The range of toleration

Preliminary

In this article I intend to provide a map and a critical assessment of toleration as displayed in contemporary democracy. I have contended that toleration as recognition is the appropriate type of toleration for dealing with contemporary pluralism within the normative framework of liberal democracy (Galeotti, 2002). Yet both social relations and institutional behavior show a variety of tolerant attitudes and practices which cannot be defined as examples of ‘toleration as recognition’, and which need to be properly grasped and accordingly valued. The conceptions of toleration corresponding to the various practices can be represented on a continuum going from the least to the most appropriate conception; that is, from what I shall label ‘disrespectful tolerance’ to toleration as recognition. The center of the continuum is occupied by the standard notion, on the one side, and by the political conception based on the neutrality principle, on the other. To be sure, I do not contend that all questions of toleration require toleration as recognition to be properly solved, but rather that all the politically relevant and divisive issues of pluralistic democracy do, and that their solution is less than satisfactory from a normative point of view if addressed by means of other notions.

I shall first proceed to present briefly the three main conceptions of toleration, namely the standard notion, the political conception based on neutrality, and toleration as recognition. On such conceptions, in all possible nuances, the contemporary debate of the last decades has been mainly focused. Then, by introducing a case study – i.e. the place of worship denied to Muslims in the city of Vercelli (northern Italy) – I shall be able to single out disrespectful tolerance which vividly represents an inappropriate form of toleration in liberal democratic polities, but which, on the one hand, probably corresponds to still widespread, though unnoticed, objectionable practices and, on the other, will also show that the standard notion is inadequate for political dimension.

I The standard notion of toleration

Under the standard notion, toleration means the non-interference with practices, actions and views of some people which the potential tolerator objects to. Circumstances for toleration thus are the following:

differences (of opinions, lifestyles, practices) which are disliked or disapproved

Toleration is the case when agent A objects to the conduct x of agent B, and has the power to prevent B from doing x, but nevertheless refrains from intervening for some other reasons of hers or his. Toleration is usually considered a value; still, it is not clear why suspending one’s power of interference with something that one thinks wrong is a good thing. This question, known in the literature as the paradox of toleration, ² brings us to the reasons for suspending our moral code or convictions in favor of tolerance. The reasons for tolerance work either as overriding reasons, or as exclusionary reasons, that is, reasons excluding the first-order reasons for interference; ³ which reasons count as overriding or exclusionary will depend on their nature, which can be of the following types:

prudential (costs of interference and conflict; preference for peace and accommodation)

Under this description, what constitutes an appropriate object of toleration is crucial. ⁴ For toleration to be a value and a virtue, the disapproval must concern, on the one hand, objects that one is morally free to disapprove; ⁵ and, on the other, objects that are not categorically wrong. ⁶ First, if the disapproval concerns, for example, someone’s race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, that is, traits that are received and cannot be changed, overcoming one’s distaste for, say, Asians or gays is not an exercise of toleration, because there are good moral reasons to think that disapproval in this case is unjustified; disapproval is appropriate for actions and dispositions, but not for ascriptive characters. ⁷ In this case the right thing to do is reviewing the racist or homophobic attitude, and not being a tolerant racist. ⁸ Second, if the object of disapproval belongs to the class of what is universally condemned and categorically wrong, such as homicide, torture, sadistic actions and so on, then toleration is turned into culpable indulgence, for in this case being tolerant would infringe on the harm principle and the rights of others. In sum, when we are confronting cases of rights violations and harm to third parties, the correct response is intolerance; when we are confronting arbitrary and prejudiced disapproval, the correct response is modifying disapproval into indifference and respect; when we are confronting a non-arbitrary disapproval, yet lacking universal condemnation, then toleration is the principled response. ⁹

It is thus clear that in the standard definition: (1) the moral quality of toleration depends on reasons: both on the reasons for disapproving x, which should not be arbitrary and unjustified, and on the reasons for suspending the disapproval and letting go x, which, however, should exclude a categorical wrong. The first set of reasons pertains to the conditions for toleration, the second set to the justification of toleration. (2) Toleration is a virtue only within limits, and more precisely between unjustified disapproval and the intolerable. The latter, in turn, is specified by two principles: the harm principle and the self-defense of liberal order. ¹⁰ Non-interference cannot constitute a value if it is at the expense of a third party’s rights or of the collective security and persistence of social and political order; both the harm principle and the self-defense principle fix the boundaries beyond which freedom is suspended and interference is justified. What counts as harm and what threatens the stability of liberal society are contested matters, but in principle the limits of the intolerable are clear.

This definition of toleration exhibits a number of controversial features, both with reference to the proper objects of toleration and to the meaning of its limits, which I have discussed at length elsewhere. ¹¹ Nevertheless, in its general terms, it has become fairly standard in the philosophical discussion and so I shall treat it, after the clarification of two issues.

The first concerns the common idea that the standard notion would imply a negative meaning of tolerance as putting-up-with and forbearance, while other notions, and specifically toleration as recognition, would imply a positive meaning of acceptance. From the distinction between negative and positive toleration then usually follows the claim that the negative connotation is entailed in the very concept of tolerance/toleration, and that the shift to positive acceptance represents an illegitimate stretching of the concept beyond its own boundaries. I rebut this claim and argue that the negative/positive distinction needs to be reset. Toleration in any versions means non-interference with someone’s liberty; whether non-interference requires omission or commission of the tolerator depends on the context. For example, toleration of a foreign dress-code implies the omission of any interference; but toleration of dietary requirements implies changing the menu options in cafeterias, hence a positive action aimed at setting people free to follow their dietary requirements. Despite original reasons of objection, non-interference with people’s liberty is what toleration always consists in, and in this respect toleration would appear to have a negative connotation. However, the tone of non-interference may sound differently according to the different reasons for sustaining toleration. If the reasons are just prudential, then toleration is just a compromise; if they are epistemological, the value of toleration is only instrumental and the original disapproval negatively affects the tolerated. If, by contrast, the reasons lie in respect for persons, the meaning of toleration and its scope change from negative to positive. The principle of respect, as an exclusionary reason, belongs to a higher order, hence trumps the reasons for disapproval making them inappropriate for interpersonal exchange, and, moreover, it makes reciprocal toleration not contingently possible. ¹² Hence toleration loses the negative overtone that is present when it is embraced on the basis of non-moral reasons. In sum, the negative/positive distinction does not pertain to the what of toleration, which is always not interference (either by omission or by commission), but to the why toleration ought to be chosen over the original disapproval. The latter is not canceled by respect, but is excluded as an appropriate consideration for interpersonal relationships with persons who are our peers. Finally such distinction does not coincide with the standard notion vs toleration as recognition, but is present in the standard notion as well and, as a result, the long discussion on whether positive tolerance (acceptance) can or cannot be considered a proper instantiation of toleration is done away with.

The second issue concerns the area of application of the standard notion, and more precisely whether it applies only to horizontal, social relations or also to vertical, political relations. On the one hand, given that only two parties are implied in the standard notion, it would appear misplaced in the political domain where usually at least three parties are enlisted in toleration questions: majority, minority and political authority. On the other, given that the two parties are asymmetrical as to the power of interference, its political application may seem obvious. In order to clarify this issue though, we must introduce also another conception of toleration, namely the one patterned after the neutrality principle.

II The neutrality principle

The standard notion has been elaborated from the traditional doctrine of toleration, which in turn was patterned after the circumstances of the absolute state confronting with religious dissent. The conception implied by the standard notion was thus originally political. On the one side, there was the king or the queen, the potential tolerator, on the other, there were the dissenters. The former judged the different creed as false and heretical, and was endowed with the power of might to suppress it; in such circumstances toleration was precisely the suspension of the repressive power of the state, i.e. the absolute sovereign, for the sake of peace. It was properly a case of negative toleration for prudential reasons: the vertical tolerance of the absolute monarch towards religious dissenters is precisely described by the standard notion. The standard conception, however, is at odds with the normative theory of liberalism, which transforms toleration from an act of grace of the sovereign into the universal rights of liberty of citizens. Before liberalism, toleration consisted in the king’s good reasons for non-interference with religious dissent; within the normative framework of liberalism, the state has a duty of toleration, corresponding to the right of conscience of citizens; moreover toleration enlarges its scope: not just freedom from persecution, but equal liberty of conscience. This passage has been vividly remarked by a well-known comment by Thomas Paine on the French Constitution of 1791 concerning toleration:

The French Constitution hath abolished or renounced toleration, and intolerance also, and hath established universal rights of conscience. Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but it is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotism. The one assumes to itself the right to withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the pope armed with fire and faggot, and the other is the pope selling and granting indulgences. The former is Church and State, the second is Church and traffic. ¹³

Equal liberty of conscience can actually be interpreted within a different and strictly political conception of toleration, based on the principle of neutrality implying that the political principle of toleration dispenses with any disapproval of citizens’ convictions. ¹⁴ Here the circumstances of political toleration are simply different conflicting views present in society, while political institutions are not supposed to express attitudes of dislike or disapproval of any views, but to provide conditions for their peaceful coexistence. Toleration is thus imposed by the state on citizens in their reciprocal relations; citizens are under the political duty of tolerating each other, and then they can supplement such civic duty with the virtue of toleration, reinforcing external compliance with internal acceptance of toleration-cum-respect. According to this sketchy outline of the normative liberal theory of toleration, it appears that the standard notion above considered turns out to be inadequate if applied to political authority, for the condition of disapproval, which is crucial in the standard notion, ought not to inform the approach to social differences by liberal authorities; the latter should instead be bound by the principle of neutrality. The standard notion is by contrast perfectly adequate for social, horizontal relations. If the political principle of toleration – which prescribes institutional neutrality concerning the many differences of contemporary pluralism, and makes horizontal toleration a duty, within the boundaries of the harm principle – represents the traditional liberal standard, nevertheless, within contemporary democracies, neither do the practices of toleration always conform to the principle of neutrality nor is conformity always the most desirable realization of toleration. On the one hand, there are still instances of toleration exercised by political authority, that is, vertical toleration, which are patterned after the standard notion, as in cases when a democratic state has an established Church, like England or the Scandinavian countries, and grants religious freedom to other creeds and congregations. In these cases, toleration does not follow from neutrality, but precisely by its opposite, by the political privilege granted to the established Church. On the other, if the neutrality principle generally applied, it might be thought that politically relevant toleration issues were pre-empted and that only trivial interpersonal questions might arise. ¹⁵ Yet this is evidently not the case in contemporary liberal democracies, so we have to try to understand why and how politically relevant questions of toleration are still erupting in liberal democracy, and whether the neutrality conception is the most adequate to address them. As to the fact that contemporary practices of toleration are often still patterned after the standard notion, I would argue that this fact may be theoretically little intriguing, but still very unsatisfactory from a normative point of view, hence that it is important to highlight and criticize such instances of toleration inadequate to the standards of liberal democracy. This is precisely the point of the case I am going to present shortly which represents an insufficient and unsatisfactory case of toleration, a case worthy of our concern and critical attention. As to the problem of why and how politically relevant issues of toleration do still arise despite the equal right of liberty, and how to address them, I am going to discuss that in the next section.

III What are contemporary toleration questions about?

In contemporary democracy where liberty rights are inscribed in constitutions, it is not obvious that important questions of toleration still arise, beside trivial issues produced by everyday interactions, and beside a pragmatic failure to implement the principle of neutrality and to grant everyone equal liberty. And still they do, from veil-wearing to places of worship. As a rule, their source lies in the public display of differences by minority groups and contested by the society’s majority. I hold that the contest over minority differences is not properly grasped by the principle of neutrality for it prescribes public blindness towards social differences, unless some party’s rights are violated. Therefore, adopting the principle of neutrality, political authorities do not perceive that some social differences, pertaining to a social majority, are part of social standards and customary ways, and that some others, pertaining to minorities, are not, and that this distinction corresponds to crucial asymmetries in power and social standing of people respectively belonging to majority and minority. The specific power in question concerns the control over societal standards and conventions by the majority, that is, the control of the public space from a symbolic viewpoint – rules of civility and propriety, of dress codes, dietary customs, traditional collective celebrations, religious rituals. This is precisely the area that most contemporary questions of toleration stem from. If instead of being difference-blind, we focus on who are the bearers of social differences and on their social exclusion from social standards, we can grasp where genuine questions of toleration are produced in the world of liberal democracy. Let us now understand how.

The problem is usually raised horizontally in social interactions between members of the majority and some minority group; the circumstances are still disliked differences, yet linked to groups that are excluded or marginalized in the liberal society, and generally invisible in the public space. Beside prejudices and biases, dislike is grounded on the perception of these differences as unduly upsetting the orderly social life based on ingrained and familiar conventions and stable expectations. The majority’s dislike is not aimed at the suppression of those differences as long as they are contained outside the mainstream of urban life; the conflict, which I understand as the contemporary form of issues involving toleration, concerns the free access of different minority practices and ways of life in the public space. ¹⁶

Contemporary issues of toleration do not revolve around the forced conversion or the exile of, say, Muslim communities, but, for example, on whether or not the hijab should be allowed in public space, and whether or not religious rituals should be publicly visible in urban spaces. These are questions of toleration because they involve leaving minorities free to pursue their lifestyle and creed, without interference in the public space. Such questions, in a way, take for granted liberal toleration in the private space, but express a resistance of the social majority to let a minority’s different customs, habits and traditions become visible in public, and hence on the same footing as majority traditions. Given that in liberal democracy no social group is endowed with coercive power, the horizontal intolerance, expressed by sectors of the majority, appeals to the political power to enforce public exclusion or restriction of minority practices. Therefore, a horizontal dislike gives rise to a vertical issue, for political institutions have to adjudicate between the majority claims for limiting toleration and the minority counter-claims for public toleration of their different habits. Contemporary controversies are thus framed in terms of where the justifiable limits of toleration should be drawn. The principle of toleration as such is not questioned. Religious liberty, freedom of expression and associations are taken for granted, but they may be interpreted in a restricted way concerning minorities (and minorities only), hence in an intolerant fashion, moreover implying significant double standards vis-à-vis the majority’s liberties. Thus toleration’s limits are seen and judged differently according to sectors of majority and minorities respectively. ¹⁷ According to the sectors of the majority raising the issue, toleration is beside the point, given that no one wants to convert or to exile the infidels; the problem is rather the trespassing on the right limits to tolerance. ¹⁸ By contrast, according to minorities (and also to other sectors of the majority), they are questions of toleration given that the invoked limits are unjustified and that what is at stake is precisely the equal liberty and equal respect of minorities, equal liberty that the opponents would want to restrict unevenly and unjustly; from this latter viewpoint, the invoked restrictions are intolerant. In this stand-off, political authorities are called in to settle the question one way or the other. I want to stress that the controversy over the limits of toleration, whether focused on a stretching of the harm principle or of the self-defense, as a rule concerns the public display of a certain practice or custom, while apparently the same practice, if confined in the private area, well outside the public sight, does not raise contestations. ¹⁹ I hold that this issue is due to an old ambiguity of the theory of toleration since its origins – as, for instance, by Locke – for it relied on and worked through the private/public distinction; the public area, concerned with matters of peace and order, constituted the political sphere; the private area, concerned with issues irrelevant to order and peace, constituted the proper domain of toleration. I am not saying that religion was actually confined to the private sphere, for it was precisely the public dimension of religion that raised the problem of toleration in the first place; I am rather saying that the confinement of toleration to the private sphere was part of the argument – for example, by Locke – aimed at convincing political authorities that toleration was indeed a convenient political solution to religious conflict.

That the divide never worked as in Locke’s representation did not prevent it from being prominently included in the neutrality principle, especially under the laïcité reading, and to be part of a common, though incorrect, understanding of toleration. To be sure, religious rituals and symbols have always been in the public sight in our societies, but, as long as they belong to the majority’s religion, they have been taken for granted and, though visible, their presence has been an unremarkable part of the public landscape, as, for example, churches in the main squares of all European cities. It was when ‘alien’ religious symbols, or other cultural customs, have become visible in our society, that the issue of whether they were compatible with liberal principles and values, hence whether they represented a threat for the orderly persistence of social order, has been raised. But if we critically consider the meaning of the expression: ‘threat for the orderly persistence of the liberal order’, we must conclude that what is at stake is not political stability or social security or the impairment of anyone’s rights, but the persistence of the orderly social interchange, based on the majority’s social standards. In other words, on the one hand, the public/private divide introduces double standards regarding what is tolerable in majorities and minorities. On the other, the issue of compatibility, usually invoked by majority sectors as grounds for non-toleration of minority differences, has to be reinterpreted: most of the time, it is not, as claimed, that the different practices and religious rituals are ‘intrinsically’ incompatible with the ethical and political principles grounding democratic society, and hence cannot be tolerated, otherwise it would lead to the disruption of liberal democracy, but, rather, that they are upsetting familiar and traditional societal standards of the societal majority. At stake then is a contest over social standards. ²⁰

In sum, contemporary relevant issues over toleration arise from the dislike by sectors of the majority of minorities’ public display of their unfamiliar practices, seen as upsetting the conventions and standards of propriety, and requiring to be settled by a political decision. These are questions of toleration for they concern an invoked restriction of, hence the interference with, personal liberty of some people (minorities) in some places (public space). Sectors of majorities resent the different customs and claim that the differences are incompatible with public order, hence intolerable, according to a rather overstretched interpretation of the self-defense principle. Given that in liberal democracy only political authorities have the coercive power to interfere with people’s liberty, such claims call on political authority to settle the conflict and reaffirm the boundaries for toleration, one way or the other. Hence: (1) politically relevant issues of toleration are produced when a horizontal dislike of a given difference in the public space gives rise to a stand-off between majority and minorities calling for a political settlement. Thus a horizontal problem is turned into a vertical issue, where political authorities, the only loci of a universally binding (i.e. coercive) decision, must declare the controversial difference to be either publicly tolerable or not. (2) The content of such a decision, and the preceding discussion, concerns not whether a certain creed or conception of the good is to be tolerated or suppressed tout court (pre-liberal tolerance), but, rather, where to trace the boundary between toleration and the intolerable, on the basis of the contentious spatial demarcation between private and public and of controversial reinterpretations of the two principles of harm and of self-defense. (3) The movement from the horizontal to the vertical dimension is further intertwined with the democratic balance between political majority and minority. While theoretically democratic institutions should be neutral among alternative and conflicting convictions and views, as a matter of fact, political representatives are part of the cultural majorities and are often willing to please them so as to be re-elected. This fact often turns the balance in favor of the majority’s claims. By contrast, courts and other sectors of public administration are usually interpreting their role more impartially and neutrally.

IV Toleration as recognition

So far I have been concerned with the understanding of questions of toleration in contemporary democracy, and, more precisely, what their origin is, what they are about, who are the agents involved, and, finally, where the power to settle them lies. This understanding is relevant in two respects. On the one hand, it clarifies which issues in the contest of contemporary pluralism are questions of toleration, and also why there is a disagreement about it. On the other, it shows the insufficiency of the neutrality principle in grasping the problem and providing an adequate normative response. Let us consider the conflict over mosque building, for example. Those who protest against granting permission for mosques, claim that their position is not intolerant, since they do not want to convert or expel Muslims, hence, in their view, the latter retain their religious freedom. Neutralist liberals, by contrast, think that such claims are instances of intolerance, but also that they are not genuine issues of toleration for their solution is already inscribed in the political principle of liberal toleration prescribing political neutrality with reference to religious differences. I contend instead that they are genuine issues of toleration which can be appreciated as such by the reinterpretation of the problem I have proposed above, also leading to a revision of the normative response. As said, the contest revolves around the control of social standards and the public visibility of minority differences, a contest whose specificity can easily escape a neutralist perspective. At stake there is not simply toleration in the sense of equal liberty of minorities, which would be impaired by a restriction of public display of minority differences in the public space, but there is also the recognition of minority members, with their different practices and customs, as equal members of the polity worth equal respect as members of the majority. Only if we acknowledge that the nature of the problem goes beyond equal liberty, and concerns equal membership, that is, full inclusion in the polity, can the kind of injustice implicit in the intolerance of minority practice be fully appreciated and properly addressed. Instances of intolerance, if politically subscribed, not only restrict personal liberty of members of minorities, restriction which is in any case unjustified if based on questionable and uneven-handed interpretations of harm and self-defense, but also undermine their full inclusion on an equal footing as the majority.

Toleration as recognition is precisely aimed at addressing this problem. While the conception of toleration based on the neutrality principle is focused on granting equal liberty rights, but does not consider the further implications of being the bearers of a minority difference in terms of equal respect and inclusion, toleration as recognition, besides granting equal liberty rights, aims at the recognition of the contested differences as legitimate components of contemporary pluralism. In this way, the bearers of those differences will be recognized as full and equal members of the polity. If sectors of the cultural and moral majority call for public restrictions on practices and traditions seen at odds with ‘our’ liberal standards, the institutional response should instead favor toleration as long as no right is violated so as to enforce equal liberty for all people in the polity. This, however, is not yet sufficient given that toleration can have different meanings and be grounded on different reasons, and only the right reasons make toleration the right response to such issues. I contend that toleration of social differences in public should neither be grounded on instrumental reasons, nor simply follow from institutional blindness which would dismiss the background contest between majority and minority over social standards; rather, toleration should aim at the recognition of those differences as legitimate options of a pluralist liberal democracy, hence redrawing the map of social standards and including their bearers as equals. Note that the recognition of an option as legitimate does not imply a substantive evaluation of that difference as good and worthwhile, let alone its endorsement, but simply its consideration on an equal footing as the options already present in contemporary pluralism. If wearing a veil does not harm anyone, it should have the same public consideration as having a tattoo, getting one’s body pierced, or wearing a wig, and such an option, whether familiar or odd, should be considered legitimate out of respect for the people who endorse it and for their reasons, whether we share them or not. In this way a woman wearing a veil for religious or cultural reasons will receive the same respect as a man wearing a baseball cap or a farmer wearing a straw hat. And as much as we usually accept the latter garments without asking people why, similarly we should approach women wearing veils without asking if it is their choice, a religious obligation, a cultural imposition or what. Toleration as recognition is then neither permission nor acceptance, since liberal institutions are not entitled to forbid or accept, let alone embrace, anything within the bounds of the law, but is instead legitimation: a public declaration that a given practice, if it does not infringe on any right, is a legitimate option of the pluralist society.

Toleration as recognition which I hold to be the normative theory of toleration suitable for liberal democracy in the context of contemporary pluralism takes off from the consideration that the standard notion of toleration is adequate only if applied to horizontal relationships, but is on the whole unfit to characterize the political principle of toleration as embodied in liberal politics. As remarked by Thomas Paine, the standard notion of toleration described political tolerance in the absolute state, insofar as it was a discretionary act of sovereign grace; by contrast the liberal state assumes toleration as the political principle prescribing universal rights of liberty, hence subtracting it from the domain of discretion to relocate it in the domain of justice. Yet, the conception of political toleration along the neutrality principle is insufficient to grasp and address the issues of toleration arising in pluralistic democracy. Nowadays not all social differences related to convictions, mores, practices and ways of life are on the same footing, and some, those belonging to minorities, are excluded and marginalized, impairing equal respect and full inclusion of their bearers. Their contested public tolerance should be an act of public legitimation of their presence in the public sight.

However, in the actual politics of contemporary democracy, toleration in the standard definition is not confined to horizontal relationships, but still sometimes informs vertical attitudes and actions towards certain different practices. In other words, we continue to encounter occurrences of institutional response to cultural differences which can be described as tolerant yet based on a conception of tolerance at odds with equal respect. Those practices can go from more to less acceptable though they all share the problematic normative element of toleration as a discretionary non-interference. This kind of tolerance, if practised by political authorities, is often closer to an act of sovereign grace than to a granting of a right. In this respect it looks like a pre-liberal form of toleration which I would label disrespectful tolerance that can be properly appreciated by looking at the more clearly unacceptable cases, such as the one I am going to present now. In order to highlight this objectionable practice of toleration and also to critically illustrate a whole menu of administrative behavior towards minority differences which represents the opposite of toleration as recognition, short of violent repression, I shall discuss the case of a contested permission for a garage-mosque, a case that occurred in the small city of Vercelli, located in northern Italy midway between Milan and Turin. The discussion of this case will help me to sustain that when the standard notion is used by political authorities to respond to contemporary questions of toleration, then the virtue of toleration is turned into a disrespectful form of non-interference which should be politically stigmatized.

V The unresolved case of a Muslim place of worship in Vercelli

In Vercelli, as elsewhere in Italy, in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, immigrants started to arrive, among whom some were of the Muslim religion. Around 1996–7, those in Vercelli founded an association, Assalam [peace], and rented a basement in the outskirts of the city, in an area of (mostly abandoned) factories and warehouses. That space was used as the gathering place of the association, for activities that included prayer. There the community was basically left alone until in 2004 the owner of the basement claimed his property back. At that point, Assalam was registered as a proper association and advanced a formal request to the city authorities for another center in a different area, again in the outskirts of the city. The request was not aimed at obtaining a free lease for the property, nor any financial help, but concerned the permission to change the use of the premises into a cultural center, a place of gathering and worship. The city government chose the policy of silence; for two years, Assalam’s claim was bluntly ignored, and indefinitely postponed in the agenda of the city council. Meanwhile (by 2007) the eviction from their original place was becoming effective, and under that pressure, the community, perhaps imprudently, decided to buy another place, in a different though again peripheral neighborhood (Cappuccini) hence placing a fait accompli in front of the city government, with the understanding that, at that point, the city could have no longer ignored their existence and, post factum, would have authorized the change of use. This decision did not involve playing perfectly by the rules, for the community lacked the permission to change the use, yet began repair work to that end beforehand. Whether this strategy was blameworthy or not, it was definitely counterproductive. The Cappuccini area had previously been mentioned also as a possible location for a Roma encampment. That fact was more than enough for the (anti-immigration) Northern League activists to start shouting against the transformation of the neighborhood into a hotbed for criminal activity. Such negative campaigning compelled the city government to awake from its policy of ignorance, and to respond not to the Muslims’ claim but to the worries of its constituency, fueled by the Northern League activists who were also represented in the city government. ²¹ The city’s position was to take the easiest way out of the controversy: they exploited the alleged improper conduct of the association for dispensing with a solution to the real problem of where the Muslim community, after the eviction, could gather and pray. For the first time, though, the mayor had to address the claim. He did so by proposing another area, much further out of town and in effect lost in the countryside, where the community would have had to sustain also the costs of making the area accessible to urban services (road, electricity and so on). Nevertheless, the offer never became real: the city administrators never discussed the convention and silence fell once again on the Muslims’ claim. Their lawyer then attempted another path: to present to the province of Vercelli a request for acknowledging Assalam as an ‘Association for Social Promotion (ASP)’. Apparently ASPs enjoy special legal benefits among which the most important is that their centers can be located anywhere as long as safety rules are granted, notwithstanding the provision of urban planning. But even this path encountered all sorts of obstacles, for, after an initially positive response on the part of the province’s council, the Northern League started another hate campaign against the Islamization of Vercelli, and as a result, the positive decision was repealed. After that the lawyer appealed to the Administrative Tribunal (Tar [Tribunal administrative regional]) and received a favorable response which later was suspended by the Council of State, and now a new appeal has been presented to the Tar and is pending. Given the difficulty of this path, the lawyer also brought a suit against the city council for discrimination, but the judge proposed and promoted a negotiated solution which was agreed at the end of September 2010. From this agreement, a draft for a convention between the city and the association was laid out, but the whole process was then once more mysteriously blocked as of Spring 2011. Meanwhile (in 2010), an accommodation path was devised by the lawyer in order to grant the community a minimal protection of their religious rights. He addressed the local representatives of the state (the prefetto) and the head of national police in Vercelli (the questore) and announced that the Muslim community, currently deprived of a place of worship and of assembly, was going to use its property to that effect as a temporary solution. In other words, the lawyer implicitly invoked state protection against local authorities for the defense of a constitutional right. Unfortunately, after the protest of a neighbor, the mayor saw an opportunity to send in the police and shut the premises just two days before the beginning of Ramadan. Since then, September 2010, the community has quietly gone back to its premises and gathers there for Friday prayers. This is known to the neighbors, to local authorities and the police, and is openly defiant of the city prohibition to use the premises. Nevertheless, so far, more than two years later, the community has been left alone, hence tolerated. It is a modus vivendi which the city prefers to any stable and legal solution that would treat Muslims as persons with rights; it is a way to hold the community under the arbitrary power and the goodwill of the mayor, who persists in denying Muslims the open exercise of their religious freedom, so denying them the status of equals, worthy of respect as citizens and residents, while treating them as inferior people, subject to the carrot-and-stick method according to convenience.

Commenting on this story, the first and I would say spontaneous attitude of local administrations was simply ignorance of Muslims’ existence. This attitude could not be labeled ‘negative tolerance’, though: for negative tolerance to be the case, the ‘tolerator’ withholds his or her original objection to some conduct or practice of the ‘tolerated’, for higher or exclusionary reasons, and, as a consequence, refrains from using his or her power of interference with or suppression of that conduct or practice. The tolerator must therefore consider the tolerated in the first place, but in this case, until 2005 the institutional attitude was ‘pre-tolerant’, given that it was superfluous to object to the community; it was less costly to ignore their existence than to dislike them. In 2005, though, the community addressed a claim to the city council, concerning the permission to use a warehouse as a cultural-religious center. At this point, the council could no more pretend that Assalam did not exist; but it implicitly decided to dismiss the claim. Such dismissal went along with non-interference with the association’s activity in their old place. How should we characterize such overall conduct of dismissal-cum-non-interference by the city government? The problem was probably considered negligible given the invisibility of the group; again it looked superfluous to consider their claim and the claimant as a group worthy of being attended to. Thus non-interference followed from the dismissal of the people and of the problem. Again this is not a proper example of tolerance either; meanwhile the move from ignorance to dismissal worsened the lack of respect to Muslims, because after the claim was presented, it clearly deserved to be attended to and the Muslims to be considered properly. In sum, the institutional forbearance was neither properly tolerant, nor respectful. Actually in a scale going from absolute disrespect to proper recognition respect, ²² this forbearance should be located just a little above physical abuse and repression: for what is more disrespectful than being erased as a person, short of bodily attack?

The Northern League attack of 2007 suddenly made the Muslim religion important despite the group’s size. The city council and the mayor had to take notice of the issue. In a way, the circumstances for toleration were now in place: the mayor was facing a group with a disliked or maybe simply problematic difference, and had the power to deny or to satisfy their claim. After a first moment of intolerance, when the administration, making a selective use of urban regulation, stigmatized the acquisition of the Cappuccini property and forbade its use, giving way to the Northern League protests, and after a second moment of apparent openness, then the city council chose to go on dismissing the issue.

I am not sure that the city’s non-interference could be defined as tolerant since it followed from a willful non-decision instead of being a choice to suspend the reasons of objection to the Muslim community. However, it cannot, as before, be defined as pre-tolerant, when ignorance of the issue could be pretended. Now, local institutions knew of the problem and the institutional attitude could not be said to be unintentional. It was turning a blind eye, expressing lack of consideration of the claimants as worthy to be attended to, whose outcome was de facto non-interference insofar as no obstacles were raised by other parties and citizens. Thus the reasons backing such tolerance were short-term political convenience, based on the discretionary dismissal of a legitimate claim. I would label this conduct as ‘disrespectful tolerance’, which is something less than ‘negative tolerance’, given that the reasons for non-interference are blunt dismissal of the tolerated. If tolerant in this limited sense, the city government’s position was overall intolerant, since it failed to live up to the political principle of toleration embodied in liberal democracy. This mode of minimal and de facto tolerance may be squeezed, with some effort, under the standard notion of toleration. But, within liberal democracy, the standard notion is adequate only for horizontal relations, while it is improper for the vertical dimension of liberal politics. What is improper in the standard notion is the state’s disapproval of some practice, character, or conviction of the powerless party. Within liberal democracy, instead, the state should grant everyone equal liberty, without judging its use unless harm to a third party or a real threat to political order is produced. Hence, political authorities should not evaluate the practices, customs, or traditions of minority groups, but only check that they are harmless. As I have argued before, it may be the case that this political conception of toleration inspired by the neutrality principle is not sufficient to grant equal liberty and equal respect, and should be supplemented by toleration as recognition. In any case, both liberal toleration, patterned after the neutrality principle, and toleration as recognition imply that it is not up to the political authority to make a substantive judgement of the behavior or practice which is the object of a toleration issue. That was instead typical of the toleration policy of the ancien régime, where the original objection was overcome by reasons of convenience of the king or queen, and where tolerance was never grounded on justice and rights, but on discretionary acts of the sovereign. The city administration precisely made use of its de facto power over a powerless minority, choosing to turn a blind eye, instead of considering the minority’s claim in its own right, hence granting and protecting equal rights of liberty among all residents. That is what justice, and within justice the political principle of toleration, would have prescribed. In this respect, even if they did not interfere up to 2007 or even later, and even if their forbearance might be labeled ‘tolerant’, along the horizontal concept of toleration, their behavior has been altogether intolerant, falling well short of their duties as democratic institutions. In a way, instead of behaving according to democratic principles and procedures, they behaved like an absolute power, using tolerance as a discretionary option, denying the ‘tolerated’ the status of equals, and considering them as ‘subjects’ of the authorities. It should be noted that here disrespectful tolerance applies at two different levels: at a first level, disrespectful tolerance means non-interference based on the dismissive attitude of turning a blind eye; at a second level, such institutional attitude and behavior imply a more general meaning, that is, treating people not as citizens with rights, but as subjects of discretionary power. That discretionary power was the case is proved by the police intervention in the community premises in 2010, just two days before Ramadan, considering that before and after Muslims have been left alone in the very same place; this implies that tomorrow they can be stopped again, and that their freedom concerning religious gathering and praying is not granted but contingent on political conveniences. Disrespectful tolerance, being precisely ‘an act of grace’, can be turned into its opposite in the light of any intervening problem, be it a campaign by the Northern League or the neighbor’s protest. Although some of the Muslims are indeed Italian citizens and the others are in any case legal residents, they are defined as immigrants and, as such, not equals. They can be ignored and dismissed, and as a consequence enjoy non-interference, or they can be obstructed in their claims and requests, hence non-tolerated, merely by an uneven and unfair use of certain bureaucratic regulations concerning urban planning, security, association definition. In this respect, the Vercelli administration has shown a whole range of attitudes and behaviors going from (1) ignorance of Muslims, that is, blunt non-recognition; to (2) disrespectful tolerance, implying (a) turning a blind eye, and (b) discretionary non-interference grounded on political convenience; to (3) straightforward intolerance, when, under the pressure of the Northern League, permission to use their premise was denied by means of a pretext; to (4) straightforward discrimination as emerged in the denial of the ASP status to Assalam.

Conclusions

Some general comments now, starting with the meaning of this case and its relevance for the theory of toleration. The Vercelli example may look like an extreme case of unfair treatment of Muslims in the context of pluralistic democracy, and in that respect it may be seen as a peripheral exception, a residual instance of parochial intolerance or of minimal tolerance, of little consequence for the general practice and the theory of toleration within contemporary democracy. Actually, I am not sure that the administration’s attitude and behavior towards the Muslim community are such an exception; I suspect that in provincial contexts, outside the national public attention, such behavior might be more common than expected; and if this is the case, it is politically important to take notice and attend to similar cases. But beside its relevance at the political-pragmatic level, this case is theoretically relevant for it dramatically shows the normative inadequacy of the standard notion of toleration if applied at the level of policy-making. To be sure, the standard notion is a very general model which can be fleshed out in a variety of ways, according, for example, to the reasons provided for the suspension of the original objection, to the reasons qualifying the original objections, to the interpretations of the harm principle, and so on. As a result, we can have a more restricted notion or a larger one, a negative (if based on convenience and prudence) or a positive (if based on respect) conception of tolerance. But what is common in any interpretation of the standard notion is the two-party asymmetrical relationship, and the power of the potential tolerator to withhold or act on his or her original objection, so as to make tolerance either a virtue or a special duty, but not a general duty. ²³ It is this structure of the toleration relationship that prompted Paine to affirm that toleration is ‘not the opposite of intoleration, but it is the counterfeit of intolerance’, and that ‘both are despotism’. The case of Vercelli is precisely meant to illustrate that toleration ought to be of the right sort in order to be the right response to the claims from a minority group for a place of worship. There is no doubt that considering the period from 2004 to 2011, the Muslim community of Vercelli had most of the time been left free to pray in their warehouse, hence had been literally tolerated, and that only on two occasions encountered direct intolerance, that is, interference in their freedom. But it is likewise clear that the attitude and behavior of the administration had been altogether bluntly unfair, and not worth of a democratic institution. For that form of toleration was not the right one: it was disrespectful tolerance. And disrespectful tolerance is a (restrictive) version of the standard notion when one of the party is political authority. I think that it is precisely with reference to the standard notion of toleration that many scholars have doubted that toleration may be a proper principle to face the conflicts arising from contemporary pluralism. If, however, the standard notion is acknowledged as appropriate for social relationships only, and if questions of toleration requiring a political settlement are instead faced by means of a political conception such as toleration as recognition, then toleration may be acknowledged as an important component of liberal-democratic justice.

A final comment on social and political participation. It seems clear that the unfair treatment reserved to the Muslim community by the city and province of Vercelli depends on their weakness as social and political actors: they are dismissed because they can be ignored with impunity by administrators. In order to reverse such a situation and to face the problem according to democratic standards, the double issue of social empowerment and political participation needs to be addressed. In general the lack of any political right even at the local level, which is the condition of immigrants coming from non-EU countries in Italy, greatly worsens the situation of community. Had they been voters, some political parties might have taken up the issue and publicly represented their claim. Thus, in a way, toleration as recognition is an instrument for full inclusion in the polity, but before being in the position to receive it, some political rights can be crucial in order for the immigrants to be taken seriously as social and political agents.