The issue of cultural rights has been considered an unsolvable problem for democracies from many different points of view. Communitarians, as critics of rights language, have asserted that “the rights discourse” diminishes “social trust,” develops “absolutist claims,” and reduces “complex social issues to simple slogans.”1 Ronald Beiner, for example, has claimed that “the whole point of asserting a rights claim is to identify an aspect of human existence that is so fundamental that its violation, anywhere, at any time, constitutes an affront to human dignity as such.” Thus, Beiner concludes, “applying this logic to the problem of the moral status of nationalities raises a problem, for it puts moralistic language at the disposal of nationalists everywhere, who, as such, are in the business of playing the ethnic grievances game.”2 From a different perspective, Seyla Benhabib argues that the paradox of the politics of “identity/difference” is that they pose the contingency of their identity definitions, while, at the same time, making claims about their essentiality. Like Beiner, Benhabib argues that identity claims are always expressed as “fundamental, non-negotiable,” yet, paradoxically, the new cultural turn understands them “as processes of social and political mobilization and cultural articulation.”3 Thus, argues Benhabib, “despite its emancipatory intentions, multicultural group politics, particularly if it leads to group differentiated rights claims, may carry seeds of a new form of political authoritarianism.”4 From both these perspectives, it seems clear that cultural rights and democracy are regarded as a highly dangerous liaison. The goal of this paper is to provide a possible answer to such objections and, at the same time, to analyze on a normative basis how it is possible to conceive of cultural rights as parts of democratic rights, that is, as a dimension of democratic citizenship. I would like to claim that we need to frame “multicultural” claims for recognition as processes of widening the democratic scope of constitutional rights. If this is possible, then these processes must be formulated as explicit steps towards universalization and integration, or as simultaneous processes of democratizing and disaggregating rights. Thus, I would like to develop a normative argument about the possibility of conceiving “cultural rights,” and in doing so, I would like to revise Marshall’s and Habermas’s notions of citizens’ rights and their “democratic evolution.” In the last part of this essay, I will examine the objections to multicultural rights expressed by feminists, and,