Group-differentiated Cultural Rights, Constitutionalism and Feminism

Abstract

We are currently witnessing struggles for and against the recognition of collective, group-differentiated, minority or special rights and ‘cultural defences’ for cultural and religious minorities, new immigrants and national minorities in the so-far predominantly liberal democratic societies. These struggles are occurring not only between the movements that have been making demands for such rights and their political opponents but also in intellectual circles. Demands for recognizing collective or group-differentiated cultural rights have now become a matter of heated contention in both liberal and left circles associated with Critical Theory with some of the strongest objections coming from feminist scholars. Following the celebrated defences of group-differentiated cultural rights in the name of virtues like cultural recognition, political equality and the just negotiation of cultural pluralism by authors like Will Kymlicka (1995), Iris Young (1990), James Tully (1995) and Charles Taylor (1994), feminist scholars Seyla Benhabib (1998, 1999) and Susan Moller Okin (1994, 1997, 1998, 1999a, b)1 have expressed serious worries about the dangers, especially for women and children, of extending group-differentiated rights to cultural minorities. The primary worry is that multicultural politics pursued in legal and constitutional terms as collective or group-differentiated rights for cultural minorities threaten individual rights — in particular the autonomy and equality rights of women. At the same time, Okin and Benhabib gesture in the direction of a promising conceptualization of group-differentiated cultural rights, one that I will call procedural, that may be capable of avoiding these dangers.