Ethnicities

The article introduces a special issue on “Rethinking Liberal Multiculturalism: Foundations, Practices and Methodologies.” The contributions presented in this special issue were discussed during the conference « Multicultural Citizenship 25 Years Later », held in Paris in November 2021. Their aim is to take stock of the legacy of Kymlicka’s contribution and to highlight new developments in theories of liberal multiculturalism and minority rights. The contributions do not purport to challenge the legitimacy of theories of multiculturalism and minority rights, they rather aim at deepening our understanding of the foundations of liberal multiculturalism and of its practical implementation, sensitive to social scientific dynamics of diverse societies. Without abandoning the general idea that cultural minorities should be granted special minority rights, the essays presented raise new questions about three dimensions central to liberal multiculturalism: its normative foundations, its practical categories of minorities or groups, and its fact-sensitive methodology. Taken together they shed light on the renewed variety of theories of liberal multiculturalism highlighting their complexity and internal disagreements. To introduce these articles, the article first draws a brief historical overview of the debates on multiculturalism since the 1990s (section 1). It then highlights the distinctive aspects of Kymlicka’s contribution (section 2) and identifies recent research trends (section 3). Doing so, it explains how the articles gathered here both expand on those distinctive aspects and explore those new research avenues. The section 4 summarizes the contributions.

Will Kymlicka has grounded group-differentiated rights for nationalcultural groups in the values of freedom and autonomy. An alternative moral foundation for such rights is dignity. In this contribution I contrast the freedom and the dignity case for multiculturalism in terms of their intellectual history and their contemporary justificatory potential. I show that the freedom grounding stands in the Herderian-romantic tradition, whereas the dignity case is older and hearkens back to the humanist claim for vernacular development. In terms of justification, I argue that, while freedom and dignity can independently justify group-differentiated rights, a theory that includes both justificatory grounds is stronger because these grounds can strengthen each other: firstly, dignitarian multiculturalism can help the freedom-based theory in withstanding the assimilationist claim that any cultural context – and not only people’s own culture – may foster freedom; while, secondly, the freedom case strengthens the dignity case by providing absolute ammunition to ward off the objection that dignity claims are normatively weak because they rely on subjective feelings.

Contemporary liberal states must provide an answer to the “question of cultural diversity”, requiring a principled way to determine which minority cultural practices a state must accommodate and support. (Liberal egalitarian) multiculturalism answers this question neatly by creating a dichotomy between national minorities and ethnic minorities (the national/ethnic “dichotomy”). Where national minorities are entitled to extensive and far-reaching cultural rights, ethnic minorities are entitled to significantly fewer cultural rights and accommodations. This dichotomy is enacted through a distributive logic that allocates cultural rights to achieve equal individual autonomy. But the dichotomy is also influenced by the ways these groups were incorporated into the state. Their modes of incorporation are different and, thus, they have different requirements to achieve equally autonomous lives.

Critics have challenged multiculturalism by questioning this dichotomy. They have suggested that the dichotomy does not adequately capture differences in kinds of minority groups and their entitlements. This paper defends the dichotomy by offering a supplementary principle to liberal egalitarian multiculturalism: the reparative multicultural principle. This principle allocates cultural rights as part of reparative entitlements for historical and ongoing injustices committed against minority groups. Supplementing multiculturalism in this way more accurately captures the idea of the historical mode of incorporation that inspires the dichotomy and can help resolve some the objections to multiculturalism.

Multicultural citizenship has provided a terrific liberal philosophical framework to justify respect for cultural minorities and their fair accommodation in contexts marked by cultural disadvantages. However, the importance it provides to societal culture in order to fulfil individual's autonomy entails a metaphysical aspect (i.e societal culture as an instrumental condition for autonomy) which calls into question the full inclusion of all individuals in multicultural societies. This paper maintains that the conception of citizenship in Multicultural citizenship should be independent of metaphysical assumptions and strengthen in its political underpinnings. Kymlicka's view on citizenship is based on liberal rights and the constitutional recognition of minorities. It does not address the process of citizenship, and how a conception of performative citizenship can be conceived to address claims for recognition in ways that produce legitimate, inclusive and inter-subjectively shared outcomes, especially with regard to an inclusive national identity. Multicultural citizenship provides principled legal modalities to accommodate multicultural societies, but does not clearly address the political modalities supporting such accommodations. It thus entails a danger of a de-politicization of citizenship; and a de-politicized citizenship, is not citizenship anymore. The article tasks to figuring out the political and democratic conditions allowing accommodations to be endorsed by all affected individuals in the name of a common and justified conception of democratic citizenship and inclusive conception of the nation.

The article assesses Will Kymlicka’s targeted approach to cultural rights by focusing on the case of the Roma minority in Europe. In Multicultural Odysseys, Kymlicka praises the European management of Roma issues as a promising way to overcome the flaws of the generic approach to cultural rights that dominates European minority rights otherwise. The article intends to evaluate Kymlicka’s statement in two ways : it combines an empirical study of the arguments that justify the institutional targeting of the Roma in the Council of Europe and a normative analysis about the specific type of transnational minority that these populations seem to form. The empirical part of the paper casts doubts on the assumption that cultural recognition matters primarily in the case of the Roma. The normative part of the paper argues that the concept of transnational minority gains more normative consistency when it is understood in terms of political mobilization against racial oppression than when it is justified in terms of cultural recognition. It concludes that Iris M. Young’s “politics of difference” provides a fruitful normative approach to make sense of the Roma’s claims of justice in Europe and that it is as such likely to refine and possibly complete the targeted to approach to multiculturalism.

This paper examines how the pandemic emergency as a global challenge – the first of its kind since WWII – has activated what I call a ‘pandemic nationalism’ that was simultaneously both inclusionary and exclusionary. On one hand, the national community was re-defined in relation to their common fate (of facing the pandemic together because residing in the same territory) extending hence the boundaries of membership to temporary residents or those with precarious status. On the other hand, it became increasingly closed towards the exterior enhancing what has been labelled ‘vaccine nationalism’ and a sense of being in competition with other nations on a common, global public good (notably vaccines and cures addressing the virus). Closures and exclusions arose also internally against those minorities that were associated with the ‘external threat’ notably people of east Asian origin. At the face of these contradictory developments, the question arises whether we could consider the Covid-19 pandemic as a turning point that signals a new phase of development of nationalism. Such nationalism is meant to respond to the increasing challenges of globalisation by incorporating those who serve the community while Othering those who are perceived to threaten its well-being.

This paper intends first to try and interpret the evolution of attitudes towards solidarity in France in the light of Kymlicka’s analysis of membership-based deservingness judgment. It suggests that the shift in majoritarian attitudes towards minority groups (racism, xenophobia, social distrust) might be linked to the increase of inequalities and social precarity, and to the reinforcement of “elective solidarities.” The article’s second aim is to show, regarding immigrant minorities, in what sense an ethics of provenance can, as a moral resource, contribute to the reconnection of distributive units.