A Multicultural Continuum: A Critique of Will Kymlicka’s Ethnic‐Nation Dichotomy

Abstract

In Multicultural Citizenship, Will Kymlicka deepens the line of argument he developed in Liberalism, Community and Culture that recognition of special rights for cultural minorities is compatible with liberalism. The idea that group based rights conflict with liberalism is of recent origin, Kymlicka claims. Many prominent nineteenth century liberals appealed to liberal values of autonomy and equality to defend special rights for cultural minorities, and Kymlicka wishes to appeal to the same values. Contemporary liberals have often been occupied by a perceived conflict between the individual and the collective that they believe group rights create. Such a conflict occurs, however, according to Kymlicka, only if group rights are defined as the right of a collective to regulate the activity of its members in any way it wishes. Claims for such internal rights are much less often voiced in contemporary politics of difference, however, than claims to what Kymlicka calls “external rights,” the rights of a cultural minority to preserve its culture and way of life as against the encroachment or domination of a majority culture. Groupbased external rights do not conflict with the pursuit of individual autonomy. On the contrary, Kymlicka’s central claim is that individual autonomy requires membership in and maintenance of a culture of one’s own, because the choices autonomy entails require a meaningful context that only a culture provides. While it is possible for individuals to leave one culture and acquire another, and some people choose to do so, the process is usually difficult and painful, so no one should be forced to do so because his or her culture has been suppressed or allowed to atrophy. Contrary to the view held by many liberals, moreover, the liberal state cannot be neutral among cultures. A state must conduct business in some language or languages, and it is almost always aligned in many other ways with the majority culture in its jurisdiction. Thus justice requires that public policy actively compensate for the lack of recognition or the disadvantage that some members of the polity suffer because of their cultural membership by according cultural minorities special rights such as language rights, religious-based exemptions, representation rights and rights of self-government. In Multicultural Citizenship, Kymlicka takes an important new step in a liberal theory of group-based rights. We should distinguish types of cultural minorities,