Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:08:44.218Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Social Unity in a Liberal State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Will Kymlicka
Will Kymlicka
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Ottawa
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Around the world, multiethnic states are in trouble. Many have proven unable to create or sustain any sense of solidarity across ethnic lines. The members of one ethnic group are unwilling to respect the rights of the members of other groups, or to make sacrifices for them, and have no trust that any sacrifice they might make will be reciprocated.

Recent events show that where this sort of solidarity and trust is lacking, the consequences can be disastrous. In some countries, the result is violent civil war, as in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and various parts of the former Soviet Union. In other countries, the state has dissolved in a more peaceful way, as in Czechoslovakia, albeit with significant economic and psychological costs. In yet other countries, particularly in Africa, the state has stayed together, but is little more than a shell, a loose confederation of more or less hostile groups who barely tolerate, let alone cooperate with, each other.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , Winter 1996 , pp. 105 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Ordeshook, Peter C., “Some Rules of Constitutional Design,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 10, no. 2 (1993), p. 223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 John Rawls says that the “basic structure” of society is the primary subject of a theory of justice. See Rawls, , A Theory of Justice (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 7Google Scholar; and Rawls, , Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 257–89.Google Scholar There is increasing recognition, however, that the focus on institutions needs to be supplemented with a theory of citizenship, including civic virtues such as tolerance and public-spiritedness. For further references and discussion, see Kymlicka, Will and Norman, W. J., “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory,” Ethics, vol. 104, no. 2 (January 1994), pp. 352–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Galston, William, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Duties in the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 By “institutionally complete,” I mean containing a set of societal institutions, encompassing both public and private spheres, which provide members with meaningful ways of life across the full spectrum of human activities, including social, educational, religious, economic, and recreational life. For a fuller discussion, see my Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), ch. 5.

5 The American Indians, native Hawaiians, and Chicanos were forcibly incorporated through military Indians, native Hawaiians, and Chicanos were forcibly incorporated through military conquest; the Alaskan Eskimos were incorporated when Russia sold Alaska to the United States in the Treaty of Cession of 1867; Puerto Ricans were incorporated when Puerto Rico was transferred in 1898 from Spain to the United States during the Spanish-American War; various Pacific Islanders were incorporated through colonization at the turn of the century (Guam; American Samoa), or were ceded from Japan after World War II (Micronesia Trust Territory). In none of these cases did the national minority consent to the incorporation.

6 For a survey of the rights of national minorities in the United States (and their invisibility in mainstream American constitutional and political theory), see O'brien, Sharon, “Cultural Rights in the United States: A Conflict of Values,” Law and Inequality Journal, vol. 5 (1987), pp. 267–358Google Scholar; Resnik, Judith, “Dependent Sovereigns: Indian Tribes, States, and the Federal Courts,” University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 56 (1989), pp. 671–759CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aleinikoff, T. Alexander, “Puerto Rico and the Constitution: Conundrums and Prospects,” Constitutional Commentary, vol. 11, no. 1 (1994), pp. 15–43.Google Scholar For the issue of secession by American Indian tribes, see Jensen, Erik, “American Indian Tribes and Secession,” Tulsa Law Review, vol. 29 (1993), pp. 385–96.Google Scholar

7 That these groups see themselves as nations is evident from the names they have chosen for their associations and institutions. For example, the provincial legislature in Quebec is called the “National Assembly”; the major organization of Indians is known as the “Assembly of First Nations.” It is important to note that Aboriginals peoples are not a single nation. The term “Aboriginal” covers three categories of Aboriginals (Indian, Inuit, and Métis), and the term “Indian” itself is a legal fiction, behind which there are numerous distinct Aboriginal nations with their own histories and separate community identities. (The term “Métis” refers to the descendants of mixed-race marriages between white [mainly French-Canadian] fur traders and Plains Indians. They formed a powerful and cohesive community in the Prairie provinces in the nineteenth century, and have remained a distinct Aboriginal group to this day.) Aboriginals in Canada can be divided into eleven linguistic groups, descended from a number of historically and culturally distinct societies. It has been estimated that there are thirty-five to fifty distinct “peoples” in the Aboriginal population. It is also potentially misleading to describe the French Canadians as a single nation. The French-speaking majority in the province of Quebec views itself as a nation – the “Québécois. “There are Francophones outside Quebec, however, and the French nation in Canada was not always identified so closely with the province of Quebec. For the change in self-identity from canadien to la nation canadienne-francaise to franco-québécois to québécois, see Crête, Jean and Zylberberg, Jacques, “Une problématique floue: L'autoreprésentation du citoyen au Québec” (A difficult transition: Citizenship identity in Quebec), in Citoyenneté et Nationalité: Perspectives en France et au Québec (Citizenship and nationality: Perspectives in France and Quebec), ed. Dominique, Colas, Claude, Emeri, and Jacques, Zylberberg (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), p. 424.Google Scholar The tendency of Aboriginals and the Québécois to describe themselves as “nations” is discussed in Cairns, Alan, “The Fragmentation of Canadian Citizenship,” in Belonging: The Meaning and Future of Canadian Citizenship, ed. William, Kaplan (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), p. 188Google Scholar; Chartrand, Paul, “The Aboriginal Peoples in Canada and Renewal of the Federation,” in Rethinking Federalism, ed. Karen, Knop et al. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Jenson, Jane, “Naming Nations: Making Nationalist Claims in Canadian Public Discourse,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 30, no. 3 (1993), pp. 337–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 On the Communist world, see Dreyer, June, China's Forty Millions: Minority Nationalities and National Integration in the People's Republic of China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Connor, Walker, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).Google Scholar On the Third World, see Selassie, Alemante, “Ethnic Identity and Constitutional Design for Africa,” Stanford Journal of International Law, vol. 29, no. 1 (1993), pp. 1–56Google Scholar; Davidson, Basil, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (New York: Times Books, 1992).Google Scholar

9 Porter, John, The Measure of Canadian Society (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1987), p. 154CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Reitz, Jeffrey and Breton, Raymond, The Illusion of Difference: Realities of Ethnicity in Canada and the United States (Ottawa: C. D. Howe Institute, 1994).Google Scholar Insofar as immigrant groups seem more cohesive in Canada, this is likely due to the fact that they contain a higher proportion of recent migrants than U.S. ethnic groups, which in turn is due to Canada's higher immigration rate. In 1991, 16.1 percent of Canadian residents were foreign-born, compared to 7.9 percent of Americans; see Statistical Abstracts of the United States: 1993 (Washington: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1993), p. 50; Badets, Jane, “Canada's Immigrants: Recent Trends,” Canadian Social Trends, vol. 29 (Summer 1993), p. 8Google Scholar; cf. Laczko, Leslie, “Canada's Pluralism in Comparative Perspective,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994), pp. 28–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 The adoption of a more “multicultural” immigration policy was official and explicit in Canada and Australia, reflected in several pieces of legislation and government reports. In the United States, the shift in policy was more implicit, although the federal Ethnic Heritage Studies Act of 1972 is an important manifestation of this shift, as are similar programs at the state level. On the move away from Anglo-conformity and assimilation to the acceptance and affirmation of pluralism in the United States, see Glazer, Nathan, Ethnic Dilemmas 1964–1982 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, ch. 7. On Australia, see Castles, Stephen et al., Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1988)Google Scholar, ch. 4. On Canada, see below. Of Course, the Anglo-conformity model was never fully realized in practice. Immigrant groups in all three countries often showed considerable tenacity in retaining various aspects of their ethnic heritage, and ethnic associations often flourished. Indeed, the eventual abandonment of the Anglo-conformity model stemmed as much from the growing recognition of its futility as from recognition of its unfairness.

11 The recent growth in bilingual education programs for Hispanics in the United States is not an exception to this trend. These programs were primarily developed as part of a broader effort to rectify the historical injustices suffered by (nonimmigrant) Chicanos and Puerto Ricans. Some recent Hispanic immigrants from Central or South America may benefit from the existence of these programs, if they happen to reside in the same areas as Chicanos or Puerto Ricans; but this is incidental to the main aim of the programs. As a general rule, immigrants to the United States who speak Spanish are expected to integrate into the mainstream anglophone society just as much as immigrants who speak Portuguese, or Urdu, or any other language. For a careful exploration of this, see Garza, Rodolfo De La and Trujillo, Armando, “Latinos and the Official English Debate in the United States,” in Language and the State: The Law and Politics of Identity, ed. David, Schneiderman (Cowansville: Les Editions Yvon Blais, 1991).Google Scholar In any event, bilingual education, even for nonimmigrant Hispanics, is seen as supplementing, not displacing, the learning of English.

12 Johnson, Gerald, Our English Heritage (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), p. 119.Google Scholar As I go on to discuss, most immigrant groups did not object to the requirement that they learn English, or to the absence of government services in their mother tongue. Hence their adoption of English was not primarily the result of “ruthless imposition.” There was a period between 1890 and 1920 when extreme restrictions were placed on the use of immigrant languages–e.g., legal prohibitions on the teaching of immigrant languages alongside English even in private schools; or prohibitions on speaking immigrant languages over the telephone, or in public places. However, these prohibitions were rare, and were ultimately declared unconstitutional. (See Kloss, Heinz, The American Bilingual Tradition [Rowley: Newbury House, 1977], pp. 52, 68–74.)Google Scholar By contrast, attempts to impose English on national minorities were often quite ruthless, since they required the coercive disbanding of long-standing educational, political, and judical institutions which used the minority's mother tongue. For a comprehensive review of the history of language rights in the United States, and the differential treatment of immigrants and national minorities, see Kloss, The American Bilingual Tradition, passim; and Sagarin, Edward and Kelly, Robert, “Polylingualism in the United States of America: A Multitude of Tongues amid a Monolingual Majority,” in Language Policy and National Unity, ed. William, Beer and James, Jacob (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), pp. 21–44.Google Scholar For the continuing centrality of English to immigration policy, see Tollefson, James, Alien Winds: The Reeducation of America's Indochinese Refugees (New York: Praeger, 1989)Google Scholar, chs. 3–4.

13 See my Multicultural Citizenship, ch. 6.

14 M. Combs and L. Lynch, quoted in de la Garza and Trujillo, “Latinos and the Official English Debate,” p. 215. Cf. Chavez, Linda, Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 42.Google Scholar Hispanic immigrant groups have expressed an interest in bilingual education, but they view Spanish-language education as supplementing, not displacing, the learning of English. This is unlike Spanish-language education in Puerto Rico, in which Spanish is the dominant language; and indeed 60 percent of Puerto Ricans do not speak English.

15 This has led to a growing debate in Europe about the nature of citizenship and its relationship with nationality (understood as membership in the national culture). On England, see Parekh, Bhikhu, “British Citizenship and Cultural Difference,” in Citizenship, ed. Geoff, Andrews (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991), pp. 183–204;Google Scholar On France, see Colas et al., Citoyenneté et Nationalité (supra note 7); on Europe generally, see Brubaker, W. R., Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America (Lanham: University Press of America, 1989).Google Scholar

16 As René Lévesque, former premier of Quebec, put it, multiculturalism “is a ‘Red Herring’. The notion was devised to obscure ‘the Quebec business’, to give an impression that we are all ethnics and do not have to worry about special status for Quebec” (quoted in Wilson, Seymour, “The Tapestry Vision of Canadian Multiculturalism,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol, 26, no. 4 [1993], p. 656 n. 33).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Similar concerns have been raised by the Maori in New Zealand–i.e., that the rhetoric of “multiculturalism” is a way of denying their national claims, by lumping them in with the polyethnic claims of non-British immigrants; see Sharp, Andrew, Justice and the Maori: Maori Claims in New Zealand Political Argument in the 1980s (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 228.Google Scholar

17 Burnet, Jean, “Multiculturalism, Immigration, and Racism,” Canadian Ethnic Studies, vol. 7, no. 1 (1975), p. 36.Google Scholar

18 Indeed, the terms “anglophone” and “francophone” were adopted in the 1960s precisely because language-group membership was no longer synonymous with ethnic origin. “English Canadian” and “French Canadian” were traditionally used to refer to those of Anglo-Saxon or Gallic ethnic origin, and hence another term was needed to describe the (multiethnic) members of the English-speaking and French-speaking societies in Canada. On the increasing disjunction between ethnic origin and language group membership, see Laczko, “Canada's Pluralism in Comparative Perspective” (supra note 9), p. 29.

19 Some national groups employ a descent-based definition of membership –e.g., Germany, or the Afrikaners. This used to be true of French Canada as well, and 20 percent of Québécois still hold that immigrants cannot call themselves Québécois (Crête and Zylberberg, “Une problématique floue” [supra note 7], pp. 425–30). However, the majority of Quebecers, as with most other national groups in the West, define membership in terms of participation in a societal culture, not in terms of descent.

20 These restrictions on integration applied most clearly during the period before the Civil War, although legally mandated segregation continued in the South until the 1960s, and of course de facto segregation had a much wider scope.

21 Sagarin and Kelly, “Polylingualism in the United States” (supra note 12), pp. 26–27.

22 See, for example, Walzer, Michael, “Pluralism in Political Perspective,” in The Politics of Ethnicity, ed. Michael, Walzer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 27.Google Scholar For other examples, see my Multicultural Citizenship, chs. 2 and 4.

23 Higham, John, Send These to Me (New York: Atheneum, 1976), p. 6Google Scholar; cf. Steinberg, Stephen, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (New York: Atheneum, 1981), p. 7.Google Scholar

24 Glazer, Ethnic Dilemmas (supra note 10), p. 149.

25 Walzer, “Pluralism in Political Perspective,” pp. 6–7, 10.

26 Ibid., p. 9; cf. Glazer, Ethnic Dilemmas, pp. 227, 283.

27 According to Glazer, the sense of being a colonized people with a right to self-government, which began with black and Puerto Rican nationalists, “spread rapidly to other groups,” including various immigrant groups. He does not give any evidence or examples of this spread, other than the demand for publicly funded ethnic studies programs by “Italian, Jewish, Polish and other groups” (Glazer, Ethnic Dilemmas, pp. 110–11). As I go on to discuss, I do not think that the demand for such programs by immigrant groups can plausibly be seen as reflecting a desire to be treated as national minorities.

28 Herbert Gans calls this “symbolic ethnicity,” to emphasize that it lacks any real institutionalized corporate existence. The ethnic revival aimed to make the possession of an ethnic identity an acceptable and normal part of life in mainstream society. In this respect, it was strikingly successful, which helps explain why the “revival” lost its political urgency. For helpful discussions of the ethnic revival, see Gans, Herbert, “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (1979), pp. 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fishman, Joshua, “The Rise and Fall of the American Ethnic Revival,” in Fishman, Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1989), pp. 666–68, 678–80Google Scholar; and Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth, pp. 58, 74.

29 Affirmative-action programs for ethnocultural groups have typically been aimed at helping nonimmigrant groups which have been subject to widespread historical discrimination (e.g., American Indians, Chicanos, and African Americans in the United States; Aboriginal peoples in Canada). But they may also cover certain immigrant groups, if these groups are seen as facing particularly severe disadvantages in society (e.g., Jamaicans in Canada), or if their status is seen as inextricably intertwined with the primary (nonimmigrant) beneficiaries (e.g., non-Chicano Hispanics in the United States). Sunday-closing laws have not been an issue in the United States for many years, but they remain a source of controversy in Canada and Britain.

30 Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future, Report to the People and Government of Canada (Ottawa: Supply and Services, 1991), p. 128.

31 See Harles, John, Politics in the Lifeboat: Immigrants and the American Democratic Order (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Whitaker, Reginald, A Sovereign Idea: Essays on Canada as a Democratic Community (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992), p. 255.Google Scholar

32 Modood, Tariq, “Establishment, Multiculturalism, and British Citizenship,” Political Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 1 (1994), p. 64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Abu-Laban, Yasmeen and Stasiulis, Daiva, “Ethnic Pluralism under Siege: Popular and Partisan Opposition to Multiculturalism,” Canadian Public Policy, vol. 18, no. 4 (1992), p. 378.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Rawls, John, “Justice as Fairness: A Briefer Restatement,” unpublished manuscript, 1990Google Scholar, quoted in Buchanan, Allen, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), p. 5.Google Scholar

35 Some indigenous peoples have argued before the U.N. that they too have a right to self-determination under the U.N. Charter (see Mikmaq Tribal Society v. Canada [1984] U.N. Doc E/CN.4/Sub.2/204). For discussions of the “salt-water thesis,” and the right of self-determination under international law, see Pomerance, Michla, Self-Determination in Law and Practice: The New Doctrine in the United Nations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982)Google Scholar; Thornberry, Patrick, International Law and the Rights of Minorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 13–21, 214–18Google Scholar; and James, Crawford, ed., The Rights of Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

36 This is evident, for example, in the 1867 Confederation agreement which specified the terms under which French Canadians agreed to form part of the new country of Canada, or in the 1870 Manitoba Act, which specified the terms under which the Métis agreed to join Canada. Other examples would include the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which specified the terms under which the Maori would accept British rule in New Zealand. For further discussion of these examples, and the theoretical issues such agreements raise, see my Multicultural Citizenship, ch. 6.

37 For example, Canada has formed a single sovereign country since it broke its colonial ties with Britain, but in important respects it has never formed a single sovereign people. As Peter Russell puts it, “not all Canadians have consented to form a single people in which a majority or some special majority have, to use John Locke's phrase ‘a right to act and conclude the rest’. In this sense Canadians have not yet constituted themselves a sovereign people” (Russell, Peter, “Can the Canadians Be a Sovereign People?” Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. 24, no. 4 [1991], p. 692CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoting Locke's Second Treatise of Government).

38 This political community may be directly or indirectly controlled by the national minority, depending on how its boundaries are drawn. The Puerto Ricans and Québécois indirectly form political communities, by forming the majority within one of the territorial units of the federal system. Most Indian bands/tribes, however, directly form a political community, tied to the system of Indian reserves/reservations.

39 The termination policy rendered Indian tribes much more vulnerable to the greater economic and political power of the larger society, and quickly resulted in the loss of Indian lands, and the breakdown of Indian communities. For discussion, see Kronowitz, Rachel et al., “Toward Consent and Cooperation: Reconsidering the Political Status of Indian Nations,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, vol. 22 (1987), pp. 533–34.Google Scholar

40 This is true of the United States, where a conscious decision was made to draw state boundaries, and/or to delay the granting of statehood, so as to ensure that national minorities would not form a majority in any state. See Kloss, The American Bilingual Tradition (supra note 12), pp. 128–29, 205–7, 291. I discuss this in more detail in Multicultural Citizenship, chs. 2 and 6.

41 Rawls, John, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 7, no. 1 (1987), p. 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Karpat, Kemal, “Millets and Nationality: The Roots of the Incongruity of Nation and State in the Post-Ottoman Era,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, ed. Benjamin, Braude and Bernard, Lewis (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), p. 163.Google Scholar I discuss the millet system in more depth in my essay “Two Models of Pluralism and Tolerance,” Analyse & Kritik, vol. 14, no. 1 (1992), pp. 33–56; reprinted in Toleration, ed. David, Heyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

43 Gurr, Ted, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflict (Washington: Institute of Peace Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Hannum, Hurst, Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination: The Accommodation of Conflicting Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).Google Scholar

44 Ordeshook, “Some Rules of Constitutional Design,” p. 223.

45 Miller, David, Market, State, and Community: The Foundations of Market Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 288.Google Scholar

46 Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 62.Google Scholar

47 John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, in Mill, , Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent, 1972), pp. 230, 233.Google Scholar

48 Green, T. H., Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (London: Longman's, 1941), pp. 130–31.Google Scholar I explore how national minorities have been viewed throughout the liberal tradition in Multicultural Citizenship, ch. 3.

49 For a comprehensive review of the moral issues raised by secession, see Buchanan, Secession (supra note 34). The breakup of Czechoslovakia is another example of peaceful secession, although it is too early to tell how healthy the resulting democracies will be. There is a significant threat of violence in the former Czechoslovakia, not between the Czechs and the Slovaks, but between the Slovaks and Hungary over the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. The potential for violence is always dramatically increased when there are irredentist minorities.

50 Miller, Market, State, and Community, pp. 237, 279, 286–87.

51 Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

52 Connor, Walker, “Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying?” World Politics, vol. 24 (1972), pp. 350–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53 Smith, Anthony, “A Europe of Nations–or the Nation of Europe?” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 30, no. 2 (1993), p. 131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54 Rawls, John, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 77, no. 9 (1980), p. 540.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 Dion, Stéphane, “Le nationalisme dans la convergence culturelle” (Nationalism in an era of cultural convergence), in L'Engagement intellectuel: Melanges en l'honneur de Léon Dion (Intellectual engagement: Essays in honor of Léon Dion), ed. Raymond, Hudon and Réjean, Pelletier (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 1991), p. 301Google Scholar; Dion, Stéphane, “Explaining Quebec Nationalism,” in The Collapse of Canada? ed. Weaver, R. Kent (Washington: Brookings Institute, 1992), p. 99Google Scholar; cf. Taylor, Charles, “Shared and Divergent Values,” in Options for a New Canada, ed. Watts, Ronald L. and Brown, Douglas M. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 54.Google Scholar

56 The evolution of the European Community is not a counterexample. The formation and extension of the EC involves sovereign countries voluntarily agreeing to relinquish some powers to a transnational organization, because it is in their national interest to do so, and on the condition that they can withdraw from the EC when they think it is no longer in their national interest to remain in it. Deciding to join the EC, in short, is one way of exercising a country's right of self-determination, not an abandonment of that inherent right. This is just the sort of relationship which national minorities seek vis-à-vis the sovereign states into which they have been incorporated. They too are willing to cede certain powers to a larger unit, on the condition that this transfer of powers is partial, consensual, and revocable. In both cases, the ceding of powers to a larger political unit is acceptable only if and insofar as it is seen as the voluntary and revocable choice of an inherently self-governing group. The fact that there are shared-political principles within Western Europe has undoubtedly made it easier to form entities such as the EC, but it has not diminished the insistence of states that they form separate and self-governing nations whose participation in the EC is consensual and revocable. The same applies to the demands of national minorities within European states.

57 See Norman, Wayne, “The Ideology of Shared Values,” in Is Quebec Nationalism Just? ed. Joseph, Carens (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; cf. Nickel, James, “Rawls on Political Community and Principles of Justice,” Law and Philosophy, vol. 9 (1990), pp. 205–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 This, of course, is only a crude thumbnail sketch of communitarianism, focusing on one strand of that complex school of thought. For the idea of “constitutive” ends, and the contrast between a politics of the common good and a politics of rights, see Sandel, Michael, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory, vol. 12, no. 1 (1984), pp. 81–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I provide a more systematic exposition and critique of communitarian views in my Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), ch. 6.

59 Some communitarians admit this. According to Sandel, for example, “the nation proved too vast a scale across which to cultivate the shared self-understandings necessary to community in the … constitutive sense” (Sandel, “The Procedural Republic,” p. 93). Hence, most communitarians talk about our attachment to subnational groups – churches, neighborhoods, families, unions, etc. –rather than to the larger society which encompasses these subgroups. See Miller, David, “In What Sense Must Socialism Be Communitarian?” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 6, no. 2 (1989), pp. 60–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60 On the divisive impact of history, see Brilmayer, Lea, “Groups, Histories, and International Law,” Cornell International Law Journal, vol. 25, no. 3 (1992), pp. 555–63.Google Scholar

61 This raises some important questions about the nature of citizenship education, and the legitimacy of selective and manipulative use of history in schools, which I discuss in Multicultural Citizenship, ch. 9.

62 Taylor, Charles, “Quel principe d'identité collective?” (What is the basis of collective identity?), in L'Europe au soir du siècle: Identité et démocratie (Europe at the end of the century: Identity and democracy), ed. Jacques, Lenoble and Nicole, Dewandre (Paris: Editions Esprit, 1992), pp. 61–65.Google Scholar

63 Ignatieff, Michael, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), p. 21Google Scholar; cf. Dion, “Le nationalisme.”

64 Peterson, William, “On the Subnations of Europe,” in Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, ed. Nathan, Glazer and Moynihan, Daniel P. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 208.Google Scholar

65 Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values” (supra note 55), p. 75. For related speculations, see Resnick, Philip, “The Crisis of Multi-National Federations,” Review of Constitutional Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (1994), pp. 189–202.Google Scholar

66 Rubinstein, Alvin, “Is Statehood for Puerto Rico in the National Interest?” In Depth: A Journal for Values and Public Policy, Spring 1993, p. 88.Google Scholar

67 Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values,” p. 75.

68 Ibid., p. 76. While accommodating both polyethnic and multinational differences complicates the situation, I do not believe that the presence of immigrant groups substantially affects the likelihood that a multination state will successfully deal with its national differences. The fact that Canada contains many more immigrants than Belgium or Czechoslovakia does not, I think, have much bearing on the likelihood of Quebec's secession.

69 Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values,” p. 76.

70 Sigler, Jay, Minority Rights: A Comparative Analysis (Westport: Greenwood, 1983), pp. 188–92.Google Scholar

71 L'Actualité, vol. 17, no. 11 (July 1992).

72 Miller, David, “In Defense of Nationality,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 1 (1993), p. 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar n. 14.

73 A. V. Dicey, quoted in Reginald Whitaker, “Federalism and Democratic Theory,” in Whitaker, A Sovereign Idea (supra note 31), p. 195.