Will Kymlicka's Multicultural Citizenship

...Last April the New York Times featured the tragic story of a young woman from Togo who fled to the United States to escape ritual genital mutilation, only to be kept in a holding cell for illegal immigrants, incommunicado and under abominable conditions, for nearly two years...

...B. these caveats fail to do justice to the implicit radicalism of Kymlicka's account...

...To be sure, the requisite changes have not yet gone far enough...

...A well-functioning democracy in which minorities and oppressed groups can publicly articulate their concerns and assert their cultural identities is the logical solvent for the misleading antithesis between individual rights and the integrity of cultures...

...In the case at hand, a better solution might be to continue to emphasize Quebec's historical uniqueness at the cultural level via festivals, days of remembrance, curricular provisions, and so forth and to refrain from institutionalizing it in legal-constitutional terms, which, as recent experience strongly suggests, represents a source of keen antagonism and discomfiture...

...The maintenance of cultural integrity must not function at the expense of individual claims to freedom, self-development, and choice...

...Elsewhere, Sikhs have been exempted from motorcycle helmet laws so that they might wear their traditional turbans...

...In the United States, constitutional guarantees of freedom of contract have been suspended in the case of Native Americans in order to preserve the inalienability of tribal lands...

...After all, liberal constitutional regimes themselves have willingly granted these legal exceptions...

...And a good deal of Kymlicka's argument derives from the (far from unproblematic) Quebec example...

...The linchpin of Kymlicka's argument for the necessity of group rights is contained in his chapter on "Freedom and Culture...

...Cultural identity often refers to a network of fixed, inherited belief structures...

...Thus, none of the national minorities or religious groups in question possesses the prerogative of depriving individual members of the right to leave the community...

...There, he seeks to revise the formal definition of freedom commonly associated with the liberal tradition by supplementing it with a strong culturalist dimension...

...Kymlicka seeks to reconstruct an ideal of citizenship that will do justice to these questions of individual and collective identity...

...Thus far, Kymlicka has merely pointed out what has already been well documented...

...And in the end, one cannot help but doubt whether this burden has been met...

...He remarks approvingly: "Under the federal division of powers in Canada, the province of Quebec (which is 80 percent francophone) has extensive jurisdiction over issues that are crucial to the survival of the French culture, including control over education, language, culture, as well as significant immigration policy...

...Storekeepers are prosecuted, much to the irritation of bilingual Anglophones and Francophones alike...

...The spread of higher education, too, facilitates individual choice at the expense of established ways of life...

...On all of these points, Kymlicka's analyses are lucid and compelling...

...Consider the case of social movements involving feminists, gays, and civil rights for AfricanAmericans...

...In the modern world people increasingly move between various cultures, walks of life, and social roles...

...In recent years there has been a profusion of interest in the concept of citizenship—a development that is far from surprising...

...Kymlicka's argument tends to confuse freedom with individual fulfillment or self-realization...

...Kymlicka even admits at one point that in the aftermath of the Quiet Revolution Quebec has progressed from a "rural, Catholic, conservative, and patriarchal" culture to a new more cosmopolitan identity...

...By Kymlicka's own avowal this move in the direction of cosmopolitanism is a step in the right direction...

...francophone Quebeckers are constitutionally forbidden from sending their children to English-speaking public schools...

...The claims of human autonomy, conversely, imply that beliefs should not be accepted merely because they have been inherited per se, but must be legitimated through criticism and reflection...

...Thus, I can easily "realize mysel' or flourish at the expense of other cultures, or by usurping their own claims to autonomy...

...The more they are called into question, the more the inheritance tends to dissolve...

...Before proceeding too far down the path he recommends, one should give the potentials of a democratic public culture another try...

...In this respect, the Canadian dilemma of a state comprising two nationalities— Anglo and Quebecois—is exemplary...

...More specifically, they must be mediated by a third term: democratic citizenship...

...Finally, the ends of democratic citizenship, which have been revivified in the aftermath of communism's collapse, entail a constitutional patriotism—a patriotism of principle—that cannot be reduced to values of nationality or culture in the narrow Herderian sense...

...WINTER • 1997 • 141...

...They constitute legal exceptions that leave the overall liberal balance between habitual "forms of life" and "rights" intact...

...In addition, the definition of culture employed by Kymlicka, on which so much of his argument hinges, is much too static...

...The entire experience compels one to wonder whether the idea of legislating cultural distinctiveness and corresponding group prerogatives doesn't amount to abetting cultural insularity and parochialism...

...WINTER • 1997 • 137 Books firms with fifty or more employees must conduct their business in French—far from being a model of enlightened multiculturalism, border on intolerance and reverse discrimination, this time against an Anglo minority culture concentrated in Montreal...

...In general, Kymlicka underestimates the extent to which particularistic cultural identities and moral autonomy may clash...

...His interWINTER • 1997 • 135 Books esting gambit is to abandon the dichotomy between communitarianism and liberalism...

...The latter position, of course, has been the bread and butter of American political traditions, and in recent decades has received compelling theoretical buttressing via the work of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin.Yet, this rights-oriented outlook seems increasingly inadequate in the face of powerful forces of economic and bureaucratic fragmentation that are inherently destructive of tradition and local cultures...

...a requirement, Kymlicka argues, that is unlikely to be realized if one continues to rely on culture-blind and highly formalized doctrines of right...

...As Michael Ignatieff observes in Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism: Quebecois think of their language as a kind of invisible shield protecting their cultural integrity from the North American norm...

...In this way, he tries to reconcile a concept of the good life or the good society proper to communitarian thought with liberal claims to individual autonomy...

...Elsewhere he observes: "The right of the Quebecois to preserve and promote their culture, affirmed in the existing system of federalism, is yet a fourth case [of group-differentiated citizenship]: it is exercised by the province of Quebec, whose citizens are predominantly Quebecois, but also includes many nonfrancophones...

...There is a pettiness in language politics that belies the cultural self-confidence the Quebecois project about their capacity to survive and flourish...

...Yet Kymlicka's solution—the legal enfranchisement of cultural difference—could well prove counterproductive...

...Cultural traditions shed their insularity...

...A few years ago, the Meech Lake accords granting "distinctive status" to Quebec were voted down after an acrimonious debate and much resentment on the part of English-speaking Canada...

...However, unless all such instances are informed by a higher conception of "right" (in Dworkin's parlance: by matters of principle)—a conception that is diametrically opposed to the hallowing of ethnic or national particularism—there are few guarantees that the results will not prove morally regressive, as the former Yugoslavia demonstrates well...

...The French language allows Quebecois a degree of cultural selfassurance toward the Americans that English Canadians can only envy...

...Instead, he attempts to reconcile two major positions in contemporary political theory that are often viewed as irreconcilably opposed: the so-called communitarian position, which emphasizes the priority of traditional ways of life and cultural identities, against a liberal legalistic perspective stressing the primacy of individual "rights...

...But the case of Quebec does not provide a ringing endorsement of Kymlicka's claims about the imperatives of multicultural citizenship...

...Such exemptions must only be granted therefore in exceptional cases, where substantial moral and restitutive considerations come into play (the case of Native Americans), or where religious practices can be accommodated without disregard of basic human liberties...

...Certainly there are cases in which the granting of home rule or limited political autonomy is merited, usually as a response to past cultural usurpation or oppression...

...yet its draconian language laws—all commercial and public signs must be in French...

...It is not so much questions of international borders or immigration that concern him...

...For whereas democratic norms require principled legitimation, the nonreflective solidarities of national cultures benefit from passive and unquestioning acceptance...

...Kymlicka draws on the experiences of Native Americans, African-Americans, and immigrant groups in order to explore these questions...

...The more interesting—and risky—part of his argument pertains to more ambitious models of group prerogatives...

...At one point, Kymlicka seemingly answers his own question about the benefits of cultural versus cosmopolitan allegiances, when he observes that "as a culture is liberalized—and so allows members to question and reject tradi140 • DISSENT tional ways of life—the resulting cultural identity becomes both 'thinner' and less distinctive...

...Of course, most of these examples are uncontroversial...

...All of these groups have struggled to articulate their plights in the spotlight of a democratic public sphere in order to convince a majority culture—predominantly white, AngloSaxon, and male-dominated—that its purported egalitarian precepts were seriously lagging behind social realities...

...In Multicultural Citizenship, Will Kymlicka pursues a different tack...

...It proceeds in a direction opposite from that of democratic citizenship: toward the entrenchment of difference, with all the attendant problems of particularism and ghettoization...

...His basic argument is that the orientation of traditional liberalism toward individual rights needs to be supplemented with theories of group prerogatives or rights so that social groups that are at a structural or historical disadvantage in relation to the larger culture might flourish or come into their own...

...At one point he quotes approvingly the philosopher Yael Tamir's claim that national identity "lies outside the normative sphere...

...For Kymlicka this is a paradigmatic example of the ways in which considerations of right must at times cede to the requirement of preserving endangered cultural identities...

...He invokes the fact that in some countries Jews and Muslims are absolved on religious grounds from mandatory Sunday closings...

...In sum, the rigid opposition established in communitarian discourse between rights, which are formal, and forms of life, which are substantive, must be deconstructed...

...Because as an asylum-seeker she was without civil rights in this country, she had very little legal or practical recourse...

...At the same time, one occasionally gets the feeling that he has reinvented the wheel...

...And while self-realization may well be essential for a well-rounded life, or what the Greeks referred to as human flourishing (eudaimonia), there is nothing to prevent such an ideal from operating at cross-purposes with the moral demands of justice, which are based on the egalitarian precept that all human natures are of equal worth...

...Yet, if this is so, then it would seem that national identity and democratic principles would operate at cross-purposes...

...As a result of this dramatic cultural shift, which effaced many residues of provincialism and parochialism, the Quebecois have in essence become (though some would be loath to admit it) good North Americans...

...Kymlicka argues that an essential precondition of freedom entails the capacity to act in accordance with and realize the terms of one's own cultural tradition...

...But it would be unwise to make a common practice of circumventing legal or constitutional provisions, in which case the latter would soon become meaningless...

...Instead, he wishes to reconcile the best that both positions have to offer...

...In all of these cases, the gap between constitutional avowals of equality and the de facto disenfranchisement of social groups has been an important stimulus toward progressive change...

...The case of indigenous peoples who were conquered and subdued against their will is a special and compelling instance...

...That is, as a culture becomes more liberal, the members are less and less likely to share the same substantive conception of the good life, and more and more likely to share basic values with people in other liberal cultures...

...The extremes of policing of this strict language legislation have reached tragicomic proportions...

...The province's cultural integrity is hardly threatened with extinction, as it perhaps was before the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s...

...Yet the same Quebecois display none of the same self-assurance in relation to their own non-French-speaking minority .. The language police are dispatched to happily bilingual towns in the Eastern Townships to photograph tiny English cardboard signs in corner stores...

...Kymlicka's main thesis, that "group-differentiated rights that protect minority cultures can be seen, not only as consistent with liberal values, but as actually promoting them," carries a considerable burden of proof...

...The onset of a "world society," abetted by global media and the rationalizing tendencies of the economy (to be sure, far from innocent developments), render local cultures much less allencompassing...

...He also mentions the case of the Pennsylvania Amish, who have been exempted from certain laws concerning the mandatory education of children so that they might preserve their traditional way of life...

...It is in large measure owing to such cases, which may well number in the millions, that the question of citizenship, which often defines who in today's world are the beneficiaries of rights to life, liberty, and economic well-being, has assumed center stage in contemporary political thought...

...In more general terms, Quebec raises so many questions about Kymlicka's arguments for the legal sanctification of group identity and multicultural ends that one is given to wonder: is he not tugging at the wrong end of the thread...

...In her classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, writing in the aftermath of a world war that had left twelve million people displaced, observed that twentieth-century history had proved that the "rights of man" were meaningless unless they could be enforced by national governments...

...but I 138 • DISSENT Books cannot thereby be considered just...