; Danley, John ‘Liberalism, Aboriginal Rights and Cultural Minorities,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (1991) 168–85, at 172Google Scholar

4 Some have argued that the freedom-based interest people have in a culture should be implemented through the national culture of the majority in the state in which they live. See Danley's ‘Liberalism, Aboriginal Rights and Cultural Minorities.’ Other commentators have argued that the freedom-based interest in culture should be concretized through a collage of fragments taken from many local cultures, a collage that each person should construct for himself. The present argument is Waldron's. See ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative.’ There could be other cosmopolitan alternatives, such as a homogeneous unified culture for all human beings, an invented culture or one of the existing cultures. Perhaps a culture with which more people are already familiar to some degree, or a culture which in practice already exceeds any other culture in serving the needs of science, technology, transportation, international relations, etc., namely, a culture whose language is English.

5 Once there is a general justification for people's interest in property, first occupancy (and other forms of acquisition regulated by law) could serve as a key for assigning particular objects of property to particular persons. See Waldron, Jeremy The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1988), 284–6Google Scholar. It should also be noted that the rights to both property and to culture could be justified in ways inherently containing answers to issues relating to their concretization. E.g., if we ground the right to private property on historical arguments, then the answer to the question ‘What property belongs to whom?’ is given by the very justification of the general right to private property. The same holds with regard to cultural rights. If they are based on the interest people have in components of their identity, as I suggested earlier (and as I shall demonstrate below in greater detail), then the issue of their concretization is resolved by this justification itself. It does not require the formulation of principles of concretization as an external appendix. This is different in the case of the freedom-based right to culture. Here we need auxiliary principles of concretization.

6 To illustrate the present point, consider an example from everyday life: I have an urgent desire to see a movie just for relaxation. There are two possible movies showing, both of which I will find equally refreshing. However, one of them will also contribute something to some work I have to prepare for tomorrow. This fact explains why ultimately I choose to go to that film rather than the other. Yet from the moment I have made my choice, my reason for going to this particular film is no longer just because it will contribute something to my work, but also, perhaps primarily, in order to relax. Even though my desire to relax wasn't my reason for going to this film in particular, from the moment I have a reason to see that film rather than any other, my desire to relax turns into a reason for seeing it. It is perhaps the main reason I have for seeing it.

7 Kymlicka, in Liberalism, Community and Culture, appears to have justified cultural rights exclusively on the basis of freedom. However, in Multicultural Citizenship he also stresses the auxiliary role played by identity. Several of his critics, specifically Taylor, Charles ‘The Politics of Identity,’ in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (expanded version), Gutmann, A. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994) 25–73, at 40-1CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and A. Margalit and M. Halbertal, ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture,’ consider identity the exclusive basis for cultural rights. Others mention both values without clarifying the relationship between them. See, for example, Raz, J. and Margalit, A. ‘National Self-Determination,’ in J. Raz, Ethics in The Public Domain 125-45Google Scholar; Raz, J. ‘Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective’; and Tamir, Yael Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994), 35–6Google Scholar.

8 The concept I have in mind here is that of ‘pervasive culture’ in the sense used by Raz and Margalit, ‘National Self-Determination.’ This includes not only national cultures but also ethno-religious (like Hinduism) or tribal, pervasive cultures.

9 See Waldron, ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative.’

10 Of course there could be cases in which such a transition would be justified; but not automatically justified. In other words, the fact that a particular love is undesirable is not sufficient reason not to respect it. However, love can be not simply undesirable, but destructive. In such a case one might possibly be justified in not respecting it. In order to justify disrespect for national identities because they are national, one must do more than simply say, as Waldron does, that cosmopolitan identities are better. One must also show that national identities are destructive as such; for example, by arguing (in the Marxist vein), that national consciousness is a false consciousness.

11 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 84–93Google Scholar. Some of Kymlicka's arguments (especially those relying on Rawls) support the culture of people's endeavor, but his conclusions seem to focus on their culture of origin.

12 As the opening lines of this paper show, the notion of a national group relevant for the purposes of this paper is a cultural notion. According to this interpretation, nations are the main cases of groups that Raz and Margalit (Ethics in The Public Domain, 133) call ‘encompassing groups,’ or groups sharing what Kymlicka calls ‘a societal culture’ (Multicultural Citizenship, 76). This conception of a nation is different from an ethnic conception, according to which members of a nation must also share a common ancestry. However, it is not entirely unrelated to ethnicity, for at least empirically, it so happens that ethnic groups usually share a societal culture so that many cultural nations are also ethnic groups or have such groups as their core.

13 Taylor's criticism of Kymlicka's freedom-based argument oscillates between the present point and another one. He says: ‘Kymlicka's reasoning is valid (perhaps) for existing people who find themselves trapped within a culture under pressure, and can flourish within it or not at all. But it doesn't justify measures designed to ensure survival through indefinite future generations. For the populations concerned, however, that is what is at stake’ (Taylor, ‘The Politics of Identity,’ 41). The first part of this quotation focuses on the fact that Kymlicka takes the weakness characteristic of North American minorities to be the reason for choosing their own culture and not the culture of the majority among which they live as the culture for concretizing their freedom-based interest in culture. However, the latter part of the criticism seems to refer to the fact that the freedom-based argument cannot justify measures intended to insure the existence of groups into the future. This latter criticism, it should be emphasized, is valid even if the rationale for actualizing people's freedom-based interest in culture by means of their own and no other culture derives not from their special weakness, but from their identity-based ties with that culture.

14 Miller, David On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995), 141–3Google Scholar, believes that this is even desirable.

15 Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, 178Google Scholar

16 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 31Google Scholar

17 See Sidgwick, Henry The Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan 1962), 44–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who refers also to Butler, Samuel; Nozick, Robert Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1974), 42–4Google Scholar. Barry, Brian ‘Self-Government Revisited,’ in The Nature of Political Theory, Miller, David and Seidentop, Larry eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983) 121–54, at 151Google Scholar, takes this (as I do below) a step further, saying that ‘If it is reasonable to include in interests having certain things happen … while one is alive, it seems strange to draw the line at one's death.’

18 See Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Addresses to the German Nation, Kelly, George Armstrong ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks 1968), 113.Google Scholar

19 Kymlicka seems to speak of a right to cultural context. Cultures according to him (and also according to Raz) give meaning to the options with which they provide people. Giving these options meaning is what makes them options. Kymlicka, (e.g. Multicultural Citizenship, 83)Google Scholar and Raz, (e.g. Ethics in The Public Domain, 176-7)Google Scholar are very clear about this. However, they do not seem to emphasize the fact that for many people, their cultures are the only frameworks within which their endeavors have a chance of leaving a mark, of benefiting others or of being continued and remembered by others. It is this component of the meaningfulness of human endeavor that I emphasize here as providing a basis for the historical thesis.

20 For the distinction between projects undertaken in order to benefit future generations, and projects presupposing continuity along generations, see Meyer, Lukas H. ‘More Than They Have a Right to: Future People and Our Future Oriented Projects,’ in Contingent Future Persons, Fotion, Nick and Heller, Jan C. eds. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1997) 137–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 In his description of the nationalism of modem industrial societies, Ernest Gellner says of their members: ‘The limits of the culture within which they were educated are also the limits of the world within which they can morally and professionally, breathe.’ Gellner, Ernest Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell 1983), 36Google Scholar. This description, which was of the industrial societies iri the latter part of the 19'h century and the first half of the 20'h, is also true with regard to many present societies and people.

22 On the fear of the descent to oblivion as part of the explanation for nationalism, see also Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Revised Edition) (London: Verso 1991), 36Google Scholar; Smith, Anthony D. National Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1991), 160–1Google Scholar.

23 This is not the only way in which offence to one's culture can be an offence to one's self-respect. Offending someone's culture can be an offense to his person because culture is a component of one's identity, and offending one's identity means offending him. Rawls, (A Theory of Justice [Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1971], 440)Google Scholar says that people's confidence in their ability to realize their intentions is a condition for self-respect. If people intend for their endeavors to exist independently of their own existence, and if many people's endeavor exists within their national cultures, then the argument made here about the connection between the continued existence of national cultures and the value of self-respect follows from the present Rawlsian conception of self-respect.

24 The fact that we are dealing with the interests of existing people makes it clear why the present argument cannot serve as an argument for reviving extinct cultures.

25 Nielsen, Kai ‘Cultural Nationalism, Neither Ethnic Nor Civic,’ The Philosophical Forum 28 (1996-97) 42–51Google Scholar, argues that liberal cultural nationalism cannot be ethnic, because ethnic nationalism is necessarily racist. The endeavor-based argument explains the place which ethnicity may legitimately have within the liberal version of cultural nationalism. The endeavor-based argument shows both why cultural nations should not be ethnically exclusive, and why they may to some extent be ethnically inclusive. They should not be exclusive because if individuals have enundertaken their endeavors within them, it is important for these individuals that they and their descendants belong to these cultures. Excluding them just because they themselves do not descend from individuals belonging to this culture makes their exclusion based only on biology. It is therefore racist. However, if an individual whose ancestors belong to a particular culture and who himself has not been a full-fledged member of this culture, wants to join because he wants to take part in preserving the framework within which his ancestors lived and worked, then he might claim to be acting on a moral reason, granting him some priority compared to others who want to join.

If descent has nothing to do with cultural nationalism, as Nielsen seems to believe, if attributing weight to descent is merely a form of racism, then people should not care about whether or not it is their descendants who form the future generations of their cultures. But people do care about this matter. (For this point see Appiah, Anthony K. ‘Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction’ in Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition 149-63, at 157)Google Scholar.

26 All three arguments are based on individual interests. However, this does not mean that they presuppose moral individualism or that such individualism is a constitutive tenet of liberalism. In other words, it is not assumed in this paper that only individual interests can support liberal theses. This paper assumes only that individual interests could be used to support liberal theses. This thesis is compatible with the possibility that non-individualist, collectivist, considerations could also support such theses, including considerations concerning the intrinsic value of cultures. Moreover, the individual interests on which the freedom, identity and endeavor arguments are based are interests the satisfaction of which depends on the existence of a collective good, namely, societal cultures. It depends also on the ascription of intrinsic value to such cultures (in the sense attributed to this term by Raz, Joseph. See his The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), 177–178Google Scholar.

27 See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, mainly at 26–31Google Scholar; Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, chaps. 6, 8.

28 Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, chaps. 6, 8

29 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 95Google Scholar