Liberalism is committed to
protecting the freedom to choose, question and revise one’s own conception of
the good life. For this reason, liberalism defends (among many other things)
freedom of conscience, expression and association, as well as mandatory,
universal education. In Multicultural Citizenship, Will Kymlicka argues
that the state is also obligated to ensure that the lifestyle options which
are made available to an individual so that she can choose, question and
revise her own conception of the good life, are meaningful to her by being
understood by her in relation to her own "societal culture". He concludes,
therefore, that in a multination liberal state, self-government rights should
be granted to national minorities in order to guarantee that their members
will have access to their own societal culture. However, in the case of an
illiberal national minority, granting them the rights necessary to preserve
their own societal culture will result in violations of the individual rights
of their members. This is a serious problem for liberalism. Kymlicka proposes
that we must accept such violations because the liberal state is not entitled
to impose liberal values and practices on to a national minority. He suggests
that the state should promote the voluntary liberalisation of the illiberal
culture from within, and is only justified in using force in order to prevent
severe violations of individual rights. In this paper I will argue that
Kymlicka’s approach is lacking in some areas. I will argue that a multination
liberal state should not grant self-government rights to a previously
non-self-governing illiberal national minority unless the individual rights of
the members of the minority can be protected effectively by an outside
authority, such as the United Nations. However, this does not mean that the
liberal state is entitled to revoke previously granted self-government rights
in order to impose liberal values. In dealing with currently self-governing
illiberal national minorities, a slight modification of Kymlicka’s approach
should be followed.
I will begin by examining why
it is that we need our lifestyle options to be meaningful, and how that is
accomplished by access to our own societal culture. Kymlicka defines a
"societal culture" as "a culture which provides its members with meaningful
ways of life across the full range of human activities including social,
educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both
public and private spheres."11
In order to understand the value of our lifestyle options being meaningful we
must recognise a fact about human nature in the modern world. This fact is
that most of us are deeply bound to our own societal culture. Kymlicka writes,
"I suspect that the causes of [people’s bond to their own culture] lie deep in
the human condition, tied up with the way humans as cultural creatures need to
make sense of their world, ... this bond does seem to be a fact."22
Membership in the culture within which we were raised or into which we chose
to integrate has special importance and value to us. This is because in the
modern world, cultural membership is the most common basis for
self-identification. This relation between cultural membership and
self-determination is highly beneficial to human well-being because it
provides a secure sense of identity that is based not on our accomplishments,
but on our belonging to a culture. Kymlicka writes, "[N]ational identity is
particularly suited to serving as the ‘primary foci of identification’,
because it ... provides an ‘anchor for [people’s] self-identification and the
safety of effortless secure belonging’3."44
In order to choose our own conception of the good life, we must form beliefs
about the value of social practices, and the only meaningful way to do this is
to come to know whether and why our culture places value in them. "[T]o have a
belief about the value of a practice is, in the first instance, a matter of
understanding the meanings attached to it by our culture."55
This is what Kymlicka calls a "context of choice". He uses the phrase "in the
first instance", because we must begin with what our culture hands down to us,
and then evaluate those beliefs and make our own choices with that context in
mind. When we use the context of choice provided by our own societal culture
to evaluate the lifestyle options provided by that same culture, we make our
options and our choices meaningful, because our own societal culture is itself
meaningful to us due to its relation to our self-identity. Therefore, a
multination liberal state must preserve the societal culture of a national
minority within its borders in order to insure that the members of that
minority have meaningful lifestyle options.
Now, what rights do national
minorities need to preserve their own societal culture? They need to be able
to provide their members with a full range of meaningful lifestyle options,
and their "shared vocabulary of tradition and convention,"66
which communicates their shared history and language, must be embodied in the
social institutions and practices, so that the culture is, as Kymlicka writes,
"institutionally complete."77
This requires extensive, if not complete, self-government rights, and usually
considerable subsidies from the liberal state as well.
The problem is that granting
such rights to an illiberal national minority will result in violations of the
individual rights of its members. Yet their self-identity is presumably just
as deeply connected to their cultural membership as anyone else, and thus
their lifestyle options will not be meaningful without access to their
societal culture. Kymlicka writes that we must grant self-government rights to
illiberal national minorities and must accept that some rights violations will
result. "In cases where the national minority is illiberal, ... the majority
will be unable to prevent the violation of individual rights within the
minority community. Liberals in the majority group have to learn to live with
this, just as they must live with illiberal laws in other countries."88
The liberal state is not entitled to impose its liberal views and practices on
to an illiberal national minority. In these cases, we will fulfil our
obligation to liberal values by non-coercively promoting the liberalisation of
that illiberal national minority. This is done primarily by lending support to
liberal reformers within the culture. This is because past experience has
shown that liberalisation is only effective when it originates from within a
nation and is voluntarily adopted by the members of that nation. The liberal
state may provide incentives to voluntary liberalisation, such as economically
beneficial political agreements, but that is the limit of the actions by which
the liberal state may seek to liberalise an illiberal national minority within
its borders. The relations between majority and minority cultures should take
the form of rational, non-violent negotiations by which they find a way to
coexist peacefully. The use of force by the liberal state is only justified to
prevent severe violations of individual rights, such as "slavery or genocide
or mass torture and expulsions."99
Basically, Kymlicka proposes that we treat national minorities within our
borders very much like foreign nations.
I disagree with Kymlicka’s
approach. For the purposes of deciding how to deal with illiberal national
minorities, we need to distinguish between two distinct scenarios: (i) there
exists an illiberal national minority that at present does not have
self-government rights and whose members possess the same rights of
citizenship as the members of the majority; or (ii) there exists an illiberal
national minority that at present does have previously acquired
self-government rights and whose members possess group-differentiated
citizenship that places them under the authority of the governing body of
their community rather than that of the majority, and which grants them a
different, presumably restricted, set of individual rights compared to the
individual rights of the members of the majority.
In the first scenario, the
members of the national minority have a legitimate claim to protection by the
state of the individual rights granted to them by their equal citizenship. For
example, if a hypothetical first nations band in Canada, who would deny their
women the right to vote or hold political office and their girls to have equal
educational opportunities as their boys, were to seek self-government rights,
the Canadian government should deny them self-government rights, because it
has an obligation to the women and girls of that band to protect their
individual rights. It is unjustifiable to restrict the lifestyle options of
the women and girls, in order to provide meaningfulness to the options of the
rest of the members of that band. Liberalism must place the provision of a
wide variety of options over the attachment of meaningfulness to those
options, because individual autonomy without culture is better than culture
without individual autonomy. A possible objection to this is that the
authority which the Canadian government has over that hypothetical band could
be seen as illegitimate since it stems from conquest, and thus the members of
the band should never have been granted equal citizenship because they should
not have come under the authority of the majority culture in the first place.
This is a powerful objection and I admit that the legitimacy of the authority
of the majority culture ought to be closely scrutinised in every situation
where there exists a non-self-governing national minority, but the fact of the
matter is that the members of the national minority in the first scenario do
have equal citizenship rights which cannot be revoked without consent. The
granting of self-government rights would result in a modification of the terms
of citizenship of the members of the national minority in such a way that it
would restrict the ability of the liberal state to protect for them the rights
that are granted equally to them and to members of the majority culture by
virtue of their equal citizenship. Liberalism demands that the state recognise
and fulfil its obligation to protect those rights, even if this means denying
access to the national minority’s societal culture. A more amicable solution
would be to set out certain conditions that the illiberal national minority
must meet to before gaining self-government rights, such as becoming a
signatory to the universal declaration of human rights and accepting the
authority of the United Nations as a third party protector of those rights for
its members. This is the most defensible approach for a liberal theory based
on the value of individual autonomy.
In the second scenario, the
self-government rights of the illiberal national minority mean that the
minority’s governing body is the legitimate authority over its members and is
the protector of their rights. Since they do not have citizenship rights equal
to the members of the majority culture they do not have the same claim as the
members of the national minority in the first scenario to protection of their
individual rights by the liberal state. For this reason, the liberal state is
neither entitled nor strongly obligated to protect their individual rights,
and it cannot impose its liberal values and practices on to the illiberal
national minority. In this situation, Kymlicka’s approach of promoting
liberalisation from within and only coercively interfering to prevent severe
violations of individual rights is appropriate, except for one point. It is
true that just as a liberal state does not have a strong obligation nor the
authority to protect the individual rights of the members of foreign nations,
similarly it does not have a strong obligation or the authority to protect the
individual rights of the members of an illiberal national minority within its
borders. However, there is a difference that Kymlicka does not acknowledge
between foreign nations and an illiberal national minority, which is that the
liberal state usually has substantially more ability and opportunity to
protect the individual rights of the members of an illiberal national minority
than of foreign nations. Therefore, to the extent that every individual is
morally responsible for defending the rights of every other individual when
the opportunity presents itself, the liberal state is obligated to make
efforts to protect members of the illiberal national minorities, whenever
possible. This obligation would entail, depending on the circumstances, such
actions as: protecting by force the freedom to leave the national minority
community, insuring the awareness of that freedom and of the lifestyle options
available in the majority culture, protecting by force liberal reformers
within the national minority from unjust prosecution or repression, and
monitoring and reporting human rights violations to the United Nations.
Although these action do not protect all, or even most, of the individual
rights of the members of the illiberal national minority, they are, in my
opinion, reasonable expectations for a liberal state in the way it should
treat neighbouring fellow human beings with whom they share mutual
interdependence and at least some degree of the bonds of citizenship.
Having access to one’s own
societal culture is essential for a healthy self-identity and for providing
meaningfulness to one’s lifestyle options. It is not enough for a liberal
state to provide freedom of choice without preserving the societal cultures of
its national minorities. For this reason, a liberal state should grant
self-government rights to national minorities and subsidise programs to
preserve their societal culture. However, in the case of illiberal national
minorities, we must differentiate between currently non-self-governing
illiberal national minorities and currently self-governing national
minorities. With the former, self-government rights should be denied in order
to fulfil the obligation to protect the individual rights of the members of
the minority, which is an obligation that stems from their equal citizenship.
Liberalism must provide options before making them meaningful. Self-government
rights ought only be granted if certain conditions are met which guarantee
that the individual rights of all the members of the national minority will be
protected, either by the community’s governing body itself or by a outside
party such as the United Nations. In the case of currently self-governing
illiberal national minorities, Kymlicka’s approach is appropriate as far as it
goes. The liberal state should non-coercively promote the voluntary
liberalisation of illiberal national minorities from within and should use
force to prevent severe violations of individual rights. But due to the
usually high degree of opportunity and capacity of a liberal state to protect
the rights of the members of an illiberal national minority, it has a special
obligation, which does not apply to foreign nations, to take further steps, as
outlined above, to their neighbouring fellow human beings.
Endnotes
1 Will Kymlicka (1995), Multicultural
Citizenship, (Clarendon Press, Oxford). p.76 [Back]
2 Ibid., p.90 [Back]
3 Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz (1990),
‘National Self-Determination’, Jounal of Philosophy, 87/9: 439-61.
p.447-9 [Back]
4 Supra, note 1, p.89 [Back]
5 Ibid., p.83 [Back]
6 Ronald Dworkin (1985), A Matter of
Principle, (Harvard University Press, London). p.231 [Back]
7 Supra, note 1, p.78 [Back]
8 Ibid., p.168 [Back]
9 Ibid., p.169 [Back]
Bibliography
Ronald Dworkin (1985), A Matter of Principle, (Harvard University
Press, London).
Will Kymlicka (1995), Multicultural Citizenship, (Clarendon Press,
Oxford).
Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz (1990), ‘National Self-Determination’,
Jounal of Philosophy, 87/9:
439-61.