Enlightened Understanding, Empowerment and Leadership - Three Ways to Enhance Multiculturalism: Comment on Will Kymlicka’s article: “Solidarity in Diverse Societies”

Abstract

© ( y c In my comment on Will Kymlicka’s (2015), very stimulating essay, I would like to argue that his basic scheme is sound, but incomplete and that his proposal for the progressive forces falls short in several respects. To begin with, Will Kymlicka stresses, in my view correctly, that the welfare state is built on national solidarity. The idea of the ‘people’s home’ (folkshemmet) of the Swedish Social Democrats, to which he refers in his text, serves as a perfect illustration of this point. Even the ‘universalistic’ Nordic welfare state intends to be universalistic within the boundaries of the national political community only. The welfare state is, as Kymlicka underlines, generally tied to an image of social membership, not to universal humanitarianism. In this respect it is important to keep in mind, as Kymlicka also argues, that the national community is conceived in egalitarian terms: the two fundamental principles of the nation – popular sovereignty and equality of all members of the national community – are at the same time the two core principles of democracy (Greenfeld, 1992: 10). The idea of democracy was, in Greenfeld’s nice formulation, contained in the idea of the nation like the butterfly in the chrysalis. (Kymlicka, 2015). Accordingly, Kymlicka (2015), suggests that appeals to national solidarity constitute a resource for progressives. One might add that appeals to national solidarity fall on particularly open ears among the poor, who identify more with the nation than the rich, because they have less to be proud of in their immediate social group compared to the rich and because they are more similar to the average member of their nation (Shayo, 2009: 162). However, national solidarity is an ambiguous resource for progressives – not only, as Kymlicka argues, because of its tendency to exclude groups not perceived as belonging to the nation, but also for yet another reason: as Shayo (2009) shows, people with a strong national identity are less supportive of redistribution in general, and, at the macro-level, the most nationalistic countries are known for being those with the least redistributive welfare states (and vice versa). The Swedes may again serve as an illustrative example. They are comparatively (compared to the Anglo-Saxon settler states, in particular) little nationalistic – class identities were relatively strong compared to national identities in Sweden – and, accordingly, Sweden did