‘Immigrants Don't Ask for Self-government’: How Multiculturalism is (De)legitimized in Multinational Societies

Abstract

In the 1990s, Canadian scholarship produced internationally accepted differentiations between minority nations and immigration-induced ethnic minorities. Charles Taylor's concept of Québécois and First Nations' ‘deep diversity’ (versus other Canadians' ‘first level’ membership in the polity) and Will Kymlicka's liberal theory of ‘multicultural citizenship’ are just two of the most common examples. However, in these theories, as well as in much of the subsequent scholarship, the relations between different types of national and ethnic struggles for rights and recognition have remained unexplored. Drawing on the results of a study on Central Canadian English-language newspaper discourses during the 1990s, this article examines whether and how images of Québécois minority nationalism affect legitimizations and delegitimizations of multiculturalism in the public space. The analysis thereby challenges the widespread assumption that the accommodation of historically grown national minorities and ethnic groups of more recent immigrant origin happens in hermetically closed ‘silos’ with little interaction. On the contrary, the article demonstrates that relations between different categories of groups and diversity accommodations are both theoretically plausible and empirically traceable.