Political Governance of Cultural Diversity

Abstract

1This book is about the political governance of cultural diversity. It analyses how public policy-making has dealt with the claims for cultural recognition that have increasingly been expressed by ethno-national movements, language groups, religious minorities, indigenous peoples and migrant communities in the past decades. Its major aim is to understand, explain and assess public policy responses to ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. Adopting the perspective of comparative and interdisciplinary social sciences, it addresses the conditions, forms and consequences of democratic and human-rights-based governance of multi-ethnic, multilingual and multi-faith societies. That cultural diversity has become a political challenge throughout the world stems from a complex set of factors. One of the major factors of cultural diversification in various societies is globalization. The intensified flow of capital, post-Fordist modes of production and the global spread of Western consumer culture have prompted a variety of social movements that emphasize their own ethnic, linguistic or religious distinctiveness. The emergence of transnational migrant networks, facilitated by growing inequalities in the capitalist world-system as well as by new technologies of transport and electronic communication, is another prominent aspect of such cultural diversification. What all these new social movements have in common, whether based on ethnicity, language or religion, is that they demand full and equal inclusion in society, while claiming the recognition of their particularistic identities in the public sphere. They criticize the assumption of congruence between political unity and cultural homogeneity which was characteristic of the classic model of the nation-state, and thereby contribute to its far-reaching institutional transformation. In this book, we address the political governance of cultural diversity by focusing on this transformation of the nation-state and of political modernity in general. The contributions to this volume deal with specific aspects of governing ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity from different disciplinary perspectives. In our introduction, we situate them within a larger conceptual framework. Thus, in the first section, we argue that a major problem implicit in contemporary debates about cultural diversity is the on