ON KYMLICKAS MULTICULTURAL ODYSSEYS

Chaim Gans*
Will Kymlickas MULTICULTRAL ODYSSEYS is an impressive book. Kymlicka is the major theoretician of liberal multiculturalism. In the last twenty years, he has been deeply involved in attempts to diffuse multiculturalism around the world. In this book, he provides us with a systematic and critical account of these attempts. He tries to explain why national minorities and indigenous peoples multiculturalism has been successful in Western Europe and in the Americas, and why it failed in many post-Communist and post-colonial parts of the world. This account is of outmost importance for any reective attempt to continue what Kymlicka calls the diffusion of liberal multiculturalism in the world. The book is not a book in normative philosophy. It is mainly an attempt to provide political and social explanations for the successes and the failures of liberal multiculturalism in different parts of the world. As Kymlicka notes in the rst sentence of the book (in the Acknowledgements), much of the territory which the book covers is on issues that have little bearing to his training as a political philosopher. I should say that this also applies to the present writer. However, although the arguments and the topics of Kymlickas book are not really philosophical, the basic concepts and distinctions along which Kymlickas discussion is conducted presuppose his previous philosophical work. In this comment, I will mainly be concerned with the appropriateness of this analytic framework for the subject matter of the current book. As he did in his previous books, he conceives of liberal multiculturalism as pertaining to minority rights. In his previous work, he presented a typology of these rights, which he divided into three different types: rights to self-government, representation rights, and poly-ethnic rights. Examples of poly-ethnic rights are the exemption of Sikhs from motorcycle helmet laws, and exemptions of Muslim girls in France from school dress-codes to allow them to wear headscarves. These rights are intended to enable groups of common national origin to express their original culture while integrating into another culture and living lives within that other culture, at least

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Professor, The Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University.

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politically and economically. Since the present book discusses the way international law and practice deal with multiculturalism, and since the category of poly-ethnic rights is not acknowledged as such in international law and practice, he uses the terminology of generic and targeted cultural rights instead. However, it is clear that what he means by generic rights is mainly poly-ethnic rights, which are soft cultural rights that are mainly intended for immigrant minorities. Regarding the targeted rights, he is speaks of them quite explicitly in the context of the self-government and representation rights of national and indigenous minorities. The current book does not only presuppose Kymlickas previous typology, but also leaves out what this typology has omitted: rights to cultural preservation. Although Kymlicka has always and still does refer to them in his writings, they were absent from his typology and are marginalized in his discussions. Cultural preservation rights are mainly intended to allow groups to preserve their status as distinct societies. Their goal is the opposite of what polyethnic rights are intended to allow. Whereas poly-ethnic rights are intended to allow their holders to express their identity within a particular territory where the public sphere and the economic and political life are conducted mainly within the framework of a different culture, rights to cultural preservation are intended to establish a given culture as the main culture within which political and economic life is to be conducted in a given territory.1 In my opinion, what I have said so far produces two (interconnected) types of doubt regarding the analytic framework of Kymlickas book. One is whether an attempt to understand the process of diffusing liberal multiculturalism ought at all be conducted in terms of minority rights. The discourse of minority rights presupposes a sort of qualitative distinction between majorities and minorities. In my opinion, it prejudges many difcult questions regarding multiculturalism, its normative aspects, as well as its politics. For example, it creates the misleading impression that majorities do not have the interests justifying cultural rights for minorities, or that their similar interests are not and need not be protected by rights. This impression is misleading, since the similar cultural interests of minorities are usually protected by the international right to self-determination. And when this right is not sufcient, the question arises whether majorities also should be protected by domestic cultural rights (such as the language rights of the Francophone majority in Quebec, or the immigration rights which Jews

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1 See CHAIM GANS, THE LIMITS OF NATIONALISM (2003), at chapter 2, and Chaim Gans, Individuals Interest in the Preservation of Their Culture: Its Meaning, Justication and Implications, 1 JOURNAL OF LAW AND ETHICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 6-16 (2007), available at http://www.bepress.com/lehr/vol1/iss1/art2 (last visited Nov. 7, 2010).

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enjoy in Israel). It therefore seems to me that it is better to conduct the discussion of multiculturalism mainly in terms of ethno-national rights and cultural rights ,while attributing only secondary importance to the distinction between majorities and minorities. The second hesitation implicit in my comment regarding the way in which the present book presupposes Kymlickas previous work pertains to his omission of cultural preservation rights from his typology of cultural rights. The present point is of course connected with the previous one: cultural preservation rights cannot just be minority rights. There are cases in which cultural preservation rights should also be granted to majorities in states. To these two doubts regarding the analytic framework of the book, I would like to add another two. The book discusses the success of international organizations in diffusing liberal multiculturalism, mainly in the non-Western world. It highlights the interest which the international community has in this diffusion. It emphasizes the fact that this interest is accompanied by newly established international opinion, according to which the way states treat their minorities is not merely their internal business, and that the norms concerning the treatment of minorities should act as constraints on the sovereignty of states. However, the analytic infrastructure of the book does not embody these matters, for it accepts and presupposes the view that the issue of minority rights belongs to the realm of intra-statist justice. The book does not discuss it as a question of global justice among ethno-national or ethno-cultural groups. This point adds to the previous point I made, namely, that the book discusses the cultural rights of minorities and not cultural rights in general, whether those of minorities or of majorities. At least philosophically and normatively, and also from the viewpoint of political explanation, I believe that it could be benecial not to discuss these as issues of intra-statist justice but rather as pertaining to global justice. I will give some examples later. Of course, it is important to note here that since the main subjects of the book are not philosophical-normative but rather political-explanatory their analysis must be conducted within the framework of current reality, in which nation states have most of the political authority in the world. However, it must be remembered that at least some of Kymlickas explanations for the failure of liberal multiculturalism in the post-Communist and the post-colonial worlds resort to relationships and histories which are neither inter-statist nor intra-statist. They are histories and relationships between cultural groups in the world, and therefore are global in a non-inter-statist manner. In fact, most of his explanations are related to histories of this type. He explains the success of national and indigenous minorities multiculturalism in the West by resorting, among other things, to Western consciousness regarding the gross historical

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injustices committed by Western nations against their national minorities [189]. He explains the failure of national-minorities multiculturalism in the post-Communist and post-colonial worlds by resorting to the historic injustices committed by the ethno-cultural groups to which state-minorities belong against the majorities in their states when these majorities were minorities in former larger states. For example, he refers to the mistreatment of the Slovaks by the Hungarians within the AustroHungarian Empire as part of the explanation for the Slovaks current attitude towards their Hungarian minority [186]. And Kymlicka mentions the cooperation of the Tamil Sri Lankans with British Colonialism as part of or perhaps the main explanation for the failure of the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka to grant national minority rights to the Tamils there [262]. In other words global relationships and histories of relationships among ethno-cultural groups in the world rather than histories of interstatist relationships form a major part in the explanations of the successes and failures to diffuse multiculturalism. This, I believe, strengthens the case for dealing with the questions the book addresses not as questions of intra-statist justice towards minorities but rather as a question of global justice among ethno-cultural groups, whether they are minorities or majorities within existing states. Of course, discussing these issues from a viewpoint of global justice must assist us in reaching conclusions relevant to intra-state relationships among groups. However, these conclusions must be drawn from a global perspective. The examples I quoted from Kymlicka demonstrate that the global justice perspective from which the rights of cultural groups must be analyzed is not merely that of the just global distribution of cultural rights, but also the perspective of historic global justice. The question of what rights Slovakia as primarily realizing the selfdetermination of the Slovaks should grant to its Hungarian minority must take into account not only the fact that the Hungarian right to self-determination is primarily realized by Hungary, but should also take into account the need to alleviate the historical tensions between the two groups by providing assurances to which the state of Hungary must commit itself. To sum up: I believe that the analytical framework within which the diffusion of liberal multiculturalism should be discussed must be one in which the issue is conceived of not as a matter of intra-statist distributive justice concerning minority rights but rather as a matter of distributive and corrective global justice concerning the ethno-cultural rights of ethno-cultural groups in general. I think that this framework might be benecial both for the normative philosophy of the matter and for the understanding of its political intricacies. I want to end by demonstrating this claim with two examples.

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One of Kymlickas main political explanations for the successes and failures of multiculturalism is the security problem, namely, the claim majorities in postCommunist and post-colonial states make regarding security threats posed to their countries by the loyalties of their minorities to foreign countries [e.g. at pg. 180196, 255-257], as a justication for their refusal to grant them some types of cultural rights. I have two reservations concerning this explanation. First, in my opinion, this explanation seems plausible only for some aspects of the refusals of post-Communist and post-colonial states to grant their minorities cultural rights. I have made this point elsewhere with regard to Israel.2 The security of the state as embodying the right of the Jews to self-determination requires Jewish hegemony in security matters, and perhaps the preservation of a Jewish majority by means that are compatible with human rights. However, it does not justify a refusal to grant the Arab minority any collective rights whatsoever, such as autonomy in education, or representation in the public domain and in the symbols of the state. Denying the Israeli Arabs the right to be represented in the symbols of the state and in the public domain could hardly be considered a form of self-defense and usually aggravates the situation, which ultimately creates more security concerns. My impression is that security risks are more often an effect of the refusal of the states to grant rights to minorities than a serious explanation of the cause for this refusal. Security problems are caused by one or both of the parties in a conict wanting more than the parties deserve. And if we think that a minority ought to be granted a right which in fact it is not granted, than we must blame the party which does not allow this right to be implemented for the creation of the security problem. Hence, if Kymlicka believes that a majority in the post-Communist or post-colonial countries should grant a certain minority right to its minority, he cannot resort to security considerations in order to explain the refusal to grant this right. My belief is that the real explanation for the lack of graciousness of the majorities in the post-Communist and post-colonial states regarding granting the appropriate cultural rights to national minorities is greed and the instinctive unwillingness of most individuals and groups of individuals to share something they possess with others (especially if these other people are strangers), even when justice mandates redistribution. In the case of these nations, this is also fed by the past injustices inicted on them by their minorities or the groups to which these minorities belong ethnically, or the colonial powers with whom the minorities associated in the past. On the other hand, the readiness of the majorities in the West to grant collective rights

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CHAIM GANS, THE JUSTICE OF ZIONISM (2008), at chapter 5.

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to its minorities, especially the indigenous minorities, stems from the fact that there is not much left to dispossess them off, and from the guilt and shame which these majorities justly feel towards their dispossessed minorities. Kymlicka reports some of the facts which I have just mentioned, but then grants an exaggerated role to security concerns in explaining the failure of national minorities multiculturalism in the postCommunist and post-colonial worlds [180-196, 257-259]. I argued that the discussion of the diffusion of multiculturalism could benet if it would be conducted from the perspective of global distributive and corrective justice regarding the collective rights of ethno-cultural groups, and that this holds for the political explanations of the failures and successes of this diffusion, as well as for the normative philosophy of multiculturalism. My observations regarding the security explanation were meant to provide an example for the advantages of the global justice perspective in providing better political explanations. I want to end my comment with an example of the advantages of the global perspective in providing better normative accounts for minority rights than the accounts which can be provided from the intra-statist perspective. The example I want to use is the rights of immigrant minorities. Kymlicka does not dedicate much space in the present book to immigrants. The book does not contain much information on this type of minority relative to the information it contains on the other types of minorities. I assume there are not many immigrants in the post-Communist world, but that there are masses of them in the post-colonial world, mainly refugees. What the book does tell us is that the conditions of immigrant minorities in the New World countries whose ethos consists in the fact that they are immigration countries, is much better than their conditions in the old world West, namely, in Western Europe. The countries there are immigration countries in practice, but not in their ethos. Kymlicka does not discuss the question why immigrant multiculturalism has had more success in the New World countries relative to the old one. His neglect of this issue can in my opinion be linked to a point deserving criticism in his previous books namely the justication he gives there for the meager cultural rights of immigrant minorities. It consisted mainly in the claim that their act of immigration implies consent to relinquish self-government under their original culture. Many have pointed out that this does not apply to all immigrants, especially not to second generation immigrants. My opinion is that the main reason for granting immigrants lesser cultural right relative to homeland minorities stems from considerations of global justice with regard to the distribution of cultural rights. Since the ethno-cultural groups to which immigrants belong usually enjoy self-government rights in their countries of origin, and since there is not enough space in the world to grant every sub-group of every group rights which would enable its members to

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live their lives within their original culture wherever it resides, immigrant minorities should get lesser cultural rights than homeland minorities. This point has much more force with relation to the old, European, West, than with regard to the New World countries, whose ethos is the ethos of immigration and their culture is an immigrant culture. If I am right, then this could provide an explanation for the backlash in the status of immigrants in Western European countries. Such a backlash has not occurred in the New World West. Again, a lacunae in Kymlickas present book reects a lacunae in a previous book. And the two gaps stem from the omission of the global justice perspective as an analytical framework for the discussion of cultural rights. I therefore return to my main point: the discussion of liberal multiculturalism and its diffusion would benet a lot if it would be conducted not as an intra-statist matter pertaining only to minority rights, but as a global matter concerning ethnocultural and ethno-national groups in the world as a whole. What we need is a theory of global justice relating to the distribution of cultural rights, which would then be modied according to considerations of corrective justice in all those cases where the appropriate balance of cultural rights of the different ethno-cultural groups has been violated in the course of the last few centuries. I think this would help us diffuse liberal multiculturalism more successfully.

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