On Patten’s Theory of Minority Rights

Abstract

Theorists discussing cultural rights, whether they approve of them, or reject them, do so usually from an intra-statist perspective. Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship and his books following it, is a prominent example. Brian Barry’s Culture and Equality is another example. Patten’s new book follows this line. However, unlike his predecessors just mentioned, whose intra-statist perspective seems to be a matter of the mere habit of thinking about political morality as an intra-statist matter, Patten’s intra-statist approach seems to be a principled implication entailed by his arguments. He purports in his book, to “[…] denationalize the nature and content of minority cultural rights”. 1 He does so by conceiving of them as rights which national minorities have by virtue of being minorities within states rather than national groups in the world. The point of his account, as he states in the introduction to his book, is not cultural preservation. 2 Rather, it seems to be states’ neutrality toward their citizens’ conceptions of the good. I’m stressing this point because difficulties pertaining to the intra-statist perspective as a point of departure for the analysis of minority rights will stand at the heart of my critique of Patten’s argument. I believe that the global perspective, and the standing of national groups in the world, rather than the standing of minorities within states, is the appropriate perspective from which to account for the rights of national minorities (and majorities). But let me first present Patten’s argument. I will primarily concentrate in the main normative argument, which is presented in chapters 3–5 of the book. Chapter 1 is an introduction delineating the subject matter of the book by introducing important distinctions and then describing its course. Chapter 2 deals with the accusation often directed at culturalism and nationalism of being essentialist. Patten responds to this accusation by proposing a detailed and nuanced non-essentialist concept of a culture, according to which—in his apt formulation, “Culture […] is the precipitate of a common social lineage”. 3 “ A distinct culture” he says – “is the relation that people share when, and to the extent that, they have shared with one another subjection to a set of formative conditions that are distinct from the formative conditions that are imposed on others.” 4“ At any given moment, its content consists in various beliefs, meanings, and practices, but what makes these the beliefs, meanings, and practices of a shared culture is that the people who hold them share a common social lineage.” 5 After this chapter Patten proceeds to the three main chapters in which the main normative argument is presented. These chapters are then followed by three other chapters discussing the implications of his theory to or the difficulties arising to his theory from more specific issues pertaining to multiculturalism and nationalism: language rights, secession from multinational states, and how to justify the widely accepted normative distinction between the robustness of the cultural rights of national minorities on the one hand, and the not very robust rights of immigrant minorities on the other. I will address the arguments of these chapters later, as far as this will be required by my critique of Patten’s main argument in chapters 3–5. But let me first give an overview of this main argument of the book, on which my critical comment later will concentrate.